Brave Dragons Page 3

  Weiss reached into his pocket and pulled out a pen. He scribbled a number on a piece of paper and pushed it across the table.

  “What’s this?” Kasten asked.

  “That’s my ex-wife’s number. Call her.”

  Kasten laughed, and Weiss got the job.

  Now Bruce O’Neil paused. He admired Boss Wang’s toughness and his passion for basketball, but he knew his reputation for meddling and had watched him quarrel with the Chinese coach during the team’s training sessions in Oregon.

  “He’s a very proud, passionate guy,” O’Neil said. “He overreacts to certain things and oversteps certain boundaries, at least as we would see them. It’s going to be a volatile situation. But you can handle it.”

  O’Neil then hesitated, and added, “I hope.” He was laughing, sort of.

  The discussion meandered to the subject of firing coaches.

  “How many has he fired?” Weiss asked. He had no interest in traveling halfway around the world for the pleasure of getting canned.

  The precise number escaped O’Neil but he said it didn’t matter because Weiss existed in a different category. “You don’t have to worry about it,” he said. “You’re coming from the NBA. He can’t fire you.

  “This is going to be your basketball adventure,” O’Neil said, “and probably the biggest adventure of your life.”

  Outside baggage claim, hotel bellboys waved placards and looked for incoming guests as knots of illegal taxi drivers hovered nearby and eyed prospective customers among the weary travelers staggering with their luggage into the canned light of Beijing’s Terminal 2. Joe, tall and lanky, a former CBA player for the elite military team, and now the Brave Dragons’ interpreter, could see over the crowd as he searched for Weiss.

  His English name was an anglicized version of his given Chinese name, Jie. He joined the team in Oregon, through a connection with Bruce O’Neil, and accepted a full-time position after Boss Wang decided to hire an American coach. Joe had accompanied the general manager, Zhang Beihai, on the expedition that led the team to Weiss. On O’Neil’s advice, they traveled to the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas, an annual meat market for players, coaches, and agents. When they met LeGarie, they made clear that money did not pose an obstacle. LeGarie mentioned Weiss, and though neither Joe nor the general manager had heard of him, Weiss was NBA, and NBA was what Boss Wang wanted. Everyone agreed on a two-page contract. Weiss would earn $250,000 for eight months’ work.

  Now, though, Joe waited nervously. He liked smoothness in life, and he had quickly learned not to expect it with the Brave Dragons. An interpreter is supposedly nothing more than a vessel; the message is the cargo, and the interpreter neither made it, nor is responsible for its contents. But the job of basketball interpreter in China is personal in ways that sometimes pained Joe. He often had to deliver unpleasant news, and today would be no exception. Moreover, he could assume Bob Weiss understood little about the team, or about the difficulties his new job would present, so inevitably there were going to be shocks and surprises. That meant Joe would be providing services beyond mere interpretation. He would be helping Weiss survive.

  The passengers from the Seattle flight trickled into the terminal. Joe had never met Weiss but recognized him from a photograph: With his bald pate and eyeglasses, Weiss might have been a visiting businessman, except that he walked like an athlete, all hips and wide shoulders; he swaggered slowly, side to side, like a retired rodeo cowboy, if one or two sizes too tall. Joe approached him, smiling and blushing, as he often did when he spoke English, as if he were embarrassed. He offered a handshake. Weiss looked relieved: He had found the only person he knew in China. He was now ready for a few days in Beijing.

  “Change of plans,” Joe announced.

  The owner had left Beijing. The original plan of keeping the fired Chinese coach around for a few weeks to ease Weiss’s transition had been discarded. Boss Wang had sent off the Chinese coach, there was no one to manage practice, and practice was in the morning. Joe had already bought tickets on that evening’s flight to Taiyuan. There would be no time to attend the Olympics, nor any transition period.

  Weiss sighed. He knew that he was not joining an ordinary team with an ordinary owner, so he had mentally prepared himself for the not-so-ordinary, or so he thought. But he had not counted on this. He had assumed the former coach would stick around long enough to offer a briefing on the players and the rest of the league.

  “No problem,” Weiss said, as he pivoted his cart and followed Joe to the check-in counter. He surrendered his luggage and stood in line to pass through security, still digesting how completely one eleven-hour flight had realigned his life. In the Seattle airport, he had kissed Tracy goodbye and hugged Stuart. After four decades as an NBA nomad, traveling through airports across the United States, he was conditioned to life on the road, to separations from friends and family. But now he was truly apart. He had known Joe for ten minutes, and was now following him around the airport like a nervous child worried about losing his father.

  “Excuse me. We need to check your bag,” said a security guard, speaking in broken English, pointing to the overstuffed gym bag Weiss had placed on the conveyer belt of the X‑ray machine. The guard wanted to examine its contents, especially given the heightened security alert for potential Olympic terrorism. The bag was placed on a metal table, and Weiss was asked to pull open the zipper.

  The gym bag represented the survivalist instincts of Tracy Weiss. She had not known what would be available in Taiyuan in the way of pharmacological products, so she had planned as if nothing would be. She had stuffed her husband’s carry-on bag with aspirin, tampons for her later arrival, and a few dozen other assorted bottles and tubes. Weiss was a mule smuggling the contents of a Rite Aid.

  “What’s this?”

  Five hundred berry-flavored chewable Tums for an upset stomach, Weiss replied.

  “What’s this?”

  Imodium multiple symptom pills for diarrhea.

  “This?”

  Bug spray.

  “This?”

  Prescription toothpaste and dental masks, specially designed to protect teeth against pollution. Tracy was preparing for nuclear winter.

  Things kept coming out of the bag: Bayer aspirin, Neosporin, moisturizer cream, Tylenol, liquid gel Advil. The guard pulled out two very large bottles filled with a thick gloppy fluid. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Shampoo,” answered the bald Weiss, “for washing your hair.”

  Another guard grabbed a smaller bottle and carried it off to a supervisor. A pink liquid was poured from the bottle and a sample of it was run through a testing machine; no one could define its content. Twenty minutes had passed. The flight to Taiyuan would be leaving soon. Finally, the bottle was handed to Weiss.

  “Drink it,” he was told.

  Uncertain as to whether the importation of Pepto-Bismol constituted a punishable offense in China, Weiss swallowed a sip and licked his pink lips.

  He and his pharmacy were checked through to Taiyuan.

  As Weiss was contemplating his first practice, he knew the Brave Dragons were not as good as mediocre American players—in Oregon, they had gotten their asses kicked by semipro clubs. What he didn’t know was that the Chinese players were not surprised by these ass-kickings because they had been taught to regard themselves as defective. Various explanations were given for their shortcomings: Chinese considered themselves genetically less capable of excelling at sports that require a combination of power and speed; China’s period of isolation meant that Chinese players were now trying to catch up with advances in the game made in the West, especially in the United States; funding a national basketball system, one organized to encourage everyone to play, and thus broaden the talent pool, was too costly and, oddly, inconsistent with the overriding goal of the Chinese sports system, which was not to promote public participation but to win Olympic gold medals.

  Humanity is such an abundant raw material in China that m
aking use of it all is considered impractical. The Chinese sports system identifies basketball talent through a process that pairs social engineering with cost-benefit analysis. The system acts as a sieve through which almost every child in the country is poured so that a selected minority can be identified as best suited for sports. The winnowing tool is the X‑ray machine. In elementary school, children undergo medical tests that include a scan of their skeletal structure, with special attention paid to their wrist bones. Doctors examine the distance between the developing bones, and that distance provides a projection for future physical growth. Kids deemed likeliest to grow the tallest are encouraged to attend government sports schools, where coaches will steer them toward certain sports, like basketball. Other kids, the ones showing narrower spaces in the bone structure of their wrists, continue attending schools focused on academics, many of which offer no team sports whatsoever.

  Most of the Chinese players on the team had been caught in the sieve as teenagers. Sun Chunlei, a lumbering power forward, had been born in the port city of Yantai, in Shandong Province, across the Yellow Sea from North Korea. Shandong is traditionally an incubator of Chinese military leaders and tall basketball players, the latter sometimes described as Shandong Da Han, or Big Guys from Shandong. Mu Tiezhu, at almost 7′6″, was a Shandong native discovered by basketball officials while working as a military border guard. Mu had never played basketball but would become a stalwart on China’s national team during the 1970s and 1980s. When the Chinese team visited the United States in the late 1970s on a goodwill tour, Mu scored 11 points in an exhibition victory against the collegiate Georgetown Hoyas and later led the Chinese to a win over the NBA’s Washington Bullets.

  Sun Chunlei, or Big Sun, as he was called, was a large child born of large parents, and the bone tests sealed his fate. He was only nine, but the distance between his wrist bones suggested he would reach 6′6″. (He actually grew to 6′8″.) By the time he was eleven, he had transferred to a sports school. When a coach handed him a basketball, he did not know what to do with it. He had never played the game and had no interest in playing, and now his preadolescence was organized to prepare him to become a basketball player. The coaches woke him every morning at 5:30 for wind sprints. He was in sixth grade and he ran three miles every morning before sunrise. He hated the game chosen for him. “When I first got there,” he remembered, “I couldn’t take it.”

  Pan Jiang, the starting point guard, grew up in the industrial city of Jinzhou in Liaoning Province, in the country’s northeastern rust belt, which, like Shandong, was part of China’s basketball heartland. Pan loved the game, playing year-round, even when the winter temperatures fell near zero. His parents, factory workers, placed him in a sports school when he was ten. He spent nearly eight years there. The bone tests predicted he would reach 6′6″, but he stopped growing at 6′2″, which meant he would play point guard. The point guard is the general of the team, directing his teammates around the court, often placing their interests above his own. The position fit his temperament. He was a pleaser.

  “I can get everybody involved and make some good passes,” he said. “It fits my personality and my character.”

  More than anything, though, the job of a Chinese point guard is to please the coach. Pan had joined the Shanxi Brave Dragons six years earlier and, while trying to run the offense of whichever coach happened to be running the team, had spent most of those years as Boss Wang’s whipping boy. Pan had a nice outside shot and a selfless attitude, but his chief failing was that he was not Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns. Nash was a transcendent player who, if he was not scoring himself, intuitively distributed the ball to the right person at the right moment. Whenever Boss Wang watched a CCTV broadcast of one of Nash’s games, Pan stood a good chance of later hearing exactly what Nash was and what Pan Jiang was not.

  But if Steve Nash was encouraged to express himself within an offense, to experiment and dabble, Pan Jiang was required to follow orders, and strictly so. “Basically, I just did whatever they told me to do,” he said. “When they told us to do a drill, we did that drill. When they told us to do something in the game, we do that. In China, we are trained to do whatever the coaches tell us.”

  Pan and Big Sun were the longest tenured players on the team, which meant they were the longest suffering. They had never experienced a winning season and they had watched the team collapse during the previous season, regularly losing games by 30 points or more. They had played for at least fifteen head coaches. They could not name them all. One coach had lasted only one game. Now another one was coming, though everyone knew this would be different, because the new guy was from the NBA. He was supposed to arrive for practice in the morning. The Chinese players were surly from their trip to America, but also intrigued, since no one knew quite what to expect. The NBA was evidence, offered live on television, of what they were not.

  They were defective, a judgment they accepted. The question was how much they could be improved.

  In the 1950s, having declared his vision of reinventing China as a Communist utopia, Mao Zedong endorsed a policy known as ba fangwu dasao ganjing zai qing ke, or Cleaning the House Before Inviting the Guests. He established a Foreign Nationals Management Bureau to identify and register the 175,000 foreigners living in China and then began squeezing them out through official harassment, onerous taxation policies, and political persecution. Within a few years, only a tiny number of foreigners remained. Merely speaking to a foreigner became a political act; a Chinese person conversing with a foreigner would be required to report exactly what was said.

  This was cleaning the house. For a century, foreigners had humiliated China, by flooding the country with opium, demanding favorable trade policies through gunboat diplomacy, and seizing Chinese territory. Mao believed that removing foreigners from Chinese soil was the only way to scrub away the stain their presence had created. Yet even Mao realized that China needed some guests. China was a ruined, destitute nation that had missed the Industrial Revolution. Among other things, Mao needed engineers to oversee dam construction projects and military experts to modernize the Red Army. He invited the Soviet Union and other Communist nations to send advisers, and created a Foreign Experts Bureau to oversee their housing, remuneration, and political status. The Soviets were the big brother of the Communist movement and they enjoyed high status in China. They were given access to private cars and drivers, treated to annual vacations, and allowed to shop at Friendship Stores offering goods not available to ordinary Chinese. While Chinese lived in shoddy, drab apartment blocks, the Soviets lived in private apartment complexes built with Western conveniences.

  But while the Foreign Experts Bureau was expected to accommodate outside advisers, it was also expected to control them. When the Sino-Soviet split in 1960 created a schism in the global Communist movement, many Soviet advisers returned to Russia, but others, sympathetic to China, remained. Deng Xiaoping, then the party’s general secretary under Mao, cautioned that those who remained had to be trained in Mao Zedong Thought and instructed to focus on their work, not on Chinese politics. He called the policy ji gan ran hong, or Squeeze Them Dry and Paint Them Red! The terms of the relationship were clear: Foreigners were to be exploited for their expertise but not allowed to influence or interfere with Chinese affairs. When Mao died in 1976, Deng eventually emerged as his successor and began undoing the disastrous planned economy. Deng recognized that the capitalist West had raced ahead and, to catch up, he reopened China to Western expertise. His economic policies were known as gaige kaifang, or Reform and Opening.

  Now the foreign experts arriving in China were no longer bound by shared ideology. Deng had declared that “to get rich is glorious,” and China represented the greatest potential business market in the world. The Foreign Experts Bureau remained intact but could no longer manage the growing numbers of foreigners pouring into the country. Foreign investors, many from Hong Kong and Taiwan, built factories in the special economic zones Deng establi
shed in Shenzhen and other coastal cities. Multinational corporations arrived, slowly at first, but their executives were intoxicated by the same alluring potential of the huge China market that had brought European traders more than a century earlier. Yet even if China was opening itself up, the same Chinese suspicions of foreign intentions remained; foreigners still had to be controlled. During the 1980s, foreign companies entering the China market were required to form joint ventures with Chinese partners, arrangements that usually proved culturally and economically unsustainable. Foreigners relayed horror stories about Chinese partners opening secret factories to produce counterfeit versions of the same product being manufactured by the joint ventures. Chinese complained that too many foreigners were only after fast riches.

  By the 1990s, China had relaxed the requirement on joint ventures, and Western business poured in, as did thousands of people who saw China as a new frontier in business, culture, and, eventually, sports. The distrust was hardly scrubbed away, but China became, again, the place where foreigners dreamed of solving the puzzle of how to succeed in the world’s most populous nation, whether in business or anything else. Those who succeeded in China would be at the cutting edge of the global economy.

  That, more or less, is what Warren LeGarie preached to Bob Weiss. LeGarie had spent two decades placing American players and coaches overseas, most famously George Karl, the talented NBA head coach who spent two seasons coaching Real Madrid in Spain before returning to the NBA. For years, LeGarie had steered clients away from China; he considered the league too unprofessional and too full of teams that reneged on contracts or failed to pay players. But now China had become the most coveted basketball market in the world. China meant that Bob Weiss was no longer on the NBA discard rack but standing at the front edge of the future of basketball.