The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  The Beijing Cyclones rolled in an hour before game time, 50 Cent serving as unintentional entrance music. Mike Ma, a Cyclones captain and Beijing native who had spent his teenage years in Los Angeles, greeted McLaurin with a purposeful thug hug. “Damn, you guys are deep, dog,” said Ma. Since many Beijing players couldn’t make the trip, Chongqing outnumbered them almost two to one. This made McLaurin cautiously optimistic. Beijing had more experience and stronger athletes, including a professional parkour practitioner. But between their home-field advantage and numbers edge, he thought the Dockers had a shot.

  Fans, mostly friends and family, gathered in the stands. I asked a student named Liu Zhiyue if he understood the game. “A little,” he said. “The quarterback is the most important.” Beyond that, he wasn’t totally sure. By the sidelines, a small squad of refs, all expat friends of McLaurin, put on the pinstripes they’d ordered online. One, a densely built Californian named Jeff, who had played semipro football in Poland and had NEVER AGAIN tattooed in Hebrew on his shoulder, was getting nervous. “I don’t know the rules, that’s my thing,” he said to the head ref. “You should have, like, taught us the rules before, dude.”

  Queen’s “We Will Rock You” came on, the international sign that a sporting event is about to occur. The Dockers lined up along the sidelines and made war whoops, as McLaurin had instructed. A smiley player named Kang had affixed masking tape to his helmet to form 杀, the character for “kill.”

  Beijing kicked off. The ball sailed deep, spinning backward, and bounced off the Chongqing receiver’s chest before he chased it down. If the crowd was already confused about the game of football, what happened next didn’t clarify much. It almost looked like the Dockers were trying to lose the ball. The Chongqing quarterback, Seven, fumbled a snap, then recovered it just in time to get sacked. Not long afterward, he passed to a receiver who wasn’t there.

  “Settttt, hut!” growled Leo, the Beijing quarterback. As soon as he took the snap, a Chongqing tackle drilled through the line for the sack. “There you go! There you go!” shouted James “Fitz” Fitzgerald, another assistant coach. The euphoria was temporary. Second down, Leo saw an opening on the left side, threaded through it, and ran, as if alone on the field, all the way to the end zone. He celebrated by chest-bumping one of his teammates and miming a graphic strip tease.

  The Chongqing players looked at each other. They’d been practicing for months, running and sweating and studying the playbook, rebuilding their bodies and reprogramming their brains, learning this weird foreign game from scratch. For many of them, football had not only become the center of their social lives, it had become their identity: Fat Baby had a custom-made bumper sticker on his car that said CHONGQING DOCKERS FOOTBALL FATBABY. Marco wore his Dockers T-shirt everywhere. Football was already more than a game to them—it represented a whole set of stories and values and attitudes that these young Chinese men had hungrily absorbed and now wanted to project. And for what? So a Beijing quarterback could gyrate his crotch in front of their loved ones. Fitz shook his head: “We’re about to get our ass kicked.”

  “American football in China” is a sport/location combo that at first sounds like a joke, like “Jamaican bobsled team.” But according to the rule that, in a country of 1.3 billion people, everything is happening somewhere, the existence of Chinese football should come as no surprise. Unlike basketball, which missionaries brought to China in the late 19th century and which has long enjoyed government support (Chairman Mao was a fan), football is a recent import. It doesn’t come close to breaking into the country’s top 10 sports. Even the term in Mandarin—“olive ball”—sounds awkward. But it is here and growing fast. The NFL first set up a China office in 2007 and started a flag-football league that has grown to more than 36 teams. Meanwhile, a raft of amateur tackle clubs has materialized, including, as of summer 2012, the Chongqing Dockers.

  The Dockers started when Fengfeng, a 19-year-old freshman at the Chongqing Electronic Engineering University, created a QQ group dedicated to American football. (QQ is one of China’s most popular online chat programs and, along with WeChat, the way most of the players keep in touch.) He named the group “Rudy,” after the 1993 movie about a five-foot-six-inch steelworker who dreams of playing for Notre Dame, which Fengfeng had seen 10 times. Marco saw the message and reached out. They and a handful of others, including Fat Baby, arranged to hold a practice. Marco also invited a journalist friend, resulting in a full-length write-up in the Chongqing Economic Times. Marco received more than 200 inquiries, and 30 guys showed up to the next practice.

  The problem was, they came expecting to learn how to play American football. Marco had studied some instructional videos he’d found online, but had never played himself. “It was truly terrible,” Fat Baby recalled. That didn’t stop them from accruing the trappings of a football team. They named themselves the “Dockers,” a reference to Chongqing’s armies of longshoremen. They bought jerseys before buying pads, designed a logo before getting a playbook, recruited cheerleaders before doing anything cheer-worthy. Nana, the squad captain, choreographed a few routines based on scenes from the Bring It On movies, employing dance moves Chinese girls don’t learn in school.

  None of this translated into actual skill. One day in the fall of 2012, McLaurin showed up to a practice. “It was like a bunch of guys who’d heard of the sport trying their best to imitate what they’d seen on TV,” he said. No one had pads, so hits were more like careful hugs. What had inspired them to pick up this strange game with an unwieldy ball that had no connection to local culture, he hadn’t the slightest. But they were eager to learn, and McLaurin, who’d just arrived in Chongqing, needed friends.

  McLaurin was immediately made head coach. He assigned positions based on size and speed. Quarterback was tricky, as the job requires a combination of height, athleticism, intelligence, and leadership ability. Seven was tall. He got the job.

  At the first practice I attended, in February of 2013, the team was preparing for its debut game against Chengdu. In one drill, McLaurin told the linemen to hit him head on, but they kept slowing down just before making contact. “Really hit me,” said McLaurin, who enjoyed the warm feeling that ran down his spine after a hard strike. “Don’t think too much.” But the players kept hesitating. After 30 minutes, they ambled over to the sidelines, where half the guys swigged water and the other half dragged on cigarettes.

  The following Sunday at 9:00 a.m.—only in China are football practices scheduled for Sunday mornings—a few team members showed up after a late night of drinking and fiery Chongqing barbecue. “My asshole is burning,” Fat Baby announced as he waddled onto the field. Rock, a railway employee who was wearing a Michael Vick jersey and a jock strap over his tights, put one teammate in a WWE-style figure-four hold. I asked if he knew that Michael Vick was famous for torturing dogs. “China has a lot of people like that,” he said, grinning. McLaurin had Seven run a simple passing drill. Not a single throw reached its target, and McLaurin grew frustrated. He made everyone run sprints, which he won. As the players headed to their cars, McLaurin walked over to the benches, braced himself against a wall, and spilled the contents of his stomach onto the ground.

  Coaching the Dockers was like coaching a peewee team, McLaurin told me, only harder. Sports aren’t built into the average child’s life in China as they are in the United States. Instead, athletics and academics are separate tracks. If a kid has potential, he gets siphoned into a special school dedicated to producing the nation’s finest athletes. Most of the Dockers hadn’t played organized team sports past grade school, and if they had, it was basketball or soccer. The core skills of football—throwing, catching, hitting—were as foreign to them as curling.

  McLaurin, by contrast, was a specimen of the American scholar-athletic complex. Born outside Detroit to a white mother and a black father, both police detectives, he was a star football player at a Catholic high school that emphasized sports as part of a well-rounded character. He went on to
play tight end for the University of Michigan and might have made it to the NFL if it weren’t for a career-ending shoulder injury. He was able to fall back on a stellar transcript, going on to get a master’s in social policy and planning at the London School of Economics and to score a White House internship. He eventually came to Chongqing on a Luce Fellowship. After years of competing, McLaurin couldn’t not go 100 percent. Between drills, he’d coil up and jump high into the air as if clearing an invisible hurdle. When his players didn’t match his intensity, he got annoyed.

  But the greatest cultural gap between McLaurin and the team seemed to be the willingness to draw up every last bit of oneself and smash the person opposite. Size wasn’t a problem; the Dockers were a strapping bunch. They just weren’t willing to use their size. Part of it was fear of injury: in the Dockers’ first six months, seven players had been hurt, including Bobo, who had broken his leg at practice. But habit played a role too. Life in China is plenty physical—just try riding the subway during rush hour—but you don’t often see kids roughhousing in the park. Figo had to get used to the idea of crushing another man. “The first time, I didn’t dare tackle,” he said. Fat Baby, too, was no natural destroyer. “You have to imagine the other guy is your enemy,” he told me. “It’s like in The Waterboy [the 1998 Adam Sandler movie], where you pretend they’re the person who bullied you.”

  By the day of their first game, they’d at least learned to talk the talk. “Kill Chengdu!” the team chanted as their coach bus pulled away in the predawn light. Six hours later, they arrived at the soccer field of Chengdu Technology University, where bamboo poles tied to the goalposts served as uprights. “I’m very worried,” Marco had confided to me. “I worry we’ll fail. I worry our players will get injured. I worry about all these things.”

  On the field, everything that could go wrong, did. Chongqing’s first three downs went nowhere. The Chengdu Mustangs scored twice early on. Seven threw a perfect interception. “That’s why we don’t throw the ball,” McLaurin said to nobody in particular. The Mustangs scored again. When they went for an extra point, Chongqing blocked the kick. But instead of ignoring the dead ball, one of the Dockers grabbed it and started charging madly upfield. The Chengdu offense, not sure if this was allowed but not certain it wasn’t, took off after him. The crowd on the Chongqing side screamed, “Go! Go!” The Chongqing player ran the ball all the way to the end zone and spiked it triumphantly. The coaches were laughing. “Just let them have this one,” Fitz said to the ref. The final score: Chengdu 31, Chongqing 6.

  On the sidelines after the game, Metal, the largest player on the team, still in uniform, took a knee and proposed to his girlfriend, who was one of the cheerleaders. She accepted. On the bus ride home, everyone hoisted bottles of watery Harbin beer. During one raucous toast, I noticed Marco sitting quietly at the front of the bus, eyes forward, unsmiling.

  For McLaurin’s birthday, two weeks later, a few of the players took him out to KTV—Chinese karaoke—in downtown Chongqing. To say that the team worshiped their coach is only a slight understatement. They repaid his dedication with free rides to and from practice, and regular invitations to dinner and drinks. One teammate even offered to pull strings to make his boss give him a raise. And they admired more than just his athletic skill. In their eyes, McLaurin was emblematic of some imagined urban American authenticity, with a love of hip-hop and a swagger that they’d previously seen only in movies. He looked good too. Marco described his first impression of McLaurin in English: “It’s a pretty boy.” Many of the cheerleaders agreed, as did the Chongqing women who on occasion walked up to him and wordlessly typed their numbers into his phone.

  I was still struggling to understand why the teammates had chosen football, of all sports, and their admiration for McLaurin provided the first hint. When I asked them what they liked most about the game, the most common response was that it’s “man”—a slangy use of the English word to mean “manly.” “Violent,” “aggressive,” and “exciting” were all runners-up. In Chinese media, the masculine ideal tends to be smart and slim, with coiffed hair. Yet here these players were bumping chests and slapping asses like Skoal-dipping American males. I questioned Joker, the team’s lothario, about what Chinese ladies look for. Physically, they want “clean, skinny” guys, he said. “Chinese girls aren’t really interested in sports.” Marco had a more cynical take. “Right now,” he said, “they only like one kind of man: rich man.”

  When we got to the bar, the men were sitting on one side of the rented room, the women on the other. Soso, who worked at a design firm, crooned earnestly to a Chinese pop ballad, while her friend Tina, a saleswoman and the team’s official photographer, told the story of how a creepy Russian client had tried to seduce her the night before. Fat Baby took the mic and launched into one of his favorite songs, “Ghetto Superstar,” by Taiwanese rapper MC Hot Dog. The chorus: “I’m so, so, so, so ghetto/I’m so ghetto/I’m so ghetto.”

  For a lot of Chinese, such revelry would be an indulgence. But as McLaurin quickly discovered, these guys liked to party. On a typical day, Fat Baby would wake up, go to work—or, if he felt like it, not—at the government construction office where he was an assistant engineer, and meet up with friends for dinner (such as hotpot, Chongqing’s blindingly spicy culinary staple) or a drink. Yangyang preferred to stay in and play games on her phone. Fat Baby’s job wasn’t especially strenuous, except for the occasions when an enraged citizen whose house was marked for demolition stormed into the office carrying a knife or, in one instance, a bowl full of feces. “These people just wanted more money,” he explained.

  As the son of a logistics officer at a military university, Fat Baby is on the comfortable end of the football team’s economic spectrum. Marco explained that about a fifth of the teammates could be considered wenbao, which means “warmly dressed and well-fed,” about three-fifths are xiaokang, or “comfortably off,” and the top sliver might be called either “middle-class” or straight-up rich. After all, football requires at least 3,000 yuan ($500 or so) of imported equipment, as well as significant leisure time. Fat Baby has both, plus a Paladin SUV, a wide-screen television, and an arsenal of video games. In short, he is not especially ghetto.

  But he is increasingly normal. China has no strict definition of “middle-class,” partly because prices swing wildly from place to place and partly because the concept barely existed until recently. Under Mao in the 1960s and ’70s, social classes were relatively equal, more because of a pushing-down of the elite than a lifting-up of the poor. After Deng Xiaoping’s open-market reforms of 1979, earnings exploded, with a tenfold increase in per capita disposable income from 1980 to 2010. But the gap between rich and poor widened dramatically too, and in the early years of Deng’s reforms, there was no strong “middle class” in the way Americans think of it: a basic level of comfort, plus the occasional vacation to Paris.

  That is rapidly changing, particularly in the cities. A 2013 report by McKinsey projected that China’s urban “upper middle class,” defined as households that make between $16,000 and $34,000 a year, will grow from the current 14 percent to 54 percent by 2022. Alongside that growth comes an expanded view of the world and a taste for conspicuous consumption. Unlike Chinese over 50, who still save nearly two-thirds of their income, this new middle class is spending—on travel, consumer goods, or, in Fat Baby’s case, an extensive collection of movie-star dolls, including Tom Cruise from Valkyrie.

  This way of life differs, to say the least, from that of their parents. During the Cultural Revolution, Fat Baby’s mother and father were among the “sent-down youth” who at the party’s behest left the cities to work on collective farms. After returning to Chongqing, his father took a job at the military university where Fat Baby’s grandmother worked, and his mother went to work at a factory that produced machinery. Others their age were assigned jobs by the government. Most people lived in housing provided by their work unit and many met their spouses there. The country’s huk
ou registration system imposed tight limitations on migration within the country and even within a province, to the extent that farmers could be arrested simply for entering a city.

  That system has since been dismantled piece by piece. Fat Baby lives in a comfortable high-rise apartment that he owns, travels when he wants, and met his wife on a volunteer trip to Sichuan after the 2008 earthquake. In other words, he chose his life. There are still limitations, but young people in China today inhabit a universe of choices that is unrecognizable to their parents. What exactly they do with those choices, though, a lot of them haven’t figured out.

  Fat Baby handed the mic to Figo, who sported his trademark bandana-bead necklace/goatee combo and screamed along to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Figo told me he regretted studying law instead of pursuing music. After graduating, he went to work for the local government’s anti-corruption office—a stable job in Chongqing if there ever was one—before transitioning to more laid-back administrative work. (I once saw him field a call from his boss, who wanted him to check that his daughter’s new license-plate number was sufficiently auspicious.) At 32, he still found time to strum his guitar at home on his parents’ couch—he plays a mean “Tears in Heaven”—but he felt like he’d missed a calling.

  Marco wasn’t singing. He was thinking about football. Since starting the team, it had nearly consumed his life. He’d previously done marketing for China Unicom, one of the three national telecommunications companies, but quit once the Dockers got going. In college, Marco studied IT so he could learn to make video games (he took his name from a character in the Metal Slug series), but drifted away from it after graduating. He and a couple of friends had recently started a wedding photography business. He was hardly flush, but he worked constantly and made enough to live alone in a modest apartment. If football was his primary passion, second was Magic: The Gathering, the Dungeons & Dragons–inspired trading-card game obsessed over by children and man-children everywhere. Actually, the two hobbies weren’t all that different, he said: “You have to use your brain to enter the brains of others.” Like Figo, he wanted to get away from Chongqing, only farther. “I’d really like to go to northern Europe, like Sweden or Switzerland,” he said. “A quiet place where I can buy a house, be with my wife, raise a dog.”