Brave Dragons Read online

  Bonzi would admit to knowing almost nothing about China. He had initially thought his new team was in Taiwan, not Taiyuan, and his companion, Daphne, was excited to learn that Taiwan was an island with great weather. Wells had seen a video clip of the team and was impressed with Donta Smith. He looked forward to playing with him. He knew Weiss was the head coach. This was important, since an NBA coach would understand how to use him, and Weiss had a reputation as being a good guy, a player’s coach.

  Bonzi had no idea he would be greeted in China as such a giant star. He knew nothing about the team’s Chinese assistant coach, and little about the owner, except that he was someone who was really rich and loved the NBA.

  He would later tell me he had figured he could do anything for a few months.

  Hours before Bonzi was to arrive in Taiyuan, Rick Turner was completing another morning in purgatory. The Brave Dragons were in the far western region of Xinjiang preparing to play the league’s second-place team, and Turner had spent the morning chaperoning the junior team with Joe. Practice finished, Turner headed toward the minibus, when Joe mentioned, offhandedly, that Bonzi Wells would be arriving later in the afternoon to join the team on a guaranteed contract. Turner had heard all sorts of rumors, for months, so many rumors that he was inured to them. But now something was really happening. He was floored.

  “That kind of sucks for Donta, doesn’t it?” he asked and climbed into the minibus.

  The losing streak would gather momentum that night in Urumqi. It was a close game but Xinjiang was too strong. At tipoff, Donta still knew nothing about Wells, or that Wells was already at the World Trade in Taiyuan, though he had noticed his Chinese teammates buzzing about something. Even Liu Tie seemed strangely distracted and had pulled Donta aside before the game.

  “I hope you get 50 points tonight,” Liu Tie told him.

  “I knew something was going on,” Donta would later say.

  By the time the team arrived in Xi’an for the next game, Donta knew. The general manager then called a meeting to inform the team of what everyone already knew. Garrison cried as he did the interpretation. Donta did not. He said what you are taught to say in the NBA: that basketball is a business, and that this was a business decision, no hard feelings. His agent was already in contact with a top team in the Australian league. Under normal circumstances Donta would have turned in his uniform; but Bonzi was not ready to play. Donta also was still under contract. In Xi’an, Donta played and scored more than 30 points in another Brave Dragons loss.

  The losing streak came during a tough stretch against top teams, and even without the Bonzi distraction, winning would have been difficult. But the team’s flaws, its lack of preparation, were also being exposed. Coach Liu did not know what to do. The endless drills and full-court running could be explained as the hammer he was using to pound out steel. Or they could be described as time fillers from a coach who had never coached before and had no experience diagramming an offense.

  When the team was winning, Weiss had managed to install a simple high-low set in which Olumide flashed out to set a pick for Donta, who either drove for a basket or dished out to the wings for Wei Mingliang or Zhai Jinshuai. It was crude, but it worked. Zhai and Wei had prospered. But whenever one of them got on a hot streak, Coach Liu would inexplicably bench him. It was hard to know if he did not know what he was doing or if he knew exactly what he was doing and didn’t want any of his Chinese players to break out as a star for fear they would outshine him. Several players suspected the latter.

  The loss in Xi’an lowered the Brave Dragons’ record to 7-6, with a home game three days off against Shandong. Practice was scheduled for the following morning. Everyone was going to meet their new teammate.

  Bonzi Wells had never been missing at all. He had just gotten tired of Mark Zhang after spending his first two days in Taiyuan sharing a two-bedroom apartment with him. Bonzi stopped answering Zhang’s calls and locked the door to the apartment. Bonzi slipped on his earphones, turned on his music, and ignored the buzzing of his iPhone until the team returned from Xi’an and Bob Weiss knocked on his door.

  Weiss seemed as bewildered and astonished as the rest of the Chinese basketball world that Bonzi was now parked inside the World Trade. Before the season opener, when Boss Wang was still nervous about Donta’s knee, Weiss had emailed Bonzi and later called him at the general manager’s request. But neither Weiss nor Wells seemed to take the conversation very seriously, and since then Donta had become arguably the league’s best player. After the loss in Xi’an, reporters had peppered Weiss with questions: Did he know? When did he know? Like everyone else, he had had no idea.

  Bonzi told Weiss he liked what he had seen of Donta on tape. “We can’t lose that guy,” he said. Weiss smiled and explained that teams could have only two Americans, meaning that Wells would be replacing Donta on the roster. “He didn’t know he was knocking someone out of a job by coming here,” Weiss said later. He also didn’t know that Weiss was head coach in name only. He discovered that the next day.

  It was Monday, December 15, leaving two days of practice and a game day shootaround for Wells to get acquainted with his new teammates before the game on Wednesday night. Wells expected to run through the offense and scrimmage so that he could familiarize himself with the other players. Instead, Coach Liu ordered running drills and spent half an hour practicing the pick-and-roll, the type of drill that Wells did in junior high in Muncie.

  “Bonzi ran about three of them and said, ‘Will you tell him that this is a complete waste of time?’ ” Weiss recalled.

  Liu Tie explained that he wanted to check whether the ten-year NBA veteran grasped the fundamentals of the game. Wells did all the running drills, and when the team practiced Tuesday, the drilling continued. Then it was Wednesday, game day, and the great Bonzi Wells had still not scrimmaged a single play with his team.

  He announced he could not play. Weiss didn’t disagree.

  Donta Smith, still under contract, had unexpectedly become best friends with the man replacing him. They stretched together, ate dinner together, and joked together on the court. Against the Shandong Lions Bonzi sat courtside, and Donta dominated yet again. He scored 41 points, passed out assists, grabbed rebounds, and played like a man about to be freed from prison.

  But a pall had settled over the rest of the team. Shanxi lost another close game. The Brave Dragons were 7-7. The Qingdao Double Star were coming to Taiyuan for a Friday night game. Finally, the greatest American ever to set foot in the Chinese league would play. Maybe.

  It was Friday morning. The Brave Dragons were stretching on the court before the shootaround. Bonzi Wells was wearing a red Anta hoodie and a black wool cap, stretching beside Donta. The day after the Shandong loss, Coach Liu had organized a short, half-court scrimmage, but Bonzi had now been in China for a week and had not played a game of full-court basketball. Thursday night, he announced he was still not ready to play. “I cannot play until I practice with my team,” he told Weiss. “I’ve got to get a run with my team.”

  Bonzi’s not playing presented a problem for Zhang Beihai. The general manager was standing beneath the bleachers, talking on his mobile phone, not far from my seat on one of the courtside pink sofas. The league office in Beijing had called yesterday. A top official was coming from Beijing, someone big, someone who wanted to see Wells’s debut. Now Zhang was huddled with the coaches and Garrison, strategizing. Weiss broke from the huddle and walked over to Bonzi, who had taken a seat on a pink sofa near me.

  “You know one thing that hits me?” Weiss began. “We’re gonna be traveling tomorrow. You’re not going to get to practice before the next game. You could start tonight and then we could take you out after five minutes.”

  Wells listened and said something I could not hear before Weiss walked over to talk to Donta. They talked for a minute and started laughing. Donta had already signed a new contract in the Australian league with a team in Melbourne. His agent had told him not to play that n
ight, no matter what Bonzi did. He could get injured. Weiss walked off the court to rejoin Zhang and Garrison.

  “Uh, no,” Weiss answered. “Bonzi says no.”

  When Bonzi first arrived, Boss Wang and the general manager had convened a meeting with the coaches. By then, even as Weiss remained frustrated with the coaching arrangement, a sense of cooperation had developed. And on the issue of Bonzi, the coaches were unified: They wanted to keep Donta.

  “You pay me a generous salary, and I feel obligated to give you my opinion,” Weiss had told Boss Wang during the meeting. “When we leave this room, we’re united as one. But I wanted to tell you this is a dangerous moment. This may not take us up. It may take us down.”

  After listening to his coaches, Boss Wang had not budged. “We’re keeping Bonzi,” he had replied. Yet now eight days had passed and even Boss Wang was wavering. He was frustrated that Wells wouldn’t play. He couldn’t be certain he still could play.

  Power was already subtly shifting within the team. There were small signs that Boss Wang was cooling on his Chinese coach, and growing wary of his ambitions. Weeks earlier, Liu Tie had hired a friend to coach the players too young for the junior team, the handful of fourteen-year-olds and fifteen-year-olds who spent afternoons practicing their dribbling. Within the team, this hire was interpreted as Liu’s first tiny move toward empire building, toward developing a support base. Boss Wang had noticed. He fired that coach.

  The frictions between Liu Tie and the players, especially Olumide, also had worsened. After a loss, a frustrated Olumide had thrown a water bottle, accidentally breaking a mirror in the locker room. Liu began shouting at him and told him to shut up. “Don’t you tell me to shut up,” Olumide had screamed back. “I’m a father. I’m a man. You can’t tell me to shut up.”

  Bonzi left the pink couch and joined his teammates on the floor. Standing a few steps from me, Weiss told Garrison to relay a message to Wingtips. “Ask him what he thought of Bonzi yesterday,” Weiss said and kept talking. “He’s strictly an eighteen-foot iso guy,” the terminology for a player who is good one-on-one but not a team player.

  Garrison began his interpretation. I wondered how he was going to translate “iso guy.”

  “This is very dangerous,” Wingtips agreed. “Very dangerous.”

  “He hasn’t even run up and down the floor,” Weiss said. “We haven’t seen him. And Smith’s agent is telling him not to play.”

  The players were now loosening up. Bonzi fired a 3-point shot that clanged off the rim. Wingtips turned away, disgusted.

  Liu Tie divided the team, putting Bonzi, Donta, Olumide, Big Rus, Big Sun, and Joy at one end to shoot foul shots. The rest of the Chinese players ran a drill where each man popped out to receive a pass and shot a quick jumper. They were almost robotic in their precision, making shot after shot.

  Mark Zhang had been observing practice, too, keeping more of a distance from Bonzi, yet still keeping watch. He sat down beside me on the pink sofa, all smiles and enthusiasm, and handed me a business card. I asked if Bonzi would play that night.

  “Working on it,” he said, smiling again.

  Mark had decided to shrug off Bonzi’s initial standoffishness. He understood that an athlete like Wells needed his space and had moved out of the apartment. He told me that Wells would fit in soon.

  “I think the problem is a lack of communication between the team, the coaches, and the player,” he said. “Everybody needs to communicate better.”

  He smiled at the thought.

  After the shootaround, Weiss and I went to a café named, in English, the Decently Stylish. The Decently Stylish was a short walk from the World Trade and had become our hangout. The manager delivered us to our usual table, and Weiss began venting.

  “What a fucking clusterfuck,” he said. “What needs to be done is the owner needs to come and watch Bonzi scrimmage because once they let Donta go, a week later they are going to come to me and say, Okay, who can you bring in for us?”

  For weeks, Weiss had maintained his equanimity. He usually laughed off Liu Tie’s practice regimen, figuring the situation was beyond his control, and he had found ways to have an impact with the players. He had worked with the young guard Duan Jiangpeng on moving without the ball on offense and also discovered a flaw in Duan’s foul shooting. Duan was looking at the floor for an instant before he shot. Weiss got him staring only at the basket and his foul shooting improved overnight.

  But Weiss was not laughing now. “We’re just so ill prepared,” he said. “They think they are being prepared. They aren’t doing anything.”

  Before Turner got sidelined, Weiss had pushed to make him a real video coach, breaking down every game so that the team could properly examine and correct mistakes. But that idea was rejected. Lunch arrived, but Weiss was growing more agitated.

  “I mean, we didn’t do a thing today,” he said. “We did layups.”

  We left the Decently Stylish and crossed the street to return to the hotel. Weiss now had a regular Chinese table tennis partner and, through Tracy, had started to make friends with people at her health club. He liked Taiyuan. If once he was timid wading into traffic, now he barely looked up, jaywalking through the oncoming cars, charging ahead with the rest of the mob.

  “The country is great,” he said as we wove through traffic. “I love the people. But it is so frustrating to have a Top Four team and watch it be destroyed.”

  We took a second-floor shortcut through the World Trade, a route that reached the apartment tower in the rear by passing through an indoor lobby called the Shanxi Mobile Information Plaza. The plaza was a mobile phone showroom, bigger than a football field, and the blue neon lighting lent a weird noir quality to the space. There were very few customers. Women dressed like flight attendants sat behind a row of desks selling service agreements.

  Weiss and I slipped into a narrow hallway leading to the apartment tower. The walls had blue and white signage with slogans in Chinese and English, inspirational messages for employees.

  “Communicate a Boundless World and Construct an Information Society,” read one in English.

  “Striving to Become Creator of Superior,” stated the second.

  “Responsibility Makes Perfection,” declared the third.

  Hours before the game, Bonzi Wells received a call. His presence was requested at the practice facility. Boss Wang wanted to see him. More than that, Boss Wang wanted to play with him.

  It was a private game with few spectators, and later, after word leaked out, the elemental question that would never quite be answered was: Why had the owner wanted a game? Did he want to test whether Bonzi was in shape? Or did he simply want to be able to say he had played with the great Bonzi Wells?

  Mark Zhang later recalled an unusual eagerness in the owner. He smiled when Bonzi arrived and introduced himself as a “super-fan.” He had already been playing half-court pickup with a handful of kids on the junior team. He told Bonzi to jump in.

  Wells did. But he made it clear this would be a straight game. He wouldn’t back down just because the owner was on the court. Wingtips refereed, and the game began. It lasted only about fifteen minutes, enough time for the sixty-one-year-old Chinese steel boss to bang against the pride of Muncie. Both seemed satisfied.

  Later, Wells said the owner was too old and too short to guard a former star in the NBA. His game was nothing special. But Wells gave him credit for his will. The old man played like a bull.

  “He was strong,” Wells said.

  Li Yuanwei, commissioner of the league, arrived about fifteen minutes before tipoff and took a seat in the coal millionaire section. Bespectacled and professorial, Li was the mystery guest, a visitation akin to David Stern showing up at the last minute for a Minnesota Timberwolves game. Li visited a different game every week and had put Taiyuan on his schedule for the debut of the great Bangqi Weiersi, as the sporting press had dubbed Bonzi Wells. That Wells was not debuting was a bit of an inconvenience.

 
Wells was already seated in what had become his customary place, one of the chairs at the end of the scorer’s table, near the Brave Dragons bench. This section had gradually mutated into a penalty box for the banished: Rick Turner had a regular seat, along with Big Calves Tian, who no longer dressed for games, and, on this night, Big Sun. He had been demoted for the game after Boss Wang screamed at him for being too soft.

  Donta had trotted onto the court, looking a little dazed, and melded into the layup line. Up on press row, every seat was taken. Television crews had set up a row of camera tripods and the number of newspaper writers had doubled, everyone anticipating that Wells would finally play. The San Jin City News had placed that day’s edition over every seat on press row to highlight an article by Journalist Li comparing Donta and Bonzi.

  “Wells or Smith?” Journalist Li wrote. “That is the question.” He concluded that keeping Smith would be the safe, practical choice. Going with Wells would be daring, romantic but risky. He fretted that the season hung in the balance.

  Wells was bent over in his seat, bobbing to the beat of his iPhone. The deejay, Ren Hongbing, blasted music and the Brave Dragons cheerleaders ran onto the court in camouflage army pants and sequined halter tops. When the team was announced, the crowd signaled its choice, or at least its respect, by giving Donta the biggest ovation. He was now the hometown boy. The Chinese national anthem was played. No one sang. Bonzi bobbed to his headset. Coach Liu had a final word with the starters and then Donta walked over for a solidarity shake and shoulder bash with Bonzi.