by Jim Yardley
The season was nearly over, and Tracy was feeling a bit forlorn. China had disarmed her. Life seemed so vibrant, so strange and wonderful at the same time. On many of her walks, she carried her camera and marveled at what she saw through the viewfinder: a grinning shirtless man with a feathery white goatee practicing Kung Fu in the middle of a construction site; a man gabbing on his cell phone as he stood on the street beside his mule-drawn cart; a grinning workman slowly pedaling a bicycle with ten-foot bundles of used Styrofoam strapped in the back; two tiny, pink-cheeked children kissing on the lips. The soap opera of the team could be grinding and sometimes difficult emotionally, especially the situation with the owner, but the experience of China had overwhelmed her. It was like living in some crazily wonderful carnival. In Sanya, she had met a Chinese Elvis impersonator. In Urumqi, the team had been greeted by the staff at their hotel and presented with traditional skullcaps. She and Bob had bicycled atop the ancient wall in the city of Xi’an; outside Beijing, they had climbed up the Great Wall of China, and ridden down on a goofy tourist toboggan. In Guangdong Province, they walked through a forest of twenty-five-foot-tall bamboo. When her sister, Susan, visited, they toured the national panda research institute and hugged a four-year-old panda as he licked a spoon of honey. In the foothills of the Himalayas in Yunnan Province, they slept in a farmer’s guesthouse beneath the jagged peak of Jade Snow Mountain.
Food had alternately amazed and appalled her. At seafood restaurants, you would select your meal from plastic bins filled with fish or eels or shrimp. Everything was still alive. At one place, Bob had pointed to a large sea bass; he and Tracy had taken their seats, when they heard the loud thwack of the chef clubbing the fish. At food markets, she saw bins of centipedes, scorpions, crickets, kidneys, testicles, and more. If she had failed at something, it was her impossible assigned task of liberating and returning to the wild every animal in the Middle Kingdom, what she jokingly called her “rescue list.” Which partly explains why she brought a cage into the World Trade apartments. She had been wandering downtown, shopping, when she came to an outdoor market selling live chickens, turtles, and other animals intended for the pot. In one of the cages was a small, strange squirrel trapped somewhere in the mountains outside the city. Wildlife of any sort was a rarity in much of north China; Mao had once ordered a national campaign to eradicate pests, birds, rats, and other rodents, but the pressure now came from the encroachment of development or from trappers looking for something to eat or sell. The squirrel was gray with large pointy ears, a bushy tail, and silver hair that stood straight up on his head. Weiss thought he looked like the boxing promoter Don King.
Tracy had pitied the squirrel. He was a variety of flying squirrel, which, if left in the mountains, would have hopped from limb to limb, tree to tree, in search of food. The cage had altered his natural environment without altering his nature. He still wanted to move and glide, so he did flips inside the cage. Again and again, with the consistency of a metronome, he flipped. He flipped with an alarming frenzy. The cooking pot almost seemed a more charitable fate.
Tracy bought him with the idea of returning him to the mountains before she left China. In the interim, she placed his cage inside the enclosed terrace of their apartment, and he continued doing flips. It was a spectacle, first funny, and then almost exhausting to watch him flipping to the point of exhaustion, the cage rattling with a tiny thud each time his tiny squirrel feet stuck a landing. The repetition was hypnotic, if unsettling, since the flipping accomplished nothing, as if he were trying to escape a padded cell by slamming himself against the wall.
After a while, everyone started calling him Hoppy.
Boss Wang took the ball at the top of the key and the junior team obediently parted so that he could perform unimpeded his patented herky-jerky drive to the basket. The young players were making an almost comical effort to enable their owner to have a Jordanesque pickup game. He was being granted a demilitarized zone of about three feet between himself and his defender. So on the last jerk of his herky-jerky drive, Boss Wang dipped his shoulder, scored, and grinned.
“He’s too good!” exulted his teammate, a league official named Hao Guohua.
It was not clear to me why Hao was sucking up. He was about sixty, maybe 5′7″, and was responsible for overseeing China’s national team. He and Boss Wang were working off their lunch in front of a small crowd, including me, at the practice gym. In a few hours, the Brave Dragons would play a vital game against the Shandong Lions, and I had arranged to talk to Boss Wang about it.
Three games now remained, and while the lines of dominoes had continued collapsing, they had created paths leading in unexpected directions. The universally accepted assumption that the league would place its unseen powers in the service of Bayi had not come to pass. Or if the league had tried, the conspiracy had not worked yet. Bayi was struggling. In fact, reliable word had now circulated that an anti-Bayi conspiracy had been initiated, a resistance movement of the embittered. In particular, the coach of a team whose playoff position was already assured decided to rest his top foreign players in a game against a team fighting for a playoff spot. This allowed the latter team to win the game, which also allowed it to edge ahead of Bayi in the standings. Cheating, apparently, was being democratized.
The Brave Dragons had not yet benefited, however. They celebrated their big win over the Pan Pan Dinosaurs by squandering an 18-point lead against their next opponent, the Jilin Northeast Tigers, and losing in a blowout. Jilin was helped because the same foreign star who had fallen inexplicably ill when the team lost earlier to the Dongguan New Century Leopards had now miraculously recovered and scored 66 points against the Brave Dragons. The loss almost ended any playoff hopes for the Brave Dragons, except that the team recovered with a win two days earlier. That was when the real miracle happened.
During the postgame news conference, Journalist Li and another reporter suddenly burst into the room shouting: “Bayi has lost! Bayi has lost!” No one could believe it. Not only had Bayi lost but so had Beijing and Shandong, the two other teams fighting for the last playoff spot. The Brave Dragons still trailed in the standings but could clinch a play-off spot by winning their last three games, assuming Bayi lost at least once. But, most of all, they had to win. One Brave Dragons loss meant they were out.
The pickup game was now over, and Boss Wang sat down and started changing into his street clothes. Hao was laughing and smoking a cigarette as he pulled on his long underwear, pants, and top, and palmed his hair into place. He shook hands with Boss Wang and left for the arena. The game started in less than two hours.
I asked Boss Wang about the Brave Dragons’ chances. “Not good,” he said solemnly, his hair wet with perspiration. “You saw what happened yesterday.”
He was referring to practice the previous day. Everyone had been feeling pretty good, since the team had won the night before and gotten itself back into the playoff picture. A group of fans had come to the practice gym with a large banner to celebrate. They unfurled the banner on the court and posed beneath it with the team. No one seemed to notice as Boss Wang arrived at the opposite end of the gym. The fans left, and Liu Tie convened the players, talking about the game the night before and what the team had and had not done well. After about ten minutes, Boss Wang wandered across the court, hands in pockets, head down, and stopped at the edge of the huddle, listening, waiting. Finally, Coach Liu asked if he would like to speak.
Yes, Boss Wang said, he would. He started shouting at the coaches and the players, mocking Liu for focusing on offense, excoriating everyone else for losing their edge.
“You’re talking about offense!” he shouted. “You’re talking about defense! But none of that matters. Look at you! None of you are prepared to fight! None of you are ready!”
He worked himself into such a fury that his chest began to shake and his body trembled as he walked back to the seats on the opposite side of the court. The players seemed terrified and silently formed their stretc
hing circle. Coach Liu approached the owner, but Boss Wang stood, stripped off his jacket, and took over practice. He grabbed Big Sun and showed him how to slam his body into a defender on a drive. This was supposed to be a light workout, a day before a critical game, but Boss Wang yelled at everyone to scrimmage and slash hard to the basket. He walked with his hips cocked, like a gunslinger, pushing players into position. Players were crashing into one another. Pickett tweaked his bad ankle. Little Ba got kicked in the knee.
Now, a day later and barely two hours before the game, Boss Wang had pulled on his knit shirt and checked his watch. He had not changed his opinion. “The players and the coaches are not ready,” he told me. “They were taking pictures.”
He paused, dripping with sweat. “Mentally, they have lost their spirit and their confidence. They don’t have the will to fight.”
The gym was empty and his voice rose against the silence. He was frustrated that the team lost the 18-point lead in the game against Jilin; it was a failing of character, evidence of a weakness he could not tolerate. He blamed Coach Liu. “After Bonzi left, Liu Tie took charge again,” he said. “I think the team lost spirit and the coaches never got them back.”
He stood up and started pulling on his trousers. Frustrations and suspicions spilled out of him. He was certain that the league was trying to thwart him, to somehow stop his team from making the playoffs. He was suspicious of Coach Liu. Boss Wang had distrusted other Chinese coaches, and now he wondered if Liu had an agenda, if he even truly wanted the team to qualify for the playoffs. They had already exceeded the goal of fourteenth place. Maybe he didn’t want expectations set too high for next season? He had reinstated Liu Tie after Bonzi left, as a way to give him experience for next season, but the young coach had disappointed him.
“He’s arrogant,” said Boss Wang. “He doesn’t listen. He resists too much.
“It’s Chinese culture. American people are very straight. They just say what they are thinking. You can never tell what Chinese people are thinking. So you need to look at what they are doing.”
We talked a few minutes about that night’s game and then about Bonzi. I asked him which of the three Americans in his opinion best suited the team. He suddenly smiled. “Bonzi helped the most,” he said. The problem was integrating him into the team. His level was too high and “some players couldn’t understand his level. The rest of the players couldn’t reach that point. That type of player has his own character. He knows how to help the team and you don’t have to tell him. He doesn’t want you to control him.”
He turned and looked me directly in the eye and, unsolicited, addressed the festering sore of the season: when he hit Kobe. “We had different ways to help Zhang,” he said. “I’m like his grandfather. Sometimes I kick him or punch him. But I’m trying to help him. Bonzi tried the American way. I tried the Chinese way.
“I could tell Bonzi really cared about the team,” he said. “But my way is the Chinese way. He’s my kid. By beating him, I’m trying to help him. To make that point.”
We were done. It was 6 p.m., and he wanted to speak to the team before the game. He finished by telling me that Chinese culture was very complicated and that I would need to live here for ten years to understand it. He didn’t seem impressed when I mentioned that I had already lived in China for six years. Chinese never say what they are thinking, he repeated. You need to see what they are doing.
Earlier that day, a rumor circulated among the Chinese players. Someone had seen Tim Pickett having a meal with the Shandong team. It was no secret that his brother-in-law, Mack Tuck, played for Shandong, but eating with the opposing team seemed unusual, if it were actually true, which maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.
When the team met for the usual morning shootaround, everyone was in a tetchy mood and still unsettled by Boss Wang’s tirade the day before. The Chinese players staggered as much as they ran. Everyone looked exhausted and beaten down. Olumide wondered if the owner had an ulterior motive for his screaming. Maybe he didn’t want the team to make the playoffs because it would save him money, since Olumide would get a $50,000 bonus.
Shandong used a zone defense, and Coach Liu spent a half hour trying to explain a play to free up a shooter on the wing for a 3-point shot. When Weiss made a suggestion, Liu called the team together, explained the suggestion in Chinese, describing it as “a good idea,” and then instructed the team to keep doing it his way. Weiss was fuming as he and Garrison left for the security meeting in the Hawaii Room.
At the meeting, a league official introduced himself. He had been sent because this was an important game and the league did not want any problems. He warned the officials to call a fair game. He reminded the coaches not to do anything to discredit the league. And then he turned back to the referees to remind them that the league trusted them, but if only a single person lost that trust, then the reputation of the whole league would suffer.
Garrison interpreted the official’s warning as an ominous sign. This was a home game. The refs were supposed to be in our corner. Now maybe they wouldn’t be.
“Tonight,” Ren Hongbing shouted into his microphone as the crowd started to scream, “is the last home game for Shanxi!”
The crowd was arriving late, as usual, and the cheerleaders on the court in their halter tops. They had brushed blue glitter onto their eyelashes and tossed their parkas onto the floor. Everyone rose for the national anthem and solemnly did not sing. Olumide loped over to the penalty box and high-fived his personal trainer, Ogoh. Pickett and Mack Tuck embraced near midcourt. Everyone was bumping shoulders. Tuck asked the referee for the ball. He wanted to feel it. He rubbed it in his palms, turning it in his fingers before flipping it back to the ref. Olumide walked to the midcourt circle opposite the Shandong center, Samaki Walker, the former Laker. They stared upward into the lights, crouched, eyes wide. The ref raised his thumb in the air and then held the ball above them for an instant. The arena was silent, expectant, and then the ref tossed the ball in the air and the two big men jumped after it.
Kobe had drawn Mack Tuck and swatted the ball out of bounds. Tuck had a temper, and Kobe was harassing him, getting under his skin. His confidence was soaring after his all-star selection and he slashed to the basket for a score. Tuck complained to a ref that Kobe was kicking him. A fan in a Brave Dragons jersey jumped up and yelled at Tuck in English: “Fuck you!”
The Brave Dragons were ferocious but sloppy. Pan turned the ball over. Big Sun turned it over. Samaki Walker pushed Shandong ahead with a few nice baskets. He was as calm and professional as everyone else was not. Kobe was stalking Mack Tuck, and Tuck was mouthing off, and the refs separated them as the crowd shouted at Tuck. The refs tried to bring Kobe and Tuck together to shake hands, but Tuck refused and started jawing at the fans behind the basket. The first quarter ended with Shandong leading 25–20.
Boss Wang was very wrong. They cared. They wanted to win. They just had to stop turning the ball over.
Shandong extended its lead to 34–29 in the second quarter and the Brave Dragons inserted Joy, Little Ba, and Duan into the game with Olumide and Pickett. Joy immediately changed the tenor of the game. He made a basket and followed it with a steal and assist to Duan. Pickett made a nice pass to Little Ba for another basket and the margin was now one point. Pickett started to find his shot, making two 3-pointers, thrusting out his chest and waving his arms. Brave Dragons led 41–39.
“Let’s go!” Ren Hongbing shouted over the microphone.
Pickett was now guarding his brother-in-law. Every time Tuck touched the ball, the crowd was on him, shouting “Fuck you! Fuck you!” Tuck walked to the edge of the court and shouted back. Duan roared in for a breakaway but was hammered by Samaki Walker, who probably outweighed him by 100 pounds. Duan was splayed on the floor, rubbing his hip, as the crowd berated Walker and the Taiyuan press corps screamed in protest. Walker and Duan talked and shook hands. Now there were seconds remaining and the Brave Dragons raced to half-court and tossed up a
prayer at the halftime buzzer. It went in. They led 50–46. Pickett topped all scorers with 24 points.
After halftime, Pickett came out of the locker room cold, missing his shots, and became more passive on offense. Shandong regained the lead, until Joy and Little Ba began hitting 3-pointers. Then came a moment that would help decide the Brave Dragons’ season: Mack Tuck was bulling down the lane, raising the ball toward the basket, elbows extended, as Joy and Pickett converged to stop him. Pickett suddenly dropped to a knee, holding his head as if he had been struck. He was slowly shaking his head, cupping his skull in his hands, as he walked down the sideline to the bench. The Brave Dragons led 79–78 as the quarter ended.
The final quarter began with Duan making a 3-point play. But the spectacle was on the sideline. Pickett was sprawled on the floor, writhing in pain, holding an ice pack to his head. On the court, Joy stole the ball and dished to Olumide for an 84–80 lead as Ren Hongbing hit his soundboard for the Wave. The whole arena was rising and falling and shouting, and a minute later, Joy scored again.
“Ji Le!” screamed Ren Hongbing. “Wo ai ni!” Joy. I love you.
Shandong closed the gap to a point, 88–87. Weiss walked over to talk to Pickett, who was still on the floor beside the bench. Shandong was now pushing ahead. The Brave Dragons were sapped. They were turning the ball over and taking bad shots. Pickett slowly rose and the crowd began chanting his name. But he dropped to a knee and remained on the floor. Olumide made two foul shots to regain a one-point lead. Garrison walked over to Pickett, carrying a message from Boss Wang: Play and you’ll get a double bonus for the game.
Five minutes and forty-seven seconds were remaining. Joy was fouled hard by Samaki Walker and made both free throws. Tie score, at 92. The crowd was jeering Shandong. A fan tossed a plastic bottle on the court. Pickett staggered to the scorer’s table.