As he sat nursing a Corona, I asked Bobo why he played football. “Life is too short,” he said. “For our parents, every day was the same. They’d get married, have kids, and die.” His own father died of cancer in 2012. Even before then, Bobo’s goal had been to see as much of the world as possible. He kept using the word tihui, to “learn from experience.” After graduating from art school in 2006, he started a design company. When that failed, he opened a barbecue restaurant. That went under too, so he and a couple friends started three hotpot joints. Success requires risk, even if that means breaking one’s leg. Would he be more careful next time? I asked him. “Probably not.”
Uncertainty doesn’t seem as frightening as it once did; values that long dominated Chinese life—like filial piety, face, and financial stability above all else—have started to lose their grip. “I don’t want to stay in one job forever,” said Seven, the soft-spoken quarterback, who works at an IT company. “I want to explore, to focus on things that interest me.”
Not all young people are so unorthodox, but football seems to filter for Chinese individualists. Part of the reason may be that many of the teammates have led relatively comfortable lives and can afford to have aspirations beyond eating a square meal. But for most of them, the source of this philosophy seems to be Western pop culture. After Rudy, Fengfeng’s second-favorite movie is Forrest Gump. “The moral is perseverance,” he said. “No matter what happened, he kept running.” Fat Baby echoed this idea using a phrase common on the Chinese Internet that translates roughly as “revenge of the losers,” but amounts to the American dream: “A person looks short, fat, ugly, but through hard work can become tall and rich,” he said.
Until very recently, Americophilia wasn’t an acceptable enthusiasm in China. Foreign powers have been resented for centuries, but during the Cold War, the United States became the main icon of imperialist villainy, depicted in Communist propaganda as a hook-nosed villain wearing aviator sunglasses. That attitude still lingers: in 2012, former President Hu Jintao wrote an essay warning his countrymen to resist Western attempts at “long-term infiltration” via popular culture. But talking to the Dockers, you realize it’s not a fair fight. I have rarely seen such pure delight as when Marco described a scene from the straight-to-video American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile in which a midget football player tackles the character Erik Stifler while yelling, “You’re still my bitch, Stifler!”
Their parents may not actively approve of these obsessions, but they don’t get in the way. “We don’t understand America,” said Figo’s father, Jianguo, who was part of the Little Red Guards at age 12 during the Cultural Revolution and whose name means “build the nation.” We were talking in Jianguo’s apartment, a comfortable two-bedroom in a high-rise on Chongqing’s southern outskirts, where Figo also lived with his wife and baby girl. Over a lunch of twice-cooked pork and eggs stir-fried with tomatoes, Jianguo, 60, poured us shots of his homemade date-and-walnut baijiu liquor, and then Figo showed off the skull-shaped bottle of German absinthe he’d just bought online. “Our cultural level is too low, our thinking too closed-off,” Jianguo continued in his gravelly Chongqing accent. Since his parents retired, Figo has taken them to Hong Kong and Japan, but they draw the line at American movies.
Marco said he knows that the American movies he loves aren’t realistic, but he likes what they represent, such as the idea that anyone can achieve their dreams. President Xi Jinping often talks about the “Chinese Dream,” but has yet to define the phrase. Perhaps it’s because, for a lot of Chinese, the dream is to be somewhere else.
The loss to Chengdu didn’t hurt morale much. The Dockers had played a full game of American football; that’s what mattered. But over the following weeks, their unity started to show cracks. “Our team has many problems,” Fat Baby confided to McLaurin at a music lounge one night. Marco had initially enjoyed broad support as founder and captain, but lately he’d been alienating some teammates. His decision to start dating Nana, the head cheerleader, hadn’t gone over well. Everyone knew that Marco cared about the team, but sometimes he cared too much: he often yelled at people during practice and bossed them around in the QQ group. Some teammates thought it was time for a leadership change. “Everyone wants to be laoda, the big guy,” said Fat Baby.
In early April, the team made some organizational changes. Whereas Marco had previously been in charge of everything, Figo would now handle outreach and PR, Tina would take care of the team’s finances, and Soso would be manager. Marco would still lead practices, but that was it. The redistribution of responsibilities wasn’t a straight-up ouster, but Marco got the message. “Every day, he is sad,” said Fat Baby.
At the same time, discipline was slipping. When McLaurin woke up for day one of the two-day “training camp” he’d organized, it was pouring rain. Only 10 people showed up, and those who did show were only half there. During one drill, the guys walked unhurriedly from the huddle to the line, to McLaurin’s annoyance. Next they ran a pursuit drill, in which the players had to try and catch McLaurin. “Marco, why are you stopping?” he yelled. Instead of push-ups at the end of practice, Seven did a limp version of the worm.
The problem was, the players were struggling to balance football and their obligations off the field. Fengfeng commuted as far as 90 minutes from school to practice and back. Figo and others had kids and parents to take care of. Marco was trying to open a Korean barbecue restaurant with a friend. An hour spent clobbering other men was an hour not spent schmoozing at a work dinner or keeping a marriage together. McLaurin didn’t see it that way. Over the team’s complaints, he pushed to bump practices up to three times a week. “It’s no longer a democracy, that’s how I see it,” he told me.
And then came the game against the Beijing Cyclones—they of the triumphant mock strip tease. It ended with the Dockers getting trounced, 36–8. They’d been practicing for nine months, and they were still losing. Something had to change.
The chauffeured car arrived at McLaurin’s apartment on time. He grabbed his giant equipment bag and helmet and climbed in. Weezy, a top-heavy, long-haired 20-year-old and the newest addition to the team, sat in the front seat. He told the driver how to get to the practice field, and put on his favorite new song, Drake’s “Started from the Bottom.” Weezy was from Xi’an, in the north, but had come to Chongqing since his dad started working for the city’s light rail system. Hence the personal driver. He’d been enrolled at Rutgers as a freshman the previous year, but dropped out because, he told me, it was too dangerous. “I got robbed by a black dude and he put a gun right to my head,” he said in English. “I heard gunfire on the school bus. I was like so afraid I was gonna die someday.” That must have been a tough decision, dropping out, I said. Weezy disagreed. “My life or my diploma?” he said. “Because you only live once. YOLO.” He broke off to sing over a verse—“I wear every single chain even when I’m in the house.”
When we arrived at the practice field, the Dockers were a different team. Not metaphorically—it was literally a new set of people. Over the summer, they’d recruited a dozen new players, including a few foreigners. There was Julian, a compact 38-year-old former boxer from Holland; Cherokee, 20, who had come to Chongqing after a tour in Afghanistan; and Eric, a 22-year-old Des Moines native with a goatee nearly as full as his mohawk. The new Chinese recruits showed promise too. Alien, a college senior in a black leather jacket and preworn jeans, was the fastest player on the team, and could catch a ball even if it was covered in Vaseline. Tong Er, a former People’s Liberation Army soldier, loved getting hit almost as much as he loved hitting.
McLaurin, who had decided to start playing quarterback, gathered the offense together in a huddle. “I want a Pro-I Right blue 43 dive on 1,” he said. Someone translated, somehow. The players lined up. “Blue 14, blue 14,” McLaurin growled. “Set, hut!” McLaurin dropped back and launched the ball in a deadly accurate arc. Off to the side, Seven, demoted to backup QB, watched.
A lot had changed
since the spring. The influx of talent brought a new energy to practices. The players were stronger and faster. “I lost 20 pounds!” Fat Baby told me. “You should lose another 20,” Yangyang said. McLaurin had also imposed a strict attendance rule: if you wanted to play, you had to show up to a minimum number of practices. And on top of all that, McLaurin and Fitz had organized a league.
The American Football League of China would have eight teams in all, four in the south and four in the north. Each team would play four games during the regular season, with a championship held at the end between the winners of each conference. There had been a contentious debate over the number of foreigners who could play on the field at once, but the teams had settled on a limit of five. Thus McLaurin’s new role. He wasn’t a natural quarterback, by his own admission, but he was a lot more natural than anyone else.
The first contest of the new season was a home game against the Dockers’ archrivals, the Chengdu Mustangs. At practice, McLaurin had the teammates line up and practice blocking. “Tell them this drill is about violence,” Eric said to Kang. Kang’s translation: “You need to use a little more power.” But the idea was starting to get through. The players crashed into each other like cars, no brakes. “Now that’s football,” McLaurin said.
They had 48 hours to prepare, McLaurin reminded the team at the end of practice. “Don’t eat hotpot,” Cherokee said.
On game day, McLaurin wore his old Michigan helmet, which he’d covered with Dockers-orange masking tape. Fitz was psyching himself up for his first game since high school. He’d had two steaks for breakfast. “I’m ready to just smash into people until I injure myself,” he said, grinning. Weezy took off his orange socks with a marijuana leaf design and put on regular orange socks.
The difference in the team was palpable from the whistle. At one point, Rock blew past two defenders, charged into two more, then dragged them along behind him, and flopped down just over the 10-yard marker. On a few downs, McLaurin just plowed through like a bowling ball.
Then the errors began: Kang fumbled the ball after a handoff (“extremely tragic,” said the announcer), Alien dropped a pass, and Rock, who hadn’t slept the previous night because he’d been on duty, ran the wrong way on a play, which led to a turnover. “Rock, you don’t know what you’re doing, get off the field,” McLaurin yelled. Later, as Chongqing was about to snap the ball, a whistle blew. The players looked around, confused. An old man had wandered onto the field for a better view.
At halftime, the Mustangs were up by a touchdown. “I know you have family and friends here,” said Marcus, one of the coaches. “We don’t wanna go home empty-handed. This is your house.” Weezy summarized: “Don’t play like a pussy.”
Chengdu scored again in the third quarter, putting them up 12–0. If things were already wrong, they started to go wronger. During one play, Fitz jammed his finger. He jogged off the field, held still while someone tied on a splint, and jogged back on. Tina sighed in admiration. “In America, when this happens, is it normal to go back in?” she asked. Fat Baby, playing defensive tackle, got in a fight—the most notable thing he did on-field all season. Rock got crunched and couldn’t move his head. A couple of teammates grabbed his limbs and carried him off the field. “That is not how you move someone with a neck injury,” McLaurin said under his breath.
It’s hard to say what happened in the fourth quarter. Maybe the Dockers finally realized they were about to be humiliated by Chengdu on their home turf. Maybe Chengdu started getting tired. Maybe Chongqing started getting lucky. But with about 10 minutes left, McLaurin launched a bomb into the deep right corner. Somehow, Fitz was there, open. The ball fell right into his busted hands and he booked it into the end zone. “He got hurt and still got a touchdown?” Tina said. “He is perfect.”
As the game wound down, McLaurin came off the field clutching his stomach, knelt down on the sideline, and, as was becoming tradition, vomited. Minutes later he was back in and Chongqing was pushing toward the end zone until there were three yards to go and less than a minute left. Eric subbed in at running back, and McLaurin handed him the ball, which he muscled through the hole Tong Er had created and over the line.
The Chongqing side erupted. The Dockers now led, 14–12, with less than a minute on the clock. Seven subbed in as quarterback for the final play. “Hut, hike!” he said for the first time in a long time. The next moment, he got leveled, and came up limping. Seven’s season was over. And within seconds, the game was too.
The teams lined up and shook hands, and the Dockers took turns posing with the Sichuan Bowl. Heads were cradled, butts were slapped. “This game changed my life,” Kang said in his first-ever post-win interview. “It made me more confident. Now I know that, in life, if I have some trouble, I should just push on and I can still make it better.”
More than any other sport, the players told me, football takes teamwork. Sure, soccer and basketball require cooperation, but those sports favor stars. “Argentina has Maradona, he’s the most lihai,” the most badass, said Fat Baby. “If they didn’t have him, they’d only have an okay team . . . Football isn’t like that; you can’t depend on one person.”
Historians and sociologists have long theorized about why football overtook baseball post–World War II as the most popular sport in the United States. Among the many explanations is that it emphasized cooperation and teamwork at a time when social ties were weakening. Now, China is navigating its own “bowling alone” moment, with an erosion of faith in public institutions and a sense that self-interest has replaced communitarian spirit. Not that the solidarity championed by the Communist revolution was by any means ideal. But some Chinese remember that time with nostalgia, compared with the market-worshiping, corruption-tainted era that emerged post-1979, even if they enjoy the spoils of the latter. A whole genre of national news story has emerged about passersby ignoring strangers in need, which only feeds the sense that China has lost its collective soul. At the same time that youngsters want to declare independence from the crowd, they also have a craving for communion. If anything, one intensifies the other.
And to hear the Dockers tell it, nothing strengthens social bonds better than football. In addition to practices and games, they’d started holding team dinners, movie nights, hiking trips, and swimming outings. “I think of them as my big brothers,” said Fengfeng, who like most of the players, and most Chinese under the age of 35, is an only child.
The rest of the season flew by. Off the field, the players—to use Fengfeng’s words—kept running. Marco’s Korean restaurant opened. Figo and his wife moved out of his parents’ place, with their financial help of course. Kang, Alien, and Weezy all got into academic programs abroad and planned to enroll in the spring. Fat Baby got a new SWAT-team doll.
And, at long last, they were actually playing football. In November, the Dockers traveled to Hong Kong to play the Warhawks and creamed them, 32–0. In December, they defeated their nemesis, Chengdu, in a game even McLaurin was proud of. They won not because of any spectacular runs or Hail Marys. They were simply finding the holes, getting the sacks, completing the handoffs, playing as a team. That win sealed it for the Dockers: they were going to the championship.
If you wanted to create a movie version of an evil Chinese football team, you couldn’t do much better than the Shanghai Warriors. They were big, they were foreign (almost half were non-Chinese), and that season they’d devoured their opponents one by one. So I was surprised when, one day over all-you-can-eat sushi, McLaurin said, “We’ll win.” Not I think we have a chance: “We’ll win.”
The Dockers cranked through into the new year, dialing the frequency of practices up to three times a week. This time, no one objected. McLaurin screened videos of Shanghai’s games for the team, pointing out the Warriors’ weaknesses.
When the team arrived in Shanghai, they dropped their bags at a cheap hotel, where escort services slipped business cards under the doors, and gathered at a sports bar downtown. Eric gave a short mot
ivational speech, which Soso followed with her own dirty version of a Chinese children’s song: “Drop, drop, drop the soap/Everyone go quickly tackle him/Go fuck him in the ass.” In the cab back to the hotel, I asked Coach Marcus what he thought the championship game would be like. “Beautiful,” he said. “It has to be. Anytime something happens for the first time, it’s beautiful.”
On championship day, the stands of Shanghai’s Luwan stadium were empty—not because no one showed, but because the officials in charge of the venue were demanding an extra 11,000 yuan to open the bleachers. “Feel free to sit on the sidelines,” said Frank Schipani, a New Yorker who coached the Warriors. Spectators stood along the fence instead.
Chongqing started strong: an interception on its first defensive possession, followed by a quick touchdown. Patrick, the American quarterback who’d been out drinking till late the night before, found McLaurin in the deep right corner of the end zone. The two-point conversion made it 8–0, Chongqing.
Shanghai answered with a long touchdown of its own, and it quickly became clear how evenly matched the two teams were. This was the most brutal, physical game I’d seen in China. The hits looked like they hurt; there were fights, even an ejection. Chongqing was able to pick up yards on the ground, thanks in no small part to Tong Er’s formidable blocking. Shanghai was disciplined, with a speedy quarterback, who helped them amass an eight-point fourth-quarter lead.
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