Brave Dragons

by Jim Yardley

  Donta was a versatile swingman who could play guard or forward, which made him a piece with value in the NBA. Prodded by friends and his own curiosity, Donta declared for the draft and the Hawks took him in the second round. He signed a two-year contract, with a team option for a third year, bought a house, and waited for his chance. His first NBA basket came on an alley oop dunk against the Milwaukee Bucks. “The Bucks called a timeout, so I got to cherish the moment a little bit,” he said. His best game came against the Lakers. “I had 11 against the Lakers, and we beat them.”

  The Hawks situation seemed perfect. They had drafted four new players as a foundation for the future: Josh Childress, Josh Smith, Donta, and Royal Ivey. They became friends, and the veteran point guard Kenny Anderson began calling them “the Toys ‘R’ Us Clan,” except they never got a chance to grow up together. The Hawks traded for five veterans, and Donta spent two years on the bench. “I played my role. I came in and practiced hard. It was good for me, because I got to watch the guys. But I at least thought I deserved a shot.”

  What he got was Bulgaria. He played five months in the Euroleague after the Hawks declined to pick up the option for the third year of his contract, returned to the United States for a failed tryout with the Sacramento Kings, and then circled back to Bulgaria in December. He was shooting a layup, when he felt a pop in his knee. In Atlanta, a surgeon discovered the same type of microfracture that had ended, or altered, the careers of other players.

  “When I woke up and he told me, I could have cried,” Donta said. “I felt like my soul left me.”

  His mother had been living in Atlanta, in his house, when Donta was in Bulgaria, and now she cared for him as he rehabilitated his knee. They had reunited during his senior year in high school, after she was released on probation. He had respected and admired his father but had ached for his mother.

  The knee healed more quickly than expected. By spring 2008, Donta was cleared to play. “I went straight to the gym,” he said. “I felt like I was a kid all over again.” By summer, he needed a job. His Bulgarian team still owed him money, so his agent got him a tryout with the best team in China, the Guangdong Southern Tigers. He was signed, but almost immediately traded to Shanxi.

  It took Boss Wang a while to decide to keep him. The Boss ordered an MRI of Donta’s knee at a local hospital. Word began to circulate that the knee was unstable. Zhang Beihai prodded Weiss about other NBA players, including, at one point, Bonzi Wells. But once the season started, the thought of dumping Donta seemed ridiculous. He was why the team was winning. He made everyone better. He figured out what his teammates could do, and put them in a position to do it. Nearly every 3-pointer that left the hands of Wei Mingliang, the shooting guard, started as a pass from Donta. Whenever Olumide found himself open inside for a dunk, he usually had gotten a nifty pass from Donta. When the team needed a steadier hand at point guard, Donta filled in. When they needed scoring on the wing, he moved to the wing.

  Zhang Beihai became a believer. After one win, Weiss gave the general manager a chest bump in the locker room. “Hey, Bonzi called,” Weiss said, jokingly. “What do you want to tell him?”

  Dripping with sweat, Zhang beamed. “Smiss stays,” he answered.

  Even Boss Wang seemed to come around. In late November, the team traveled to the eastern port city of Qingdao for a Friday night game. Thanksgiving fell the day before the game and the foreigners gathered at a Crowne Plaza to celebrate with an actual turkey dinner. They were also celebrating Donta’s birthday. Boss Wang arrived and paid for everything. He put his arm around Donta, posed for a picture, and declared him part of the family.

  Ruslan Rafaelovich Gilyazutdinov was not certain what he was a part of. It was all very strange, or, as Big Rus liked to say in his heavily accented English, It was boooooolsheeet.

  Yet unlike the other foreigners, Big Rus was actually less appalled with the circus of the Brave Dragons. He had seen worse. He had played in Iran. He had played for a coach in Kazakhstan who was a former soldier. “It was terrible,” he said. “He didn’t know anything, but he thinks he knew everything. Big bullshit. We had lots of meetings. Same shit. Before the game, after the game.”

  His father had been a volleyball player, a member of the Soviet team before the breakup of the Soviet Union, who had then played abroad in Cyprus. There, he took young Ruslan to see a game in the Greek professional basketball league where one of the foreign imports was the former Atlanta Hawk Dominique Wilkins, once famous for his windmill dunks. Ruslan had been playing volleyball for six years, but he dropped the sport immediately after watching Wilkins. “When I saw what he does, I want to play basketball.”

  The problem was that Kazakhstan was not a basketball country. It won Olympic medals in wrestling and judo, so the government put money into those sports. Basketball players were lucky to make $2,500 a month for a six-month season. When Joe offered $5,000 a month and bonuses, Big Rus saw a chance, even if he was in terrible shape because he had not played in almost a year and wasn’t doing any running because of the Kazakh winter.

  Taiyuan struck him as modern and cosmopolitan. He had once played in China in a youth tournament and remembered it as a terrible place. “It was like . . .” he continued, fumbling over the English phrase, “Age Stone. Age Stone? Stone Age. But now it is so much more cultural. Now it is so clean I like it better than Iran.”

  In the Iranian league, he had played near the Caspian Sea in the Gorgan region. “Terrible city,” he says. “Not city. It looks like big village. In Iran, there is nothing to do. I go to practice. After practice, I go to shop and to buy some food. After that, I go to game. That’s it.”

  He promised that he would be in top shape in two more weeks. Then he would show everyone what he could do.

  Tracy was worried about all of the Chinese players. To her they were boys tossed into basketball prison, and she wanted to save them the same way she wanted to save the stray dogs and cats on the streets of Taiyuan. She sometimes carried hot dogs in her pockets to feed the mangy strays she came across on her daily walks, but there was little she could do for the players. When the country celebrated National Day in October with a week off, the Brave Dragons practiced every day, twice a day. “I wish our NBA players could spend just 1 week here to gain a little better appreciation for what they have,” Tracy wrote in an email home. “Bob’s concern that I will want to leave here with an adopted baby is somewhat warranted,” she wrote in another. “However, it is more likely that I will bring home a young twenty-year-old to room with Stuart [her son]. I grow more fond of these young men every day and it is difficult to watch what they go through, and they never question it.”

  Of all the players, Little Sun, the Taiwanese point guard, spent the most time with the foreigners, because of his grasp of English and because he, too, felt foreign. After Coach Liu’s arrival, Tracy had watched Little Sun endure the pressure and she had sent emails trying to encourage him. “I don’t have confidence because coach Liu always say: you are to small, and also too soft on the defence,” Little Sun wrote back. “He will not let me play more time on the court he said, he always talk about poliics of tawain independent to me, that’s booshit! Whatever just focus on the positive, its easy to say but difficulty to do.”

  She told him to just keep trying.

  By late afternoon on Friday, December 12, the two photographs were spreading across the Internet. The first was inconclusive. It showed Bonzi Wells dressed in a wool hat and blue jacket, staring directly at the camera with an expression registering somewhere between stunned and angry. He looked like a man who had awoken from a bad dream to discover his wallet had been stolen while he was sleeping. It was a tight shot, showing no one else but Wells. He appeared to be inside an airport, but it could have been any airport in any city.

  It was the second photograph that clinched it. Now Wells was outside. The sky had a familiar leaden color. Wells seemed startled and was running away from a handful of people chasing him with tape rec
orders. They were Chinese journalists, and there, practically tugging at his sleeve, trying to push himself in front of the American star, was one especially persistent reporter: Journalist Li.

  Bonzi Wells was in Taiyuan. He was the new American ambassador of basketball.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE AMBASSADOR

  Bonzi Wells had been in China for barely four days, and Mark Zhang was his assigned body man. Unfortunately, Zhang had lost him. Zhang called Bonzi’s mobile phone and knocked at Bonzi’s seventh-floor apartment at the World Trade. Nothing. That Bonzi Wells could be erratic or moody was no surprise but already he had confounded his new Chinese employer. He had refused to play. The Brave Dragons had lost three straight games and the new savior had yet to slip on a uniform.

  Mark Zhang, chubby and earnest, his hair shaved into a buzz cut, very much wanted the whole Wells thing to go smoothly. Zhang worked for the Starz Sports agency and had already worked with NBA stars. Starz Sports had been founded by two intimates of Yao Ming and often partnered with one of Yao’s agents in America, Bill Duffy. Nearly every name player in the NBA seemed interested in getting something going in China—an endorsement deal, a clinic, or appearance opportunities. When Duffy or another agent sent someone over, Zhang was often on the receiving end. He had escorted the guard Baron Davis (who would sign a shoe deal with the Chinese sportswear company Li Ning), as well as the NBA’s top point guard, Steve Nash. He had taken Nash to Beijing’s most famous streetball court, where Nash had disguised himself in a knit cap and played some pickup. Zhang had chaperoned Shaquille O’Neal, Shane Battier, and Luis Scola, too.

  Now Duffy had sent over Bonzi, but this would be a different exercise. It was one thing for an American star to pass through China on a prospecting tour; Wells was coming to play. In the broader context of Chinese sports, Zhang thought this was a good thing. China’s sports market had lagged behind other sectors of society, as far as opening up to the market was concerned, and reform was critical if Chinese basketball was going to catch up. Reform meant more commercialism and exposing Chinese players to better competition. Bonzi Wells represented the best competition ever to play in the CBA.

  But Wells also had a reputation, and Zhang had worried that a player with Wells’s temperament might not slide so seamlessly into the Chinese league. Normally Zhang would cold-call teams and manufacture a bidding war to drive up the price for a player of Wells’s caliber. But now he worried his agency’s reputation might suffer if something went wrong; he didn’t want a general manager complaining about being misled if Wells lost it in China. Zhang wanted the team that signed Wells to do so of its own free will. So he planted a story in Titan Sports floating the fact that Wells was interested in playing in China. Then he waited for his telephone to ring.

  It rang, several times. He responded to each query with the same answer: Yes, Wells is a major talent, but be certain you want him. Check him out. He is an American player who might require special arrangements. Do an Internet search. Then decide. “He’s definitely a good player,” Zhang would tell each caller. “But whether he fits your team—that’s your job and your coach’s job, not my job.”

  Some teams checked the Internet and did not call back. A few others kept nibbling. The one team that never hesitated, that kept calling, eagerly, was the Shanxi Brave Dragons.

  “The owner was a big fan of Bonzi,” Zhang would later recall. “He kept calling us and promising everything. And he put it all in the contract.”

  A media onslaught ensued, at least by the media standards of Taiyuan. Reporters from national newspapers and leading websites were now arriving to bear witness to Bonzi. Where once Taiyuan existed outside the basketball consciousness of China, it was suddenly the place to be. The hype only grew after Yao Ming himself blessed the Bonzi experiment. In the Rockets’ locker room, Yao told a herd of Chinese reporters that Wells was a big talent and still had a big game. He expected him to put on quite a show in China.

  The clip was aired across China: the great Yao, iconic figure of the global game, the breakthrough Chinese star whose talent and dignity had won over fans in America, giving props to the man being crowned as the greatest American to ever play in the Chinese league, assuming he would play.

  Now if only Mark Zhang could find him.

  Bonzi Wells would not have been America’s first choice as ambassador-at-large for America’s game. Gawen DeAngelo Wells, born in 1976 in Muncie, Indiana, had cursed coaches, cursed fans, cursed referees, brawled with fellow players (spitting on one), and had once been named by GQ magazine as one of the country’s “Top Ten Most Hated Athletes.” Any Chinese general manager combing the Internet would have found a damning rap sheet, a complicated blend of defiance and contrition, and at least one humanizing anecdote: He got his nickname from his mother because of her love of chocolate bonbons.

  He had come into the NBA out of Ball State University. Twice in college, he was named conference player of the year, even as he was ejected from games for arguing with referees. After a loss against Central Michigan, he slapped an opposing player who had tried to shake his hand. He was so combustible that his coach sent him to a psychologist to work on his temper. But at 6′5″, 210 pounds, Wells also had a unique skill set; at either shooting guard or small forward, he was a tough rebounder and defender, and an explosive scorer who could post up smaller guards near the basket. The Detroit Pistons made him the eleventh player selected in the 1998 NBA draft. On the day of the draft, he arrived in the Green Room, the holding pen for likely top picks, with his family and friends donning matching fedoras. The sports columnist Bill Simmons would later describe his entourage as “all looking like extras in a Notorious B.I.G. video.”

  Wells was traded before his rookie season to the Portland Trail Blazers, a proud franchise that soon veered so badly out of control that the team became known as the “Jail Blazers.” Criminal charges and controversies quickly piled up: marijuana arrests for Rasheed Wallace, Damon Stoudamire, and Qyntel Woods, who also pleaded guilty to animal abuse charges after staging dog fights in his home. Wallace was suspended for threatening a referee. At one practice, Zach Randolph and Ruben Patterson got into a fight (the club having signed Patterson despite his no contest plea to an earlier felony sexual assault charge). Popular players like Steve Smith, Jermaine O’Neal, and Arvydas Sabonis either left or were traded. Portland, epicenter of earnest Pacific Northwest crunchiness, had supported the Blazers for years; now fans started to recoil at the team’s aura of thuggishness.

  In such a poisonous atmosphere, Wells earned a media reputation as a “bad chemistry guy.” A Blazers beat writer described him as a fake and a con man. In his first two seasons, he was fined or suspended at least five times, once for giving the finger to a fan and again for cursing the coach Maurice Cheeks after Cheeks removed him from a game, establishing a pattern of clashing with coaches, especially those with reputations as disciplinarians. He was suspended for spitting in the face of Danny Ferry (and for calling him a “honky”) and also suspended for being involved in a fight with an opposing player, Chris Mills, at the end of a game. When he was later traded to the Memphis Grizzlies, Coach Mike Fratello suspended him during the 2005 playoffs.

  What sustained Bonzi was the cold calculus of the NBA—he could play, and most teams will overlook most anything for someone who can play. Moreover, a few voices out there argued that if Wells was complicated and often unable to control his emotions, he wasn’t really a terrible guy. A Chinese general manager would have found a smattering of stories describing how a “misunderstood” Wells was trying to turn things around, to get his act together. He had been thrown unprepared into the NBA glitter, this argument went, and had acted out. He would occasionally say as much himself. Now he was trying to mature. He still lived in Muncie and had donated money to keep the local community center from closing down. He cried when the court was named after him. He was still basically a small-town guy.

  His greatest moment as a player precipitated his great
est humiliation. By 2006, he was with the Sacramento Kings, thriving under the more relaxed coaching style of Rick Adelman, when the eighth-seeded Kings met the defending champion San Antonio Spurs in the first round of the playoffs. Expected to lose badly, the Kings pushed the Spurs to a deciding seventh game largely because of Wells, who averaged 23 points and 12 rebounds a game. Spurs coach Gregg Popovich called him “a one-man wrecking crew.” The Kings lost the deciding game, but Wells was redeemed, and at a felicitous moment. He was a free agent, and the Kings offered him a five-year deal for roughly $38 million, a major payday.

  He didn’t accept it. His new agent, William Phillips, pushed for $50 million and told the Kings that Wells had other suitors. Apparently, he didn’t, or at least not at that price. The Kings signed a cheaper player, and Wells fired Phillips. He signed with the Rockets for two years for a total of $4.5 million and was mocked for his arrogance and stupidity (though he was hardly poor, having earned about $35 million in eight seasons). It was a hard thing to shake. He arrived in Houston overweight and had problems with Jeff Van Gundy, a coach with a reputation as a hard-ass. When Adelman arrived as coach the following season, Wells was jubilant, arriving in great shape and seemingly poised for a great season. But he suffered injuries and never found the right niche with the Rockets before being traded midseason to the New Orleans Hornets. When his contract expired, Wells had no other offers.

  Duffy first tried to place him in Spain, but after negotiations broke down he turned to China. When Wells played in Houston, he had signed a shoe deal with Anta, a Chinese brand that was a sponsor of the Chinese Basketball Association. He was benefiting from the Yao effect: Almost any player on the Rockets was attractive to Chinese shoe companies, given the obsessive coverage of the team on Chinese television. But his trade to the Hornets complicated the deal; Anta had wanted him because he was a Rocket. Coming to China and playing in the Chinese league might help resurrect things with Anta. It could also give Wells a chance to prove himself worthy of a second chance in the NBA, assuming he played well and could keep his head.