by Jim Yardley
In the heartland of Chinese manufacturing, professional basketball teams were in the business of manufacturing players. Like the surrounding factories, they were still trying to manufacture for the American market or at least were trying to follow the American model. What had changed, or evolved, was the formula for doing it: better pay, better conditions, better management, and better training. There were flaws, and much to be learned, but change was happening in Guangdong, again. Outside, in the factories, the hives kept churning, but a new generation of teenagers coming off the farm now had higher expectations and lower tolerance for unending overtime and low pay. Economists were already predicting that China’s moment as the world’s lowest-cost manufacturer was coming to an end and that Guangdong, again, would have to become an experiment zone, another petri dish.
The airplane banked hard right as it turned sharply toward the Taiyuan airport. Out the window, the brown, desiccated ravines of Shanxi Province seemed as lifeless as the face of the moon. Winter showed no sign of abating. Six games were remaining, and the Liaoning Pan Pan Dinosaurs were the opponent tomorrow night. It would be an elimination game. The losing team would be out of the playoff chase.
On the bus back to the hotel Pickett sat alone, listening to music on his headset. He had already told me that he would never come back to this team, and it was hard to blame him. In Guangdong, he skipped a team video session to get a massage. He was a prisoner in the last two weeks of his sentence.
The bus exited onto Fuxi Road and we approached the mall with the Louis Vuitton store. Olumide leaned over, nodding toward Pickett, and whispered in my ear. “One of the Chinese players told me they may jump Tim,” he said, eyes widening. He said they were fed up with his criticisms. They called him mini-Bonzi. “I’ve seen it happen before. They were giving me a warning.”
I was stunned. It didn’t seem possible. The bus passed the mall, and the gray tower of the World Trade came into view. Olumide was already thinking about next season, about who would need him and who would pay him. He said interpreters from six different teams were already calling him, gauging his interest. He was certain he didn’t want to return to Taiyuan, though then he paused.
“Never say never,” he said, laughing. “If they pay me $1 million, then I would suck it up.”
He thought the Brave Dragons had almost no chance of making the playoffs. Bayi was also fighting for the last playoff spot, and Olumide said the refs always favored Bayi. Last season, the officiating was so bad that the league imported foreign referees for the final rounds of the playoffs. In China, this was how it worked. Corruption was part of the game.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
BLACK WHISTLES
What was transpiring was a theft in progress. Or at least an attempted theft, since the Brave Dragons seemed determined not to accept the victory the referees seemed equally determined to steal for them. This resistance might have been admirable were it a moral stand, but it was not that. It was plain incompetence. The game was now in the fourth quarter, with barely two minutes remaining, and the refs had sent three Liaoning starters to the bench with six fouls and had sent the Brave Dragons to the foul line more than sixty times. Some teams do not attempt sixty foul shots over the course of three games. This was a pistol-shooting contest where one competitor was getting twice as many chances. Yet the Brave Dragons had missed more than half of their free throws. So the refs had ejected Liaoning’s biggest star. Yet the game was tied at 100.
Timeout. Ren Hongbing unleashed the Wave. It never got old. The crowd was loopy, leaping out of their seats. The referees were huddled on the sideline, plotting, presumably wondering what more they could possibly do. Everyone had warned that the refs might try to steer the outcome of that night’s game. What was surprising was that they were trying to steer it to the Brave Dragons.
The morning had begun with a whiff of paranoia. On the way to the shootaround, Olumide spoke as if the wheels of some invisible piece of machinery were now beginning to turn. He spun various conspiracy theories, none of which involved a happy ending for the Brave Dragons. By this logic, the season had arrived at the moment when the league inevitably began acting like what it was: a system rigged to protect itself and its most important stakeholders, with no stakeholder presumed more important than Bayi. Just a phone call from a general in the People’s Liberation Army and a whole cascade of dominoes could fall to clear a path for Bayi.
“The CBA decides who they want to make the playoffs,” Olumide said, his eyes widening for effect, “and who they do not want to.”
That games were sometimes fixed was obvious, if not necessarily proven. The Guangdong team was the league’s template, as far as professionalization went, but also the object of occasional suspicions about gambling, such as when they lost badly earlier in the season to one of the league’s worst teams. There was speculation that the private owner of the Dongguan New Century Leopards also secretly owned the Jilin team and had ordered Jilin’s top foreign player to fall ill when the two teams met, which had helped Dongguan win the game and consolidate its playoff position. Prada had sworn the refs cheated all the time, but the motive was greed more than a skilled conspiracy, abetted by a failure of oversight, which was usually how corruption worked in society at large.
Every so often, Communist Party leaders launched an anticorruption campaign, and a high official might get taken down in the excitement. But few people interpreted these campaigns as genuine attempts to address the systemic corruption that pervaded so much of official and private life. It was either about public relations or political infighting; one political official or faction, having accrued enough leverage inside the party, was taking down a rival official or faction. When Shanghai’s Communist Party secretary was defrocked in a salacious real estate and pension scandal, his real crime was bucking policies from Beijing. The arrest was a message intended for internal consumption within the Communist Party: Don’t get too uppity. Corruption enraged ordinary citizens, yet their rage, unable to coalesce into anything broad-based or meaningful, usually dissipated into cynicism. Everyone knew the game was rigged and that the only people empowered to make changes were the people running the game, which meant the game wasn’t likely to change. Many people simply played along, too. Cheating scandals erupted on national college entrance examinations. Fake receipts and fake diplomas were national industries, sold outside train stations or over the Internet. Cell phones buzzed with text message advertisements selling fake corporate records or fake visas to Canada. When President Hu Jintao ordered all 70 million Communist Party cadres to attend political education classes and write formal essays, a market quickly appeared online for prewritten essays.
Corruption presented a more complicated challenge to the Chinese Basketball Association. It was one thing to know that party officials or powerful real estate developers were stealing without having to witness the larceny. It was another to pay for a ticket to see it happen. A basketball game actually represented a rare social exercise in China where ordinary people could scream at authority figures such as referees and the game commissioner. Chinese soccer still had not recovered from the public revulsion over corruption scandals, and while basketball was now having its moment of popularity, if fans believed the games were all rigged, or that players weren’t trying their best, then the essential aspect of the competition—that something real was at stake—would be lost.
This season, league officials had introduced an anticorruption policy titled the “Chinese Men’s Basketball Industry Competition Law Punishment Guideline,” which for the first time listed infractions and prescribed fines for wrongdoing. The league applauded itself for this newfound specificity, saying that it was reforming from “people rule” to the “rule of law.” There were also new restrictions on smoking in arenas—this was working like a charm—and the self-babysitting policy for referees. “A minority of referees have a low ability to resist interference,” Titan Sports had soberly reported. “After getting some ‘advantage,’ they giv
e up their principles, and manipulation of games certainly exists.” No longer, the league promised.
It all sounded nice. But no doubt those referees could find someone willing to sell them fake forms to turn in to the league office if they were still out drinking baijiu with general managers and taking envelopes of cash. No guideline addressed the broader corruption in basketball and elsewhere that was more about systemic favoritism than about bribing referees. No matter how fast the league or the country was changing, power had diffused far more slowly.
A few days before the game, I had lunch in Beijing with Boss Wang’s son, Songyan, whose English name was King. The first time I met King, I had wondered about his choice for a name. It seemed a touch presumptuous. But he was merely using the English translation of his surname, Wang. King was the temperamental opposite of his father, forever friendly and reasonable, polished and proud of his correspondence degree in English from a school in California. We met at an Italian restaurant inside an expensive mall, and King arrived in his usual preppy attire. He traveled regularly for his different businesses but as the season wore on, he had started turning up on the bench beside his father during games. He had befriended Weiss and Tracy, joining them in Sanya for the Lunar New Year vacation. The clouds of anger that invariably darkened his father’s face never seemed to touch King. And yet when I asked about the team’s prospect for the playoffs, his mood turned sour.
“Not this year,” he answered emphatically before catching my eye. “Too many complicated things in China.”
He took a bite from his salad.
“Do you know the hei shao?” he asked. The black whistle.
I nodded. Fans had yelled it at a few games.
“When we played against Bayi in Ningbo, we only lost by two points. Ningbo is their hometown.” He had counted five fouls called against the Brave Dragons in the final minutes. I had watched that game on television and noticed that Bayi was getting to the line but had not suspected corruption. I just thought their players were smarter about drawing fouls. But King was certain that the outcome was fixed and he wasn’t alone. He had laughed when he saw someone on the Web had written that the refs should be called “Protect the Army Whistle.”
King saw the cheating as part of the broader problem of the league clinging to control and power. Bayi represented the last stand of a system. The team was fighting with the Brave Dragons, the Pan Pan Dinosaurs, and a few other teams for the final playoff spot, so it was commonly assumed around the league that a general had made a call to the league office. With so many teams fighting for the spot, clearing the path would not be straightforward but no one seemed to doubt it was happening. That was the other part of having a rigged game; everyone always assumed the real game was hidden, even when sometimes it actually was not.
It would never be clear whether Boss Wang bought the refs, but if he did, he must have been wondering about his investment with three minutes left in the game.
The players returned from the timeout and Liaoning took a two-point lead. This inspired the referees to send Olumide to the line for six foul shots on the next three possessions. Miraculously, he made five of them. The odds of an asteroid strike had seemed greater, given the team’s poor foul shooting, but those foul shots could have been enough to finally seal the game. With only five seconds remaining, the Brave Dragons led by three points. Except Liaoning’s American import, Awvee Storey, who had played a fairly awful game, caught the ball cleanly, squared to the basket, and shot a lovely 3-pointer that snapped the net, tied the game, and sent the whole compromised mess into overtime.
The binding contract that had compelled the refs to aid and abet the Brave Dragons did not seem to extend beyond regulation. Overtime began with Olumide quickly being whistled for his sixth and final foul, as was Kobe. The game was at stake, and only then did the Brave Dragons seize it. With seconds remaining, Tim Pickett isolated his man, shook his shoulders, and then rose for the winning basket. It was a gorgeous shot and the crowd leaped out of their seats. The Brave Dragons had won, 118–117. Fans rushed onto the court to engulf Pickett and it wasn’t even clear that everyone realized what they had really just witnessed.
Weiss had seen the game from the trenches and later was surprised when complaints arose about the officiating. He thought both teams got calls, but his view was in the minority. The postgame news conference began with an appearance by the Liaoning coach, who appeared to have been crying. His eyes were reddened and he left after making a short statement. The room overflowed with reporters, including several who covered the Pan Pan Dinosaurs, but no one asked the Liaoning coach any questions, much less the obvious one. When Weiss arrived, he looked exhausted. He began, almost out of habit, by praising the refs for controlling what was a rough, physical game. Toward the back of the room, a young reporter began frantically waving her hand. She was one of the Liaoning reporters and had already confronted the game commissioner about the 45 fouls called against her team. The commissioner had just shrugged.
Now she was seething, her voice cracking.
“You said the referees handled this game well,” she began. “Do you think it was a fair game?”
Weiss waited for Garrison to translate the question.
“It’s not my job to judge the referees going into the game and after the game,” he said coolly.
The rest of the room wrote down his quote, presuming the subject had now been broached and deflected. But rising out of her seat, the young Liaoning reporter was trembling and shouted something in English. “I just don’t think you guys are really honest!”
“Please speak in Chinese!” warned the news conference moderator, but the reporter had already stormed out of the room.
The game would become the scandal of the week in the CBA. What followed was a discussion of corruption without ever directly mentioning corruption. There were blaring Internet headlines about the travesty of a game with 79 fouls, as if the game were a road accident with a high fatality count. But any discussion of the conditions of the road, the highway patrol charged with overseeing the law, or the quality of the drivers was muted. The Liaoning team, last season’s runner-up, was now eliminated from the playoffs. They were infuriated but could only vent their rage where it was inevitably vented in China: on the Internet.
“The basketball here is very dark,” Zhang Qingpeng, the star guard who had been ejected, wrote on his blog. “The sky here was gray. When you come to the arena, you find the floor is black. And the basketball is different than in other places. It is dark and black.”
His teammate Yang Ming, who had played the game with a broken nose, also wrote a note to his fans:
“This is the first time after so many years of playing basketball that I can only use one word: unbelievable. The only thing I can remember is whistle, whistle, whistle. My teammates kept going out of the game, one after another. The other team kept shooting free throws, one after another. But the whistles would not stop. I hope everybody can understand. This is something we could not control.”
The next day at practice I asked Joy about the refs. He laughed.
“They were good for us,” he said as he exercised his knee on a stationary bike. “They were bad for them.”
Why?
“Home game,” he said.
A win was a win. Five games remained, three on the road, two at home. Winning five would almost certainly secure the final playoff berth. Winning four might do it. From the outside, the season had been a success, and Taiyuan fans were thrilled with the team’s progress. A television poll found that 90 percent of respondents thought the team had done very well. Even Boss Wang’s boldest preseason goal had been tenth place. Now the team had a shot at the playoffs.
Yet the view from inside the team was of people being fed into a grinding machine. Winning a game fortified everyone temporarily, but winning was more often confusing than clarifying. What did it validate? The offense barely existed. Against the New Century Leopards, Pan had been so confused by the conflictin
g orders from Liu Tie and Boss Wang that at halftime he asked not to start the second half.
“When we win, everybody is happy, but I don’t know how we are winning,” Joy said as he grimaced and stretched his bad knee. “I can’t understand. We are not playing well. We played badly last night. It must be because the foreign players are better.”
Joy stepped off the bike and wrapped an elastic band around his knee. He blamed part of his gloomy mood on his injury. He had never been seriously hurt before and had hoped leaving Guangdong for Shanxi would allow him enough time on the court to achieve his dream of being chosen as an all-star. He was the most quietly indispensable Chinese player on the team, yet his injury had cost him a third of the season, and the erratic management of the team had left him disillusioned. The all-star team had just been announced, and the team’s two selections were Olumide and Kobe, the latter selection a surprise to Weiss. He thought the league had at least forty Chinese players who were better. But Kobe played tough defense against foreign stars and was one of the rare Chinese players with an athletic game. Little Ba and Duan were selected to play in the rookie game, and Wei was picked for the 3-point contest. Having five players in the all-star events was considered a validation of the season. Weiss would be a judge at the dunk contest.
On the court, the junior team was running full-court layup drills. Three passes to cover the court, no dribbling, and then a layup.
“I can’t learn anything at this club,” Joy said before walking off to join the senior team for practice. “We have no teamwork. I don’t know what I’m doing out there. I used to work really hard at practice, and I cared very much. But now my dream has died.”