Brave Dragons Read online

  Goldman informed potential investors that the NBA wanted to raise $230 million in equity, which would constitute 11 percent of the new NBA China, leaving the remaining 89 percent with the NBA. This meant that Goldman had valued the unborn NBA China Inc.—a basketball company without a basketball league—at more than $2 billion. Completely out of the air.

  No one seemed to doubt it was worth it. The Chinese system was failing miserably at producing good basketball and failing even worse at making the game profitable. The NBA brand was so popular that the league envisioned fitness and entertainment centers in China called NBA Cities, as well as chains of stores, lounges, and restaurants. “The pitch was: This can be huge,” said one person familiar with the presentations. “The NBA is a brand. They are selling a brand. It is almost like selling Louis Vuitton bags.”

  By the end of the Road Show, the NBA had raised $253 million, surpassing its goal, and landed the elite of China’s private and state-owned business establishment as partners: Hong Kong’s richest and most politically savvy businessman, Li Ka-shing; the Bank of China; China Merchants Bank; and Legend Holdings, the parent company of Lenovo computers. While everyone was excited to be allied with the NBA, the subject of the Chinese league never went away. The Goldman overview mentioned the league under the banner of “The NBA’s Presence in China.” It read: “Potential to establish an NBA-affiliated professional basketball league in China following the 2008 Olympics.” That was it.

  “It was sort of the elephant in the room during these meetings,” one participant recalled. “The NBA always positioned a role or stake in the China league as a potential upside, although never as a promise. But everyone asked about it, the subject always came up.”

  In May 2008, inside the Grand Hyatt, the sleek and airy hotel on the Avenue of Eternal Peace in the heart of Beijing, Tim Chen presented the NBA’s proposal for a China league. Born in Taiwan, Chen had been recruited from Microsoft to become chief executive of NBA China, partly because of his reputation for finessing the Chinese bureaucracy into granting whatever approval or clearance his company needed.

  Inside a conference room, Chen and other NBA officials sat across from Li Yuanwei of the CBA. Chen explained that the NBA wanted to create a new Chinese league with eight teams. Teams already competing in the CBA would be given the priority to join but would be required to pay a $50 million fee. Ownership of the new league would be equally divided between the NBA and CBA, with the NBA receiving an operations fee and the CBA receiving a management fee. Importantly, Chen said, the new league would carry the NBA brand.

  Li Yuanwei listened with two other CBA officials. He knew the global consulting firm McKinsey had advised the NBA on the proposal—reportedly for a $1 million fee—and was not surprised. “Within minutes, I realized this plan was totally a product of the American mind-set and self-involvement,” he later wrote in his memoir. Chen argued that David Stern had made a big compromise by not insisting on a controlling share of the league. But Li thought the plan demonstrated again how the NBA did not regard his league as a true partner. To Li, the concept was unrealistic and not feasible: What would happen to the existing CBA? What about the CBA’s current teams and sponsors? As for the $50 million fee, none of the CBA teams could afford it.

  “If we want a new league, the CBA is fully capable of going forward alone, so why do we need to cooperate with the NBA?” Li asked, mockingly. Li knew very well that the Chinese league needed a great deal of help and had long considered the NBA as the best model. As far back as 2003, Li had even floated the idea of some sort of partnership. But now he was irritated and asked Chen whether the NBA had contemplated the impact of the proposal on the Chinese league. He later recalled that Chen seemed embarrassed by the question.

  There was nothing further to discuss. Three months remained before the Beijing Olympics, and Li was absorbed with preparations. He had no time to concentrate on a new league and thought the plan needed a major overhaul. For now, the issue would be pushed aside. Before he left, Li couldn’t resist making his own joke at the NBA’s expense.

  “How about you guys give the CBA only $500,000,” Li teasingly told Chen, “and we’ll definitely come up with a much better plan that could even become a reality.”

  David Stern was hardly giving up. Two months after the Olympics, Stern stopped in London to announce a new partnership with AEG, the global sports and entertainment conglomerate, to operate twelve new arenas in China. Then he flew to Guangzhou for the latest staging of the China Games—a preseason game between the Golden State Warriors and the Milwaukee Bucks—where he announced that the NBA would design and manage a new state-of-the-art arena in Guangzhou, as well as another arena in Shanghai. Counting Wukesong in Beijing, the NBA would now control stadiums in China’s three premier cities.

  In Beijing, where the Bucks and Warriors played a second game, Stern announced a new deal to stream more NBA games over the Internet and then took questions from Chinese reporters. Everyone wanted to know about a possible league. Stern said he was in discussions with Infront, the Swiss marketing firm, as well as the CBA, about “mutual cooperation.” Without offering any specifics, Stern predicted that “there will be announcements in the next several months” and described the stadiums as pieces of a grander plan. “If we do get to the point where we have that cooperative league, we’ll have the buildings already,” he said. Yet over the next several months, there would be no major announcements.

  Stern wasn’t the only person who was stymied. Ma Guoli, the father of CCTV5, was now regarded as the godfather of Chinese sports. He left the sports channel in 2005 to manage the television production of the Beijing Olympics and then was hired to run the China office of Infront, the Swiss firm handling the marketing for the CBA. Ma’s professional life had come full circle. CCTV5 and the CBA had been born together and their relationship had once seemed mutually beneficial. CCTV5 needed content; the CBA needed exposure. Just as the CBA was trying to make itself relevant by copying the NBA, CCTV5 had emulated global sports networks like ESPN or Star Sports. It copied the same garish stage sets, offered the same highlight shows, and sold advertising for the same products—cars, razors, tires, and basketball shoes.

  Yet Ma understood the critical difference between CCTV5 and its Western role models. CCTV5 was a division of the Chinese government, a megaphone for the Communist Party’s propaganda machine. China had scores of provincial or city television stations, but CCTV was the only national network permitted by the government, an arrangement partly designed to protect the Communist Party’s grip on information. Yet this lack of competition was a critical problem for a commercial basketball league. The economic formula created by the NBA—one the CBA hoped to replicate—depended on television contracts for huge amounts of revenue. Teams got richer and players got richer when the league’s television contracts got richer from bidding contests among competing networks. But in China, where CCTV was the only national network, there were no bidding contests. Ma Guoli had built CCTV5 into a television power; now, without any leverage, Ma had to persuade his old channel to give more money in television rights for the CBA.

  “I joke with our people that for TV rights maybe I can ask CCTV to pay 10 percent more than before because of my relationship,” Ma told me. “But no more. I know the situation. This situation—I don’t know when it can be changed.”

  Finally, the Olympics also coincided with the end of Li Yuanwei’s five-year term presiding over the CBA. Like others, Li had expected the Olympics to usher in major reforms in Chinese sports and introduce more commercialization. But unexpectedly, the opposite happened. China’s top sports officials, having seen Chinese athletes win a record fifty-one gold medals, concluded that the system did not need to be changed at all. They underscored this point through their selection of Li’s successor—Xin Lancheng, the man Li had replaced in 2003. Li could rightly claim to have overseen a small revival of the CBA; the finances were now secure and television ratings were rising. But Xin’s return wa
s a triumph of the old system over the new. Reform was pushed aside; talk of an NBA league was tabled.

  “I never imagined this would happen,” Li wrote in his memoir. “Five years of exploration seem to be wasted. If I knew this, I would not have taken the job in 2003.”

  Yet one small experiment was still under way in Taiyuan. Like David Stern, Bob Weiss had the NBA brand on his chest and he was already inside the Chinese league, witnessing for himself the difficult process of blending together two very different strains of basketball.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  RUMORS

  The rumors surfaced on the Internet, a smattering of unsubstantiated reports on a handful of Chinese basketball blogs speculating on a tidbit of gossip that seemed to defy logic. Boss Wang was preparing to sign a former NBA star. Similar gossip had floated about during the preseason, but now the rumors carried an unusual specificity. The new player would arrive in about a week, on December 12. His salary was reportedly $80,000 a month, among the highest in the league. And his name was Bonzi Wells, the former playoff hero for the Sacramento Kings, the former Houston Rockets teammate of Yao Ming, and one of the signature bad boys of the NBA. If he was now past his prime, Wells was a name player, a genuine though exasperating talent, who would rank as the biggest star to ever play in China, assuming he actually was coming to China. The whole idea seemed nutty. Why make a change now? The Brave Dragons were winning.

  Quite unexpectedly, the team was the surprise of the CBA. Eleven games into a 50-game season, the Brave Dragons had won seven, lost four and were an early contender for a playoff spot. True, the coaching arrangement was still a mess, and Boss Wang was meddling more and more. But Olumide was leading the league in rebounding at 19 per game, and Donta Smith was arguably the league’s most versatile player, scoring, rebounding, and dishing out assists to his Chinese teammates, who were finishing the job. In Taiyuan, success had startled the fan base. The local press was portraying Weiss as a Western guru (Liu Tie was also credited), while Olumide had easily become the team’s most popular player. A knot of fans in Brave Dragons jerseys waved photos of the big Nigerian during home games and serenaded him with cheers. When Olumide dove for a loose ball or fell hard to the court—and falling theatrically to the floor was apparently stipulated in his contract, given how often it happened—Taiyuan gasped. Then, as Olumide slowly rose, grimacing or shaking out a potentially injured limb, the cheers filled the stadium. Olumide would smile and trot down the court, waving his arms at the crowd, and even sometimes shouting out in Yoruba. Of course, no one had a clue what he was saying.

  The strangest thing about the Bonzi Wells rumor was how neatly it demarcated the divisions within the team. The Chinese players knew all about it. They started reading snippets of gossip a few days before on the Internet. The foreigners, who could not read, write, or speak Chinese, had absolutely no idea. I had first heard about it from Joe a few days earlier. Practice was canceled that morning and Rick Turner and I were puttering toward the practice gym in the minibus, following the frozen Fen River beneath a morning sky so clotted that the faint outline of the sun was barely visible, a milky white pearl trapped behind the gray haze. Turner was starting his second week coaching the junior team, a thankless job. Leading a team that never scrimmaged and never played games was the coaching equivalent of being the rat in the wheel.

  Joe was already on the court when we arrived and the junior team players were doing layups. Christmas was less than three weeks away, and Rick wanted to make a short visit home. His daughter was sending emails saying all she wanted for Christmas was Daddy. Rick needed a few days off and assumed his absence would not matter since the junior team only practiced, but he could not get a meeting with Zhang Beihai. The general manager kept avoiding him and the uncertainty left Rick stewing, as did Joe’s advice.

  “As long as you stay here, nothing is going to happen,” Joe advised him. “If you leave, I don’t know what is going to happen.”

  As Joe saw it, Rick would already be gone if not for the intricate and unspoken social codes that governed Chinese life, codes Chinese intuitively know how to navigate. The owner had no more use for Rick and had left his fate with Zhang Beihai. Usually, this would mean a succinct firing, except firing Rick would be embarrassing, given that Rick, a foreigner, was Weiss’s chosen assistant. Firing Rick would represent a loss of face for Weiss, which, in turn, would mean a loss of face for Zhang. By keeping him, even in a do-nothing job, Zhang was saving face for everyone. He was doing Rick a favor, even if Rick felt wronged and slighted. Joe had accepted his own demotion as something beyond his control. Mei Banfa—there is nothing I can do. Confrontation was pointless. Survival is what mattered, staying employed and making it through the season.

  “In the Chinese way, sometimes they don’t want to talk directly,” Joe said as we stood together, watching the junior kids lope up and down the floor, as clumsy as foals. They practiced fifty weeks a year, sometimes seven days a week, repeating the same dribbling or running drills, again and again, as if they were factory workers asked to master every job on an assembly line. I wondered how long it took these kids to begin to hate basketball. Probably longer than it took to hate working in a factory.

  “I always tell the players that everything doesn’t happen like you wish,” Joe said. “So just enjoy the best parts.”

  Midway through the practice, the team accountant arrived in search of Rick. His visa needed to be renewed and he needed to go to the visa office before it closed. Rick seemed startled, if pleasantly so, as he trotted off the court, smiling with relief in my direction: Maybe they aren’t trying to can me. The players started running another drill, and Joe leaned over to me.

  “I hear we may be getting Bonzi Wells,” he said.

  I was incredulous and said so to Joe. Joe believed it would happen. I left the practice gym certain the rumor was a hoax and returned to the World Trade.

  From down the hall floated a staccato of sharp popping sounds. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. I followed the noise, which sounded like a machine gun.

  “Fuck!”

  Donta Smith was at the end of his bed with the curtains drawn, sitting shirtless in the dark, shaking a joystick and glaring at his television. He was slaughtering virtual Nazis in a video game, “World at War,” but was pinned down inside a farmhouse in what appeared to be virtual Poland. He had just gotten blown away. If the rumors were correct, and if Bonzi Wells really was coming to Taiyuan, the league quota on foreign players meant that either Olumide or Donta would be going. Given that Olumide accounted for most of the team’s inside scoring and rebounding, Donta would be the odd man out.

  When he was with the Atlanta Hawks, Smith had a short taste of what he now called “the Life.” He roamed the nightclubs in Buckhead or downtown Atlanta under the social directions of the more veteran players. He was a country boy from Kentucky, and in Atlanta his eyes were opened. “It was crazeeeee,” Donta recalled, smiling. Now “the Life” meant nights at the World Trade. He ate in the hotel, or at McDonald’s, and watched movies, played video games, or talked to friends through instant messages or Skype.

  He really didn’t seem to mind. He had learned to adapt growing up in the town of La Grange, about twenty miles outside Louisville. By age seven, he was stuffing his house key and a few dollar bills into his sneakers for emergencies. His mother sometimes disappeared for work, which in her case was selling drugs in Louisville, and on those nights she didn’t come home Donta would shuffle down the street and stay with a friend. He knocked and the family let him in.

  “When I was with her, everything was crazy,” he said of his mother.

  She was a dealer, not a user, and if only from the perspective of a child, she met her basic obligations. She fed and housed him. He remembered visiting neighborhoods in Louisville where his mother sold drugs. People knew him because they knew her. They were her customers, and when the kid came around, they were almost protective. It was a chaotic, confusing life for a little b
oy and by the time Donta reached elementary school, his mother was in the penitentiary.

  “I don’t remember seeing her a lot,” he said. “I would go and talk to her through a glass. I didn’t like being behind the glass. When I saw her, I would cry, and then she would cry.” When she was transferred to a lower security prison, mother and son were able to meet in the same room. “I could touch her,” he said. “I never cried when she was in that one.”

  When he first joined the Brave Dragons, Donta came off as another American scorer slumming for a paycheck in China. He could be moody and petulant, and he seemed to prefer to keep his distance. Only gradually did he begin to smile, and it took Tracy Weiss to realize those dark moods weren’t who he really was. She decided he was guarded, even sweet, and a long way from Kentucky.

  “He’s only twenty-five,” she said, “and he’s in China.”

  At Oldham County High School, Donta had played football and basketball. He had moved in with his father, a devoutly religious man who did not tolerate any foolishness. As a senior, Donta was already 65 and played wide receiver well enough to whet the interest of some major football schools. Basketball, though, was the game he loved. He dumped football after his basketball team lost a tough game against the school’s archrival, Shelby County. He was distraught. “The emotion I felt that day—I knew I was a basketball player,” he said. He signed with Southeast Illinois Junior College, averaging 26 points a game, and was ready to transfer to play for Rick Pitino at the University of Louisville when his name started popping up on mock NBA draft boards.