Brave Dragons

by Jim Yardley

  What complicated the situation was the boss’s mistress. Or at least I assumed, as did everyone else, that the decidedly younger woman at the side of Boss Wang was his mistress. She was in her twenties and attractive, and Boss Wang did not have a daughter, nor did the younger woman conduct herself like a daughter. Boss Wang did have a wife, a cheery woman in her sixties, so if it could not be indisputably confirmed that the younger woman was a mistress, it could be confirmed that she was The Woman Who Was Not His Wife. And regardless of title, her presence represented another potential regulations violation, depending on league policy for female companions.

  The Pan Pan Dinosaurs were now on the court, awash in the banging of thunder sticks from their fans, when the announcer turned his attention to the Brave Dragons. The first player introduced was Oyedeji, number 00, and he bounded onto the court to loud applause from the Liaoning fans. He had been the equivalent of a rent-a-rebounder for the Dinosaurs the previous season, joining the team shortly before the playoffs and carrying them to the finals with his defense and unmatched work on the boards. But the Pan Pan owner had thought him too short at 610 to play center and had refused to sign him. Olumide hopped and grinned, and when his teammates came onto the court, he greeted each one of them with a flying chest bump. You would never have known they had met only a week or two before.

  Introductions finished, the teams standing at opposite ends of the court, the loudspeakers crackled for a moment and then the tinny, recorded sound of a marching band playing the Chinese national anthem, “March of the Volunteers,” spilled into the arena. The anthem was composed in 1934 and embraced by the resistance movement during the Japanese occupation of much of northeastern China, including what is now Bayuquan. Even today, nearly eighty years later, popular sentiment against Japan can be visceral in northeastern China, where families hand down stories of rapes and murders by Japanese soldiers and where Chinese schools remind students of an era when China was weak and at the mercy of its neighbors. Once, while traveling in the region with my family, we had dinner at a seafood restaurant near the Bohai Sea. It had been a typically friendly experience, with the waitresses cooing over my small children and carrying them from table to table, showing off the pretty foreigners. Later, a small girl, maybe eight years old, with pigtails, walked over to our table without a smile. She apparently had never seen foreigners before.

  “Are you Japanese?” she asked.

  No, we replied. We were Americans.

  “Good,” she said. “Because we won’t let those Japanese devils win again.”

  When the Communists took over the country in 1949, “March of the Volunteers” was adopted as the national anthem, though its status, and its lyrics, would fluctuate with the fluctuations of Chinese politics. During the Cultural Revolution, the song’s lyricist was imprisoned as a rightist and singing the anthem was forbidden. “The East Is Red” became the nation’s unofficial anthem, and Mao ordered loudspeakers attached to a satellite so the song could propagandize the cosmos. “March of the Volunteers” was restored in 1978, but with edited lyrics, including a call to “raise high Chairman Mao’s banner.” The public didn’t seem enthusiastic and the original lyrics were restored a few years later.

  The sound of rising patriotic voices was now filling the arena. I was standing behind the scorer’s table, on the folding bleachers reserved for reporters. There were no desks and none of the buffet-filled hospitality rooms common in NBA arenas. The Chinese reporters had placed their laptops on their knees and were connected to broadband lines running from the scorer’s table so they could file live blog updates from the game. A few reporters had made the trip from Taiyuan, including Journalist Li, stalwart of the San Jin City News. He cleared a space for me and I listened to the singing of the anthem.

  Arise!

  All who refuse to be slaves!

  Let our flesh and blood forge into our new Great Wall!

  As the Chinese people faces its greatest peril,

  Every person is forced to expel his very last cry.

  Arise!

  Arise!

  Arise!

  Our million hearts beating as one,

  Brave the enemy’s fire,

  March on!

  Brave the enemy’s fire,

  March on!

  March on!

  March on!

  It took me a moment to realize the crowd was not actually singing. Everyone was standing in stiff silence. The voices ringing in the arena were recorded. I leaned over and mentioned the lack of singing to Journalist Li.

  He blushed.

  “Chinese are shy,” he said.

  Unexpectedly, this was turning out to be a game. The Dinosaurs opened with a 4–0 lead, and the Brave Dragons seemed flatfooted and outmatched. But they soon found their equilibrium and by the end of the first quarter the score was tied. Zhai Jinshuai, his finger wrapped in a bandage, scored from the outside and Olumide dominated the boards, scoring mostly on offensive rebounds. Journalist Li spent the quarter madly typing blog updates, and when Zhai nailed a 3-pointer from the corner, Journalist Li and the other reporters from Taiyuan screamed and punched the air.

  Boss Wang had started the game at the far end of the bench, sitting in a folded chair, perhaps as a concession to league policy, but as it became clear that a real contest was under way, he pushed his way beside the coaches. His companion followed, wedging herself into the bench, which triggered a chain reaction of musical chairs in which two players had to relocate to the folding chairs. By halftime, the Brave Dragons led, 40–37. The players walked slowly to the locker room and a Dinosaurs cheerleading team skipped onto the court, accompanied by the team mascot, someone dressed as a very malnourished panda.

  The fans rushed toward the bathroom. I went into the lobby, where I soon began to choke. Everyone was smoking, as if the lobby were one of those small airport smoking rooms, except instead of twenty people crammed inside, there were 2,500, every person nervously inhaling cigarette after cigarette and exhaling clouds of nicotine. No country on earth has more smokers than China. When Joe had played, smoking was so heavy inside the arena in Jilin City that state television refused to broadcast games, complaining that the viewers could not see the action because of the clouds of cigarette smoke hanging over the court. New rules now banned smoking inside arenas, but lobbies were obviously exempted. Inside the bathroom, the smoke was even thicker, as men stood five deep in front of urinals, puffing away and shuffling forward, shoes sliding through the puddle of urine on the tile floor. When the smoke in the lobby became too thick, security guards opened the windows and doors, ushering in the Manchurian winds, which pushed the smoke into the arena. By the time the second half began, a front of carcinogenic clouds had settled over the court.

  Donta Smith stretched the Brave Dragons’ lead to 55–47 on a coast-to-coast scooping layup, one of his few bright moments. He would later limp to the bench after getting kicked in the testicles. During timeouts, Liu Tie squatted in front of the starters, barking orders in Chinese as Weiss stood at the edge of the huddle, listening to Joe’s interpretation. Yet Liu wasn’t doing all the coaching; I could see Boss Wang shouting in his ear, whereupon Liu would spring up and shout something onto the court. Or Boss Wang would whisper something and then Coach Liu would turn to Joe, who would turn to Weiss, who would suddenly stand and call timeout.

  On the court, a pattern was emerging: Olumide was grabbing nearly every rebound and scoring easy baskets. He wasn’t a natural scorer, as far as creating his own shot, but he got so many garbage baskets from rebounds that he was dominating the game. With 2:59 left in the third quarter, Olumide put back an offensive rebound for a basket, pushing the lead to 62–51 and sending an electrical current through the yelping Taiyuan press corps. By the final seconds of the quarter, the game had become a rout.

  The final score was 94–74. Toward the end, popping sounds echoed off the roof, as sharp as gunshots. Dinosaur fans were streaming out of the stadium, stomping on their thunder sticks
along the way. At the buzzer, the Brave Dragons rushed to center court to form a victory circle, hopping and shouting like teenagers. The bumpkins from Shanxi Province had won the team’s first road victory since moving to Taiyuan. Boss Wang grinned and posed for photographs with the Chinese players. Weiss caught my eye and laughed. His expression was easy to interpret: Can you believe it?

  By the time I reached the locker room, the Chinese players had left for the team’s hotel. Donta and Olumide were icing their legs and stripping tape off their ankles. Olumide, who had scored 23 points and grabbed 24 rebounds, savored his revenge. “They said they could win without me!” he yelled. “The owner said they needed a taller center! It’s money in my pocket, that’s all I know!”

  Postgame statistics usually confirm why a team won or lost, and reinforce ingrained assumptions about how teams should play the game, and how they should not. If a team is sloppy, and turns the ball over to the other team too often, it usually loses. If a team misses too many foul shots, it usually loses. By the judgment of the raw numbers on the stat sheet, the Brave Dragons should have lost, and lost badly. They had committed 28 turnovers, or about as many as a well-coached NBA team might make in three games; many times they didn’t even attempt a shot before losing possession. Their foul shooting was terrible. Not a single Brave Dragon player, other than Olumide, had shown even faint interest in rebounding, and the team’s best player, Donta Smith, was terrible. Yet they had won by 20 points.

  Which is why Rick Turner held the stat sheet with a sense of disbelief after he had packed up his video camera and descended from the rafters. Turner had watched Coach Liu’s crazy practices and crazy ideas and assumed the team would get blown out against Liaoning. He hated to admit it but he had wondered if losing might be the best thing for the team, not to mention for him. Losing might shatter whatever illusions Boss Wang had about his Chinese coach and force him to put Weiss fully back in charge. Losing might restore some semblance of order in Turner’s basketball universe.

  When Bob Weiss had circulated word through his network of contacts that he needed an assistant in China, he described the ideal candidate as a coach familiar with “unorthodox situations.” Rick Turner’s name came back. At forty-four, Turner was tall and blond, a high school point guard who had gained twenty-five pounds in the last twenty-five years, a smart and sarcastic guy who had begun in broadcasting before deciding he wanted to coach. “When you are young and naive, people tell you, ‘Just do something you know and love,’ ” he said. “So I chose coaching.”

  Lacking a basketball pedigree or any connections, Turner evolved into a master of unorthodox situations. He coached a semipro team in the Seattle area, the Bellevue Blackhawks, of the American Basketball Association, to a second-place finish. The team’s owner saved money by working as the public address announcer and, according to Turner, would use his microphone to mock his own players if the team was losing. During road trips, the owner gave Turner a credit card to cover the team’s meals. “We had to eat every meal together because I had the credit card,” Turner said. When the team traveled to Little Rock for the league finals, the manager of their hotel refused to allow them to leave because the bill had not been paid, meaning the team was held hostage in Arkansas for three days until the hometown team agreed to pick up the bill. Turner had coached other semipro teams and had adopted a philosophy he attributed to Frosty Westering, the longtime football coach at Pacific Lutheran University: Make the Big Time where you are.

  “That’s the philosophy I’ve taken, because everywhere I’ve been has been the little time,” he said.

  Turner, no longer young and naive, was broke, depending on his wife’s job at Microsoft to support them and their daughter. His friends worried he was a romantic, chasing a boy’s dream. He clung to a different idea: He was a good coach, and he should do something he was good at. He just needed a chance, and China had seemed to be just that. He would earn $5,000 a month, which was more than he had made during a single season in the semipro leagues, and he would have a chance to learn from Weiss. “Plus the NBA is starting to get more involved here,” he said. “I thought maybe I’d be over here and make some contacts. I guess I looked at it as a proving ground.”

  But now he was in the rafters, doing film. The arrival of Liu Tie had undercut no one more than Turner. If Liu still deferred to Weiss, at least outside practice, he had barely acknowledged Turner and had discarded his weight program. Turner now had nothing to do during practice except rebound during shooting drills.

  “I feel like my head is on the chopping block and they could send me home at any time,” he told me. “I’m kind of stealing money.”

  Yet even before Coach Liu arrived, China was not what Turner had imagined. He knew the country would be different—the language, the food, the people. But he had assumed basketball would be roughly the same and it clearly wasn’t. When Weiss had changed practice to make it less punitive, some of the players had started loafing. It was as if they wanted the hard hand Boss Wang said they required.

  “These guys think that your culture matters in terms of basketball,” he said. “I just think it is like sign language. It is universal. The things that work in the United States will work here, or in Argentina or Spain. I don’t think Coach Weiss or I have to be Chinese to have success here. But then we talk about it and we wonder, Is that just a completely ethnocentric way of looking at it? Because if we think our way can work here, we definitely don’t think their way can work in the United States.

  “Maybe we’re wrong.”

  The postgame buffet was spread across a table in the team’s hotel. I found Little Sun, the Taiwanese guard, hunched over his plate, dressed in his yellow warm-ups, chewing on steamed buns. I sat down and congratulated him. He had first entered the game in the third quarter. Just before that, Liu had draped his arm over his shoulder and whispered into his ear as Little Sun stripped off his sweats, as if he were a father figure sending him into the fray with a word of kindly instruction.

  Little Sun had looked pale and small on the court, yet he got a quick steal, and then a second steal from Liaoning’s Olympian, scoring on an uncontested layup. But soon the bigger Liaoning guards rattled him, posting him under the basket on offense, where they had a strength and height advantage, and then forcing him into a bad turnover. He seemed uncomfortable on the court, and Liu Tie pulled him, never to return. Still, I thought he had played well enough and told him so.

  Little Sun looked up from his plate. He smiled unconvincingly. The steal was lucky, he said. Coach Liu despised him. “He says, ‘You don’t have much time you can play because you are too short, too soft,’ ” Little Sun said.

  Little Sun leaned across our table toward me as his eyes widened. “You know why the Chinese don’t like the Taiwanese?” he asked. His dark eyelashes were long, like a doe’s. He smiled. “They are envious.” He mispronounced the word—in-vye-OOUS—and I gently corrected him.

  “Envious,” he repeated, properly. “There are a lot of businessmen in Taiwan. We are just a small island. But we have a lot of genius. I’m telling the truth.” He said a close friend recently graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They are envious, envious,” he repeated, firmly, still smiling. “We are a small island, but we can do a lot.”

  He told me once again how his teammates had been suspicious of him at first. “But in fact, I was not political,” he said, pronouncing the word slowly. “I just want to be in China and to learn to play basketball and to learn the culture.” When I had first met Little Sun in October, he had not told his parents about his problems to spare them any worries. But the pressure, or loneliness, must have been too much. “I also tell my dad and my mom,” he said. “I tell them about the pol-i-tick-al problem.”

  Which was really a Coach Liu problem: “The first time he met me, he said, ‘You guys can’t have independence.’ I said, ‘Hey, I don’t want independent. If I want independent, why am I here? I’m here to learn basketball.’ ” L
ittle Sun looked at me and kept chewing on the bun. “My mom said this is good to me. After this, I will be stronger.”

  I told him I thought his confidence has slipped, and he agreed. “Here, sometimes, no confidence,” he said of his time in China.

  The dining room was now almost empty. I asked Little Sun if the players could go to bars or restaurants, if they had much free time in Taiyuan or if they must live in the dormitory throughout the year. “Of course, no free,” he answered. Then he banged his fist against his chest. “Me, me,” he said. “Me, I just play for eight months. Then I go back to Taiwan.”

  He restored himself by telling me stories of other Taiwanese guards: a 5′9″ guard who once led the CBA in assists, now coaching in Taiwan; another Taiwanese guard who played for years in China. He was part of a tradition, and even within that tradition, he was now special, the only Taiwanese taught by an NBA coach. This season was his test, and he knew it. He wanted to coach basketball. He wanted to meet the challenge of China. He smiled.

  “Basketball is life,” he said.

  We were about to leave, when Coach Liu arrived. He filled a plate at the buffet and sat down at our table. Little Sun did not blink. Liu and I had spoken many times, but we sometimes needed someone to help interpret. I asked Little Sun to help, and he nodded. Then I began my postgame interview: What were the keys to the win?