Brave Dragons Page 4

  The flight from Beijing to Taiyuan took less than an hour. Weiss and Joe talked about the Chinese players on the team and the upcoming season, but mostly they got acquainted. Later, when Weiss recounted the flight, what resonated most with him was how Joe had seemed to frame the season as a matter of survival, a matter of making it all the way through. Joe promised that he and the general manager were committed to Weiss, would stand by his side, as if another group of people were not.

  “No matter what happens,” Joe said, “we are going to help you.”

  Inside the airport, a young smiling man awaited. His face was so unlined and boyish that he might have been only a few years out of college. He was the general manager, Zhang Beihai, not yet thirty years old. He did not speak a word of English, but he kept smiling as he handed Weiss a large arrangement of flowers.

  “Welcome to Taiyuan,” he said in Chinese, and they walked outside into the hot evening air for the ride to Weiss’s hotel.

  They soon arrived at one of the tallest skyscrapers in downtown Taiyuan, a glass building, unremarkable except that the glass was tinted the color of a ripe banana. It was too dark and Weiss was too exhausted to notice the color but what seemed familiar was the Howard Johnson sign shining atop the building, an emblem of unpretentious Middle America gleaming in the central China night. Weiss took comfort in the sign. So much was already unfamiliar: He had moved to a city whose name he could barely pronounce to coach a team he knew nothing about, other than that it was very, very bad. He had not understood anything anyone said to him all day, except for Joe, and Joe was now leaving for the night.

  Weiss rode the elevator to his room, and opened the door and walked in. The overstuffed furniture was old and stained and crowded together in the small room. He smelled the acrid odor of stale cigarettes. There was a combined bedroom and living room, and the tiny bathroom appeared to be missing essential parts. There was a small sink and toilet, but the shower nozzle poked out of a wall next to the toilet. There was no tub or shower stall; the entire bathroom was the shower stall. When Weiss flipped on the water and stepped under the nozzle, most of the water sprayed upward, where it performed a bank shot off the ceiling before splattering down onto Weiss, the toilet, the sink, and the rest of the bathroom. His shower had flooded the bathroom.

  Weiss flicked on the television. He had been promised international cable service, but every channel was Chinese, except for one with news updates from Canada. He opened his Apple laptop, but the room lacked the promised Internet connection, so he collapsed on the bed, disconnected from the world he had known, and fell asleep. When he awoke in the morning and stepped outside, he learned two things: He was living in a yellow skyscraper. And the Howard Johnson was not actually a Howard Johnson. The familiar Howard Johnson sign sat atop the yellow building, but a less conspicuous English sign above the door identified the hotel as the Howell & Johnson.

  Bob Weiss had spent his first night in China at a knockoff HoJo.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE PURGE

  Taiyuan is the boiler room of China. The furnace. Dust and soot are blown through it, whether it is billowing dust from coal mines in the surrounding mountains, or the blinking dust of the cement factories, or the dust and dirt that blow off the dry brown fields and settle over the city like a fine ash. For a time, Taiyuan ranked as the most polluted city in the world, and residents could oftentimes judge the condition of the day by the condition of their clothes. A short walk on a downtown street could stain a shirt collar. On the worst days, coal dust floated in the air like black pollen. When in 1987 provincial leaders became interested in the business of processing French fries, a local delegation traveled to Idaho and Tennessee on a fact-finding mission to study potatoes. Beyond the potatoes, two things were memorable about their trip: First, the American no-smoking rules; one man in the group would wake himself after midnight for a cigarette to compensate for lost opportunities during the day. Second, the air. It was so clean that no one had to polish his shoes during the entire ten-day trip. This was a revelation, because shoe polishing was a daily necessity back home.

  On his first morning in Taiyuan, and the many mornings that followed, Bob Weiss did not immediately realize he was in an improved city. Taiyuan had surrendered its pollution title to a sister city, Linfen, a grim, industrial scar located a few hours down the highway. Taiyuan was still polluted, just less so than Linfen. In winter, when the big municipal furnaces heated the city by burning piles of coal, and the factories belched smoke into the sky, a permanent grayness still settled over Taiyuan, as if it were the city’s natural state to be drained of color.

  Taiyuan was the economic and political heart of Shanxi Province and once enjoyed broad political influence and social cachet in China. I once struck up a conversation with a man in the Beijing airport as we waited for a flight to Taiyuan, his home. He proudly repeated a local saying: If you want to know 1,000 years of Chinese history, go to Beijing. If you want to know 2,000 years of Chinese history, go to Xi’an. (Xi’an, currently the home of China’s Terra-Cotta Warriors, was the capital of the ancient Qin Dynasty.) But if you want to know 3,000 years of Chinese history, go to Taiyuan. Shanxi Province was once a cultural and economic center that had given rise to China’s banking system and its first great merchant class, men who ferried their goods to the Great Wall and dared trade with the barbarians from Mongolia.

  It was also true that 3,000 years of history had wrung Shanxi dry. The country’s merchants now lived on the coast, or in Beijing, and as players in the Chinese export machine they traded globally. Shanxi was landlocked and deracinated; drought had shriveled wheat fields into lunar landscapes. What money was generated in Shanxi came from digging holes into one of the richest veins of coal in the world, and as more factories and apartment towers rose along the coast, more holes were dug in Shanxi to extract the coal that fired the Chinese machine.

  It was a primitive human enterprise, and it made multimillionaires out of semiliterate coal bosses. So much money had come out of the ground, and had concentrated itself so inequitably, that Shanxi distilled the country’s sharpest contrasts: It was where miners earning maybe $5 a day died by the thousands inside unsafe mines, and it was where so many overnight millionaires had been created that Louis Vuitton and Cartier were anchor tenants in the newest shopping mall in downtown Taiyuan. To people elsewhere in China, Taiyuan had come to symbolize the crudest, if essential, denominator of the country’s economic miracle. Chinese reporters in other cities were flabbergasted that Weiss was associated with Taiyuan, as if he were a fancy piece of new technology that had been shipped to the wrong place.

  His early days were disorienting. The tumult of the city was overwhelming. Traffic was a swirling sea of cars, trucks, and people, everyone pressing forward in persistent tides, honking and lurching between lanes, bicyclists pedaling in narrow streams along both sides of the pockmarked roads. Men hauled bricks or plastic bottles or garbage on three-wheeled carts. Merely crossing the street required planning. Pedestrians would slowly push into the road, edging farther and farther outward, strangers temporarily united in a chain until they had created a human blockade that for a few moments paralyzed the crush of cars and allowed everyone to rush across. Weiss began drafting behind old women as they ventured into the fray. They seemed to have the survivor’s instinct.

  Slowly, he established lines of communication to his known world. He acquired Internet service and began sending his family emails and photographs of Taiyuan. His favorite was an open manhole on a busy sidewalk that had been left unmarked, day and night, for weeks. The team provided him a cell phone with limited paid minutes, and the phone chirped when time was about to elapse. “He would call and say, ‘I’ve gotta go! I’m running out of minutes. You cannot come over here!’ ” Tracy recalled. Then the phone would go dead.

  His contract had included a vaguely defined Personal Amenities section that provided not only for a luxury apartment but a driver on call twenty-four hours a day. In the
NBA, a contract for a head coach is a meticulously lawyered document intended to protect a coach from the day he is hired to the inevitable day he is fired, and beyond. Specifics such as travel arrangements are carefully parsed, down to the levels of luxury a coach receives on road trips. Weiss had once stayed in a suite so fantastically grand that he summoned his assistant coaches so that they might chuckle over the piano, the bottles of wine, and tables of fruit and flowers. His Chinese contract left the definition of luxury to cultural interpretation.

  His driver was a middle-aged man, Mr. Zhou, who collected him every morning in a dusty gray van. Mr. Zhou spoke no English, and Weiss spoke no Chinese, so they exchanged morning grunts as Mr. Zhou steered into the churn of traffic. He weaved between lanes, bleating his horn, dodging cars and people, seemingly determined to drive more recklessly than the competition. Weiss was alarmed and fascinated; either there were no rules, or the rules didn’t present any meaningful deterrent. People drove as if there were no other cars on the road.

  On his first morning in Taiyuan, Weiss staggered out of the van and joined the players at the team’s training camp on the outskirts of the city. The practice gym was inside a converted factory on the fringe of an industrial park, not far from Taiyuan’s new airport at the southernmost edge of the city. It was about ten miles from downtown; Boss Wang had chosen the location because it was cheap and away from the temptations of the city. Most taxis did not go out there, and if the Chinese players wanted to leave, they had to arrange for illegal taxis, known as black cabs, to pick them up. The Chinese players slept inside a three-story concrete dormitory painted burnt orange. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were taken in a canteen on the first floor. The gym was an old warehouse, as high as a barn and constructed with sheet metal. Inside, two courts lay end to end with what amounted to the team weight room placed at the edge of one court: a few machines, a couple of bench presses, some dumbbells, and mats for sit-ups. Later, when foreign players arrived at the practice facility, they compared it to a prison.

  Weiss’s first practice was awkward. The players stared at him, slightly stunned that an NBA coach had actually materialized in Taiyuan. Weiss could not name a single player on the court, nor could he name a single team in the Chinese league outside of his. With Joe interpreting, he introduced himself, saying how genuinely excited he was to be working with the Brave Dragons, and then asked everyone to run a few drills and scrimmage. He wanted to see what he had.

  The players divided into three lines at one end of the court and began running toward the other basket. The drills were universal: the weave, three-man full-court layups and two-man sets for passing and dribbling. The players ran them better than most American players; their footwork was precise and their timing was almost flawless. The problems surfaced when they faced actual defenders in a game, and their footwork and any semblance of teamwork collapsed. No one seemed to understand where to go on the floor, how to move without the ball, or how to play team defense. Everyone ran hard and played hard and had decent skills, as far as shooting and dribbling were concerned, but they played the game as if they were careening through traffic with no one else on the court.

  His biggest player, Big Sun, could barely get off the ground and seemed incapable of dunking. Big Sun would anchor himself on the low post, close to the basket, and wait for an incoming pass. When the pass arrived, Big Sun would lean into the defender and pound the ball on the floor, one time, with purpose, before picking up his dribble, whereupon he was marooned. He had either to pass the ball back outside or shoot, and shooting presented a real challenge because he could barely jump. His answer was to unleash a succession of head fakes, up and down, up and down, as methodical and predictable as an oil field pump jack, until, finally, he would shoot. What happened at that point was hard to predict: Occasionally, he scored; often he missed; and sometimes the defender swatted the ball away. It would have made a fine instructional video of how a big man should not take the ball to the basket. Weiss made a mental note to find a foreign center.

  Weiss clapped his hands together and called practice to a close. With two exceptions, everything he said to or heard from his players had to be filtered through Joe. There was a Taiwanese kid, Sun Huanpo—Little Sun, he was called—who spoke decent English and seemed to sop up everything Weiss said. He was the smallest player on the team and had signed a few weeks earlier to compete for the job as starting point guard. The general manager had dangled Weiss as an enticement, because the kid hoped to become a coach one day and figured that an NBA coach would teach him the higher concepts of the game. There was personal pride, too: No Taiwanese player had ever played for an NBA coach. The other player with some English was a shooting guard, Wei Mingliang, the only Chinese player who had attended college. Weiss asked for photos with the players’ names. The language was so perplexing to him that attaching a name to a face demanded time and practice. It also required him to use different muscles in his mouth, so he initially depended on the language of the locker room. Sun Chunlei was already Big Sun. His other forward, Zhang Xuewen, became Kobe, for his Kobe-inspired armband. The college kid was just Wei, as in Way.

  Practice presented another problem. In the NBA, training camp lasted about two weeks. Here, it was only August, three months before the first game of the season, but the team had already been practicing two or three times a day, for months. Other than a month off every season, and a short break for the Lunar New Year, the routine rarely changed. Practice never ended.

  Weiss started making changes. He canceled the team’s regular Sunday night meeting after concluding it was a waste of time, merely a curfew check after the players’ one day off. On the court, he spent less time on rote drills, the running and layups, and more on installing an NBA-style offense and teaching team defense. The team already had a Chinese assistant coach, an older man who spoke in the gravelly voice of a lifelong smoker and sometimes wore dress shoes on the court, earning him the nickname Wingtips. But Weiss had managed to convince the general manager to hire an American assistant, Rick Turner, who had coached in an American semipro league. Turner, who oversaw conditioning, introduced a program modeled on those in the NBA in which the players ran to different stations and performed speed or strength drills at each one before moving to the next. He had tossed out the team’s old regimen, which, with its heavy weightlifting exercises, seemed better suited for an American football team.

  Weiss assumed he had been brought in by Boss Wang to teach the NBA way, and that was what he was doing. He thought things were going pretty well.

  Two months had passed, and Weiss had settled into Taiyuan. The October weather was quickly turning colder and the team had started tryouts for the two positions reserved for foreign players. Once the foreigners began to arrive, Weiss saw his opportunity to escape the Howell & Johnson; if the team wanted to impress and sign the best foreign players, he said, it would need to provide better accommodations. The general manager agreed and moved Weiss and the incoming foreigners to a new hotel, the Longcheng, which overlooked People’s Square, the broad plaza built for mass rallies during Mao’s era. Now the square was just a place for people to gather. In the early mornings Weiss could see groups of older women dancing and twirling small flags, the morning exercises common for women in cities across China. The Longcheng had a bar, a restaurant that listed steak on the menu, and rooms that provided Internet and a few television channels in English. A small sign above the bathroom sink, written in English and Chinese, presented guests with the same riddle every morning: “The Cold Water Drinkable Upon Heated. The Hot Water Non-Drinkable.” The answer seemed to be bottled water.

  Weiss had become a figure around Taiyuan. Local reporters had written feature stories on the city’s famous new coach, and people now recognized him on the street. But more than anything, what drew Weiss into his new city was his wife. Tracy had arrived, unpacked, and announced her intention to explore. “I know the only two choices we have are to sit up in our room and wait for these next nine
months to pass or jump in and assimilate ASAP,” she wrote friends and family in her first email after arriving. “I am choosing to jump in and think I’ll head straight for the deep end. Bob is off to practice and so I am going to try and walk and explore what is outside this building.” She hit the send button and walked outside. No one spoke English and few signs were in English. She was impressed that Bob was already testing out a few Chinese phrases, though whenever a communication breakdown occurred, he simply spoke more slowly and loudly in English.

  Outside the hotel, Tracy found a city in a state of upheaval, with near-epic amounts of construction and demolition under way. She felt as if she were walking through Universal Studios: the main boulevards were modern and lined with shiny new office towers but a block behind them were only poverty and dirt. Tracy was stepping through unfinished sidewalks and steering herself around work sites, when she noticed a small boy was trailing her. He was maybe eight years old and had a pack of cigarettes hidden in his sleeve. Since he wasn’t in school, Tracy figured he was an orphan. Soon they were walking together. They stumbled upon a small aquarium, and she bought tickets. It was dingy inside, but there were tanks filled with fish and other creatures. They watched the seals perform and held an alligator. They joined a small crowd clapping for three young women in mermaid costumes and yellow goggles who would dive into a large fish tank, perform a couple of flips, and surface for air. The music was deafening and the audience did not stop clapping as the young women dove again and again, performing the same flips. Tracy spent an hour with the boy; she spoke to him in English, the boy smiled and answered in Chinese. When she ran out of money, their day together was over. She waved goodbye. He smiled and offered her a cigarette before disappearing back into the streets.