HispanicBusiness

Believe it or not, basketball wasn't the first love of Denver Nuggets star Carmelo Anthony, now one of the best players in the NBA.

Nor was it for Charlie Villanueva, a starting forward for the Milwaukee Bucks.

For both players, that distinction belonged to baseball.

But it makes a little more sense when you learn about their heritage. Anthony's father was Puerto Rican, and Villanueva's parents emigrated from the Dominican Republic.

In fact, Anthony, whose mother is black, started playing basketball only when he no longer had the option to play baseball.

"Once I got to high school, the school I went to didn't have a baseball team," he told HispanicBusiness.com.

Now, they are two of just six U.S.-born Hispanics in the NBA.

If the NBA has anything to say about it, Hispanic kids participating in athletics will rank basketball first. Perhaps more importantly, the league hopes, so will Hispanic sports fans.

Of course, the league isn't simply crossing its fingers. It's throwing resources at the problem -- flooding the zone, so to speak. And it appears to be working.

The Hispanic viewership of this year's All-Star Game in February surged by 13 percent over last year, with 472,000 Hispanic households tuning in, according to Nielsen ratings. Particularly pronounced was the one-year jump in male Hispanic viewers between 18 and 34: from 166,000 last year to 249,000 this year -- a rise of nearly 40 percent.

The NBA isn't the first American mega-business to recently gain full appreciation of the golden opportunity presented by the burgeoning Hispanic market.

This year, Wal-Mart announced that it will open two stores that cater expressly to Hispanic customers, and Coca-Cola released a new nationwide ad in Spanish.

According to the U.S. Census, from 2000 to 2007, the Hispanic share of the U.S. population grew from 12.5 percent to 15 percent. In raw numbers, that translates into 10 million more people.

The NBA has been working hard to reach them.

From inviting Hispanic entertainers to sing the National Anthem to broadcasting more and more radio and TV games in Spanish, to trotting out its small-but-growing number of Hispanic players at public-outreach events, the campaign officially launched in 2000, but has ramped up recently.

Three years ago, the NBA launched Noche Latina, a kind of "Hispanic awareness month" for the NBA that occurs every March.

As part of the program -- which doubled in size this year to include eight major Hispanic markets -- the players don uniforms emblazoned with the Spanish version of their team names.

"The Miami Heat" becomes "El Heat;" the San Antonio Spurs, "Los Spurs."

The league is also tapping more international Latin players.

Since 2000, the number of Spanish, Hispanic or Latino players from outside the United States has grown to 17 from five. (One player -- Eduardo Nájera of the Denver Nuggets -- is from Mexico.)

To get Latin American countries stoked on basketball, the league stages pre-season games in those countries. Thus far, it has played 25 such games since 1992.