by Jim Yardley
The lobby was as bright and cavernous as the East Wing lobby was dark and cramped. The floor was covered in yellow marble, and a large circular chandelier radiated a soft white light. I could hear the faint chords of piano Muzak tinkling out of unseen speakers as I approached the grandly appointed front desk. Rivulets of water trickled down an ornate frieze on the wall, a few steps away from a small set of steps leading to the Yingze International Shopping Arcade, home to a Vasto store and other luxury retailers selling imported goods. The only thing missing was customers.
Every hotel had the same stores, and if the stores rarely seemed to have customers, they also never seemed to close. The salesgirls folded and refolded expensive sweaters or stared blankly from behind glass counters, preparing clothes that never seemed to sell for customers who never seemed to arrive. I assumed the stores were ornamental, intended to bestow prestige on the hotel, which probably charged a low rent, if any at all. It seemed logical that a store selling $425 knit sweaters would struggle in a nation that in 2008 had a per capita income of about $3,100. But I would later learn one explanation for the stores that made sense: The stores survived because of the economic logic of the modern Communist Party official.
If a businessman needed a permit or some other official approval, he might offer a cash bribe. But if that proved too crude, he might also present a gift of, say, a gold and diamond watch. The official would accept the gift, as well as the receipt, which meant he could keep the watch or return it for the purchase price, maybe tens of thousands of dollars, equal to a few years’ salary. It was an elegant bribe. Those officials or businessmen also had to maintain wives and mistresses with gifts or with allowances to shop for gifts. Gift giving was so central to the conduct of business and official life in China that some businessmen kept wrapped gifts in the trunks of their cars, just in case. Controversies periodically surfaced over doctors who refused to treat hospital patients unless a patient’s family provided a red envelope, or hongbao, stuffed with money. Beijing launched regular anticorruption campaigns, but the gifts kept coming.
The Yingze had evolved as China had evolved. It was still a government hotel, a setting for government business and those doing business with the government, but it had changed as business had changed.
Media Day was on the tenth floor. Four men huddled together at the front of the banquet hall beside the dais. Three of the men looked like what they were: well-fed party officials, each dressed in a suit and tie, their hair dyed black and parted. The senior man was a vice mayor of Taiyuan, while the other two were officials from the provincial sports bureau. The fourth man wore a cheap nylon jacket and could have passed for a guy loitering at a street corner labor pool. He was Boss Wang, the only person in the room worth almost $300 million. He had not bothered to comb his hair. He was so unpolished for such a public event that it seemed deliberate, as if he was offended by the softer men in suits, or at least wanted to make clear he wasn’t one of them. He took a seat on the dais, and Media Day began.
The theme was quickly established: This would not be a championship season. Seated behind a long table to deliver this message were, from right to left: Zhai Jinshuai, the injured top scorer from last season; the general manager, Zhang Beihai; the owner; the three local officials; and, finally, seated at the opposite end of the table, Weiss and Joe. If the subtext of past failure hovered over the proceedings, the mood was hardly gloomy, and the reason was Bob Weiss. He was a living repository of NBA philosophies and principles somehow delivered to Shanxi Province. He looked polished in a tailored navy suit, smiling his friendly, toothy smile as Tracy sat in the back of the banquet hall with the players, snapping photographs.
Zhang began by introducing the coaching staff. He offered a mini-scoop to reporters by announcing that the team had just signed a contract to play home games at the new arena on the campus of the Shanxi University of Finance and Economics. It was the finest arena in the province, and the team would donate a percentage of the ticket proceeds to the school.
Then, reminding everyone that the Brave Dragons were inexperienced, he pleaded for patience.
“Please trust us,” he said. “We’re trying.”
Zhai Jinshuai cleared his throat and pulled the microphone to his lips. Zhai is 6′8″ and barely weighs 200 pounds. Pale and covered in acne, he looked like a Chinese Ichabod Crane, yet, when he was not injured, he was the team’s most dynamic Chinese scorer. He stared down and read a prepared statement on behalf of the players. “We’ve hired a very high-level coach, and we’re practicing very hard,” Zhai said. “We will play with a spirit to never give up, never surrender. We’ll give our best to take the team to a higher level.
“Remember, we’re trying.”
Now it was Weiss’s turn to speak. If he still had not mastered the pronunciation of the owner’s name, he had mastered some simple Chinese phrases. There were maybe twenty reporters from local newspapers and television stations sitting in front of the dais. A few had driven out to the training compound to interview Weiss, and he was already known around the city, but this would be his official introduction to his new fans, so as he leaned over the microphone to speak, the Chinese reporters leaned forward to listen.
“Ni hao. Ni hao ma?” Hello. How are you?
For the briefest moment, the banquet hall was silent. The room seemed to flinch. And then came loud, happy applause from the press. The American coach was friendly! And he spoke some Chinese! He had taken a little chance, risked a little humiliation, and the room appreciated it. He introduced Tracy, who rose to more applause in her black knit dress and string of pearls. He praised the team’s management for trying to turn the team around and introduced two of the team’s foreign imports. First was Donta Smith. And then, pointing to the last row, Weiss introduced the team’s new center, the Nigerian rebounding machine, Olumide Oyedeji. The Tractor had left (he would eventually sign with a team in Turkey) without practicing a single minute in Taiyuan.*
Olumide Oyedeji had wasted little time in demonstrating why mercenaries are valuable in any profession. He had landed in China about a week earlier, having circumnavigated four continents, and disembarked ready to play basketball. The night he landed in Beijing, the team was in northeastern China for a preseason game. Olumide hopped a flight, reached the gym minutes before tipoff, and played all forty-eight minutes, collecting 21 points and 28 rebounds in a losing cause. Now Olumide sat quietly at the back of the room, the object of so much anticipation and calculation. If the arrival of Liu Tie had tilted the balance of power away from Bob Weiss, Olumide represented a very large counterweight. He was the league’s leading rebounder, a proven star in China, and he was in Taiyuan solely because of Weiss.
“I was very touched that he would want to come here and help myself and the management turn this team around,” Weiss said in introducing his new star.
“I never make predictions on how many wins, or how far we’ll go,” Weiss said, as the reporters hung on his words, or, more accurately, Joe’s translation of those words, “but I know this team will be better than last year. We are working very hard to make this a team, to make it a group of players working together as one.”
The same lines could have been delivered in Atlanta or Seattle or San Antonio. I assumed that Weiss had them hardwired somewhere deep in his subconscious after forty years of press conferences, but the room wasn’t looking for originality. Weiss smiled and the Chinese journalists clapped again.
The officials came next. If it was true that the Brave Dragons had been a consistently terrible and often embarrassing team, it was also true that the team represented for Shanxi Province a rare inclusion in the fast lane along which China was so famously racing forward. China had three professional sports leagues—for soccer, volleyball, and basketball—and most of those teams were in cities along the more prosperous coast. The Brave Dragons were the only professional team in Shanxi, and their struggle for respectability reflected that of the province.
“The Brave Dra
gons are our pride,” said the director of the provincial sports bureau. “They motivate our sports department, and they motivate our youth to play the game. And they contribute to our harmonious society.” Ever since President Hu Jintao had declared that China should pursue a “harmonious society,” party officials across the country had inserted the phrase into almost every speech. Basketball was no different from a new bridge or a new water treatment station in that regard.
The speeches concluded, and the floor was opened to questions. A television reporter stood and addressed Weiss: What is your biggest problem?
“Well, one of the biggest problems for me is communication,” he said, through Joe. “Fortunately, I have a real good interpreter. I do not have a real good feel for the other teams in the league. Fortunately, we have Coach Liu Tie, who does know it well.
“I don’t see problems,” he continued. “I see challenges and difficulties, which I see as a positive. We are going to work hard to have a better team this year than we’ve had in the past.”
Another reporter asked about Internet gossip that the team might still sign a big-name former NBA player, maybe Gary Payton. “We have not signed anyone else,” Weiss replied. “This is the team I think you’ll see on the floor. We have had some key injuries, some to Chinese players. Donta has been injured for the last week. It’s putting us a little behind where we ought to be. But I think we very soon will come together as a team.”
Then a reporter with the local San Jin City News took his turn. Li was pale and thin, with glasses that magnified his eyes and an uneven hairstyle that appeared to have been trimmed with lawn clippers. He had never covered basketball before, but he intuitively grasped the essential conflict of the team. “How is the blending of the American and Chinese coaching approaches working out?”
Weiss did not hesitate. “That is something we are working on very well. I think Coach and I are, you know, doing that, and I think we’ll blend the two styles together.”
Media Day would obviously not be a confessional. I wondered if Weiss might say something more, possibly scratch a little closer to the scab, but he didn’t get a chance.
Unexpectedly, Boss Wang leaned over his microphone and blurted something out. Until now, Media Day had been an unwanted obligation for the players. They sat together in their matching yellow sweat suits and scribbled with the colored pencils on sheets of blank paper distributed to the reporters. Big Calves Tian had drawn a clown. Donta had traced a large dollar sign. They were teenagers determined not to pay attention in class.
But now the team was alert.
“This year, we can assure you we’ll finish fourteenth,” the Boss began. “We’ll try to finish twelfth, and the best we can possibly do is tenth place.”
He pushed back from the microphone. He had nothing else to say. The man who traveled to the United States to buy the league’s first NBA head coach aspired for tenth place. Donta scowled after listening to Garrison’s translation.
“What kind of owner is he?” Donta whispered to the back row. “He says the best we can be is tenth place?”
The Chinese players were not offended. The league had eighteen teams, and the Brave Dragons were the last-place team. Tenth place would not be easy. I later learned that Boss Wang had gathered the Chinese players together at practice and told them he would pay a salary bonus of 10 percent if the team finished fourteenth, and then another 5 percent for every slot higher.
Media Day was over. The season opener was four days off, and the road to tenth place was to begin with an away game against last year’s runner-up, the Liaoning Pan Pan Dinosaurs.
The final member of the Brave Dragons was en route. Days earlier, when he had flown to Beijing to submit his roster to the league office, the general manager intended to include the name of Osama Mohammad Fathi Daghlas. But upon arrival, he panicked. He apparently could not overcome his anxiety that someone, somehow, might prove that Daghlas was less than a purebred Asian Jordanian.
Instead, the final name on the roster was Ruslan Rafaelovich Gilyazutdinov, pride of Kazakhstan. Joe had called Boss Wang with the names of two prospects, a point guard and a big man. Go with the big man, Boss Wang had ordered.
The Kazakh would arrive in China in about a week, and stories were already filtering back to Weiss and the rest of the team. One story held that Gilyazutdinov had played on the international circuit and starred for the Kazakh national team. The other story held he was a guy Joe found in a bar.
* He would remain on the international circuit until 2011, when he died unexpectedly in a hotel room from an apparent heart attack while playing in Puerto Rico.
CHAPTER FOUR
BASKETBALL IS LIFE
The Liaoning Pan Pan Dinosaurs’ basketball arena is shaped like a whiskey tumbler, squat with rounded glass walls, glowing on this night with intoxicating promise. For any last-place team, the first game of a new season is an absolution of past sins, a chance to begin anew, yet as the Brave Dragons trotted onto the court for warm-ups in their canary yellow track suits, it is fair to say that almost no one was giving them much of a chance to win.
The previous day the team had landed in Dalian, the biggest port in Liaoning Province, and boarded a charter bus for the two-hour trip to the Dinosaurs’ hometown, the obscure industrial port of Bayuquan. The highway was a perfect black ribbon slicing through the brown deadness of early winter, the landscape already neatly folded and put away, as farmers had cleared their fields and stacked their hay into yellow mounds shaped like teepees. China’s new highway system, based on the American interstate network, had grown so rapidly that, in many places, the economy hadn’t caught up, the roads seemingly leading to a country yet to be built. The highway to Bayuquan was almost empty, except at the roadside, where handfuls of people huddled together, bending against the stiff Manchurian winds and clutching bags or cardboard boxes, as if standing at imaginary bus stops, waiting to be collected and delivered off the farm into that future yet to come.
They were waiting for rides to big cities like Dalian, which only accentuated the strange fact that the team was headed in the opposite direction. Dalian is one of China’s showcase cities, curled around a peninsula overlooking the confluence of the Bohai and Yellow seas, decorated with manicured parks, high-rise apartment towers, and populated by more than six million people. It would be a logical hometown for Liaoning Province’s only professional basketball team (as would Shenyang, the provincial capital of eight million people) if logic were dictated by the American economic rationale of professional sports, which holds that the bigger the city, the bigger the potential fan base, meaning more people to buy tickets and more people to watch local television broadcasts of games. Bayuquan was not even really a city; it was formally classified as an administrative industrial district. Bayuquan is what the future became a decade ago, when thousands of urban and industrial districts were built across China, many tossed up after central planners decided that for China to prosper, hundreds of millions of people needed to move from farms to cities. Except China didn’t have enough cities to accommodate such an epochal migration, so places like Bayuquan were hurriedly paved into existence.
What Bayuquan did have, however, was the Pan Pan Security Industries Company, which manufactured metal security doors. The same urbanization policies that encouraged the hyperactive spread of high-rise apartments and office towers across China had created a thriving market for security doors; the Pan Pan Security Industries Company quickly prospered. The company’s owner loved basketball, and when he got control of the provincial team, Bayuquan became the region’s basketball capital. Elsewhere, the same formula often applied; in Fujian Province, the team was located in Jinjiang, rather than in the province’s two biggest cities, because the Fujian team was owned by SBS, a zipper manufacturer headquartered in Jinjiang. Imagine if a multimillionaire from Chico, California (population: 88,228), bought the Los Angeles Lakers and moved them to Chico, simply because he lived there. In China, teams were located wher
e the powerful men who controlled them wanted them to be.
The Pan Pan Dinosaurs did not seem worried about a tough game. Halfway through warm-ups, a large banner was carried onto the court to celebrate the Dinosaurs’ runner‑up finish the previous season. The team’s young coach trotted out in a dapper gray suit to collect a trophy, as did the team’s star shooting guard, a reserve on the Chinese Olympic team. The stands were packed, and if the arena was tiny, with maybe 4,000 seats, the place was vibrating. Fans didn’t seem to mind the apparent lack of any heating; they were bundled in heavy coats and stomping up and down. One group of Pan Pan boosters had flown more than 600 miles from Beijing and was pounding thunder sticks so loudly that the noise echoed off the roof as the announcer introduced the home team.
On the visiting side, Bob Weiss sat at the end of the bench, silently watching, understandably a bit glum. His coveted point guard would not be joining the team and the mysterious Kazakh replacement had yet to arrive. His star Nigerian center was already feuding with management, since the first payment on Olumide’s contract had not landed in his bank account and the team had not yet reimbursed his airfare for circumnavigating the globe to reach China. Weiss also had gotten clarity on the coaching situation, and the news was not in his favor. He would be introduced as head coach and would call timeouts, but Liu Tie would run the huddle during those timeouts and also handle substitutions. This did not strike team management as especially strange or insulting; it was standard practice in many Chinese government agencies that the director was a figurehead while the vice director does the work. But Weiss was annoyed.
The arrangement also created practical problems. League rules dictated that only a head coach could stand during a game. Those same rules also forbade owners from sitting on the bench and placed limits on how many people could do so. The rules were designed for a normal team, and the Brave Dragons, after a period of private deliberation, had devised a plan to ignore them. Rick Turner would be banished to the rafters to videotape the game. Boss Wang was formally designated as Team Leader, a title with uncertain responsibilities that nonetheless gave him legal standing on the bench. Now that Liu Tie was actually doing the coaching during the game, a seating chart had coalesced: Weiss, as titular head coach, took the first seat, Joe sat beside him, followed by Liu Tie, Boss Wang, then Wingtips, the second Chinese assistant coach, and, finally, the players.