Brave Dragons

by Jim Yardley

  “The officials tonight are the best for this game,” the game commissioner said, trying to instill confidence, describing the two men beside him as if they were some carefully calibrated chemical compound. “They are the best combination.”

  Then the game commissioner turned away from the refs to address the rest of the table. “If anything unexpected happens in the game, I hope everyone will handle it in the proper way,” he said. He turned and looked directly at the police officer, who fidgeted in his chair. “Keep everything in order, especially the fans. Security has to be taken responsibility for.

  “Seven-thirty tonight,” the game commissioner said in conclusion. “Any questions?”

  Garrison translated into Weiss’s ear. He smiled.

  “Meiyou,” Weiss said in Chinese. I don’t have any.

  The table was tickled. The Sturgeons’ coach was also an American, J. T. Prada, and his translator started laughing. Prada had coached here for four years, could not speak a word of Chinese, and had little interest in trying to learn any. Prada smiled as the Chinese men mocked him in a language he couldn’t understand. He could not have cared less.

  When Weiss and I met Prada before the security meeting, we made a little bet. I guessed Prada was a New Yorker. Weiss guessed New Jersey. He was all energy and wiseguy bluster. The answer was Cupertino, California. His parents had emigrated from Italy, first to South America, where Prada was born, and then to Cupertino, where his mother was a seamstress, his father was a janitor, and Prada picked lettuce with his five brothers. His parents divorced, and his mother raised the family. She had a winter dress and a summer dress. Her son learned to be tough.

  “You come here as a foreigner and they beat on you to do things their way,” Prada told me. “But if you don’t fight that, you’re done, you have no chance. The assistant coach will be Chinese and will start talking to the players, and then they won’t listen to you.”

  Prada and I were having brunch at his hotel after the meeting. When I mentioned Boss Wang, he rolled his eyes. Once Boss Wang had hired a Korean coach, who prepared the team for weeks for the season opener against Fujian. Fujian won. Boss Wang fired the Korean after the game.

  “Bob has got no chance,” Prada said, taking a sip of soup.

  Prada was wiry and intense. He ran every morning and seemed to barely eat. He had a few slices of cucumber and a piece of garlic bread on his plate. His narrow face was all sharp angles, his head shaved to the tiny nubs of his remaining black hair. Profane and funny, he had a habit of interrupting himself midway through telling a story—maybe about how he got fired from a job, or how he didn’t realize that ass kissing was a prerequisite for coaching employment—and shaking his head with a wry smile as he told you how stupid he was. It was his rhetorical pump fake. Stupid he wasn’t.

  Prada considered himself the victim of an NBA system that would seem familiar, even logical, to many Chinese. He saw the NBA coaching fraternity less as a meritocracy than as a series of personal networks that sometimes contributed to the rise of talent and sometimes kept it from rising. The biggest network consists of former players who become coaches, and he could not be a member. He played at tiny Linfield College in Oregon and then moved up in coaching from high school to becoming an assistant at the University of California at Santa Barbara and, later, at Loyola Marymount. There, he worked under Paul Westhead, the former Los Angeles Lakers coach whose radical offensive philosophies would have appealed to Boss Wang. Visionary or madman, Westhead wanted his teams to play as fast as humanly possible. At one point, he ordered his players to shoot within three seconds of crossing half-court. When Westhead left for the Denver Nuggets, Prada went with him. He was in a network.

  It lasted a single year. He worked for Jerry Tarkanian when Tarkanian briefly coached the San Antonio Spurs. He worked for Jimmy Lynam in Philadelphia. But when they got fired, he got fired and eventually his network was dead. Nor was he likely to charm his way into a new one. “For me personally, I’m absolutely the worst at kissing ass and networking,” he told me. He seemed to be offering this point as a character reference but also because it was true.

  He went to Asia, spent a few years in Taiwan, and then ended up in Fujian. Every summer, he tried to reattach himself to an NBA team, and every fall he returned to Fujian. He had coached the Sturgeons for the previous four seasons, making the playoffs every year, his existence outside basketball almost monkish. He watched DVDs and got foot massages. His favorite place had installed a DVD player so he could watch footage of an opposing team while his feet were rubbed. “People are nice,” he said. He had built a house in Colorado, where he lived four months of the year with his wife and their two children, ages six and five. The rest of the year he was in Fujian.

  “It’s life,” he said, looking around the hotel restaurant. “You gotta pay the bills. Oh, I’ve really fucked my wife over.”

  He gestured toward the young waitresses. Maybe they were sixteen. They had bad haircuts and were trying not to stare at the two foreigners, and you could tell they were from the countryside. “In the rest of the world, this is just how it is,” he said, pointing to a waitress as she refilled his water. “This lady here, she doesn’t expect to have two cars, a home, and a bank account. Americans have this sense of entitlement. Well, I don’t think the rest of the world thinks that way. These little waitresses will work seven days a week, twelve hours a day. To them, that is perfectly normal.”

  When he first arrived in Fujian, the team had practiced every day of the year, morning and evenings, with a single week off for Lunar New Year. The players took a three-hour midday nap, as was common in China. He immediately broke the cycle; he canceled the nap but also canceled the endless practices. His Chinese assistants and the general manager wanted him to practice for five hours daily but he refused. He restricted practice to a regimented ninety minutes to create a sense of urgency, efficiency, and purpose. Prada also did something unique; he designed his offense around his Chinese players because he thought it was the best way to play basketball in China and to keep his job. Without his interpreter, Prada could barely communicate, but he had learned all the cuss words in the Fujianese dialect. He could not order a beer in a restaurant, but he could tell his players to eat shit. They had reciprocated by learning to tell him to fuck off in English.

  “What has really helped me out is my best local players are on my side,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if the American guys are on your side. There are ten of them and two of you. If you don’t have the local guys, you have no chance of staying. The other coaches only run plays for American players. I don’t. I try to use the team concept. And I think our Chinese players like that. It’s human nature. No one wants to come down the court and just stand there.”

  He created a star out of his undersized point guard, Lu Xiaoming, who led the league in assists after his Chinese coaches had given up on him as too short. Prada believed the Chinese league was steadily progressing (“there are decent Americans who come over here and get their ass knocked”), but the legacy of bad coaching would take time to overcome. Chinese coaches rarely worked on more nuanced, technical aspects of the game, like helping out teammates on defense, Prada said. When I asked him where Chinese players excelled, he smiled and shook his head.

  “Shooting,” he said. “Chinese are great at copying shit. You give them a Rolex watch, they’ll copy it, and make it better and cheaper. But they won’t come up with the idea.”

  I asked about Shi Nengkeng, the owner. “I call him Boss,” Prada said, grinning. “I don’t know his name.”

  When Prada and Shi had a meeting, Shi spoke first. Then Prada spoke. The only ground rule established by the owner was that neither man interrupted the other. There was pressure, and when the team lost “it is like the world is coming to an end.” But Shi had never attended a team meeting and never interfered. “I probably have the best situation in China,” Prada said.

  Yet Prada would have left tomorrow. He was curious about Weiss and
seemed interested in making a possible attempt at networking. To him, Weiss embodied the NBA network, a former player and four-time head coach, a longtime assistant, a guy who had gotten breaks that he hadn’t. “Most people like to hire people they know,” he said. “That is absolutely normal.” He smiled as he repeated what an unemployed coach once told him: “I’m just one phone call away from being happy.”

  “He’s right,” Prada said. “I’m still waiting.”

  He said he compartmentalized his emotions or otherwise he might go crazy, lying in bed, wondering what he was doing so far away from home and why an NBA team wouldn’t give him another shot. “You go to other countries and see they are trying to survive day to day,” he said. “Here you see families where the wife is here and the husband works in Beijing. Life is life. But you want to keep going forward.”

  I asked what he hoped for.

  “My hope is that the kids need to eat. So I pay the bills.”

  The trip south had inspired the fashionista in Boss Wang. He was sitting in the front row of the bus in designer blue jeans, a cream-colored shirt, and a pair of large, tinted sunglasses. He appeared to have combed his hair. Not to be outdone, Garrison was in shades and tricked out in a tight white tank top under his black epauletted jacket. They were costars in a Chinese rendering of Miami Vice. It was two hours before tipoff, and the players clambered out of the bus into the locker room.

  The arena was a centerpiece of the SBS zipper empire. Outside, billboards showed different Sturgeons players posed before images of half-opened zippers. Other billboards advertised SBS Olympic Spring, an enormous nearby residential community with a sales office across the stadium parking lot. The sales office was decorated with more SBS marketing posters, one with a zipper opening to reveal a line of mountains, another opening to reveal a flowing river. There were also schematic posters of SBS Olympic Spring with imaginary Americans frolicking on floats in the swimming pools. I asked the clerk if they expected lots of foreign buyers. It turned out the posters were made by a design team in the States. He showed me another poster populated by happy, imaginary Chinese.

  The Sturgeons were another example of the irregular economic incentive structure of the Chinese league. The zipper king was a basketball nut but his team was also a handy tool for government relations. It might have made more sense to have been located in Xiamen or Fuzhou, the two biggest cities in Fujian Province, but the team was in Jinjiang because SBS was in Jinjiang. Jinjiang was a classic Chinese sweatshop city, with hundreds of factories making athletic shoes and other exports, yet despite this economic clout it lacked prestige or any national identity. Having a pro team gave face to the local officials, and local officials apparently gave the land for SBS Olympic Spring to the zipper king at a very cheap price.

  The game was less than an hour away, and I found Weiss sitting on the sideline, appalled. Boss Wang had watched the NBA that morning and decided the Brave Dragons should run on every possession, driving to the basket every time or kicking out for a shot. No plays or offensive sets were needed. He had scrapped Olumide going to the foul line for the pick-and-roll. Just run and shoot. Somewhere Paul Westhead must have been smiling.

  “It’s insane,” Weiss said, watching the players shoot layups. “You know, when you don’t have any clothes on, and nobody is going to say anything, you always think you are right.”

  Olumide trotted by on the court and rolled his eyes. “I’ve nayvuh seen thees in my life,” he shouted to me. “In my life.”

  At the opposite end of the court, Prada had taken his players into the locker room for a quick pregame meeting before they returned for final warm-ups. “This is American style,” Weiss said. “He pulls his team in and they’ll go talk about their strategies.”

  The Brave Dragons had no strategy. Longnail walked by, sunny as ever, resplendent in an orange shirt and a blue nylon jacket. “That’s the guy who sold the village down the tubes,” Weiss said, musing for a moment. “Everybody looks at the downside. He probably started the economic upturn of this area. And the village complained.”

  The game began with the desired dose of anarchy. Prada had prepared the Sturgeons to defend against the high pick-and-roll, but the Brave Dragons were not doing that or anything else. They were running wild. Kobe opened the game with a quick 3-point shot that completely missed the basket. The Chinese guards raced down the court and threw up wild shots at the basket, missing everything. But each time Olumide grabbed the rebound and scored an easy basket. Boss Wang was smiling on the bench.

  Tim Pickett helped matters by scoring at will. He made a long 3-pointer and then banked in another. Fujian’s point guard, Lu Xiaoming, made a 3, but the Sturgeons were struggling to make sense of this unrecognizable form of offense. Prada called a timeout, and the Fujian cheerleaders pranced onto the court and started thrusting their hips. They seemed comfortable with the task of wearing little clothing and conveying sexiness in public. Growing up in warm weather probably helped.

  The game assumed a frenetic, methamphetimal rhythm. The Brave Dragons led 59–48 at halftime, and Tim Pickett had scored 31 points, if not necessarily winning the hearts of his teammates. At one point, when Duan Jiangpeng tossed the ball away, Pickett confronted him on the court. “What is wrong with you?” he screamed. He had not turned out to be the chemistry guy Weiss had hoped for. He had little patience with his teammates’ mistakes and rarely passed. The Chinese players resented Bonzi but were awed by him. They already seemed to despise Pickett.

  Yet he had played an incredible half. Before the game, Prada had predicted the Brave Dragons had little chance to make the playoffs. Their foreigners shot all the time, he said, yet weren’t good enough to single-handedly win the game. Yet Pickett was doing just that. He had made seven 3-pointers and clearly unnerved the Fujianese fans. Cigarette smoke was pouring out of the lobbies and impressive nicotine clouds were hanging over the court. When the teams returned for the second half, Pickett started coughing and complained to a referee. The ref laughed.

  The second half started and the Brave Dragons kept running and shooting. Pickett was navigating the smoke and made a long 3-pointer. Brave Dragons by 10. On the Sturgeons bench, Prada turned his head and said something. At the end of the bench, a large man with a flattop unfolded his legs and stripped off his sweatsuit. He was built like a nose tackle with blocks of cement for calves. His name was Liu Yudong and he was the Chinese Michael Jordan. Or he once was. For years, Liu was Bayi’s top star, carrying the Chinese flag during the 1992 and 1996 Olympics. Now he was almost in his forties and was playing out his career in his home of Fujian Province.

  Prada had told me that Liu was still one of the finest shooters he had ever seen, but he didn’t seem to be inserting him into the game for his shooting. On defense, Liu quickly hammered Olumide. Then he hammered him again. The Chinese Jordan soon had three fouls. But he was scoring, too. He pump-faked and got to the foul line. He buried a 3. The margin had narrowed to 74–71. The Brave Dragons were reluctant to guard him, almost deferential. At brunch, Prada had said that younger Chinese players rarely challenge the older, established veterans in practice, that doing so would be seen as a breach of etiquette. The Brave Dragons seemed to be carrying it over into the game. Prada knew exactly what he was doing. The third quarter ended with the Brave Dragons leading 81–79. The Chinese Jordan had contributed seven points.

  The fourth quarter exposed the downside of just running rather than not running an offense. The Brave Dragons were exhausted. Pickett was starting to miss shots and growing frustrated. Liu Yudong went to the free throw line for two shots on a horrible call of a ghost foul. Wingtips walked down the sideline and complained to the game commissioner, who shooed him away. Prada had told me that the officiating was always skewed, especially for the road team. He had lost two playoff series in deciding games on the road. “They all take money on the side,” he said. “We’re probably the only team that doesn’t pay them. You heard them saying in the meeting that we have the bes
t three officials in the league. They say that in every game. You go on the road and you get screwed.”

  Fujian had now pushed ahead. They were playing a nice team game, spreading the ball around, with everyone scoring. Their point guard was dominating the perimeter, and refs were sprinkling a handful of friendly calls. It was 107–100, and the game seemed over. But then Olumide scored, and Pickett followed with a 3. With eleven seconds remaining, it was 107–105. Now Boss Wang and Wingtips approached the game commissioner. Boss Wang was furious, barking, his head shaking, until he was pulled away. There were still eleven seconds left. Fujian got another friendly call but their center missed both shots. Kobe grabbed the rebound and raced up the court. Pickett was waving for the ball, but Kobe sprinted toward the basket. Pickett was shouting, furious. But this was what Boss Wang said to do! Kobe crashed toward the goal. Foul. He was awarded two shots with one second left and the Brave Dragons down by two points.

  Kobe stood at the line and took a breath. He bent his knees, lifted the ball, and released the shot. For a small moment there was a brief, expectant silence.

  He missed. Then he missed again. He stood at the line, hands on hips, staring at the basket. The game was over.