by Jim Yardley
Like any other Chinese entity, the Chinese Basketball Association had global aspirations, one of which was to become one of the world’s leading basketball leagues. If no one yet dared dream of supplanting the NBA, CBA officials wanted to surpass the leagues in Europe and Russia and, more immediately, to become recognized as the dominant league in their own Asian neighborhood. Someone in the CBA marketing office had reasoned that recruiting players from other Asian nations would boost regional interest and help establish the CBA brand. The powerhouse teams would have rebelled if the doormats were allowed to hire a third American, European, African, or Australian; that could transform a laggard like the Brave Dragons into a championship contender. But the powerhouses could stomach the Asian policy; no one expected an Asian player to have much impact. Chinese apparently perceived, say, South Koreans to be as racially inferior as they perceived themselves to be. Asian countries, in the language of the Chinese government, were at a lower stage of basketball development.
The question was how to use this slot wisely. If Liu Tie regarded Chinese players as molten iron, whose final shape depended on heat and pounding, Weiss talked about a basketball team as a puzzle assembled by connecting pieces of different shapes and sizes. Once the pieces were fit into a whole, a team was made. This type of thinking was common in American basketball, where players are often categorized and typecast. There was the deadeye 3-point shooter, the defensive stopper, the heady point guard. The pieces became clichés. There were also pieces whose role was to counteract pieces on other teams; Shane Battier, a top defender now with the Memphis Grizzlies, made millions for doing many things, one of which was to play tough defense against Kobe Bryant, the ultimate piece, when his team played the Los Angeles Lakers. This emphasis on pieces promoted specialization and could prolong a career. Even when he could no longer score, Dikembe Mutombo, the 7′3″ center from Africa, maintained his NBA career into his forties because he was a rare piece, a really big shot blocker, rebounder, and defender. Yet this specialization also created ruthless competition if you were a common piece, a 3-point shooter one shade less deadeye than a competitor, or a big man a little less adept around the basket. Every single foreigner dominating the Chinese league was a piece already discarded by the NBA.
Weiss’s two months with the team had convinced him that the piece he lacked was a very good point guard, the player who brings the ball up the court, distributes it to others, and is capable of scoring. Pan played hard but struggled to effectively run and control the team. His backups had not shown enough talent to displace him. Throughout the league, even the best point guards were not capable of competing with the weakest guards in the NBA, physically or mentally. There were theories for this: Point guard is a position that requires individualism, creativity, and the ability to make decisions on the fly; Chinese players are drilled to strictly follow the instructions of the coach, and creativity can be interpreted as disobeying the coach. The Chinese sorting system also was a problem, since size was deemed the most valuable raw commodity. Yao Ming was the most extreme result of this system, regarded less as an aberration than proof of its success. The system was still looking for other 7′6″ centers while effectively excluding the vast majority of kids, many of whom would eventually grow far less tall but tall enough to be point guards equal in size to most of the NBA’s best.
The piece Weiss now coveted was Sam Daghlas, 6′5″ and 200 pounds, the starting point guard for the national team of Jordan. Jordan, neighbor of Israel and Lebanon, beneficiary of the warm breezes of the Mediterranean, would be regarded as a distant cousin on the family tree of Asia, at the far edge of West Asia. But in basketball, Asia was defined by Fédération Internationale de Basketball, or FIBA, the international body governing the sport, which partitioned the globe to organize regional qualifying tournaments for the world championships. Under the FIBA formula, Asia stretched from Japan to Uzbekistan to Iran before ending at Jordan. Weiss had dedicated much of his recent telephone time talking with Daghlas’s agent about a deal, which now seemed set.
Except a problem had emerged. Daghlas had played college ball in the United States, and an Internet search suggested that while Daghlas did have Jordanian lineage, he might actually have come into this world in San Diego. Being Asian American or even being an Asian with an American passport would disqualify anyone from being considered an Asian in China, and the general manager was worried that the team could lose the Asian slot altogether if the league rejected Daghlas’s application.
“Well, tough shit,” Weiss said. “He’s Jordanian.”
Getting Daghlas was especially critical because of the potential alternative. Boss Wang had dispatched Joe to Kazakhstan on a talent search. Kazakhstan was indisputably within Central Asia, but it was the land of weightlifters and wrestlers, not basketball players. Yet reports had circulated back to Taiyuan, indirectly, that Joe had located a prospect, possibly another big man.
“Now we’re going to start seeing Iranians and Kazakhs and who knows what else,” Rick Turner complained. “So let’s finish this Sam Daghlas thing.”
With the general manager now en route to Beijing, Garrison was responsible for finishing the Daghlas thing. After leaving Liu Tie in the canteen, I found Garrison at one of the desks in the front office, sifting through a small stack of papers that represented the official lineage of Sam Daghlas. Garrison needed to fax Daghlas’s application to the league office and was weighing the geopolitics of how best to complete the form. He pulled out a copy of a passport issued by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan declaring that Osama Mohammad Fathi Daghlas had been born in the capital city of Amman on September 18, 1979.
“Do you think I should use his full name?” Garrison asked. He examined the copy of the passport. The full name certainly seemed more Asian, and less American, than Sam Daghlas, as far as any Chinese basketball bureaucrat knew. Garrison deliberated. He asked my opinion and we decided, on behalf of the team, that the full name would be used. Garrison Guo, soon to become a paid employee of the team, hoped he had secured the team’s missing piece.
The Chinese players wore heavy coats and shuffled slowly across the darkened courtyard toward the gym. The third practice of the day was the nighttime shooting session reserved only for them. The Americans were at the Longcheng Hotel, relaxing, and I had spent the past hour visiting with the Taiwanese player, Little Sun, who was sharing a second-floor dorm room with one of the new players acquired in the trade, a forward named Ji Le. His English name was Joy and he had already become one of the most popular players on the team. In the dorm room, Joy was wearing earphones, sitting at a small desk watching a Justin Timberlake video on an outdated desktop computer, bags of ice taped around his knees. The centerpiece of the room was a large, dusty television set, and Little Sun and Joy each slept atop large wooden crates covered with thin pallets. The toilet was a stained urinal. Little Sun cleared a space for me on his crate.
He was distressed. Liu Tie’s arrival had been a pinprick that had slowly deflated him. At 5′9″, Little Sun was small, if muscular, with the wisps of a faint black mustache. He spoke barely above a whisper. Before, he had been gaining confidence in scrimmages, soaking up whatever Weiss asked the players to do, eager to learn anything from a man who had touched the courts of the NBA. His teammates had taunted him initially because of his Taiwanese background. Taiwan is the island off the southeastern coast of China where the Nationalist Army fled after being defeated in 1949 by Mao’s Red Army. Ever since then, Chinese leaders have shaped their military strategy and foreign policy around one day reclaiming Taiwan, even as Taiwan, now a democracy, has shown little interest in being reclaimed. Taiwanese and Chinese shared lineage and history but were divided by a bloody history. In Little Sun’s first weeks of practice, Big Sun had pummeled him with cheap shots, but eventually his teammates’ attitudes changed.
“The first month was very hard,” he said in his simple English. “They were bitching me. They were saying, ‘You guys from Taiwan are too sho
rt. You can’t play in the CBA.’ But I think I proved myself. I won respect.”
But not from Liu Tie. Coach Liu once played for the air force team, and should China ever attack Taiwan, the initial assault would come from land-based missiles fired across the Taiwan Strait, with support from the Chinese air force. Even if Liu Tie was not a fighter pilot, Little Sun knew his coach would consider it a patriotic duty to bomb Taiwan. Taiwanese point guards had a reputation in China for their smarts and cunning, and a few had played well in the CBA, including one who once led the league in assists. But in practice, Liu Tie mocked Little Sun for playing “Taiwan independence defense.” He called him soft. The excitement Little Sun once had about playing for an NBA coach had been replaced with confusion.
“I am the first player from Taiwan to have an NBA coach teach me,” he said. “I feel I have improved. That is my pleasure. But it is very strange right now. Coach Bob is just standing there.”
He pulled out his journal and opened to a page where Liu Tie had scribbled criticisms in the margins. The coach had complained the players were not sharing enough about their lives, but there was only so much to share. Their lives consisted of nothing but practice. At one team meeting, Rick Turner had scribbled his own faux entry:
Dear Diary,
Today I watched as we dribbled up and down the court for 45 minutes. This makes me feel terribly bored. So much so that if I have to go through another day of this, I will attempt to gouge my eyes out with a spoon.
Little Sun dutifully documented his thoughts about practice and never dared write about his confusion over Weiss.
“They say he is still the head coach, but he is not teaching now,” Little Sun said. “I don’t know why.”
After I left Little Sun, I found a few players already shooting in the gym, even though the shootaround was not scheduled to start for another twenty minutes. Liu Tie’s grip on the Chinese players was such that he did not even bother to attend; he knew the players would not dare defy him. Without any coaches, the mood was lighter. Soon everyone was shooting and laughing, and the sound of balls snapping through the net filled the gym. Little Ba stood behind the 3-point line nailing shot after shot, flicking his wrists perfectly. Big Calves Tian was shooting nearby, shouting out his standard “Fuck!” with every miss. We offered one another a respectful “Fuck!” as a greeting.
Joy was one of the last players to arrive, laughing and shouting out my name. He was studying English through a popular course in China called “Crazy English,” in which students are encouraged to shout as a means of overcoming any bashfulness about practicing English out loud. His mobile phone was programmed to translate English into Chinese, and he tapped his huge fingers against the screen whenever he was puzzled by a word. When I had one day asked him why he studied English—none of the other players did—he smiled. “Because I want a foreign girlfriend,” he answered, laughing. But he already had a girlfriend, the most famous cheerleader in China, who cheered during the Olympics in a string bikini at the beach volleyball venue. “No, really,” he had admitted, “I want to be able to talk to the American players.”
In the context of Chinese basketball, Joy had moved from the Enlightenment to the Dark Ages by coming to Taiyuan. His old team was the league’s defending champions, the Guangdong Southern Tigers, and attracted the best talent in China. At 6′6″, he was too short and too slow to dominate inside, but he was smart and had made himself into a name player out of sheer hard work. As a child in the city of Liuzhou in Guangxi Province, he had been singled out by the sieve and steered to a top provincial sports school at age twelve. But by fifteen, his coach sent him home and told him to find another sport, since China needed athletes in more than basketball. “He said I should try water polo,” Joy said. “But I think water polo is bullshit. I still thought I could be good.”
He returned to a regular high school and dedicated himself to basketball. “Every morning, I woke up at 5:30. Besides school time, I practiced all the time. Then, after two years, I got a chance.” His high school coach got him a tryout with the junior team of the Southern Tigers. He would steadily move up to the top team, first as a practice player, then a benchwarmer, and finally as a solid contributor for rebounds, passing, and reliable shooting. When the Southern Tigers won the previous year’s championship, Joy played valuable minutes. But the team was stocked with forwards and had bigger, younger players who needed time on the court. When the general manager floated the idea of a trade, Joy had agreed. The Shanxi team was horrible, so playing time there would not be a problem. He hoped Shanxi would give him the chance to achieve his biggest goal.
“All-star, all-star,” he would say, smiling.
At the foul line, Joy was making shot after shot as I stood beside him. When we first met, I had unwittingly insulted him. His home province of Guangxi is along the border with Vietnam and has a high percentage of minority groups in a country that is overwhelmingly Han Chinese. He had the high, pronounced cheekbones common among some of the minority groups in Guangxi and had a menacing stare, when he wanted one, which was not very often. I later learned that his American teammates with the Southern Tigers had nicknamed him “Mean Mug.” When I asked if he were minzu, or a minority, he had flinched. No, he was Han Chinese. I also asked the provenance of his English name. It was a literal translation. His parents had named their only child Ji Le, or Season of Joy.
Joy made another foul shot, and then another. He smiled, peering down at me as he said something. “Im de groof.”
He made another foul shot.
“Im de groof,” he repeated, grinning.
I looked at him, puzzled. He pointed to the basket and formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Then he stuck another finger through the whole, again and again. I wondered if dorm life was getting to him.
He kept making foul shots when I finally got it.
“In the groove,” I said.
His smile was radiant. He tossed the ball off the backboard and into the basket.
“In the grove,” he tried.
I corrected him. “In the groove.”
Practice ended and we walked outside. It was freezing cold, and I stumbled in the dark on the short step outside the gym door. I saw the dimly lit windows of the dorm and got my bearings.
“In the groave!” Joy tried. I corrected him again.
Then he shouted it louder, Crazy English style. “In the grove! In the grove!”
Finally, shouting still louder, he hit the perfect note. “In the groove! In the groove!”
I started shouting, too, and we walked through the darkness toward the dorm. We were in the groove.
The Yingze Hotel somehow missed the rise of China. There was a strange dusty quality to the lobby, though not the usual polluting dust of Taiyuan. This was the dust of neglect, the type that accumulates in a room where time is somehow suspended, the dust you might find upon returning to your childhood home, where the same lamps remain on the same tables, the same green vase sits unmoved on the same shelf, placed between the same hardback books. Outside the Yingze Hotel, it was November 12, 2008, and China thrummed with the usual tumult and energy. Inside, it was 1955.
I had come to the Yingze to attend Media Day. The season was about to begin, and the Shanxi Brave Dragons were introducing their new coach and players. But when I stepped into the lobby I might as well have entered a museum exhibit entitled “Hotels in Early Socialist China.” In that era, hotels were as rare as guests; travelers needed government permits to move between cities, which meant the only people traveling were usually Communist Party officials or the rare foreign visitor. China was a destitute and austere place, about to fall off a precipice into two decades of Maoist famine, chaos, and paranoia. The Yingze lobby was so badly lit and so determinedly undecorated that it seemed like a deliberate admonition: Do not expect any pleasure here. To one side was a dingy state-run bookstore paired with a dingier state-run travel agency. The front desk was a small counter staffed by a woman in a stern blu
e suit. Something seemed off. The Yingze commanded prime real estate, a short walk from People’s Square, across a major boulevard from a large city park. My taxi driver told me it was the elite hotel of the local Communist Party, the hotel owned by the party, and if Chinese officials wanted anything out of an elite hotel, it was grandeur and pleasure, usually at a Las Vegas scale.
The desk clerk smiled and, upon my inquiring, corrected my error. I had stumbled into the original hotel, now the East Wing, but Media Day was in the newer West Wing, about 100 yards away. The Yingze turned out to be a timeline of the Communist era in Taiyuan. The original building had opened in 1955, a project overseen and designed by architects and engineers from China’s Communist patron, the Soviet Union. The Yingze would quickly become Taiyuan’s premier address; peasants would stand outside the gate to gawk. By the end of the 1950s, the Soviets began an expansion and poured the foundation for an octagonal west wing. But the diplomatic split between Beijing and Moscow froze the project. The Soviet advisers left with the blueprints, and Taiyuan had neither the expertise nor the money to finish the job. The foundation stood fallow for years, a cement scar in the ground, proof of what China could not yet do. Then, as the country rapidly picked up speed, Chinese architects finished the West Wing with Chinese money.
It was a cold, sunny morning, and as I approached the entrance of the West Wing, the most striking things about the exterior of the building were the large advertisements beside the entrance for Vasto, a retailer selling European-styled clothing. In one ad, a European businessman in a pin-striped Vasto suit sat atop a steed adorned in medieval mail, gripping a pool cue rather than a lance, his horse being led by a blond woman dressed in an Arthurian bikini of metal rings and steel scales. “Universal Charm,” read the slogan, in English. In another ad, the same businessman wore a Vasto gold and diamond watch as two women spilled over his shoulders. No slogan was necessary. I walked inside.
