Brave Dragons Read online

  Then Donta Smith scored on a jumper, followed by a 3-pointer. He slammed down a dunk, pounding his fist against his chest, shouting at the roof. From press row Journalist Li turned to me and mouthed a single word: Qiaodan. Jordan. Donta moved to point guard and kept scoring. He and Weiss had huddled on the sideline and crafted an impromptu offense, placing shooters like Joy on the wings to create space for Donta to drive and score, or dish outside for open shots. When Donta finished the third quarter with a driving baseline dunk, Bayi’s lead was halved, 94–85.

  Shanxi was still reckless on defense, but now the character of the fouls seemed to change. There was a very questionable whistle against Joy. A teammate drew a whistle after barely touching a Bayi player.

  “Hei Shao! Hei Shao! Hei Shao!” Black Whistle! Black Whistle! Black Whistle! The fans were shouting at the referees, screaming the Chinese expression for corrupt officiating.

  It was 100–98, Bayi leading. Six minutes and 45 seconds remained. The crowd was bellowing. The Taiyuan press corps was in a state of frenzy, not from the approaching deadline nor from typing blog entries but from screaming, pounding their fists against the table and raising their arms in triumph after a Brave Dragon sank a 3-pointer to take the lead, 101–100.

  One minute and 27 seconds remained, and Bayi had again pushed ahead, 110–108. Beating Bayi for the Brave Dragons would mean felling Goliath. A Bayi player kicked the ball, an infraction, but the referees ignored it. The fans shrieked. Seconds remained. Shanxi had a chance to tie or pull ahead. Donta received the ball in the post area, close to the basket. He spun, shrugged off a foul, and took a tough shot. The ball rose toward the basket but clanged off the rim. A Bayi player grabbed the rebound and was fouled. He made both shots. Shanxi rushed down the court and missed a foolish 3-pointer. The Brave Dragons fouled again.

  Final score: Bayi 116, Shanxi 110. Wang Zhizhi led all scorers with 33 points, while Donta scored 24 in only three quarters. The crowd filed outside as the deejay mourned the loss with the theme from Star Wars.

  Bayi shot 65 free throws, Shanxi only 21. At the postgame news conference, a reporter noted that Shanxi seemed to commit a lot of unnecessary hand fouls. Was this the NBA method, playing this type of defense? Weiss was asked.

  Weiss absorbed the question. His assistant, Liu Tie, oversaw the team’s defense, he replied. He praised the team’s tenacity, their will to fight. “But they have to learn the difference between aggressive and overaggressive,” he said. “They’ve got to know when to pull back. We can’t have other teams shooting this many foul shots against us.”

  Another reporter reminded Weiss that Shanxi had been one of the league’s worst teams. Did the players really believe they could win games against teams like Bayi?

  “They should believe it now,” he said. “We can win against anybody.”

  The news conference ended, and Weiss walked down the corridor to the locker room. The door was closed but a voice could be heard inside. Someone was shrieking. Weiss opened the door and stepped inside. I stole a quick glimpse. The players, sweating and exhausted, were sitting in chairs, backs against the wall of the room. Boss Wang was moving from player to player, dissecting their performances, lecturing them one by one. The door closed, but the voice still rang through the hallway. He would talk for another hour.

  At the edge of the court, the ushers were standing in a line as a supervisor conducted a postgame review. On the court, the cheerleaders had changed into street clothes and were standing in formation. The lights were off, the music was off, but they began to move in unison on the darkened court, practicing, hips grinding and shoulders shaking in the silence.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SELLING AIR

  Not long after Bob Weiss landed in Taiyuan, David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA, walked into a Beijing conference hall to conduct the business of basketball in China. It was August 23, the day before the gold medal game between the United States and Spain, what for Stern should have been a moment of triumph. He had spent twenty years cultivating China, and the NBA was now one of the most popular and recognizable foreign brands in the country. The American team of NBA stars was about to win the gold medal in a thrilling final, yet even the Spanish team bespoke the NBA’s global domination. The Spanish roster included Pau Gasol, the starting center for the Lakers; his brother, Marc Gasol, soon to be the starting center for the Memphis Grizzlies; and two players about to be selected in the NBA draft, Ricky Rubio and Rudy Fernandez. No matter which team Chinese fans rooted for, they were rooting for the NBA.

  Stern did not seem triumphant, however. He had a global vision for the NBA, one that extended beyond North America into Europe, where he had long wanted to place teams, and especially into China, where 300 million people supposedly were playing basketball, a number roughly equal to the entire population of the United States. For the past year, the NBA had made its biggest and riskiest global bet in China, forming a Chinese subsidiary and pursuing its own Chinese league, and the Olympics were tantamount to a product launch. A day earlier, Stern met with officials from the Chinese Basketball Association to discuss a partnership on a possible league. The Chinese media had been buzzing about a possible announcement, but nothing had happened. Instead, as he took his seat of honor inside the conference hall, David Stern was about to sell some beer.

  The event was the union of the NBA and Tsingtao, one of China’s leading beer brands, and the wedding party sat on opposite sides of a stage as a local television personality presided. The room was already saturated with virtual booziness, as if the wedding reception had already taken place. Stern had been running late, so the waiting Chinese journalists were entertained with a Tsingtao infomercial showing tipsy foreign tourists clanging tankards, everyone stupendously jolly during Tsingtao’s annual Oktoberfest celebration along the Chinese coast. Next came images of a single, shimmering Tsingtao, quivering with tension until the cap finally exploded off the wet green bottle. Music blared off the ceiling and the images of inebriated foreigners and ejaculatory beer bottles were repeated again and again, spliced with game footage from the NBA, until Stern finally arrived. A group of Chinese drummers pounded out a welcome, banging away as performers beneath a paper lion burst through a rear door and twisted toward the podium. “The lion dancing will bring good luck to the cooperation between you two,” the mistress of ceremonies shouted as the paper lion settled at the foot of the podium. Stern gazed down, puzzled then bemused, before smiling and rising to speak.

  “This is an alliance between the best of sports and lifestyle,” he pronounced. His new partner, Tsingtao’s chairman, Jin Zhiguo, beamed and declared that the NBA was an ideal mate for brand positioning, brand attractiveness, and brand association. “It’s really hard to imagine that life as we know it today would be as wonderful without the NBA or Tsingtao beer,” he concluded. Then the drummers resumed their banging as the paper lion clambered to life for the ceremonial exchange of gifts. The Tsingtao delegation presented the NBA side with a statue of a horse pulling a Tsingtao beer wagon, while the NBA’s deputy commissioner, Adam Silver, reciprocated with an NBA ball signed by the American team. Stern and Jin stepped off the stage to dot the eyes of the paper lion with a calligraphy brush while a troupe of Chinese streetballers in NBA jerseys performed some dribbling and passing tricks. Finally, mercifully, it was over.

  “Beer represents fun,” the mistress of ceremonies declared in her deliberate English. “Basketball is, of course, fun. We’ll have double fun after your cooperation.”

  It was a goofy, schlocky event that also happened to represent how the NBA makes money in China. The NBA and Tsingtao were signing a branding partnership, the corporate version of a high school romance in which the cheerleader gets to wear her boyfriend’s letter jacket. Tsingtao was agreeing to stamp each of its millions of beer bottles with the familiar logo of the NBA. Ordinarily, this might be considered advertising, which would mean that the NBA would pay for the privilege, since millions of beer bottles represent lots o
f advertising, but a branding partnership is different, happily so for the NBA. NBA basketball is so popular in China that Tsingtao was paying an unnamed sum for the privilege of using the NBA brand. By the time of the Olympics, branding partnerships represented the largest share of the $75 million in annual revenues earned by the NBA in China. When corporations like Tsingtao partnered with the league, the NBA granted them a package of marketing products: advertising time during broadcasts of NBA games in China, the chance to participate in NBA promotional events around the country, and the right to adorn their products with the trademarked image of the NBA logo. In China, the NBA logo was considered synonymous with America itself; one survey by a consulting firm rated the NBA as one of the ten brands Chinese consumers most identified with the United States. The league’s popularity had turned logic upside down. The NBA wasn’t selling a tangible product, such as a Nike shoe or a Spalding basketball. The NBA was selling air, and doing so at a nice return.

  Now it wanted to create more air. Any multinational corporation with the kind of name recognition and success enjoyed by the NBA would have tried to create more products to sell in the Chinese market, which helps explain why the NBA decided it wanted a Chinese league. Economically, a league would create new revenue streams from tickets and concessions, yet, most of all, a league would create new content, new air, which could be packaged and sold in China. The potential existed for a whole new tier of branding partnerships for a China league, new trademarked merchandise that could be sold to Chinese fans, as well as new television contracts. NBA executives also reasoned that an NBA league would bring a more exciting style of play to Chinese fans and improve Chinese basketball by exposing Chinese players to better coaching and training methods. It seemed like a just reward; the NBA was the reason basketball was so popular in China.

  But a league is very different from air. China already had one, under management of the Chinese government. A partnership certainly made sense, if judged by the cold logic of mutual need. The Chinese league needed help making money and improving the quality of play; the NBA had the world’s greatest players and moneymaking was encoded in its corporate DNA. The NBA needed help getting government approval for a league; the Chinese league was the government. Yet this logic went only so far. The real issue was control. The Chinese league saw the NBA as both a model and a threat. In Taiyuan, Bob Weiss was running into the hard, invisible wall of Chinese culture. His expertise was to be exploited but also contained. Now David Stern was hitting a wall, too. When he left the Tsingtao event and walked toward the elevator, Stern was followed by a small cluster of reporters, including me. We wanted to know about his meeting with the CBA. “We had a very good meeting with the CBA yesterday,” he said, a bit testily. “Generally we are discussing having a potential league. But there is no timetable.” The situation, he said cryptically, was “very complex.”

  Born in New York, raised in the New Jersey suburbs, David Stern earned a law degree at Columbia and joined the NBA as outside counsel in 1966. He became commissioner in 1984. His legal background dovetailed with the different challenges facing the league. He negotiated a drug testing policy with the players union and hammered out a revenue-sharing agreement between players and owners that created a team salary cap. When the owners locked out the players during a labor dispute in 1998, Stern grew a beard as a symbol of his discontent. More than his peers who ran professional baseball and football, Stern was widely recognized in the United States and beyond, partly because of his long tenure and partly because of the stagecraft created for the annual NBA draft, carried on live television and followed intently on the Internet. Stern greeted each first-round draft pick for a posed handshake: the short, grinning Jewish commissioner shaking hands with a procession of enormous players, most of them black, nearly all of them gigged up in outlandishly tailored suits.

  The draft was evidence of how Stern’s NBA had become a marketing machine with global ambitions. If the promoters of baseball and football often debated which one was America’s favorite sport, or which was the most truly American sport, Stern spoke of basketball as a global game with the NBA perched at the top of a global order. Now kids playing basketball around the world dreamed of their handshake with David Stern, and when some of those kids began showing up on draft day, befuddling American announcers with their strange-sounding names, gigged up in their own ridiculous outfits, the breadth of the NBA dream machine became clear. The NBA was America itself, or what America claimed to be: the place where anyone from anywhere could compete against the best in the world and get rich doing it. The draft became a tool to tether different countries to the league; any player imported into the NBA from a foreign country also exported the NBA back to his country, which is why the 2002 draft was so important. When David Stern shook hands with Yao Ming, the first pick in the draft, the NBA believed it had pushed open the door to the greatest basketball market in the world.

  Stern had first knocked on that door in 1987, when he arrived at the headquarters of China Central Television in Beijing with a videotape of highlights from the NBA All-Star Game. Stern couldn’t yet visualize what China would become—who could?—but he had already started exploring the international market, including the then Soviet Union, where he was negotiating with sports officials over the star Lithuanian center Arvydas Sabonis (who would later play for the Portland Trail Blazers). In the United States, basketball was the country’s third most popular professional sport, but as American sports slowly started trying to attract a global audience, Stern had an advantage. Basketball was played almost everywhere and had been an Olympic sport for decades; China had sent a basketball team to the Games in 1936. And as the politics of the Cold War melted, the economics of globalization were starting to become clear. If the NBA didn’t try to capture the global basketball market, another league would.

  “We were participating in a sport that had already had a global presence,” Stern said. “And, of course, it became apparent as globalization occurred that there were economic opportunities that could be accessible to products that cross borders easily.”

  At CCTV, Stern had an appointment with Li Zhuang, the man overseeing foreign programming in culture, entertainment, and sports. Two years earlier, Stern had met a delegation of Chinese basketball officials visiting the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, but his expectations were low for any immediate returns from his visit to CCTV. China’s reform period was just starting and the country did not yet have anything close to a market economy or a middle class. The CCTV building was a bland white tower on the west side of Beijing, in the bureaucratic heart of the city. Stern and a staffer arrived at the gate and offered their names to the guard. The guard made a telephone call while Stern waited. And waited. “Mr. Li said he had no record of a meeting with us,” Stern recalled later. “We sat in the lobby for two hours.”

  Ultimately, Stern got his meeting, and eventually his deal, even if it didn’t seem like much of one. He was pitching a demo tape of an NBA highlight show. The league would provide one tape every week for free. The NBA would get half of any ad revenues attached to the show, but Stern expected little if any money to materialize. He would later say that giving away the show was partly a goodwill gesture. But he also wanted exposure and CCTV could deliver an audience unlike any other.

  Television first appeared in China in 1958. In the United States, television was emerging as the nation’s most powerful cultural force during the 1950s as audiences watched Gunsmoke, Jack Benny, and Lucille Ball. In China, the country’s lone network, Peking Television, operated on a closed circuit and broadcast political updates and ideological directives to a select group of high officials. Party leaders soon recognized the propaganda value of the new medium and steadily expanded Peking Television’s coverage area while provincial governments also started new stations. For all programming, the government instructed the stations to promote the political agenda of the leadership. And when Deng Xiaoping announced his reforms in 1978, the only h
int of coming change in television was cosmetic; the name of Peking Television was changed to China Central Television, or CCTV.

  Then something entirely new happened in 1979 in Shanghai. For the first time, an advertisement was broadcast on Chinese television. The ad was hawking a local brand of rice liquor and represented a clumsy introduction to the entirely new concept in China that television could be a tool of commercialism. By the time David Stern arrived nearly a decade later, commercials had become common, though the political agenda of the network remained the same. No department was more heavily censored, or more politically sensitive, than news, as a young employee named Ma Guoli had discovered. Ma had graduated from Beijing Broadcasting Institute in 1982 and was ordered to report to a teaching position on the east side of the city. But Ma lived on the west side and bicycling to his new job took three hours every day. “The government was required to give you a job, but the job didn’t depend on your interests,” he said. “I asked them to reconsider my situation.” They reassigned him to CCTV. After a few years in the news department, Ma engineered a transfer to the tiny sports division, a stepchild within the larger operation, a less politically complicated assignment that Ma thought might provide better job security.

  By the late 1980s, CCTV still had only a single channel, CCTV1, which carried only sixty-five minutes of taped sports programming a week, much of it an amalgam of carefully edited international highlights of bullfighting, horse racing, and race car driving that was broadcast on Tuesday nights. One problem was a lack of content. China had no domestic professional sports leagues, which meant CCTV had little to work with, other than qualifying tournaments for the Olympics or the World Cup. When China hosted the World Cup Table Tennis championship in 1987, CCTV provided extensive coverage. Newspapers were starting to carry accounts of foreign leagues but CCTV had neither the budget nor the sophistication to purchase broadcast rights. Reforms in the 1980s had allowed CCTV to import certain programs from countries including the United States and Japan, among them The Man from Atlantis and Animal World. But sports had only its limited programming.