by Jim Yardley
Boss Wang stalked to the scorer’s table, jabbing the air as he shouted at the game commissioner. The Fujianese fans started chanting for Boss Wang to shut up. The referees had hurried off the court. I could see Longnail. He had spent the game seated directly behind Prada. Now he was laughing. He walked to half-court and pointed to a nicely dressed man in the box seats. It was the zipper king, and he was smiling.
J. T. Prada joined us after the game at a Pizza Hut. He ordered juice. Weiss was having dinner, and the two men commiserated and were soon deep in coachspeak. Before the game, I had asked Prada if he especially wanted to win tonight, given all the hoopla about Weiss. “Oh, that doesn’t really mean shit to me,” he had said, convincingly. He knew Weiss was in an impossible situation and also knew Weiss might be a good person to get to know.
Weiss wanted to meet Prada, too. Because if J. T. Prada was angling to get back to the NBA, Bob Weiss had decided he wanted to stay in China. He was having a ball. Tracy loved it. She could even imagine returning to Taiyuan for the following season, though Weiss had a harder time imagining that. He was curious about other teams, other possibilities, and Prada knew people.
We walked outside to find Jinjiang vibrating in anticipation of Valentine’s Day. Large booths were erected across from our hotel where couples could pay to shoot an arrow at Cupid’s heart. Another booth had costumes for photographs. Our hotel, the Xingtai, had placed a large heart-shaped pink arch above the door to the lobby. Anyone without a date could go to the Xitai International Spa on the second floor. An advertisement in the elevator showed one masseuse in a belly dancer costume, posed in a bedroom atop a king-sized bed. Another showed a blond Russian woman lying in an empty bathtub in a yellow nightie, pulling a black stocking off her leg.
Weiss and Prada stopped on the street outside the Cupid booth. They exchanged telephone numbers and promised to keep in touch. A new network had been formed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE PROMISED LAND
The experiment had not produced the expected result. Money had been spent to hire an NBA coach to serve as a change agent, a technology transfer to upgrade an inferior Chinese product, the Chinese player. Yet not long after this savior had arrived, the product had proved immutable, the transfer incompatible, not so much because of the raw materials—the actual players, who were flawed but seemed capable of change—but because of the system that produced the raw materials and the people who controlled the system. The court was the same, the ball was the same, the rules of the game were the same, but everything else was different. Even the rebels inside the system, including the very rich, very unpredictable, and very combustible man who instigated the experiment, held strong convictions about what could not and should not be changed. What had seemed to Boss Wang a logical idea—to try to copy the game as it was played on television by hiring the people on television—had foundered, in part, because changing how players played on the court meant changing how things were done off the court. What the rich man had really wanted was a result. He had wanted it immediately, which, as it happened, was not possible.
Yet one unexpected result of the failed experiment was that it had produced a better team anyway. This was an upside of starting at such a low base of performance and playing in a league where most teams didn’t bother with experiments. The Brave Dragons, having won five games the previous season, were now very much in pursuit of the eighth and final playoff position. They had won 21 games and lost 21. Eight games remained in the season. Tim Pickett was not an avatar of team play, had little confidence in his teammates, and shot the ball even more than had Bonzi. This was partly out of frustration, since Pickett had never experienced a team like the Brave Dragons or an owner like Boss Wang, and his temperament was a poor match for the situation. Yet Pickett was averaging about 40 points a game, and while the Brave Dragons had not gotten better, they had not gotten appreciably worse.
Weiss was now mostly resigned to his predicament, if still frustrated at how the owner had dismantled a potentially top team. Weiss had decided that the benefits of being in China outweighed the frustrations presented by Boss Wang. Liu Tie was now acting as the head coach, though Boss Wang regarded him largely as a vassal. In one game, the owner had simply stepped into the huddle and begun barking orders. After a humiliating loss to Xinjiang, he screamed at the coaches and players for more than an hour, working himself into a frothy, blithering rage before suddenly announcing he would speak no more. “From now on, I’m not going to give my opinions or meddle,” he told the players. “I’m not going to say anything. But for you coaches, you have to win five more games, or six.”
The following day, he strode into the practice gym, stripped down to his underwear, slipped into his shorts and T‑shirt, and summoned Liu Tie so that he could scream at him. Liu Tie spent the rest of the practice pacing the sideline, head down, pausing sometimes to rub a spot on the floor with his shoe. Boss Wang divided the players into two teams and installed an offense that called for the guards to throw the ball inside on every play, forcing the defense to collapse, so that the big men could kick it back out for open shots. “I think meddling has a different definition in China,” Weiss said as he wandered at the periphery of practice. Weiss eventually stepped in, trying to organize something functional involving actual picks and movement off the ball out of Boss Wang’s vision, while the boss pulled aside two players to show them how to lower their shoulder and ram into a defender. He was teaching them how to play linebacker.
The players existed in a state of deepening stupefaction. Pickett was especially bewildered. After practice, he had wandered over to the sideline and taken a seat. “I’ve never seen a team like this before,” he said. “The owner says he is not going to speak anymore, but then he comes to practice the next day and speaks the whole time.” Olumide had started counting down the days until the end of the season. Big Rus was no longer around to be stupefied. His foot never really recovered, and Boss Wang sent him back to Kazakhstan. Pan Jiang, the beleaguered point guard, appeared progressively more ashen, as if he were being drained of a pint of blood every day. He was suffering recurrent fevers. No one absorbed more verbal abuse from the owner than Pan, who had the impossible task of deciphering contradictory orders, of running a team when the instructions on how to run it changed every day. Even Garrison was on the injured reserve; his throat was sore from too much interpretation.
Yet winning always made things better, always provided the evanescent salve necessary for everyone to keep pushing ahead. If there had been a singular moment that provided validation, that demonstrated that the experiment might not be a complete failure, it had come the previous week during a rematch in Tianjin. In the fourth quarter, in a tight game, Pickett turned his ankle and crumpled to the floor. Now the team would have to win without him and prove they could win without any foreign scorer. Olumide was still on the floor, grabbing rebounds, but now the Chinese players had to prove they were more than props. Kobe scored on a drive and then Duan made two foul shots (Weiss had kept reminding him not to look at the floor). With Pickett icing his ankle on the bench, Duan scored again on a slicing drive, Pan hit two foul shots, and finally Little Ba, who had been getting better every game, hit a big 3-pointer. The Brave Dragons won, 107–95, with five players in double figures. When it ended, everyone raced to midcourt to celebrate, a little surprised at what they had managed to do. This, after all, was what the experiment was supposed to produce.
But now only eight games remained, and Boss Wang was right: The Brave Dragons needed to win five games, maybe six, to qualify for the playoffs. The margin was even tighter because no one expected them to win the next game. They were flying south again, this time to Guangdong Province, the engine of the Chinese economy and the place where experiments usually happened first. They would play the Guangdong Southern Tigers, the league’s first-place team, which a few years before had produced China’s second most famous player, Yi Jianlian, a forward in the NBA.
Unlike the Shan
ghai team, which had collapsed when Yao Ming departed, the Southern Tigers had gotten better when Yi left. They had won the previous year’s championship and five of the last six.
Nature seemed to have disappeared. The car moved over the elevated highway above fields of factories: white tiles and gray concrete, followed by more concrete, and then distant smokestacks and, to the left, in the farther distance, the skyline of the provincial capital, Guangzhou. Dusk was falling. The smokestacks twinkled with tiny white lights. What we could see were the miles upon miles of unseen productive space, once green hills or farms, now filled with power plants and factories. Warehouses crouched at the edge of a canal. Barges were moving piles of dirt. The coast was not far away but the air smelled of chemicals and industry, not of the sea. The car kept moving, through a deceptive silence, at a deceptive elevation, since we could only see the buildings, not hear them, and what we saw were mostly rooftops, deliberately anonymous, one little different from another, rather than what these buildings were: hives. Inside were tens of thousands of workers doing thousands of small repetitive jobs to make millions of products: iPods, laptops, mobile phones, Christmas ornaments, cheap toys, fake paintings, T‑shirts, basketballs, running shoes, screwdrivers, automobiles, love seats, coffee mugs. Even more than neighboring Fujian, this was where everything in the world was made.
The driver raced past an exit marked “Dongguan City,” which, I mentioned, was our destination. He braked in the middle of the highway, shifted into reverse, and backed up, dodging, backward, the oncoming cars, which were determined to keep coming forward. We braked, dodged, backed up, braked, backed up, and dodged until we took the exit to Dongguan. We drove into the city, except the city didn’t seem to recognize itself as one. It was a condensed version of what we’d already been seeing. It was crowded, with hotels and neon lights, with streets lined with dingy apartments and tiled office buildings, and still more streets, narrower ones behind gates that were lined with more factories. It was a formless incoherence, as if it had never intended to be a city, a social organism, but only a place for work and money. Which was what it was.
Dongguan was what happened in China when opportunism, profit, and desperation conflated at the edge of policy. For his great economic experiment, Deng Xiaoping had chosen Guangdong as a setting for several of his special economic zones. They would be petri dishes where droplets of market reforms and foreign investment could germinate without the risk of spilling out into the rest of the country. He wasn’t looking for a contagion yet, just a lab experiment to see what happened when foreign ideas and foreign money were set loose again in China. Shenzhen, the most famous petri dish, the swamp turned megalopolis, was actually surrounded by a fence. Except fences were pointless, since the petri dishes had been created to culture money, and the thirst for money defies fences. Soon factories seemed to be spreading everywhere in Guangdong. Deng had ordered everyone to go make money. Who was willing to defy orders? Even before Shenzhen was formally established in 1979, a Hong Kong company had already opened a handbag factory in Dongguan, that city’s first foreign factory. Unblessed and unrecognized, Dongguan would make the cheap stuff, the low-end products shunned by other cities, and would become China’s fourth biggest export center. It would exploit and enrich. Millions of young people would flow out of the countryside, mostly teenage girls, to work in awful conditions for maybe $100 a month. Yet the sweatshop represented crude progress, a first step off the farm, where almost no one made $100 in a month or even four.
Dongguan was also a historical footnote: It was here, in 1839, that a Qing official, Lin Zexu, confronted the British and their debilitating opium trade. Lin appeared at a local harbor and ordered the incineration of 20,000 cases of opium. It was a defiant act by an imperial regime that had not yet realized it was already in irreversible decline. The British and Chinese engaged in the First Opium War, in which British warships routed the Chinese military in the waters of Guangdong, the Qing were forced to open the treaty ports to international trade and hand over Hong Kong to Britain. Later, when the Chinese realized that the world had lapped them, that the modern age was being forged with guns and machines, the Dongguan incident would be elevated to a historical milestone in China. It was considered the beginning of the country’s century of humiliation and subjugation to foreign powers.
One hundred and seventy years later, Dongguan was now the sweatshop that made the narcotic that had tilted an increasingly unbalanced global economy in China’s favor—cheap everything.
The small metal plaque beside the guardhouse was engraved in English and Chinese: “Winnerway Basketball Club.” In December 1987, a man named Chen Haitao founded the Guangdong Winnerway Group to capitalize on the inconceivable boom spilling across the provincial coastline. First the company developed industrial parks, including the Winnerway Industrial Park that housed its headquarters. Winnerway (known in Mandarin as Hongyuan) would become Dongguan’s first publicly listed company, on the Shenzhen exchange, and would later expand into pharmaceuticals. But property was the heart of the business, and, needing advertising, Winnerway decided to sponsor a soccer team bearing the company name. By the early 1990s, though, Winnerway decided that soccer wasn’t the sport of China’s future and basketball was. A dynasty was born.
I had arrived the morning of the game to meet the Winnerway general manager, Liu Hongjiang. The complex was less impressive than I had expected; a small, peach-colored dormitory, a narrow concrete courtyard and a small administrative building, right in the heart of Dongguan. The foreign players lived a short walk away in a hotel owned by Winnerway. But if the facilities were unremarkable, there were also small differences. Every player had his own apartment in the complex, and the covered garage was filled with luxury cars. I walked through a meeting room lined with trophies and team photographs as a secretary led me into the office where I would meet the general manager. At other appointments, etiquette called for a host to offer a cup of tea or a cup of heated water. At Winnerway, the secretary brought a can of Red Bull. On the wall above a conference table, a large, framed piece of calligraphy served as a mission statement: “If we combine our knowledge, and if we combine our strengths, we can all succeed.” It was a Mandarin version of “There is no ‘i’ in team.”
Liu Hongjiang arrived late, apologizing yet in a good mood. He was not expecting a close game that night. Liu had a shaved head and a pleasantly conspiratorial manner; as he talked, he leaned forward, elbows on knees, drawing closer, as if sharing a secret. He had been a sports journalist in Guangzhou, considered an expert on basketball, when the Winnerway owner cajoled him into running the team. He knew Winnerway had originally conceived the team for its corporate interests, as an advertising tool and also for government relations. Now, though, he told me, the team was evolving into something different, something organic and independent.
“We are the first and only professional basketball club in the CBA,” he said. “We are different from the traditional way. We follow the management of private enterprise rather than following a government policy.”
For all the mythology of China’s economic renaissance and stories of men like Boss Wang who become multimillionaires, the China story is hardly a parable of capitalism as we know it. Private entrepreneurship exists in perpetual tension with the state, and those tensions seemed more starkly evident in a basketball league organized to be a commercial exercise, even when it actually was not one. Liu disagreed with even the most basic assumption that the CBA was a true professional league. He said league officials tried to copy the NBA, even as they maintained complete control of how the teams were allowed to do business.
Winnerway’s changes started at the top. Chen Haitao once had a reputation for meddling much like Boss Wang, but as his sons had assumed more power in the company, the team had become less of a mere vanity project. Coaches and the front office usually made decisions about the team with less interference from the owners or corporate sponsors. More important, Winnerway was not at the mercy
of sports bureaucrats, as were the Shanghai Sharks. Revenues came from ticket sales, sponsorship, and club-run businesses, including a store that sold T‑shirts, jerseys, and other collectibles. Still, Liu chafed at not having control over advertising in his own arena.
The team’s front office had also learned lessons during the NBA’s recruiting of Yi Jianlian. Yi was a skilled small forward in a power forward’s body and a potential marketing dream; Nike signed him when he was still a teenager and also signed a contract with the Winnerway team. The Milwaukee Bucks drafted Yi in 2007 with the sixth pick in the first round, and he ultimately signed a contract, after acrimonious negotiations between Winnerway, the NBA, and the Bucks. But the process provided an education for the team; the specialists and coaches who came to evaluate and tutor Yi also advised Winnerway on conditioning, weight training, and how best to prepare players. The advice was usually the same: The players are too tired because they practice too much, and they are too weak because the weight program is misguided. Liu said the team now spent $2 million a year to send players and coaches to train and practice in the United States, Europe, and Australia.
Liu thought the team’s success validated their approach. Yet what frustrated him was the straitjacket presented by the league. Teams needed free agency, the ability to market their brand, to control sponsors inside their own arenas, and to sell more concessions and souvenirs. He agreed that the league needed to produce the best national team possible but thought the old model clearly wasn’t doing that. Players were being wasted. Talent was not being properly developed.
“The NBA is a self-evolving league,” he said. “The CBA is nothing at all. I disagree with the Chinese reporters who write that this is a professional league. This is not a professional league. The mind-set of the authorities must be thoroughly changed.”