On 21 November 1997 ACBA went on a tour of Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. A total of 13 people, making up ACBA over 35s team went to Hatyai, Thailand to compete in the 13th World Basketball Invitational Tournament for Chinese. The tournament was held from 27 to 30 November 1997 and a total of 96 teams from all over the world participated.
It was the first year that ACBA had participated in this prestigious event whereby all the enthusiastic Chinese Veteran basketball players from all over the world, converged and demonstrated their skills and competitiveness in the 4 days tournament.
Our over 35s team was very impressed with the standard of basketball in the tournament, and it was an eye opener for our younger guys to see 70 years old still running around and competing aggressively, indicating to them that there are many more years of basketball competition to come. However, ACBA was not able to make the playoffs because we lost all three games.
It was in this tournament that ACBA bided for the rights to host the 16th World Basketball Invitational Tournament for Chinese in Sydney in the year 2000 : At the time of the bidding, the ACBA organising committee did not realise that it was going to be a mammoth task to host this meaningful event.
During the above trip, the ACBA team also played a friendly basketball game in Ipoh against a Malaysian team, Dragon Sky which consists of Leon Teh’s Perak State team mates and unfortunately, we lost to them by a small margin.
