Brave Dragons

by Jim Yardley

  Then the game began. As in Peking Opera, the symbolism and gestures told the story. The first quarter opened with the quandary of the protagonist. Donta started sluggishly, distracted and not yet immersed in the game, perhaps weighing summer in Australia versus winter in Taiyuan. The crowd madly cheered everything he did, having assumed that this was his final game, even as public fascination deepened about his brooding replacement sitting offstage. At one point, a television crew walked onto the court and pushed a camera toward Bonzi’s face for a close-up. He glared and waved them away.

  The second quarter introduced the drama’s supporting players. Olumide missed a foul shot and fell back gasping, shaking, and hopping in what could be called his frustration dance. The crowd cheered. Zhai Jinshuai, the demoted scorer, came into the game shooting. Then an unexpected figure arrived in the penalty box: Joe. He had not attended a game since his demotion but now he took a seat, a moth to the flame. Then another unexpected move: the Kazakh was sent into the game to replace Olumide. Enough time had now passed that everyone, with the possible exception of Big Rus himself, realized that he was not going to be the Asian secret weapon. Instead, he had become the team’s cult hero. Fans loved him the same way fans in the NBA love it when the last guy on the bench gets in the game. The San Jin City News ran a picture of his newly shaved head beneath a one-word English headline: “Cool.”

  He blocked a shot. He made two foul shots.

  Ren Hongbing could not contain himself. “Rus!!!” the deejay yelled, waving to the crowd. “Do you think his haircut is coooollll?”

  “Yes!” the crowd bellowed.

  The third quarter introduced the unexpected plot twist. Donta was on the bench with an ice pack on his knee. The crowd murmured. Big Rus had entered a trance. He grabbed a rebound and scored. He took a pass from Olumide and flushed a dunk. He launched a long 3-pointer and it crashed against the backboard. Trance broken. Except the ball landed in the hands of a teammate for an easy basket. Assist, Big Rus. Boss Wang laughed and gave Rus a high five when he returned to the bench, winded but triumphant.

  The fourth quarter brought the return of the hero. Donta was back in the game, limping. Qingdao led 80–76, but Donta drove for a dunk. He threw down another dunk. He passed to Joy for a basket. Not to be outdone as far as injury theatrics, Olumide made a foul shot and limped down the court. He dove for a loose ball and then hobbled down the floor as if stricken by gout. Donta made an incredible spinning move, scored, and got fouled. The Brave Dragons led 96–91, with fifty seconds left. Timeout, Qingdao.

  Ren Hongbing seized his moment and pushed a button on his soundboard: Beethoven’s Fifth. The Wave. Bedlam. Coal country ecstasy. A roiling water bed of brown jackets.

  Donta made two foul shots and a dunk at the buzzer. The Brave Dragons won 106–95 and improved their record to eight wins and seven losses. Fans ran onto the court and engulfed Donta. Ren Hongbing rushed to his side with a gift, a jade bracelet; Ren had bought it himself. Fans began to hug Donta, to touch him. A few people were crying. Donta was touched, if bewildered, since he could not understand a word anyone was saying.

  After midnight, my phone rang. It was Weiss. He was looking for Donta and Bonzi. He wanted to make certain they were both on the early morning bus for the trip to Tianjin.

  I asked if there was clarity yet on who was staying with the team and who was going.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  Boss Wang had decided before the game to keep Donta. Liu Tie had even formally welcomed him back to the team. But now the owner was wavering again.

  “He’s also made another decision,” Weiss said. “We’ve got a new head coach.”

  I was stunned. Who? I asked.

  “Me.”

  We hung up. Later that night, Boss Wang chose Bonzi. Weiss was irritated, if not surprised, and took the elevator down to Donta’s apartment to deliver the news. He was going to Australia after all.

  No one could quite pin down why the owner made the decision he did. One explanation was that the commissioner, Li Yuanwei, had personally recommended taking Wells, reasoning that such a big star would bring good publicity for the league. The team had played better than expected and perhaps the boss thought Wells might push them into the Top Four.

  But I was inclined to believe a different explanation. I later had a long lunch with the owner’s son, Songyan, who reminded me that when Wells played for the Trail Blazers, one of his teammates was Scottie Pippen, the longtime Chicago Bulls sidekick of Michael Jordan. Boss Wang figured that Wells had absorbed from Pippen some of the lessons of Jordan. By keeping Bonzi Wells, Boss Wang was only three degrees of separation removed from the great Jordan.

  Bonzi and his new teammates were going to Tianjin in the morning. Quite unintentionally, the debut of the greatest American to play in the Chinese league would have a historical symmetry. More than a century earlier, American missionaries with the YMCA had arrived in Tianjin preaching that strong bodies could make a strong nation. To prove their point, they had brought a newfangled game called basketball.

  CHAPTER TEN

  BIRTHPLACE OF THE GAME

  The trains come and go from Beijing South Railway Station, but the size of the crowds never seems to change. It was Sunday afternoon, December 21, and sleek white bullet trains were departing for Tianjin, three or four leaving every hour, with another three or four arriving to complete the circuit. The station was lagniappe from the Beijing Olympics, built for fans traveling to see matches at the Olympic soccer venue in Tianjin, about ninety miles away. Many of the Olympic stadiums in Beijing would become white elephants, empty and evanescent, but Beijing South, the city’s fourth railway station, was another piece of hardware for China’s race into the future, another reminder of how differently scale was defined here.

  The concourse was a cavernous rectangular plaza the length of several football fields beneath a curved steel roof with a translucent plastic hole in the center. A milky light filtered through the hole onto a grove of artificial palm trees where passengers in heavy coats sipped tea in overstuffed chairs. Winter air rushed through the sliding glass doorways leading down to the tracks. Up on the big digital boards, the train schedule turned over every few minutes, more trains coming, more going, a metronome of relentlessness, a turnstile of humanity. Ticket sellers told me every seat to Tianjin was sold out for the next several hours, despite every hour having so many trains. Sunday night was especially crowded because weekenders were returning to Tianjin. People kept pouring into the concourse. People replenished people.

  I took a seat to wait for my train. Humanity is commonly considered an excess natural resource in China. There are too many Chinese, the Chinese often say. A Beijing taxi driver muddling through midday traffic will inevitably complain about the volume of people in China, shaking his head at the inconvenience. Deng’s recipe for progress encouraged this calculation; he recognized that even rapid economic progress could not sustain so many people. Progress would require more growth and fewer people, which led the Communist Party to introduce the one-child population policies that seemed so inhumane to outsiders, so unthinkable. Chinese leaders in response said they were doing the world a favor. Preventing the births of 300 million people meant 300 million fewer mouths to feed, 300 million fewer claimants for jobs, land, and water. It was ruthless practicality in a country where people are measured in bulk.

  A door slid open and people pushed toward an escalator leading down to the tracks. A young couple embraced. He was wearing designer eyeglasses and an expensive suede coat. She was petite in a wool coat. They were yuppies, the one-child generation born from Deng’s calculation, the economic beneficiaries, the generation said to be more individualistic, more selfish and demanding. This new generation of urban Chinese say they want only a single child; having more was too expensive, too inconvenient. Then the couple was gone and replaced by more people pressing toward the escalator, moving anxiously to their precious seats as others remained in the concourse, glancing at th
e big digital boards, waiting.

  A rail clerk approached a woman sitting beside me.

  “Are you going to Tianjin?” the clerk asked. “Do you want to get on the 5?”

  “Yes,” she said, hopping up, “but I have a ticket on the 6.”

  No matter, the clerk said. The woman grabbed her bag and walked toward the gate as I followed uninvited. The ticket taker tried to shoo us away but we pointed toward the clerk, who was trolling the packed concourse, tapping other startled people on their shoulders. Another ticket taker waved us through, and we rushed past, down the escalator, into the cold of the tracks, and found . . . no one. The landing was empty. The white bullet train was purring. I stepped in and found . . . no one. A minute later, other people arrived, everyone a little giddy, having slipped behind the wizard’s curtain. We left the station with the car little more than half full.

  In precisely thirty minutes we arrived in Tianjin. The bullet train had streaked through the winter darkness at speeds reaching 322 kilometers an hour (just over 200 miles an hour). The train suddenly shivered with a startling whoooosssshh!! as we ripped past another bullet train racing toward Beijing on a track only a few feet away. It was a thrilling ride. These high-speed train networks were being constructed across the country, a steroidal central nervous system connecting steroidal cities designed to mobilize a populace encouraged to regard itself as a surplus commodity.

  When we pulled into the station, Tianjin was prostrate beneath a foot of snow. I walked out of the station in search of a taxi, a thin crust of ice cracking in places under my feet, and a small red cab finally collected me for the ride to the basketball arena. The debut of Bonzi Wells was taking place in about two hours. Snow was still coming down as we puttered through the city’s old colonial concession districts, preserved today as a tourist attraction, streets lined by stolid gray-brick apartments left by the British or columned, baroque houses once erected by the Italians and the French. The Americans left a much smaller physical mark, a three-story brick building erected almost a century ago by the Young Men’s Christian Association.

  The Tianjin YMCA was a modest building but the Y’s ambitions in China were determinedly immodest. The Americans did not come for Chinese trade; they came for Chinese souls.

  In 1895, David Willard Lyon, twenty-five and newly married, arrived by ship in the city of Shanghai. He was an anomaly not merely as an American in China but as an American born in China. His parents were Presbyterian missionaries who lived in the city of Hangzhou until Lyon was ten, when the family returned to the United States. Like his parents, Lyon would dedicate himself to spreading the Gospel, attending McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, where, among other things, he became president of the student branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association. The YMCA then sent him back to China.

  Lyon was part of a global evangelical outreach by the YMCA, which was promoting a muscular brand of Christianity rooted in ideas of service and the belief that citizens of a nation must be physically strong for a nation to be strong. He was trained in Springfield, Massachusetts, at what is now known as Springfield College. In China, any type of American missionary faced a difficult task. Preaching blind faith for an unseen God whose son died and returned as a redeemer was a decidedly foreign concept for a peasantry taught to worship their ancestors and revere the emperor as a deity. Many Chinese wanted more than abstractions. One Christian missionary in Yantai brought back apple seeds from the American West. Yantai had always produced a small apple, and when the missionary planted the new seeds, he promised local peasants that God would help grow a bigger one. Even today, the big, juicy Yantai apple is famous in China.

  Lyon’s seed was the idea of self-empowerment through physical strength. His timing was perfect. China’s military humiliations and the steady encroachment of foreign powers onto Chinese soil had sparked intense intellectual ferment and introspection. Where once Chinese intellectuals had taken as self-evident the superiority of Chinese civilization, now social reformers began to question traditional Chinese beliefs. Even as resentment festered over the presence of foreigners, many Chinese intellectuals looked to the West for methods that could be used to modernize and strengthen China. Few comparisons were more grating than the most basic: Chinese were physically weak compared to Westerners.

  Qing rulers spurned physical exercise. Refinement was prized, and even the symbol of the Qing—the long ponytail, or queue, worn by men—would for many Chinese reformers come to symbolize the decadent rot of the imperial era. In one famous story, a Chinese athlete competing in a high jump competition kept clearing the bar only to see it knocked over again and again by his queue. Enraged spectators yelled, “Cut off your queue!” The next day, the athlete returned, having sliced off the queue, and won the competition. The Qing’s rejection of physical exercise seemed further proof that the imperial order was oblivious to modern thinking. Social Darwinists were starting to apply the concepts of natural selection and evolution to nation-states; as with biology, politics and diplomacy were disciplines where only the strongest would survive, a potent argument for increasingly nationalistic Chinese intellectuals humiliated by the “Sick Man of East Asia” insult.

  “The people of our nation are weary and spiritless, our bodies emaciated by disease,” wrote one reformer, Xu Yibing. “Alas! These deficient, weak, exhausted bodies—what in the world would happen if they were pushed into the unforgiving competition of men in this evolutionary world of strong countries and strong physiques.”

  Lyon chose Tianjin for his new YMCA after deciding that the national capital, Peking, was too rooted in traditional thinking. Tianjin had a large foreign presence and several universities from which Lyon hoped to attract young Chinese to his new endeavor. It was also where the Qing government was introducing “modern” educational principles that would attract students from around China. “Working among these students means influencing the coming great men of ‘new China’—men who will be scattered all over the Empire in their various posts of influence,” Lyon later wrote a friend. His thinking was plain: If the Y could indoctrinate the country’s new elite, the elite, in turn, would spread the principles of the Y throughout China.

  In December 1895, Lyon founded the Tianjin YMCA at a ceremony attended by about 100 students from local universities. To commemorate the day, Lyon introduced a game created four years earlier by James Naismith in Springfield. Naismith had been asked to invent an indoor game as a diversion for young men during the cold New England winter, something wholesome and vigorous that would keep them out of trouble in the growing cities of America. It took some time but soon he nailed a peach basket against a wall, divided up a group of young men into two teams, and handed them a ball. Basketball was born. As the Y began introducing the new game in America, men like David Willard Lyon began to carry it around the world.

  Lyon left Tianjin in 1898 but other Americans arrived to continue his work. At its pinnacle, the Y had branches in at least thirty Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, as well as 170 student associations with a combined membership approaching 50,000. Before the Y, modern sports had barely existed in China. Foreign merchants or diplomats had brought tennis and cricket to the treaty ports controlled by foreign powers, but they played only for amusement and among themselves. Now the Y introduced basketball and another new game, volleyball, and translated the rule books into Chinese so the games could be easily taught at every branch.

  In Tianjin, the Y also pursued Lyon’s goal of influencing a new generation of Chinese leaders. One of the most influential would be Zhang Boling, a former sailor in the Chinese navy who had resigned in embarrassment after the disastrous loss in the Sino-Japanese War. Having witnessed the incompetence and impotence of the Chinese navy, Zhang wanted to end Chinese backwardness through modern education. A passionate Chinese nationalist, Zhang joined the Tianjin Y, converted to Christianity, and founded two schools dedicated to strengthening China by learning from the West, Nankai Middle
School and Nankai University. One of the students studying on a scholarship was a slender young man named Zhou Enlai, who would later join the country’s underground Communist movement and ultimately become prime minister under Mao.

  Merely introducing sports was one thing. Making sports a tool of national empowerment and spreading the influence of the Y was another, and for that the Chinese YMCA found a powerful rationale in the Olympic movement emerging from Europe. Drawing inspiration from ancient Greece, the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin was resurrecting the Olympic Games as an international competition organized in the name of friendship and goodwill. By 1896, the first “modern” Olympics were held in Athens. For the Chinese Y, the Olympics were based on modern ideas about competition, national strength, and chivalrous behavior, yet ones that derived moral authority from ancient virtues. Here was a stage for the leading nations of the new century to compare and compete. C. H. Robertson, an American who had arrived by 1908 to run the Tianjin Y, saw the Olympics as a marker for gauging China’s progress. Hoping to catalyze China’s athletic movement, Robertson began a campaign focused on three questions:

  When will China be able to send a winning athlete to the Olympics?

  When will China be able to send a winning team to the Olympics?

  When will China be able to invite the world to come to Peking for an international Olympic competition?

  The three questions resonated in Chinese sports through the coming century. Zhang Boling became one of China’s most ardent Olympic enthusiasts. Different YMCAs began holding the country’s first sporting tournaments as Y leaders organized elite teams to represent the country. A team of basketball players from Nankai University, known as the Nankai Five, became famous for defeating a team of American soldiers. In 1910, the Y organized the First National Athletic Games in Nanjing, a tournament that would ultimately become the equivalent of a national championship to select teams for the Olympics. The First National Athletic Games attracted 150 athletes and more than 10,000 spectators.