Can Alibaba’s Jack Ma make US college basketball a hit in China?

Forty years ago, former basketball star Bill Walton made a decision he still regrets today. His UCLA college team was invited to play an exhibition game in China in 1973, the year it won its second national title with Walton, and he decided not to go. The rest of the team then stayed home, too.

“I said I didn't want to come,” he said. “I didn't know any better. I was wrong.”

On Saturday, the men's basketball teams from the University of Washington and University of Texas will do what Walton chose not to: play a game in China, halfway around the world from their college campuses.

Dubs up in Hangzhou! #BackThePac #Pac12ChinaGame https://t.co/zKcoKTQSAN

— Pac-12 Conference (@pac12) November 10, 2015

It won't just be an exhibition, either. They'll contest the first-ever regular season college basketball game in China, the first of perhaps many for US university teams as they try to tap into a new market for their sports — and their schools — in the world's second-biggest economy.

“The opportunity that these young people have to come to this country ... [it's] an opportunity that I sadly turned down,” said Walton, who will provide commentary for ESPN's live broadcast of Saturday's game in the U.S. “It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.”

Hopes are high on both sides that this opportunity will lead to a much deeper cooperation than anyone could have imagined just a decade ago, let alone in 1973.

In the Pac-12 Conference, which organised the game at Shanghai's Mercedes Benz Arena, officials have spent the past few years trying to find a way to build on the well-known academic reputations of their schools in China, as well as the Chinese love of basketball, to build a fan base for their sports programs.

And on the Chinese side, the e-commerce giant Alibaba Group has jumped on board as a way of acquiring content for its brand new sports platform and, as founder Jack Ma put it at the company's headquarters in Hangzhou on Tuesday, to help young Chinese learn the value of playing — and working — on a team.