by Jim Yardley
He learned his English growing up in Nigeria, in Ibadan, where he was born on May 11, 1981, as the only son in a family with five daughters. He told me that he was descended from African royalty, and if I never proved or disproved this, he did have a distinctly regal bearing. When he joined the SuperSonics as a second-round draft pick, everyone called him “O” or “Double O,” mostly, he would say, because they were too lazy to figure out how to pronounce his name (oh-LOOM-i-day). This was a shame, because his name is imbued with heroic meaning in his native Yoruba language; Olumide translates as “My warrior has arrived.” A slightly different translation would be “My savior has arrived,” which was probably how his mother saw it.
His mother was a devout adherent of the Christ Apostolic Church, which, like English, had come to Nigeria on the same tide of British colonialism that found its way to China in the nineteenth century. She prayed four or five times a day and ran a strict household. As a boy, Olumide was given a choice: If he chose to attend church, he would be fed. If he chose not to attend church, he would have to find his own food. He went to church. In his apartment in Taiyuan, he kept a Bible in his bedroom and, on the coffee table, another Bible, which offered a passage for every day of the year. One evening after we discussed Liu Tie, chewing over what Olumide considered the coach’s innumerable and obvious failings (“He doesn’t understand basketball!”), the big man shuffled back to his bedroom when I heard him exclaim, apparently still stewing and commingling his religious background with his distinctive interpretation of English, “Jesus! G-E-S-U-S. Jesus!”
In the geopolitics of the team, Olumide was counted as an American. When Weiss discussed the team with the Chinese press, he often commented about “the two Americans.” Olumide did own a home in Orlando, though he rarely saw it, and he had spent four seasons with the Sonics and the Orlando Magic. His Americanness was more a statement of his place in the basketball world, a verification of his status as a bond with a higher rating. In truth, he had turned pro at sixteen and played in Russia, Germany, South Korea, Slovenia, Kuwait, Spain, Puerto Rico, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Israel, and elsewhere. His four years in the NBA were the highlight, even if he spent most of his time on the bench. He was a piece that didn’t quite fit; he was a “small” 610, and if his rebounding was ferocious, his offensive skills were raw. He had not moped when the NBA dumped him. It clarified things. Basketball was a business, which made him a basketball businessman.
He was “looking for money and trying to explore different ideas and different mentalities,” he told me.
He was also looking for a washing machine. The game against Bayi was hours away and his Brave Dragons jersey had bled in the wash.
When word came that the general manager wanted to see him, Rick Turner understood it was not good news. “I knew either I was going home or it would be the junior team,” Turner said. It was the junior team, the kids on the other court. Turner would take over as head coach. It didn’t make sense to have so many coaches for the main team.
The general manager seemed embarrassed as Joe translated his words for Turner. But the decision had come from Boss Wang. And the job had certain restrictions created by Liu Tie: The junior team practiced twice every day but they never played games. They had no season. Turner’s entire job would be to run drills.
Joe did not bother to mention that he had been demoted, too. He was now Turner’s assistant coach.
CHAPTER SIX
FIGHT
Again and again, Michael Jordan scored. It seemed like a miracle, a man so sick, yet so relentless, ruthless even, so determined to prevail, to win a basketball game. He took the ball behind the 3-point line, squaring his shoulders, feinting one time, two times, before rising for the shot. Good. He slashed into the lane, propelling himself upward through a crowd of Utah Jazz players, only to float for an extra instant and toss up a shot. Good. Again and again: good, good, good. Only during timeouts would Jordan weaken, covering his head with a towel, once too tired to lift a cup of water. Or toward the end, as he walked off the court, draping his arm around his teammate Scottie Pippen, a man clinging to a raft. To watch Michael Jordan in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals was to wonder if he might simply collapse. His flu was so bad it was stunning he played. Yet to watch him was also to wonder if he was incapable of collapse, if anything existed, on a basketball court, greater than his will.
Boss Wang watched the game on a small television in China. He was not yet so unfathomably rich, and a deal would disintegrate because he skipped a meeting to watch the game. But he would not forget what he saw, and more than a decade later he would still grow excited at the memory, his enthusiasm less about Jordan’s talents, his unmatched skills, than about the sheer brutish force of his will.
“Jordan was very famous,” he recalled. “He made a lot of money. He had his own jet. He didn’t have to play the game for money. He just wanted to fight. He fought for something other than money. There was something in his heart. He wanted to show how tough he was, how special he was.”
What made that game resonate so much for Boss Wang was that he saw something in Jordan, a feral spirit, maybe even a greatness, which he believed existed in himself.
It was, admittedly, an opinion not universally shared.
The waitress brought our tea. We sat at a corner table in the coffee shop of Boss Wang’s hotel, on the opposite side of the Fen River, not far from the new provincial museum, a massive structure built with coal money and filled with relics of the ancient Shanxi civilizations. Joe had arranged the meeting and we waited near the front desk, both of us nervous and pacing, until Boss Wang came out of the elevator in expensive blue jeans and a gray coat, his shoes clacking against the marble floors, breaking the silence of the lobby. He took my hand.
“We are friends,” he said. I considered it as much a warning as a greeting.
I had asked for the meeting to discuss basketball and his life. The home opener against Bayi would start in less than twelve hours.
I had assumed I would be meeting with a madman. What I got was someone harder to define.
“I grew up in the countryside,” he began. “It was before Reform and Opening. In the 1960s, the countryside was very poor. It was hard to fill up your stomach. So to keep from thinking about my stomach, I played basketball. The hardest period in China was 1960. I was twelve. I had started primary school when I was eight. I ate anything. I peeled the bark off the trees. I took seeds out of the ground. There were no vegetables in the soil. A lot of people died.”
What Mao had called the Great Leap Forward, his misguided collectivist campaign to transform Chinese industry and agriculture, would kill more than 30 million people. Teachers canceled physical education because most students were too weak from hunger. People ate worms and rats. People ate people. People were falling down dead as party propagandists cheered the success of the nation’s productive forces. By the time the famines ended and the hunger finally eased in 1962, Wang Xingjiang was sixteen. He had survived. It was time to go out.
“I started my independent life,” he said. “I left my family. I shaped my own character from then on. I started to rely on myself.”
His father was a farmer in Hebei, a province stretching northward from the dusty plains above the Yellow River to the mountains around the national capital of Beijing. Boss Wang wanted nothing to do with farming. After leaving home he enrolled at a four-year technical school in the provincial capital of Shijiazhuang to train as an accountant. He assumed he would be assigned a government office job in China’s planned economy, a notable feat for a farmer’s son, but his graduation in 1966 came only weeks before Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution. Wang was swept away in the national hysteria. He was sent to a small factory in a rural county, Wuji, on the outskirts of Shijiazhuang, where his accounting background was rendered useless. Mao wanted to reorganize society around the idea of perpetual revolution, to reeducate the urban elites by sending them to learn the simple, essential skills of the countrysi
de. Wang became a mechanic and a fitter, repairing heavy machinery.
“Whatever Mao said, we followed,” he recalled. “He controlled everyone’s minds. So when Mao said educated people should be reeducated on factories and farms, we thought at the time that it must be the right thing.
“I spent eight years at the factory. It hardened my mind and made me tough. I learned how to run a factory. And I kept my connection with basketball.”
His interest in the game had taken hold during his time at the technical school. There, he organized a tournament, but he did not play. When the games began, he sat on the sideline, watching, until a player confronted him. “You just watch us,” the player said. “You are tall. Why don’t you play? You are wasting your talent.” The words stung. He would hardly be considered tall today—he was perhaps 5′9″—but in that era, when weaker teenagers had fallen dead, the suggestion that he was wasting his potential was more than an insult. It was a political rebuke. He began practicing with a fury, and even with little formal coaching he became captain of the school team. When Wang first was sent to the factory, basketball was suspended across China, as the Cultural Revolution meant the closing of schools and a prohibition on activities regarded as bourgeois. It would take Mao’s overture to America in 1971 to resurrect the game. When Mao invited the United States table tennis team to China for an exhibition, a gesture that opened the door for Nixon to visit the following year, it was the strongest signal inside China that people would not be punished for picking up balls and playing sports.
The Cultural Revolution had upended the country’s human geography. Cities were drained of much of their human capital, as professors and accountants were plowing fields or working on assembly lines in the provinces. Basketball was no different; basketball had always been a city game, and a sport of the military, but the Cultural Revolution dispersed the country’s best players and many landed in Hebei Province, including in the counties around Shijiazhuang. Factories had already quietly begun to field teams, and factory bosses snapped up the top players as employees.
Wang was a starting player for his factory’s team, earning 20 yuan a month, less than $5. In that era, it was a decent wage but not enough to feed himself and send something back to his parents on the farm. Although people were no longer starving, hunger remained a dull pang. Food was still defined by scarcity, vegetables were rare, and people in the north survived winter by eating baicai, or Chinese cabbage, known in Beijing as ai guo cai, or Love Your Country Vegetable. While he was playing for his factory, Wang learned that officials were forming an elite county team and that every player would be rewarded with six months of free food. Making the team also meant players could stop working in factories for at least three months every year in order to practice. Wang befriended the army recruiter who also ran the county sports program and got a tryout. He made the team.
“Basketball gave me the chance to leave the factory and eat for free,” he said. “Basketball changed my life.”
His marriage would, too. In 1972, he married the daughter of a Communist Party official in the city of Xingtai, a steel center in Hebei with several large state-owned factories and a competitive basketball league. The couple initially lived apart, a fairly typical arrangement, since they were assigned to positions in different counties, but Wang’s father-in-law slowly exerted his political influence to unite them in Xingtai. It was a small but telling example of the special privileges available to Communist Party members, and Wang had married into the club. After his transfer to Xingtai, Wang was assigned to a division of the city’s construction bureau that built buses. He also joined the construction bureau team to compete against some of China’s best players. Bosses in Xingtai would hire top players with no-show jobs and good salaries; Wang remembered that one coal mine hired four former players from China’s national team. There were no gymnasiums but factories draped lights over outdoor courts and sold tickets for games.
“There were no movies, no television, nothing to do,” Wang recalled. “A basketball game would attract a lot of people.”
It was 1976. Wang Xingjiang was a new father of a son, Songyan. He had no reason to imagine everything was about to change again.
Mao envisioned steel as a symbol of China’s socialist might. Industry was the muscle of Western capitalism, and Mao wanted to prove Communism was stronger. He ordered the construction of large steel mills and other heavy industries, hewing to a Stalinist development model, and then introduced his own industrial campaign in 1958 as part of the Great Leap Forward. He declared that China would double steel output in a single year, surpassing Great Britain as a producer. Across the country, peasants and factory workers frantically built small mills, sometimes backyard blast furnaces, and melted down pots, scrap metal, spoons, and anything they could find. It became a disaster that crippled Chinese industry.
But if Mao’s methods would be discredited, his vision of China as an industrial power, an unmatched producer of steel, would be realized five decades later. By 2008, China was by far the world’s top producer and consumer of steel, with a capacity to produce more than 700 million metric tons annually. China’s economy had become insatiable, and anyone in the business of feeding it could get very rich. From Deng’s symbolic embrace of market reforms, China had evolved into a messy hybrid, a blend of private and state-owned enterprises, with tight regulation in some sectors as well as vast, vaguely defined gray areas of opportunity for an entrepreneur.
Wang Xingjiang did not immediately jump into steel. First he had to jump into the sea. The expression, xia hai, originated from ancient poems about sailors who had risked their lives by going out to sea. But by the 1980s, the phrase signified the cadres, the so-called Red Hat Capitalists, who left their government jobs and jumped into private business for a chance to get rich in Deng’s new and churning ocean. Wang had been transferred to the city materials bureau, a job that carried him around the country to purchase buses or heavy machinery for the Xingtai government. He had become a ganbu, a party cadre, and his young son attended the elite elementary school reserved for the children of government officials. By the early 1980s, he had decided to jump.
“I saw the chance,” he said. “I could make some money.” At that point, he had none.
When Deng lifted the boulder off Chinese society, the immediate reaction was to look upward, everyone squinting at the sun, frozen, waiting to see if the boulder would come crashing back down. But as change started to arrive, people began to move, to scramble toward the factories that were rising along the coast, or to do a little business. Almost no one had any money to speak of, and getting money took guanxi, or connections. Plenty of peasants would get rich by dint of hard work and business acumen. But those with the early advantage were the officials who would benefit from their government ties after jumping into private business. Wang was one of them. If people were starting to move in China, Wang wanted to give them a ride. His break came when a friend at a government credit union loaned him enough money to buy a used bus. He established routes through the industrial corridors of Hebei Province.
“We started with one bus, then two, then three,” he said. “Then I had more than twenty.”
He expanded into trucking. Hebei was the steel center of China, and he began delivering rebar from factories in Xingtai to other cities in Hebei and neighboring provinces. He was now Wang Laoban, or Boss Wang, and by the early 1990s he thought he was a rich man. He took a trip to Europe and wandered into a jewelry shop. There, as he would later tell the story, he saw a large, beautiful pearl. It captivated him, but when he asked the price, he could not afford it. He realized he was not such a rich man after all.
He returned to China and went into steel. Steel, like coal, would become an engine of the Chinese economy. Economic planners in Beijing categorized steel as a nationally strategic industry that should be dominated by the state. But the state-owned mills were enduring a painful restructuring and would be slow to respond to a market about to change radically. I
n the mid-1990s, China’s prime minister, Zhu Rongji, ordered the bloated state sector to begin shedding workers and other obligations. Tens of millions of workers were laid off, particularly in the northeastern Rust Belt, and enterprises began dismantling the “iron rice bowl” benefits of schools, health care, and housing, the security net of the danwei system. As part of this, enterprises transferred the titles of tens of millions of apartments to residents, usually at below market prices. Whether by design or dumb luck, this transfer of property marked the birth of a private real estate market in China and would underpin the biggest economic expansion in the history of the world.
With new equity in their old apartments, urban residents began buying new, better housing. Developers built apartments in every city in China. Demand surged for concrete, cement, and steel, but the state-owned sector could not respond fast enough. China had to import steel to meet demand. Private operators saw an opening. Even before the real estate boom, Wang had discovered there was more money to be made in making rebar than in moving it. When he had returned from Europe, he got another friendly loan and began importing steel billet from Ukraine, becoming a middleman who supplied the raw materials that Chinese factories processed into steel wire. By 1995, he had saved enough to buy his own steel factory in Henan Province.
Steel placed Boss Wang in the messy, chaotic center of the rise of China, a place of incredible opportunity and moral ambiguity, filled with dreamers and schemers. Owning a steel factory in 1995 was akin to being a modern-day warlord. A private mill owner had to be able to cut deals with local officials, guarantee his own supply of raw materials, and secure credit; had to be comfortable in the gray zones of an authoritarian state; had to be tenacious, hardworking, a tough son of a bitch. In 2006, investigators arrested Boss Wang, his brother, and managers at a factory he had opened in Shanxi. The factory had been using fake receipts to avoid taxes on purchases of raw materials, a violation that was shouldered by the brother, who went to jail. Boss Wang was released.
