Brave Dragons

by Jim Yardley

  Steel would make him very rich, and owning a factory offered another fringe benefit. He was one of the earliest of a small group of modern-day Chinese who could pursue a wild fantasy of self-expression and get away with it. One Chinese millionaire, for example, built a replica of the U.S. Capitol as his home. Boss Wang simply organized his own basketball team.

  He had first discovered a wider world, as far as basketball went, when he joined the county team in the early 1970s. The coaching improved, and he learned specific drills to hone certain skills. He also got access to the team’s small black-and-white television and began watching occasional games from other countries. He had not realized he was playing a global game.

  “We did not know about the NBA,” he said. “But people told me that American basketball was the best.”

  When NBA basketball did start appearing on Chinese television, Boss Wang was transfixed and became determined to implement the lessons he was learning. In 2002, he had bought a new CBA team and merged it with players from his factory in Henan. He left Henan after officials in Shanxi Province offered him land and tax incentives to open a new factory in Linfen, the industrial city south of Taiyuan. Bringing the team was part of the deal. Shanxi was dripping with coal money, and provincial leaders wanted a pro basketball team to boost the province’s image.

  When he bought the team, Boss Wang inherited some talent, but those players had signed contracts that were now expiring. Most of them left. At the same time, the Bayi team finagled the rights to his best player; when Boss Wang filed a lawsuit, Bayi beat him in court. He felt screwed. He arrived in Taiyuan in 2006 with Big Sun, Pan, Kobe, and a few others. As a steel boss, Boss Wang had been an outsider, compared to the big state mills, but he considered the steel industry a good model for the basketball league. Private entrepreneurs had proved that they could compete against the state monopolies that controlled the steel industry; in basketball, he would have to make the same breakthrough, even though he felt constrained by the system. He couldn’t obtain new players because the Chinese league had no free agency. He felt the league needed to be more like the NBA, more commercial, if it wanted to improve.

  He hired coaches and then exploded when they failed to make changes that seemed plainly obvious to him. He meddled in practice, berated his players for making mistakes, and ran the team the way he ran his steel mills—as a fiefdom defined by hard work and ruthlessness. It did not take long for him to earn a terrible reputation among Chinese coaches—having fired so many of them—which matched his opinion of most of them. He thought they were too insular, too willing to soak him for money, and too resistant to learning from the NBA, which finally led him to America and to Bob Weiss. Yet he had sidelined Weiss after only two months and replaced him with an inexperienced Chinese coach intensely resistant to learning from the NBA.

  We had been talking for more than three hours. We had moved to the hotel restaurant and eaten lunch. Boss Wang leaned across the table, closer to me, when I asked about his experiment with Weiss. “Bob brought a lot of modern principles and ideas from the NBA,” Boss Wang said. “He is accustomed to dealing with lots of high-level principles. Our players are very young, very raw. They couldn’t understand what Bob wanted them to do. They couldn’t follow Bob’s ideas on the court.”

  Coach Liu did understand, he continued. He knew how to implement the NBA principles through drilling, and Liu Tie was helping the players execute Weiss’s ideas. He thought the partnership was working, and the players were more confident.

  “Maybe they feel they have an NBA coach standing behind them and a young Chinese coach,” he says. “Maybe they feel like there are a lot of people trying to support them. I felt they were lonely before and felt abandoned on the court. Now they have support.”

  He sounded almost grandfatherly. Or delusional.

  I asked about the Bayi game, and he smiled. Bayi’s players took note of Shanxi’s opening win and had spoken about the team with respect. “A lot of people are saying Shanxi’s team is like a nail in the wood,” he told me, grinning. “It is not easy to pull out.”

  He asked my opinion about an idea he had been pondering. What did I think about benching the foreigners in the first quarter against Bayi?

  Playing Bayi always demanded a gimmick. Bayi had no foreigners, since hiring imports would be akin to the People’s Liberation Army depending on foreign mercenaries to fight battles. That meant that any team playing Bayi had to play under the old rules, in which foreign players were limited to six combined quarters. Boss Wang’s idea was to play Chinese against Chinese for the first quarter. He said the Chinese players could keep the game fairly close for a quarter, then the advantage would swing to Shanxi for the rest of the game. Bayi would be tired, while the foreigners would be rested and eligible to play the rest of the game.

  “The coaches do not like this,” he said, “but it is my idea.”

  I asked if the team would employ his strategy. He pulled back from the table, smiling.

  “Oh, the coaches will make the decision, not me,” he said.

  We walked to the cashier. The game was starting in a few hours, and Boss Wang was leaving for the team meeting. I had barely noticed the strange decor of the restaurant. Pieces of fake seaweed were hanging from the ceiling, which was plastered with beige-colored stucco intended to resemble sand. Shells were placed in the stucco. The floor of the ocean was staring down at us. We were upside down in the churning sea.

  The foreigners had a new van, more of a minibus, to accommodate their growing number. Ruslan Rafaelovich Gilyazutdinov, the Kazakh, was sleeping on the back row, a Russian pulp novel rising and falling on his chest. He had arrived in Taiyuan a few days earlier and immediately reported to the practice gym for a late night workout ordered by Liu Tie. The coaches wanted to see what their Asian could do. The answer was not much. He was in terrible shape, a large, lumbering cinder block of Central Asia who nearly vomited after a half hour of Liu’s running drills. His value to the team remained an open question. He wasn’t dressing for the Bayi game.

  The minibus was moving along a newly improved road. The incessant tumult of construction in Taiyuan had produced a divided six-lane thoroughfare, Binhe East Road, stripping along the eastern edge of the Fen River, running south to north as a connector between the new airport and the new downtown, slicing beside the new high-rise apartments in the process. Driver Zhou must have felt bored; the road was devoid of bicyclists or mules or rickshaws or old women stumbling into traffic. He glided past one of the riverside parks where workers were building a replica of a large pagoda.

  Weiss sat near the front, staring at a printout of a long email that arrived that morning from his financial advisor. The news from America was grim. The collapse of the subprime mortgage industry was still rippling through the American economy, wreaking havoc on real estate prices. Foreclosures were shooting up. The new president-elect, Barack Obama, faced a banking crisis before taking office. In Seattle, Weiss’s home was on the market but no one was even taking a look.

  “The key thing he said,” Weiss said of the email, “was to keep your revenue stream alive.”

  For a moment, everyone was silent.

  The night before, the defending league champions, Guangdong, had destroyed the team from Yunnan Province by 40 points. The Chinese press was already holding up Guangdong and Bayi as defenders of the national honor by not depending on foreign talent. Guangdong had two foreigners, but the team was built around Chinese stars, including four members of China’s Olympic team. The opening weekend of games had seemed a little like the Opium War. “Foreign Players Go Crazy!” screamed the banner headline in Titan Sports, the country’s leading sports publication. The former Houston Rockets Michael Harris and Kirk Snyder had become overnight superstars. Snyder, playing in coastal Zhejiang Province, had become such an instant celebrity that the general manager of his team was trying to block press interviews because “if there are too many articles, it will have an influence on our domestic pla
yers.” Titan Sports responded to the interview ban by following Snyder to a restaurant in Shanghai and running a full-page story on his thoughts about seafood prices.

  Harris was playing for the Dongguan New Century Leopards, a team expected to contend for the championship. The Leopards had a mix of top Chinese players and had also signed an American center, Jamal Sampson, to pair with Harris. The Chinese press was hyping the Leopards’ upcoming game with powerhouse Guangdong as a battle between East and West.

  “They are powerful,” snapped Du Feng, the star forward for Guangdong, when asked about the new foreign stars on the Dongguan team. “But don’t you think we are powerful? We’re not like other teams who rely on foreign players. The key for us is preparing well.”

  The one team getting almost no attention in the national basketball press was the Shanxi Brave Dragons.

  Driver Zhou turned the minibus into the campus of Shanxi University of Finance and Economics and stopped at a service entrance behind the arena. The Brave Dragons marketing department had already been at work. Team posters were hanging outside the service entrance. One had Big Sun driving to the basket, another Pan Jiang dribbling on the wing. Donta Smith pointed to a life-size poster near the door.

  “Look!” he shouted. “Ba-bu Wee-Suh!”

  It was a photograph of Weiss, with a ball embossed with the CBA logo cupped in his arm. He was wearing a blue New York City firefighter’s sweatshirt and staring ahead with a determined look, captain of the ship.

  He grabbed his clipboard and walked into the gym.

  “It’s hell being an idol,” he said.

  The crowd stirred when the two teams walked onto the court for the opening tip. There were the great Bayi Rockets, led by the league’s greatest domestic player, Wang Zhizhi, a 7′1″ center with a lethal outside shot, the first Chinese to play in the NBA. Next came Li Nan, veteran of four Olympic teams, the leading scorer in league history. During introductions, the Taiyuan fans had cheered politely for Bayi, so powerful was the Bayi brand, so intertwined was the team with China itself.

  Basketball had been the sport of the Chinese military since before 1949, when the Red Army general He Long organized competitions among different army brigades. Bayi became the army’s elite team; the name ba yi translates as 8/1, or August 1, the founding date of the People’s Liberation Army. For decades, Bayi skimmed off the best players in the country, many of them from poor families, by offering lifelong employment, bonuses like fur coats or even a Mercedes. Players received high military ranks without the obligation of military service. Following the formation, in 1995, of the Chinese Basketball Association, Bayi won seven of the first eight league championships, the only defeat coming in 2002 to Yao Ming and the Shanghai Sharks. Beating Bayi meant you had beaten the People’s Liberation Army.

  Yet if the Taiyuan crowd stirred at the sight of Bayi, they were also reacting to the all-Chinese starting five for the home team. A murmur swept through the seats as the fans craned down at the Shanxi bench. Olumide Oyedeji was still in his yellow sweats. Donta Smith sat beside him, elbows on knees. Up on press row, the Taiyuan reporters assumed they were witnessing the unorthodox strategy of the new foreign coach. I could see Boss Wang on the bench, still in his expensive jeans and gray coat, pinched between Liu Tie and Wingtips.

  The arena seated about 4,000 people, with the different seating sections divided into red, yellow, or blue. It could pass for an arena at a small college in the United States, except that gyms in the United States usually turn on the heat in late November. During the pregame, the Brave Dragons cheerleaders—known in Mandarin as the La La Duis—danced in halter tops and spandex pants, then pranced quickly off the court to slip on their matching blue parkas. Fans had poured into the arena, most of them men, nearly all of them wearing the same brown or black jackets that pass for wintertime male couture in coal country. Almost no one took off their jackets, given the frigid temperature, and the fashion effect was the same as a winter dust storm. The arena turned as brown as the fields outside.

  The referee tossed up the ball to start the game, and the crowd howled. Bayi controlled the tip, and Pan Jiang attacked on defense like a feral dog. At the morning practice, Coach Liu had pulled Pan aside. Pan was already Boss Wang’s whipping boy, and Liu was not happy with his defensive intensity, his will to fight. Liu Tie had crouched into a stance and slammed his hips against Pan, slapping at his arm, to show him what he wanted. Now Pan was pressing against the Bayi point guard, banging against his hips, raking at the ball. Whistle. Foul. A minute later, Pan hacked again. Whistle. Foul. A backup replaced him. The backup hit a Bayi guard so hard that the guard was rolling beneath the basket. A pattern had been established: Nearly every possession, Shanxi was attacking on defense, pushing, crashing around the court.

  Offense was another matter. The Taiyuan fans, rather than witnessing the unveiling of a high-level NBA offense, were watching complete disorganization. Everyone stood in place, uncertain where to go, what to do. Liu Tie had effectively deconstructed Weiss’s offense. The problem was that he had not constructed anything in its place. The frontcourt players were frozen under the basket. The guards were throwing up wild shots. Kobe threw an errant pass into the stands and the fans started laughing. Luckily, Joy was in the groove. He made a 12-footer. He hit a 3. He was as disciplined as his teammates were out of control. He made a steal on defense. He scored 12 points and the Brave Dragons led halfway through the quarter. Bayi was rattled and called timeout. Boss Wang sat silently on the bench, legs crossed, as the players celebrated around him. His gamble appeared to be paying off.

  Then came the Wave. The music came out of the sound system like the scream of a jet engine, a screeching techno version of what once was Beethoven’s Fifth. At the corner of the court, a paunchy man in a blue sweatshirt, Ren Hongbing, the Brave Dragons’ deejay, was pounding on a soundboard, shaking his head to the beat of the music and shouting for everyone to get up. They did. As if an electrical current were crackling through their pants, the spectators in section after section, brown and black jackets flying upward, arms flailing, a roiling sea of giddy potbellied coal bosses and everyone else, smiled and laughed and reached for the roof. In America, the Wave had devolved into a canned act, no longer novel enough for anyone to risk spilling a beer, but it was a sensation in Taiyuan. The Shanxi University of Finance and Economics was trembling.

  It took a moment for everyone to realize the game had resumed, and not in Shanxi’s favor. Bayi was pressing full court, unnerving the Brave Dragons’ guards, who started turning the ball over. Wang Zhizhi was hitting everything, almost nonchalantly, and would finish the quarter with 15 points. Bayi also was returning the favor on defense: A Brave Dragons guard was knocked to the floor by a vicious foul in front of the Bayi bench. The Bayi coach was a dashing figure, arms crossed in a tailored suit, his nose tilting slightly upward, his head covered by a dark blue beret. He glared down at the player on the ground, disgusted, as if he had been served cold coffee at a Paris bistro.

  Bayi kept coming, scoring on baskets by Wang Zhizhi or going to the foul line. Shanxi was struggling to get off a shot. Weiss slumped on the bench, staring at the floor. Liu Tie rubbed his hands over his head in frustration. Bayi led 39–29 at the end of the quarter. Defensive intensity had not translated into good defense. The Brave Dragons had 16 fouls, a ridiculously high number.

  Donta Smith and Olumide Oyedeji stood up and and stripped off their yellow sweat suits.

  We were standing in pee. At halftime, I followed the Taiyuan press corps into a small lobby reserved for police, soldiers, journalists, and the stadium crew. Everyone was smoking. The People’s Liberation Army soldiers were smoking. The cops were smoking. The photographers were smoking. The Communist Party hacks were smoking. I found it difficult to breathe. When our small journalistic party attempted to enter the bathroom, we could not breach the door. Cops and soldiers were peeing and smoking simultaneously, so we waited beside the lavatories in a small adjacent room. Our sho
es stuck to the floor. No one seemed to notice. We discussed the game.

  Bayi led 65–53. Olumide and Donta started sluggishly. The Brave Dragons were piling up fouls. We shook our heads at what had been a monumentally sloppy half.

  On the court, the Brave Dragons cheerleaders, having shed their parkas, were finishing a number, grinding their hips and shaking their shoulders as the deejay played “Don’t Push Me” by Sweetbox.

  Don’t cage me in,

  Don’t tie me down.

  Clouds of nicotine moved out of the lobbies and settled over the court. The game clock showed the second half starting in less than a minute. The Bayi Rockets were getting loose, shooting layups and jump shots. The Brave Dragons were still in the locker room, talking, or being talked to. One of the scorekeepers sent someone to get the team. With only seconds until the buzzer, the familiar yellow jerseys appeared. One of the first players onto the court was Donta Smith. He was squinting. He waved his hand in front of his eyes to clear the smoke.

  With 8:39 remaining in the third quarter, Bayi led 72–53 and the cheerleaders were shivering in their parkas. Then the foreigners took over the game. Olumide began vacuuming up every rebound, waving his arms to draw the fans out of their seats, tumbling to the floor or crashing into the courtside photographer, always grimacing in pain, seemingly in need of medical evacuation, only to rise up each time and trot down the court. When two Bayi players offered to help him up, Olumide slapped their hands away. The Shanxi crowd roared.