Brave Dragons Page 2

  Still looking for work?

  Yes.

  There’s an opening in China. The job is technically as a consultant. The Chinese owner wants a former NBA coach to mentor his Chinese coach and players.

  Where?

  An industrial city. Taiyuan, or something like that. A bunch of young players, kids almost.

  LeGarie lathered it on, talking in terms of legacy, of being the first former NBA head coach in China. “That can never be taken from you,” he said. “Once you are the first at something, it is important.”

  The team wanted him in China within a week. Weiss asked how he would communicate. The team would provide an interpreter. Tracy was thrilled and already on her laptop researching a list of places to visit in China.

  What the hell, Weiss figured.

  He was curious about one more thing: the owner. Weiss had worked for some real characters in the NBA.

  The owner is a big basketball fan. He is just crazy about the game, LeGarie said. And he really wants someone from the NBA.

  It was August 10, a few minutes before tipoff. Henry Kissinger gazed down at the players around the basket. Warming up on the court was the greatest collection of basketball talent in the world, at least on one side of the court. The United States and China were about to play in the opening round of the basketball competition of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The Americans, led by Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Dwyane Wade, would eventually win the gold medal. The Chinese had Yao Ming, the 7′6″ center for the Houston Rockets, and a collection of players few people outside China had ever heard of. The game was expected to be a blowout, yet more than 100 million people, possibly more than 200 million, were watching on television, one of the largest audiences ever for a sporting event. In the stands, George W. Bush, in the final months of his presidency, sat not far from his father, former president George H. W. Bush. Television announcers were eagerly comparing the game with the Cold War showdowns between the United States and the Soviet Union. Geopolitical hype was good for business; NBC wanted to attract more viewers and the NBA regarded the Olympics as a worldwide demonstration project for its brand.

  Yet it was not just hype. There was something else at play: At stake in the game, in the Olympics, was the same thing at stake in the world, the inexorable rise of China. No one expected China to win on this day (it lost, 101–70); the question was how fast it was gaining speed. The next morning, the Chinese sporting press was hardly disappointed; the game was close for a while, an indicator that China soon might compete at a higher level. The same principle was being applied to almost everything, whether military affairs, business, or science, and China had closed the gap in those areas much more quickly than in basketball. The relentlessness of the Chinese machine was a spectacle the rest of the world found both awesome and unnerving to behold.

  Kissinger, of course, had been there at the beginning. In 1972, Kissinger escorted President Richard Nixon to Beijing after months of secret diplomacy between two countries that for decades had not formally recognized one another’s existence. Nixon and Mao Zedong reopened the door between America and China in what, at the time, was classic Cold War politics. Yet, more profoundly, it was a bet on the future, a grand experiment: Despite differences in history, language, and political ideology, China and the United States both realized that they should, in their own self-interest as well as the best interests of the world, learn how to cooperate, how to get along. Superficially at least, that had been accomplished, except that the experiment was still in progress, and now that China had become a juggernaut, the experiment was changing in unexpected ways. That Kissinger was now staring down at a basketball game in China like some Cold War gargoyle only accentuated how much had changed since 1972, and how much had not.

  Basketball, oddly enough, offered a timeline of the aspirations and anxieties of the relationship. Basketball had been introduced in both countries at almost the same time, as if a scientist had planted a pair of the same genetically engineered seeds in starkly different soils and produced starkly different fruits. When James Naismith invented the game in 1891, his sponsors at the Young Men’s Christian Association immediately embraced it as a proselytizing tool. Within a few years of the game’s creation, YMCA missionaries, carrying basketballs in their luggage, arrived in the port city of Tianjin. China’s ancient imperial order was collapsing, and younger Chinese elites were grappling with an identity crisis, trying to reconcile the impotence of China’s ancient civilization against the military and industrial ascendance of the West. The Y built gymnasiums, organized China’s first national and international sports tournaments, and preached that basketball could help build stronger Chinese bodies and transform China into a proud, modern nation.

  Mao’s founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 shattered the Y’s ambitions and closed the door to the West. Mao introduced an atheistic, socialist state anchored in a disastrous cult of personality. He regarded “colonial” sports as bourgeois affectations but made an exception for basketball, the sport favored by his military. In the United States, meanwhile, basketball was emerging as the urban game, a stage for individuality and creativity, and by the 1960s and 1970s, Oscar Robertson, Bill Russell, Jerry West, and even Bob Weiss were creating a distinctive American brand of basketball that would keep evolving and one day give rise to Michael Jordan and the global game. In closed China, basketball evolved in a vacuum because China existed in a vacuum, and everything, including the game, existed to serve the state. Those who played did so in the name of the Communist Party, or as an escape from the drabness and desperation of daily life. One of them was Boss Wang.

  The experiment launched by Nixon and Mao in 1972 began in earnest after Mao died in 1976. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, unleashed reforms that over the next three decades transformed the Chinese economy, while also loosening the state’s once clenched grip on society. Young people could pierce their noses, dye their hair, or join punk rock bands. Or play basketball. By the opening of the Beijing Olympics, basketball had become the most popular sport in China, mostly because of the popularity of the NBA. Chinese youth were no longer partitioned from the outside world. Television programming expanded in China just as Michael Jordan was becoming the first global sports superstar and his sponsor, Nike, was becoming the first multinational corporation to grasp that sports could become a new global religion, and a very profitable one. If the YMCA had brought basketball to China to convert the heathens, the NBA and Nike now offered a different promise—inclusion in a hip new global order. Chinese youth were still grappling with an identity crisis, still trying to figure out how to be modern and Chinese, and Nike responded by saying Just Do It or Be Like Mike.

  The problem was that China still wasn’t very good at basketball, or at least not as good as it aspired to be, which, as with everything, meant being the best. Yao Ming’s arrival in the NBA had rightly been treated as a geopolitical event and his success with the Rockets had injected new energy and global attention on the potential of Chinese basketball. Yet beyond Yao, China’s basketball league was failing to develop talent on the court and failing even more off the court at running basketball as a business. The NBA thought it had a solution—itself. It already had a thriving business in China selling television rights and corporate branding partnerships and had recently formed a Chinese subsidiary, valued at more than $2 billion. The league’s commissioner, David Stern, had decided he wanted an NBA league in China. The Olympics were his sampler; the NBA was helping to stage the basketball competition during the Games and had imported NBA cheerleaders, techno dance soundtracks, halftime trampoline teams, and even mascots so that Chinese fans could taste a version of the “NBA Experience.”

  Except that much had not changed in China. The Communist Party still dominated the government, outlawed any opposition parties, censored the press, and jailed dissidents. Basketball might seem unrelated to this authoritarian structure, but the Chinese Basketball Association was an expression of the government itself; the l
eague was run by the government’s sports ministry and the league’s general secretary was appointed by the Communist Party. Whether he realized it or not, by declaring he wanted an NBA league in China, Stern was challenging the Communist Party. It would have been an untenable position, except the Chinese league was struggling to remain relevant. The same tensions coursing through Chinese society were coursing through Chinese basketball. Local governments or state-owned companies still controlled many teams, but Chinese entrepreneurs had started buying in and wanted more freedom to market their teams and develop talent as they saw fit. They wanted to disentangle the CBA from the government and operate as a purely commercial entity. As proof of their argument, the private teams were beginning to dominate the league, especially the top team from Guangdong Province, the region along the southern coast that once led China into the reform era.

  The exception was the Shanxi Brave Dragons. Among the private teams, the Brave Dragons had only proved that bad management and bad players could transcend any system. This failure grated on Boss Wang, because he considered himself a reformer. He saw the NBA as an opportunity, not a threat, and he wanted to plumb its secrets. When his coaching search turned up Bob Weiss, even though the two men had never met or spoken, Boss Wang didn’t hesitate. He believed Weiss could be the technology transfer he was looking for.

  A Westerner living in Beijing and a lifelong basketball fan, I had spent five years observing what was changing in China, and what seemed impossible to change, and I thought that the partnership between Boss Wang and Bob Weiss would provide an object lesson in that distinction. Little did I know that basketball would help me understand China, and China’s relationship with the United States, in ways I never imagined. In between Boss Wang and Coach Weiss would be a team of colorful, sometimes heartbreaking, oddballs from around China, and around the world, playing in a crazy, unpredictable season that carried them into stadiums in every corner of China, a season in which the games were as much about testing different cultures and about how well, or not, they could be blended together.

  Weiss was supposed to take those two strains of basketball seeds that had grown so differently and try to commingle them in the same pot. China had become the manufacturing colossus of the world, with factories that made televisions, cell phones, basketballs, and so much more. Making things had made China powerful again. But Boss Wang wanted to manufacture basketball players. And that would prove a very different challenge.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE FOREIGN EXPERT

  Walking out of baggage claim, pushing an overstuffed luggage cart, groggy and disoriented after the eleven-hour flight from Seattle, Bob Weiss was looking for someone named Joe. He had been anxious before taking off, having never heard of his Chinese carrier, Hainan Airlines, but the flight had been pleasant, the business class service attentive. He read a novel and dozed as the flight traced, in reverse, the migratory path of civilization: along the Alaskan coastline before turning left near the Bering Strait, flying over the chain of islands that anthropologists believe once formed a land bridge on which the first humans to reach North America walked over from Asia. Time itself spun forward at the International Dateline, and the airliner soon raced over Siberia, Mongolia, and Manchurian China before descending into the afternoon haze shrouding the ancient city of Beijing. Time had spun forward in Beijing, too: The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games was on Friday, two days off. Beijing was again the center of the world.

  Weiss was looking forward to a few days in Beijing so that he could recover from the flight in a nice hotel, enjoy the Olympics, and get to know Boss Wang before they joined the team in Taiyuan. The two men had not met, and their language divide prevented them from speaking directly on the telephone, a situation that made the hiring odd, when compared to the vetting process in the NBA. Weiss wanted to make a good impression and brought a bottle of Kentucky bourbon as a gift. Weiss knew as much about China as the average American, which is to say not a great deal, so Tracy, the former schoolteacher, bought a load of books about the country, plumbed the Internet, and tutored Bob on what amounted to a survival primer on etiquette. Tracy had determined that Bob would attend many banquets governed by a complicated and symbolic protocol. Bob should not leave his chopsticks planted like fence posts in a bowl of rice because this symbolized death. He would be expected to give and receive many toasts of Chinese alcohol, and toasting adhered to its own protocol. He should hold the rim of his glass just below the glass of the toastee, as a sign of deference and respect. Every person in the room might toast him, and he had to drink with each one. New acquaintances would want to pose for photographs, possibly several, and Bob should oblige as a gesture of friendship. Finally, he had to be ready with gifts, and the gifts had to be wrapped with care (hence the commemorative wooden box that came with the bourbon).

  He was supposed to serve as a consultant and tactical adviser to the team, explaining NBA strategies, diagramming offensive sets, and teaching other specialty plays and techniques. Weiss knew that a Chinese coach had overseen the team in Oregon, and he assumed the same coach would be the object of his mentoring. As a consultant, Weiss figured he could exist in a more detached realm, insulated from direct responsibility and the pressurized decisions borne by a coach, the decisions that often made coaching in the NBA so grinding. Weiss was sixty-six. A consultancy sounded fine.

  Several days before leaving for Beijing, Weiss had contemplated his wardrobe. He knew the CBA was instituting a dress code for coaches, and had he been one, he would have packed his tailored suits from coaching in the NBA. But he was a consultant, and if a consultant was not expected to sit on the bench, he might not need the suits. Knowing almost nothing about his new team, his new country, or his new owner, Weiss called the person who, along with LeGarie, was most responsible for his job: Bruce O’Neil.

  During the 1970s, O’Neil had coached at the University of Hawaii, his alma mater, and led the team to a winning record. But he was pushed out after three seasons when NCAA investigators discovered rules infractions. He returned to his home state of Oregon and started over, founding a production company that made instructional sports videos. A natural salesman, O’Neil traveled to Japan and discovered a big market for baseball training videos; he also sold videos to ESPN. But he missed basketball, so he sold the production company and founded the United States Basketball Academy in Oregon as a training camp for international teams. He returned to Asia to drum up business and made his first visit to China in 1995. He was exhilarated. Kids were playing all over the country. The NBA was seeping into the youth culture, and O’Neil felt like an explorer who had unwittingly stumbled upon basketball’s New World.

  He spoke no Chinese but visited China so frequently that he soon ingratiated himself with the Communist Party bureaucrats who ran the Chinese Basketball Association, partly by identifying the dilemma of their existence: They oversaw a socialist-era system that produced poor players and desperately needed reform, yet their jobs, status, and livelihoods were dependent on that system. Any outsider who wanted to improve Chinese basketball, and profit from it, not only had to persuade the CBA bureaucrats to change but also reassure them that change would not render them obsolete. O’Neil took them on golf junkets to Hawaii or Las Vegas, and for several years organized tryout camps where Chinese teams could evaluate and draft Americans interested in playing in the league. In Oregon, he tailored his academy toward Chinese teams and even hired cooks from China. One of his clients was Boss Wang, who had sent over the Shanxi Brave Dragons for the summer. When Boss Wang had stormed into Oregon, looking for a former NBA coach, Bruce O’Neil was enlisted to help. He soon connected the team with Warren LeGarie, who offered up Bob Weiss for the job. Once a deal was struck, O’Neil had told Weiss to expect the unexpected in China. Now that advice was being proven wise.

  “You’ll need to bring the suits,” O’Neil told Weiss. “You’re going to be the head coach.”

  “I am?” Weiss stammered into the telephone. “What h
appened?”

  Until this moment, knowing practically nothing about the Shanxi Brave Dragons had not bothered Weiss, just as the Shanxi Brave Dragons had not seemed bothered by knowing so little about him. Weiss had wanted a job and a chance for an interesting life experience in a foreign country. He had NBA on his chest, and that was all that mattered to Boss Wang. The Chinese coach Bob Weiss had been expecting to mentor had been fired, O’Neil now explained, so Weiss would have to run the team. The Chinese coach would remain through the transition, and the team would find a young Chinese coach who would spend the season as an assistant and be groomed for the future.

  “Fine with me,” Weiss said, pausing for a moment before asking the question that had not preoccupied him so much before. “What can you tell me about the owner?”

  Weiss knew only the essential facts about Boss Wang. He was Chinese, very rich, had made his money in steel, and was absolutely bonkers about basketball, especially NBA basketball, which Weiss assumed counted as a point in his favor. But Weiss did not know Wang’s philosophy on basketball, or whether he even had a philosophy; he knew almost nothing about Boss Wang’s temperament; nor did he know how involved, or not, Boss Wang expected to be with the team. Weiss could not even pronounce his new boss’s full name: Wang Xingjiang.

  Weiss did know that relationships were essential in professional basketball, and, given that success hinges on personal chemistry, front office executives in the NBA usually wanted a personal relationship with the coach. When Weiss had interviewed with the Atlanta Hawks, his most important meeting came with the team president, Stan Kasten, a New Yorker with a New Yorker’s distrust of anyone who appeared too unblemished.

  “Bob, I’ve got a problem,” Kasten had told Weiss. “No matter who I call, everybody tells me you are a great guy. That bothers me. I want to find one person who doesn’t like you.”