Brave Dragons Read online

  “I fell in love with China after that,” she said later.

  She wanted to see more and decided to walk to the practice facility, several miles away. Her husband had warned her about the chaos, the open manholes and the general state of vehicular anarchy. Tracy slipped into her nylon running shorts and set off anyway. Elbows chugging, legs churning, she powered past bewildered shopkeepers, gawking taxi drivers, yapping stray dogs, and giggling children. Taiyuan had seen foreigners before, but the spectacle of a 5′2″ blond-haired woman motoring through the city in track gear was something altogether new.

  “Guess who just walked 4 miles in her running clothes only to find out the people in this province thought I was in my underwear!?” she wrote in another email home. “I thought there was more pointing and laughing than usual but since I was tired and sweaty I just put my headphones on and my head down and tried to ignore it.”

  Tracy joined a local gym, hired a personal trainer. She took Bob to a party at a disco. People and animals seemed to affix themselves to her. In Seattle, the Weiss family had housed, over many years, four cats, four dogs, two birds, two goldfish, a squirrel, and five horses (stabled nearby). Tracy loved ferrets, and had owned four, including Bandit, who had required weekly acupuncture treatments for an ailing rear leg. Then there were the two rats, Cutie and Cuddles. (“They are smart, they are clean, and they are sociable,” she said.) Now she found a puppy, which she couldn’t resist, but nor could she keep him at the Longcheng, so she took him to the team’s training compound and presented him to the two women who swept the courts. It was unclear whether they considered the puppy a welcome gift or another mouth to feed.

  Tracy’s Internet research had proved correct about the banquets. A week earlier, the general manager had invited them to lunch with the vice director of the provincial sports bureau, an important supporter who was eager to meet the foreign coach. When the Weisses showed up, they discovered that lunch was a wedding; actually, part of a three-day celebration of the vice director’s daughter’s nuptials. There were 600 guests. Bob and Tracy took seats of honor and drank wine and shots of baijiu, Chinese grain alcohol. Before they left, they watched two performers dressed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse walk down the aisle as part of the entertainment.

  The new Chinese assistant coach arrived in the first week of October. His name was Liu Tie, and he seemed eager and gung ho. Weiss knew that part of his job was to mentor a Chinese coach for the future and he regarded Liu as his protégé and heir apparent. For his part, Liu addressed Weiss as if he were an honored teacher.

  But a week after Liu’s arrival, Zhang, the general manager, invited Weiss to lunch. Joe was there, because conversation would be impossible otherwise, and so was Liu. The general manager offered his usual pleasantries and then delivered his message: The owner wanted to make a change. He wanted more discipline. Weiss already knew that Boss Wang believed coaches should emphasize discipline. “I want you to rule with an iron hand,” the owner had told him at their first meeting in August.

  In the NBA, Weiss’s reputation, of course, was as a player’s coach, the opposite of a martinet, and if he hadn’t changed his personality in the NBA, he wasn’t going to do it in China. “Everyone has a different coaching personality,” Weiss had told the owner in August. “But I’m going to get what I want out of these guys. It may not look like an iron hand, but the important thing is you get them to do what you want.”

  Now the general manager told Weiss that Liu Tie would run practice as well as oversee team discipline. Weiss was stunned. Liu Tie had retired as a player the season before and had never coached. Weiss was running NBA practices, teaching the players a new offense, and they were slowly getting it. Practice was paramount. Now Liu Tie was supposed to run practice?

  Liu Tie interrupted the general manager. Any deference on his part had vanished; now he was giving orders. He wanted Weiss to put together a practice schedule for the next forty-five days, complete with times for drills, scrimmages, what to do and when to do it. He also had some changes of his own he wanted to introduce. “This is bullshit,” Weiss answered, growing angry. He told Joe that if he didn’t run practice, he couldn’t prepare the team for the games. If he didn’t run practice, would he really be the head coach? Joe translated the conversation. Weiss had no idea what was going on.

  There had been signs. The players were surly. Here was yet another coach, even if he was from the NBA. Worse, none of them had been paid for months, something Weiss had not been told. When the players complained about the money, the general manager replied that the entire front office, including him, hadn’t been paid, either. All payments to the team required Boss Wang’s approval. For much of the summer, the boss had been negotiating to sell his factory, and money had been a problem. At one practice, Big Sun started skipping around the gym, yelling in broken English, “No money, no honey! No money, no honey!”

  Zhang knew the money would eventually come, but what made him anxious, or what was making Boss Wang anxious, were some of the changes Weiss was making. Weiss was giving the players freedoms they never before enjoyed, eliminating some practices and meetings, like the one on Sunday night.

  All of this was relevant to Zhang because his actual title was “interim general manager.” If the owner had fired a line of coaches, he had fired a line of general managers, too; eight since 2002. Most of those men had come from other teams or sports organizations, recruited to bring greater professionalism or contacts or something, and they had all run into Boss Wang, often with a clash of ego. Zhang often seemed to have no ego. He almost never raised his voice or lost his temper. The boss had hired him in 1998, when he was barely out of college and was working in neighboring Henan Province as a telephone lineman, a miserable job. Boss Wang was opening a factory nearby, looking for workers who also could play ball for his factory team. Zhang Beihai, a good semipro player, landed a job.

  Four years later, after Boss Wang took control of the Brave Dragons, Zhang was transferred to the front office, where he spent the next seven years working every job and bearing witness to management chaos. There was firing after firing, and the gossip mill around Chinese basketball circles reached a consensus that Boss Wang was nuts. No one ever said as much, and the boss had advocates at the league office, but the team had become a circus. Through it all, Zhang remained deeply loyal to Boss Wang. Without the owner, he would still be hanging lines on telephone poles.

  “He trusted me like his family,” Zhang said.

  The decision to become general manager—interim general manager—had not come without reflection. He had turned it down once before, considering himself too young; even now he was not yet thirty. His wife and infant daughter still lived in Henan Province; he slept in the dorm, in a single bedroom connected to his first-floor office. When Boss Wang had declared he wanted an NBA coach, Zhang had been pleased to find Weiss. But now he was worried; players in the NBA, he believed, were more professional than Chinese players, who needed to be treated differently.

  “They cannot control themselves,” he later told me. “They need someone to manage them. If they are left alone, they could lose control and hurt the team.”

  Joe had seen the signs, too. He saw that Weiss was trying to treat the players like professionals, a radical step in China. Back in the 1980s, Joe had played for China’s most famous team, the Bayi Rockets, which represented the People’s Liberation Army. “Bayi was like a jail,” he said. The team spent three years inside a training compound in Beijing, practicing in an unheated gym in the winter, playing games in the summer. “Even though I lived in Beijing, I couldn’t go out and see my friends,” Joe said. “It was a concentration camp. Every morning, we’d get up at six and run ten laps. It was so dark we couldn’t see each other.”

  Players were treated better now, Joe thought; they lived in rooms with computers and televisions. But Chinese basketball had not really changed. A coach’s paramount task was to control a team, to bend the players to his will. Under the Chinese
system, everyone slept and ate together, like soldiers. This arrangement had once been common in China, when society was organized around a person’s danwei, or work unit. People lived in dormitories attached to their state-owned factories, ate in a factory commissary, visited the factory doctor, and sent their children to the factory school. But as society loosened and government promoted real estate as an engine of the new economy (not to mention a source of seemingly unlimited official graft), city people bought apartments and cars and assumed the lives of commuting and mortgage payments that were familiar to anyone in the West. Except for professional basketball players.

  “The Chinese drill to keep players doing something,” Joe said.

  If a coach relaxed his grip around the team, Joe thought, the reaction of the players would be immediate rebellion. They would be no different from lifers who unexpectedly find the prison gate left open.

  Weiss was NBA, and the Chinese players liked him and took him seriously. One player told Weiss that he was the first coach he had ever seen smile. But Joe felt the players also sensed the grip had loosened. There were small rebellions. Weiss twice tossed Big Sun out of practice for knocking down Little Sun with cheap shots. At another practice, one of the backup point guards grabbed a brick and chased after the starting point guard. Sometimes the players loafed in drills. They were picking up the offense, but Boss Wang and Zhang worried about what was happening off the court. A Chinese head coach would live at the dorm with the players and act like a hall monitor. Weiss resided downtown. Wingtips had a room at the dorm, but the players didn’t fear him.

  “In China, in this league, management believes that controlling players is more important than developing their skill level,” Joe said. Yet Joe was angered by how the players had reacted; their behavior had confirmed the worst assumptions of management. “They only respect you if you treat them harshly,” he said, sadly. “The players do not complain. They like it.”

  At 6′3″, lean and athletic, Liu Tie was a rarity in the Chinese Basketball Association. It had not ground him into dust. He had played for sixteen years, for a handful of teams, despite the constant practices and year-round schedule that broke so many players. Much of his prime had been spent as a shooting guard for the now defunct team sponsored by the Chinese air force, and his career had bridged a transition in which basketball was changing from a sport organized to project national glory to a sport that appealed to a new generation partly because of its subversive and individualistic edges. Liu Tie was only thirty-eight, but his values were entrenched in that earlier era. His goal for Chinese basketball was little different from the Communist Party’s goal for China. He talked about helping China become a global basketball power by 2020, the same year designated by Chinese leaders for the country’s arrival as a truly developed nation. Basketball had to develop along the “stronger, higher, faster principle,” which “is extended across the whole nation,” he would say.

  As a player, Liu Tie was a prolific outside shooter and a tough defender. Nicknamed “the Mongolian Steed,” he was from the northern region of China known as Inner Mongolia, and he had the high cheekbones and wide-rounded eyes common to many ethnic Mongolians. He was born in 1971, during the Cultural Revolution, and soon after the family was sent for reeducation to a farming village in Inner Mongolia. After a few years, basketball intervened: Liu Tie’s father was a good amateur player, and the county sports commission needed a coach for the county team. Dad got the job and the family was able to leave the farm for a nearby city. They moved into the team dormitory.

  It was the family’s danwei; Liu Tie grew up in the system that Boss Wang had supposedly hired Bob Weiss to change. Now Liu had moved into the Brave Dragons’ dormitory. His first task would be discipline.

  CHAPTER THREE

  PIECES

  The Tractor was sleepy. He had arrived late the previous night from Michigan, having quickly packed his bags after his agent reached an agreement for him to play with the Brave Dragons. After traveling almost twenty hours through ten time zones, Robert “Tractor” Traylor was now standing in the middle of China, his very large sock-covered feet sticking out of plastic shower shoes embossed with the logo of the Cleveland Cavaliers, one of his former teams. Rain leaked through the roof of the gym, and the Tractor was a bit bewildered as he watched the Chinese players run the court. The Tractor was listed at 6′8″ but 6′6″ seemed more accurate. He was a huge, burly man, yet in the NBA he had been an undersized power forward in the mold of Charles Barkley, a former first-round draft pick of the Milwaukee Bucks and college star at the University of Michigan. He had decided against practicing, as a precaution against injury, until signing his contract. He assumed that would be a formality.

  It was October 22, one day before the eighteen teams in the Chinese Basketball Association had to submit their final rosters to the league office. The next day, the general manager would fly to Beijing to deliver the names, yet no one was certain which names would be on the list, or, more precisely, which foreign names would be on it, and those were the names most critical for the team’s success or failure. If Mao envisioned China as a nation of classless equity, a Chinese professional basketball team is a fraternity of inequality. Foreigners so dominated past seasons that the league limited their playing time, calculating that while foreigners were needed to improve competition, they should not hoard minutes that could be dedicated to developing Chinese players. The rules operated like trade restrictions. China was willing to open its market to foreigners, but only so much, under certain conditions, and not without protecting the locals.

  Yet no team could afford to have crummy foreign players. On nearly every team, the foreigners were the leading scorers and leading rebounders, irrespective of playing time. This year would be different anyway; the league office, as an experiment, was allowing foreigners to play the entire game. The old system had distorted the game and reinforced the basest stereotypes of American players as selfish. Foreigners made the most money of anyone on the court, yet their minutes were limited, meaning they felt obliged to shoot, and shoot often, to score enough points to justify their contracts and earn their next ones. Without the artificiality imposed by the time restrictions, the hope was that foreign and Chinese players might better blend together this season. The Brave Dragons had already signed their first foreigner, former Atlanta Hawk Donta Smith. Six feet seven inches tall, Smith was an excellent passer and scorer who could play every position on the court. He had spent two months practicing on weekly contracts, his mood darkening every passing week without a deal, until a few days earlier the general manager had finally offered him a contract for the season. Smith had already clashed with Liu Tie, but he signed the contract.

  “My congratulations,” Weiss had said to him. “Or maybe condolences.”

  The Tractor was a candidate for the second foreign slot, reserved for a big man, if unaware that he was merely the latest very large American who had been promised a contract to play for the Brave Dragons. Before him came players even the most obsessive fan would struggle to recognize: Tyrone Washington, Eric Turner, Sean Lampley, Norman Nolan, and Larry Turner among them. None of them held any fairy-tale notions of playing overseas to earn a shot at the NBA. The NBA had already processed them, quantified and evaluated them, and spit them out. They were castoffs, here for the same reason unemployed airline pilots from the United States had started migrating to China, India, and Southeast Asia: There were jobs there.

  A wintry cold had settled over Taiyuan, and the gym was frigid. The radiators were cold to the touch. Outside, fields were starting to die, and plumes of white smoke from distant smokestacks curled in the air. On the court, a large orange bucket had been placed near the 3-point line to collect raindrops trickling through a hole in the roof. Coach Liu was on the floor with a mop as the Chinese players stepped carefully through full-court passing drills. They dodged the bucket and the mop as they ran. In less than two weeks, Coach Liu had undone two months of Weiss’s work by converting h
is new authority over practice into authority over the team. He still presented himself as the dutiful student, the protégé, focusing intently whenever Weiss addressed the team or even taking notes when Weiss walked players through an offensive set. But he had reinstated the repetitive drills that Weiss abandoned as a waste of time, and limited Weiss to only twenty minutes each practice to install the type of NBA offense that Boss Wang admired on television. It was the same emphasis on rote repetition that shaped Chinese education, where students were graded by how closely they were able to get to a verbatim answer. Rather than worrying that the players might burn out before the season, Coach Liu had instituted a third daily practice, after dinner, for the Chinese players to shoot free throws and practice jump shots. He also ordered every Chinese player to write daily entries in a journal, subject to his review. He encouraged them to bare their souls.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Coach Liu shouted as the Chinese players navigated the wet spots on the court.

  I sat courtside with Donta Smith, Rick Turner, and the Tractor. Smith was nursing an injury and taking the afternoon off. Weiss walked over to ask if the Tractor was going to practice.

  “Waiting on a contract,” he answered. “Haven’t signed it yet.”

  Weiss walked away, and the Tractor leaned over toward Smith.

  “He didn’t even know I was coming,” the Tractor said. He was discovering that almost no one knew he was coming.

  The Tractor’s arrival was the latest unexpected moment in Bob Weiss’s China adventure. He had worked through his anger over losing control of practice, if not his confusion. He thought about leaving, and had he been a younger coach, he might have. But he liked China, and Tracy was having a ball being a foreigner in a strange land. On one flight from southern China, Tracy was asked to pose for photographs as she walked down the aisle to the bathroom. She loved it. Weiss had not come to China to prove anything. He came for an adventure and he was getting one sooner than expected. He had initially been hired as a consultant, and he was now acting as one, though Liu Tie had so far demonstrated limited willingness to consult him. The strangest thing to Weiss was that he remained head coach. The new arrangement gave Liu Tie control of practice but Weiss retained control of games, or so he was promised. He would be introduced as head coach, call plays during the games, and address the media afterward. Anyone watching would assume the NBA coach was the coach.