Brave Dragons Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2012 by Jim Yardley

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  All photographs courtesy of Tracy Weiss unless otherwise noted.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Yardley, Jim, [date]

  Brave Dragons : a Chinese basketball team, an American coach, and two cultures clashing / Jim Yardley.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95770-2

  1. Shanxi Zhongyu Brave Dragons (Basketball team) 2. Basketball—China. 3. Social change—China. 4. Americans—China. I. Title.

  GV885.52.S53Y37 2012

  796.323′6409—dc23 2011023514

  Map by Steven Shukow

  Cover photograph by Simon Lee

  Cover design and hand-lettering by Joel Holland

  v3.1_r2

  FOR THEO

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Map

  Prologue: Summer 2008

  One The Foreign Expert

  Two The Purge

  Three Pieces

  Four Basketball Is Life

  Five Shooting the Messengers

  Six Fight

  Seven Selling Air

  Eight Rumors

  Nine The Ambassador

  Ten Birthplace of the Game

  Eleven Merry Christmas

  Twelve Bodies

  Thirteen Yao’s House

  Fourteen Corner Pockets

  Fifteen Red Soldier

  Sixteen LOL

  Seventeen Cast-Outs

  Eighteen The Promised Land

  Nineteen Black Whistles

  Twenty Tenth Place

  Epilogue

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Teams in the Chinese Basketball Association usually have different English and Chinese names, which explains why the Shanxi Brave Dragons are more commonly known in China as the Shanxi Zhongyu. For the sake of this book, I’ve favored using the English names, when possible.

  PROLOGUE

  Summer 2008

  Boss Wang’s experiment was not working. From the moment he arrived in the mountains of western Oregon, he was displeased with what he saw on the court. He had sent his Chinese basketball team to America for a summer immersion program, figuring that since the best basketball was played in America, his players would improve there. So far, they were losing every game by 20 or 30 points against semipro teams on the West Coast. Boss Wang hated losing, truly loathed it, but the losing wasn’t what most frustrated him now. What drove him crazy about his Chinese players was that they didn’t play like Americans, no matter how hard he tried to alter their basketball DNA. In gathering up his team from central China and depositing them in the United States, Boss Wang thought the change in environment might help. But as he stood at the edge of the practice court, watching his Chinese coach run a scrimmage that seemed little different from a scrimmage in China, Boss Wang decided change was not happening fast enough.

  Boss Wang was visiting the United States for the first time, having arrived in San Francisco after the eleven-hour flight from Beijing, and his son hoped he would spend a few weeks absorbing some American culture, maybe even drive cross-country. The son had hired a guide in Beijing who specialized in escorting Chinese bosses to America. The guide knew Chinese bosses liked to gamble in Vegas and tour the strip bars in L.A. The Statue of Liberty, the White House, and Disney World were perennials, too. He made the usual arrangements. But Boss Wang had little patience for any of that. He had a business deal to finalize back in China. He raced through six cities on both coasts in five days. In Portland, he bought a few pairs of $300 designer jeans. In Midtown Manhattan, he spent about $200,000 on jewelry. His biggest purchase was still pending. He was now convinced he needed to buy an American basketball coach.

  Boss Wang was sixty-one, but looked younger, with tousled black hair that fell onto his forehead. He had a thick chest and thick hands, and his appearance was a little rough, unfinished. He didn’t smile very often; he eyed most people as if they might take something from him. His son, Songyan, admitted that even now, as a grown man, he was still stopped cold by his father’s glare, or by his father’s voice when it splintered into sharp, angry edges. Boss Wang looked more like the son of a peasant farmer he was, rather than the steel baron he had become—one of the richest men in China. Forbes had estimated his wealth at roughly $260 million and ranked him as the country’s 236th richest person, though gauging wealth with any precision is nearly impossible in China. What could indisputably be said was that money had showered down on China during the previous decade; it had sprinkled over hundreds of millions of people, enough to lift many of them out of aching poverty and push them, tentatively, into better lives. But for a smaller group, the money had poured down as if in a deluge, and this new Chinese class had become as fabulously wealthy as the most fabulously wealthy people in the world.

  His team, the Shanxi Brave Dragons, had arrived in the United States a few weeks ahead of him. He had owned the Brave Dragons for several years but worried that he had inadequately immersed himself in the team. (His players and coaches felt quite the opposite.) Now he was selling his last steel mill in China in a merger, and given that entanglements had arisen about unpaid taxes, the deal resembled a shotgun marriage with the shotgun pointed at him. Still, he told friends the sale would be a relief. Now he could focus his energy and resources on basketball. The previous season, the Brave Dragons had won five games (two by forfeit) and lost 24, the worst record in the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA). What enraged Boss Wang as much as losing was how the team lost. Sometimes his players simply quit. “Basketball is a fight,” he told me later. “You never quit. You never give up.”

  The Brave Dragons were based for the summer at the United States Basketball Academy, about forty-five miles outside Eugene, in the ridgelines of the Cascades. It is a beautiful, isolated place, embroidered with fir trees and overlooking the McKenzie River. The academy was a boot camp for international teams looking for a crash course on the metaphysics of the American game, yet one where a foreign owner did not have to worry that his players would be distracted by anything other than basketball. When he arrived, Boss Wang was assigned the John Wooden Cabin. Filled with memorabilia from Wooden’s coaching career at UCLA, the cabin was a tribute to one of America’s most famous college coaches, the academy’s holiest shrine. A special edition of Wooden’s book about life and basketball, Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success, rested on the coffee table like a Gideon’s Bible.

  Boss Wang had never heard of Wooden. What he knew of American basketball came from what he watched on state television in China, which meant the National Basketball Association. His admiration of the United States was mostly admiration of the NBA, and how NBA players played the game. He had skipped a visit to Los Angeles when he learned he could not attend a game of the hometown Lakers; in New York, he dedicated much of his day to visiting the trophy hall of the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. He watched almost every NBA game on China Central Television(CCTV), studying how the players moved up and down the floor, how the best guards glided toward the basket, as if they were running along a conveyor belt embedded in the court. He stared into his television set and saw movement, always mov
ement, and he studied patterns and clues to whatever formula was making that movement possible. Yet when he tried to impart his knowledge to his team in China, barking out instructions and then waiting to see his vision realized, the result inevitably disappointed him. His players never moved the way the Americans did on television. They never seemed to get it right.

  Among many of the general managers, players, and reporters who followed the Chinese Basketball Association, Boss Wang was regarded as just short of a madman, a meddler who had fired fifteen (or sixteen coaches?) since buying the team in 2002. He had fired a Korean coach, an Australian coach, and a dozen-plus Chinese coaches. He had been fined repeatedly for his outbursts during games, and although league officials appreciated his dedication to the sport (and the money he was willing to pour into it), they were probably relieved that his team was located far away from the media spotlight, in the city of Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province, at the heart of the nation’s polluted coal belt. The team was an embarrassment on the court, and Boss Wang was an embarrassment off it.

  He hardly felt shamed. He had a sharply critical view of most Chinese coaches, considering them too stubborn, too close-minded, to embrace the concepts he saw in the NBA. He blamed them for lacking his passion, his love of the game. If his coaches hadn’t been able to Americanize his players, he would just take the team to America. Yet now he realized that wasn’t enough. In Oregon, he decided his latest Chinese coach was incapable of transplanting the NBA game onto a court in China. “He said no Chinese coach can understand his ideas,” said the team’s general manager.

  The new CBA season would begin in four months, and Boss Wang knew that the league was conducting its own experiment this year. Officials were under pressure to produce better players and create a more exciting style of play, more like games in the NBA. Salary restrictions on foreign players and coaches were being lifted, which meant the richest teams could in principle hire the best talent available. Boss Wang decided that merely hiring an American head coach was not enough; he wanted to be the first Chinese owner to hire a former NBA head coach. He wanted a coach with a higher basketball consciousness, someone who understood the game the way he did.

  It was 8 a.m. on June 12. A former NBA coach was losing consciousness on an operating table in a Seattle hospital. Bob Weiss was being sedated as the surgeons prepared to remove the cancer discovered in his body. In the waiting room, his wife, Tracy, was quietly terrified. It was a sunny morning in Seattle, and Tracy sat beside a big window filled with light, working on a needlepoint belt, trying to distract herself through the monotony of stitching, loop after loop after loop, until a hospital pager vibrated against her hip. Tracy called the nursing station. Her husband’s operation had started. It was scheduled to last four hours.

  Six months earlier a routine physical had determined that Bob Weiss had an elevated PSA count. A biopsy had brought more bad news: He had an aggressive, advanced stage of prostate cancer. Tracy interrogated the doctors and spent days conducting gloomy research on the Internet that had left her consumed with dread. She and Bob had married twenty-two years before, when she was barely out of college and he was coming off a broken marriage. He was an assistant coach for the Dallas Mavericks and seventeen years older. She was a teacher in Plano, a suburb of Dallas. They had shared a full, fun life. But now she suddenly, unexpectedly had to face the possibility her husband might soon die. The doctors hoped they could get all the cancer, but they were not certain what they would find. Tracy stared at the fine sunny Seattle day and returned to her stitching.

  As a player in the NBA, Bob Weiss had known only minor health concerns. He had played for more than a decade, during the era of John Havlicek, Wilt Chamberlain, and Oscar Robertson, and was a rugged defender who teamed with Jerry Sloan on some tough Chicago Bulls teams. He was nicknamed “the Ironman” after his streak of 555 consecutive games; when he tore ligaments in the middle finger of his left hand, Weiss filed down the small cast so that he could continue to dribble and shoot. When his playing career ended, Weiss began a coaching career that lasted more than two decades. Bald, with oversized wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, Weiss was anti-glamour in a glamorized, hip-hop league. As a coach, his outfits were so mismatched that Tracy, appalled, began using color-coded sticky notes to coordinate his suits, shirts, and ties for road trips. Pat Riley and Phil Jackson were gurus. Bob Weiss was a regular guy.

  It was now 9 a.m. Tracy was still stitching, glancing at the Today show, when her cell phone rang with a call from a friend, John MacLaren, who tried to ease her anxieties. The operation was the surgical equivalent of an arcade game wherein you use a joystick to try to retrieve a stuffed animal with a metal claw: The doctors were tapping buttons on a computer keyboard to manipulate a robotic arm performing the surgery. MacLaren teased that the doctors had probably run out of quarters for the operating machine. Tracy had to laugh.

  Another old Seattle friend arrived in the waiting room. Bob and Tracy had lived in Seattle for fourteen years, raising two children in the city, an almost unimaginably long tenure in the vagabond NBA. Bob spent twelve of those years as an assistant coach for the Seattle SuperSonics and had accepted that he would likely retire as an assistant. He had arrived in Seattle after getting fired as head coach of the Los Angeles Clippers, which followed getting fired as head coach of the Atlanta Hawks, which followed getting fired as head coach of the San Antonio Spurs. He had a reputation as a smart tactical coach who was liked by his players, though perhaps liked too much, according to his critics, who considered his relaxed style a shortcoming. He had taken teams to the playoffs, but his head coaching jobs had usually been with second-rate teams. He had a sharp sense of humor, which made him popular with the beat writers stuck covering his teams. “We’re going to be exciting,” Weiss predicted of his 1992 Atlanta Hawks. “Of course, it was exciting when the Titanic went down.” Beneath his wisecracks, though, Weiss always believed that he could have been a winner, given the right opportunity, even as he assumed his chances for another head coaching job were slim. Being an assistant in Seattle had kept him in the game and provided a nice life.

  Then, quite unexpectedly, in 2006, the rising young Sonics coach, Nate McMillan, departed after a contract squabble and took the top job with the Portland Trail Blazers. Weiss, the lead assistant, became head coach. It would have made a heartwarming story, except Weiss was fired before midseason. Injuries and a lousy start had doomed him. Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks, was an impatient owner who would soon sell the Sonics out of Seattle. During a road trip in the Midwest, Schultz ordered his general manager to replace Weiss with an assistant, leaving Weiss to return alone to Seattle, despondent and humiliated. The Seattle media rallied behind him, as did many of the fans, but Weiss spent weeks rarely leaving his house until one evening he and Tracy finally ventured out to visit a neighborhood bar called the Attic. The television was tuned in to the NCAA basketball tournament when the fired Sonics coach walked through the door.

  “All these college kids stood up and gave Bob a standing ovation,” Tracy said. He could show his face again.

  For any fired coach, a guaranteed contract is better than a standing ovation, and Weiss had eighteen more months of paychecks. He kept busy as a television commentator in the Pacific Northwest while his youngest child, Grace, entered her final year of high school. By the time Grace graduated, his contract had expired. His son, Stuart, was already in college. The economy was falling apart, and tuition bills would be arriving. Weiss wanted to downsize but his house in a Seattle gated community wouldn’t sell. He needed work. Tracy was inside a big, lonely house, fretting about an empty nest. She had always wanted to travel abroad. What about coaching overseas? Italy was beautiful. France might be romantic.

  Bob Weiss had spent the first six decades of his life happily confined to the United States of America. The prospect of international travel so thoroughly unnerved him that he had never applied for a passport. He worried about terrorists, and he worried ab
out silly things, like getting lost. When the Sonics played exhibition games in Germany, Weiss, then an assistant, volunteered to stay back and scout college players in Tracy’s hometown of Memphis. Finally, after a friend invited them to France, and Tracy insisted on going, her nervous husband followed. France turned out to be quite nice. Later, when the Sonics traveled to Japan, Weiss went there, too. He began to think anew about the rest of the world. Coaching overseas might be fun, an adventure as well as a paycheck.

  Weiss contacted Warren LeGarie, an agent known for placing American coaches and players with foreign teams.

  “What about China?” LeGarie asked.

  China was the future, LeGarie said. The NBA was getting into China, and getting in fast.

  Weiss listened. France and Italy were not China. “That’s not really what we were thinking about when we said ‘abroad,’ ” he replied.

  His cancer diagnosis interrupted his plans. Unlike Tracy, though, he did not bother researching prostate cancer or calculating his odds, figuring certain things were out of his control. Weeks before his surgery, China unexpectedly came calling again; Adidas invited him to coach at a basketball camp in Shanghai. What the hell, he figured. He stayed at the Shangri-la Hotel and enjoyed butler service in a room overlooking the Bund, the colonial-era district known as being where the East meets the West. Shanghai was spectacular and racing forward and he liked the Chinese kids in the camp. He returned to Seattle and soon entered the hospital.

  It was now noon. Four hours were up. Tracy’s imagination was spiraling downward into the mind’s most fearful places. Why was it taking so long? The nurses never paged her with updates. Had something gone wrong? Finally, the doctor arrived: He thought he got all the cancer, but they would have to wait for more test results to be sure. Tracy shook with nerves and tears.

  In early July, the results arrived. Weiss was cancer-free. He recuperated for a few weeks and took his family on a vacation to Oregon in late July. Alive and healthy, he still needed a job when the phone rang. Warren LeGarie was on the line.