Brave Dragons

by Jim Yardley

  Boss Wang had been hospitable, inviting Weiss and Tracy to dinner, but Weiss was uncertain how to read the owner. Communication was an obvious problem. One afternoon in the gym, with the owner expected to arrive later, Weiss and I were watching practice, when he asked, “How do you say W-o-n-g?” He was practicing how to say Boss Wang’s name. I explained that the surname was actually Wang. Weiss opened a leather Spalding binder and wrote down the name. “Is it J-i-n-g?” he continued. “Jiang,” I had answered, Wang Xingjiang, and Weiss had walked onto the court practicing the name of the man paying his salary.

  Boss Wang was already proving to be perplexing; after the team lost an exhibition game, he spent an hour screaming and bellowing in the locker room, singling out each player, dissecting his performance and character. At other times, Boss Wang spoke to Weiss about how the Chinese league needed change and reform, how Chinese coaches wrongly shackled players as far as style of play went. Then he had brought in a Chinese coach who was quickly shackling them again.

  The presence of the Tractor was a surprise because Weiss was already personally negotiating with one of his former players from the Seattle SuperSonics, a backup center named Olumide Oyedeji. He was 610, a Nigerian who led the Chinese league in rebounding the previous season while playing for two teams. He was an established star in China, and the Brave Dragons had offered him one of the highest salaries in the league, about $350,000 for five months’ work. He had an offer for more money to play in Russia, and interest from teams in Europe, but he was willing to take less money for the stability and familiarity of playing for his old coach, Weiss. The only problem was getting him a visa to China. He lived in Orlando, Florida, but was seeking British citizenship under the sponsorship of his British wife, even though he was a citizen of Nigeria. Despite his having played a handful of seasons in the Chinese league, the Chinese government was treating Olumide like a stranger and refused to allow him to fly directly from Orlando to China. Instead, he had been directed to fly from Orlando to London to Lagos to China in order to acquire the necessary stamps, though it wasn’t clear why. So when the Tractor appeared the previous night in the lobby of the Longcheng Hotel, Weiss was a little taken aback. He headed to the bar for a drink.

  The Tractor now rose and walked out of the gym. He was going to meet the general manager.

  It was so cold in the gym that Donta Smith was wearing a parka. On the court, point guard Pan Jiang led the players through another sprinting drill, screaming and shouting as he raced ahead of his teammates. Pan’s body was so stiff that he seemed fused together, as if someone had created him by pouring cement into the mold of a basketball player.

  “That boy goes hard every play, every second,” Donta said, approvingly.

  The Tractor pushed through the double doors of the gym and took a seat. Judging from the expression on his face, his meeting with the general manager had gone poorly. He was a very large, unsatisfied man who had traveled a long way for a contract that did not exist.

  “No practice?” Donta asked.

  “Ain’t gonna do that shit,” the Tractor answered, his voice low and bitter. “They told me the deal was done. Now they are like, ‘We’d like to see you practice for two or three days.’ ”

  Weiss walked over for a status check with the Tractor. “They rushed me here because they said the roster had to be set by Thursday,” the Tractor said. That much, at least, was true.

  Forty minutes had passed, and the Chinese players were still running. The rain continued, though the orange bucket had been removed and the players were trying to step around the spot where Liu Tie had been mopping.

  “If I’m out there, and I get hurt, where do I go from here?” the Tractor asked.

  Liu Tie now divided the Chinese players for a scrimmage. Ever since he had arrived, he had emphasized intensity and aggression more than execution, and the scrimmage was more like a scrum. Pan played tight, hawking defense, fouling on nearly every possession. The offense was disorganized and out of control, everyone banging into everyone else like bumper cars.

  “Man, pretty ugly out there without an American,” Weiss said to the other Americans.

  Liu Tie blew the whistle and the players grabbed water bottles. Tian, the fourth-string point guard, walked over to the row of Americans. He had arrived with two other players as part of a trade with the Guangdong team. Weiss was still trying to figure out the mechanics of the trade, since no one had left. Tian was slow, a bad shooter with poor judgment on the court. His legs were so thick and shapeless that the Americans called him Big Calves. But he was also a prankster who walked around smirking like the kid who figured out how to cheat on the test.

  “Fuck!” he shouted at Donta, pounding the ball on the floor.

  “Fuck!” he shouted again, smirking and pointing at the court.

  Donta laughed and slapped hands with Tian. Communication on the court was fairly basic when the Americans were blended together with the Chinese players, with everyone understanding the meaning of “shoot” or “pass” or “defense,” but off the court there was very little shared vocabulary. “Fuck” seemed to transcend all cultures.

  “Fuck!” Donta yelled back in what had become a team-building exercise.

  The scrimmage resumed and the Americans were appalled.

  “They are just running without purpose,” the Tractor said. Liu Tie had told everyone to race the ball up the court on every possession without regard to pace or self-control. Neither side was bothering to run plays nor concentrating on team defense. Tian, nursing a leg injury, rejoined the Americans, smirking.

  “Fuck you! Fuck you!” he shouted.

  It was 5:32 in the afternoon when Liu halted the scrimmage. Through the slat of windows, the rain had stopped and the sun was dissolving behind a distant line of mountains. The gym had gotten colder.

  “I feel like we are just a couple of degrees away from seeing our breath,” Rick Turner said from the American row. “It’ll be like one of those NFL films, and they are talking, and it is slow motion, and we come out and steam is coming off our heads.”

  Liu placed two orange cones on the opposite foul lines and two more on the opposite sides of midcourt, forming a diamond. The players had been running for more than two hours, but he divided them into small groups and ordered them to start running around the perimeter of the diamond. Tian was told to join in. After a lap, he began grimacing, grabbing his bad leg.

  “Fuck!” he screamed. He was no longer smirking.

  Donta and the Tractor watched, incredulous. An NBA team might do this kind of running during the first day or two of training camp, but the Brave Dragons had been practicing for months. Liu blew the whistle and ordered the players to run faster, and they began sprinting around the cones. Pan was sprinting and screaming, raising his eyebrows and baring his teeth, as if he were being electrocuted.

  “He’s going to run them again?” Donta asked. “That’s too far.”

  The Chinese guys were gasping. Liu kept blowing his whistle, sending group after group. One of the new players from Guangdong, Ba Zhichang, known as Little Ba, started to wobble. Pan had turned pale and was coughing as Liu again sounded the whistle. Pan screamed and took off sprinting.

  “Man, that is too much,” the Tractor said.

  Little Ba, who was 6′8″, was about to faint. He was swaying so much that his legs seemed to be disintegrating beneath him, a marionette about to collapse in a heap. He was staggering around in a circle, when Liu Tie grabbed his hand and pulled him into an embrace. He grasped Little Ba around his shoulders and steered him around the court, keeping him walking, keeping him conscious, a gesture that seemed gentle and kindhearted, until Little Ba recovered and Liu Tie ordered him to run again.

  “That’s a little too homoerotic for me,” said Rick Turner.

  “Yeah,” said the Tractor.

  One by one, the players kept running. Liu was timing them. When they ran fast enough, they could stop. Finally, Tian was the last player on the court. H
e sprinted from sideline to sideline, screaming, holding his leg. Liu Tie refused to let him stop, and when Tian staggered off between sprints, the coach grabbed his hands and pulled him back. Tian’s face was red, dripping wet, and contorted in pain, almost swollen. I was certain practice must be over, that Liu Tie could not ask him to run anymore, but he did.

  Liu Tie blew his whistle, and Tian ran about ten steps before he fell onto the court. Now practice was over.

  The front office of the Shanxi Brave Dragons, two rooms on the ground floor of the team’s orange dormitory, had the dingy impermanence of a Chinese bus station. There were four desks, a sofa and matching chair made of imitation leather, a glass coffee table caked in dust, and a dying potted tree. The tile floor was cracked and littered with cigarette butts. I settled into the chair. Liu Tie was on the sofa with a young Chinese sports agent named Garrison Guo. Garrison had arrived a few weeks earlier representing one of the Americans trying out for a job and had remained on his own tryout for a job as a second interpreter. He had helped me persuade Coach Liu to discuss his philosophy of basketball. Liu was a handsome, swaggering man, his hair shaved into a crew cut as thick and luxuriant as an animal’s pelt. He smiled and checked his watch. We began.

  I asked about his coaching influences, and he cited his mentor, Jiang Xingquan, known as the toughest coach in China. “First, he emphasized being strict,” Liu began. “He emphasized discipline. And he emphasized the little things. And this works especially well in China. As we all know, Asian players are not as capable as players elsewhere.”

  I had not actually known this, or at least no one had very convincingly explained to me why it was true, but Liu Tie persisted. Asians were genetically inferior, he argued, at least as far as the physical demands of basketball, which meant that the methods of Chinese coaches were tailored to help Chinese athletes overcome their physical shortcomings.

  “We have our own special ways to narrow the difference,” he said. “As long as we apply these principles over a long time, we can eliminate the difference. Just like in ancient times, our ancient martial arts masters would defeat foreign boxers or martial artists from other countries.”

  He leaned forward on the sofa, his elbows resting on his knees, and stared at me. “Like we are doing in this gym,” he continued. “We are working harder, and consistently, step by step, and little by little, we’ll get better. We’re consistently doing the hard work.” The Americans regarded Liu as a martinet who wasted practice time on pointless junior high drills; Liu saw himself as an ironsmith pounding substandard Chinese ore into stronger, better steel.

  It was not just their bodies Liu considered lacking. He believed the Chinese players had lost hope, not because they were asked to practice too hard, or because their lives were too constricted, but because past coaches had not taught them lessons a Chinese coach was expected to teach. So part of his job, as he saw it, was to restore hope. Which explained another of his habits that grated on the Americans: the long speeches at meetings or after practice. He treated team meetings as history seminars, extolling the virtues of Napoleon as a model of aggressiveness and proof that a little guy can do big things. He talked about Mao as a model of determination (as opposed to a model of destructive megolamania).

  “Through my experience, through stories in my life, I can let them know what they should do when they are older, what is right and wrong, what is their place in the universe,” he said, returning to China’s ancient martial arts masters as a source of inspiration. “It is pretty much the same principle. We know we Chinese players are different than African American players. They are more physically gifted. We are not. But we believe that by working harder, bit by bit, it’s like water dripping into a cup. Over time, you finally achieve a full cup.”

  Patience was paramount, he continued. A kung fu apprentice might need a decade of study before attaining true competence. Basketball might be the same.

  I realized we were having a strange conversation, or at least a conversation that would run roughshod over political correctness parameters in the United States. Garrison had been helping with some interpretation, and he rolled his eyes when Liu digressed onto the kung fu warriors. Yet nothing that Liu had said was considered outside mainstream thought in China. Even as the rest of the world regarded China as a rising power, as the country most likely to dominate this century, most Chinese regarded themselves as genetically deficient, at least individually. Mobilizing the masses, not inspiring individuals, had always been the priority of Chinese leaders. The X‑rays and bone tests conducted on Chinese boys like Pan Jiang and Big Sun were a systemic response rooted in assumptions of physical inferiority. No country on earth believed in Darwin more than China.

  I asked about his strategy for motivating players. From observing practice, I assumed it was to run them to death. “Sometimes, I will be a teacher, a philosopher, or a strict disciplinarian,” he said. “Or maybe a bad guy, like a criminal. I have plenty of roles to teach them how to grow. Maybe sometimes I will be like a brother, a true friend, or be gentle like a woman, to care for them, love them, help them grow and become more mature.

  “I have one simple goal,” he continued. “I have to master them, to become like me. I want them to contribute to the improvement of Chinese basketball.”

  Liu wanted to lift Chinese basketball in the same way China was trying to lift itself in every other endeavor. Basketball presented a greater challenge because Chinese were not naturally gifted in the sport, he said, so they must be made better through hard work and sacrifice. He told me that at night, when the Americans were at the hotel, he lectured the Chinese players on the greatness of the ancient Song and Tang dynasties, the periods often regarded as the zenith of Chinese civilization.

  “This team is built on one principle,” he said. “It is an army of tigers and wolves. They should fight like tigers and wolves, but they should be kind in their hearts.”

  Liu looked at his watch and stood up. It was time for lunch. Garrison left to make some telephone calls, and I joined Liu in the canteen where the remnants of the buffet were on the server: tofu, fish, chicken, rice. Coach Liu loaded down a metal tray and hunched over his food, shoveling rice into his mouth with his chopsticks, slurping down the juice served with the meal, his lips inches above the table. Cooking and eating are among the most languorous delights of Chinese life, but Liu believed Chinese spent too much time and energy on food. He finished in less than ten minutes. Another practice began in an hour.

  When Garrison Guo first walked into the gym, I could not decide if he was posing as a sports agent or a cocaine dealer. His tinted sunglasses were propped atop a soufflé of long, wavy 1970s hair that tumbled onto the epaulets of his black jacket. His unbuttoned, wide-collared silk shirt opened to a silver chain swirling around his bare chest. He was all smiles and high fives, and every few minutes one of his two mobile phones jangled awake with Chinese pop music ring tones. At twenty-four, Garrison was fluent in English and had spent the previous season translating for the Beijing team, a job that placed him in the floating, interdependent network of foreign players and their interpreters. Being an agent had seemed like a career advancement, but he had yet to see any money out of it. Spending the season with the Brave Dragons could be appealing, he thought. He knew enough about Boss Wang to be wary but he was intrigued with Weiss. He thought Weiss represented “advanced basketball culture” and should hold seminars to lecture players and coaches on American philosophies.

  “They need to connect with the thinking in the West,” he had told me during one practice, as Liu Tie ordered up more sprinting drills. “The young guys are eager. They want to play like Americans.”

  It spoke to the fluidity of the organizational chart in the Brave Dragons’ front office that Garrison, having arrived only two weeks earlier, was now acting, more or less, as the team’s assistant general manager. He had not yet been offered a job, nor was he receiving anything more than an empty bed and free meals in the dorm, but he was alre
ady enmeshed in the making of the final roster.

  Year in, year out, the Chinese Basketball Association standings were dominated by the same handful of teams: Bayi, the military team; Guangdong, the southern juggernaut supported by private money; Jiangsu, owned by a state steel factory in the old Nationalist capital of Nanjing; and Liaoning. Though the power structure occasionally shifted, and unexpected teams rose momentarily in the standings—the Shanghai Sharks won the championship with Yao Ming—bad teams tended to stay bad, which made the league boring and predictable. Since the league lacked free agency, bad teams could do little to quickly improve, other than sign better foreigners or maybe an NBA coach. To inject more competition this season, the league was not only lifting the playing time restrictions on imported players but also lifting its salary cap. Now teams were spending Steinbrennerian money, in the context of China, and attracting more talented players: the Beijing Ducks were pursuing the 7′1″ behemoth and former Indiana Pacer David Harrison for a once unfathomable offer of $100,000 a month. Former Houston Rockets Kirk Snyder and Michael Harris were now with teams in southern China. The Chinese basketball press was floating almost daily reports that former NBA stars, including Gary Payton, Vin Baker, and Bonzi Wells, could be headed to China, possibly even to Taiyuan.

  The league also had made one more change as a direct boost to the perennial bottom-feeders: The four worst teams would be permitted to sign a third foreigner, as long as he was Asian.