the Sorkin Rowling connection

I recently got ahold of the entire Sportsnight series (all 45 episodes of this sadly misunderstood show) on DVD and I have to say… Aaron Sorkin rules. For the uninitiated, Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing, did a little half-hour ‘comedy’ series called Sportsnight which ran for almost two full seasons before getting cancelled. A year later Sorkin gave the world Jed Bartlet’s West Wing and its crew.

Anyway, in the first episode of the second season of Sportsnight one of the characters goes on a rant about a sporting incident that’s newsworthy and should be highlighted:

JEREMY: Cho Chang, a Chinese swimmer, is swimming the Taiwan Strait from Tescadora in Pong Hu to Tun Ting Dao. And there’s some question as to whether the mainland Chinese government is going to let her come ashore. Some quick facts: The island is separated from South China by the 161-kilometer-wide strait, and together with Matzu and Humoi form the seat of the government of the Republic of China, which of course claims the right to rule all China.

I stole the dialogue from an episode recap which you can find here, trusting the transcription to be accurate.

Now, Cho Chang is Harry Potter’s love interest. (wow, talk about being Captain Obvious there) At least, for three books worth she remained his interest. And Cho Chang is not a common Chinese name. As a matter of fact I didn’t even realise Cho Chang is supposed to be chinese till… well, a fairly long time after she shows up in the stories. And I will bet all the tea leaves in China that there is a sure connection between the swimmer Cho Chang of Sportsnight and the Ravenclaw Cho Chang of Harry Potter.

A simple search on Google indicates that some rare souls out there, those few other people who are as geeky and as lacking a social life as I am, have picked up on this too. Sadly, nobody seems to be pursuing it with any interest.

It’s known that Jo Rowling is a fan of The West Wing. This was revealed in an exclusive interview she gave to the people behind The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet. In a rundown of the interview, Leaky Cauldron’s Melissa Anelli said:

I still don’t know how we got on the topic, but Jo said that she is a tremendous WEST WING fan. Although in retrospect, and comparing writing styles, this seems a natural and unsurprising fact, nothing on this great wide earth could have made me happier, as I love that show with a passion, and admire Aaron Sorkin’s writing almost as much as I do Jo’s. She waxed on about him, and how intense his life must have been, to write those shows the way he does.

Emerson Spartz of Mugglenet pretty much echoes the sentiment albeit in greater brevity- “Melissa and I were happy to hear she’s a huge West Wing fan, because we can’t get enough of that show either.”

I posit that this admiration is mutual, and that Aaron Sorkin named his swimmer after a character of Jo’s as an homage (and way before Rowling became his fan). Since I will have no way of proving it short of grabbing Mr. Sorkin by his jacket lapels and bellowing, “WHY DID YOU NAME THAT SWIMMER CHO CHANG? HUH? HUH? HUH???” let’s just pretend for now that by presenting the two facts below, there is enough to believe that my conspiracy theory is right.

Fact one: Cho Chang is first mentioned in the third Harry Potter book ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’. This book was published on July 8th, 1999.

Fact two: the Sportsnight episode mentioning a swimmer called Cho Chang has an original air date of October 5th, 1999.

Before you go yelling post hoc ergo propter hoc at me, please just think about what an unbelievable coincidence this would be that Sorkin would pull a name like Cho Chang out of nowhere.

(Of course, a simpler explanation would be that Sorkin had in fact read Prisoner of Azkaban, liked the name and stole it and it’s not really a hat tip to Rowling or anything.

But this is more fun.)

“If coincidences are just coincidences, why do they feel so contrived?”