Brave Dragons

by Jim Yardley

  The Brave Dragons were introduced. Olumide hopped off the bench and loped onto the floor, greeting every teammate who followed with his customary chest bump. Like the rest of the team, Olumide was uncertain what to make of the new imported star. The team was wearing their red road uniforms, and Wells wore Number 42. When he was introduced by his Chinese name, he trotted out for his chest bump with the Big O.

  Bangqi Weiersi!

  The Tianjin crowd exploded. No one appeared to be rooting for the home team. Wells stripped off his warm-ups and walked out to midcourt. The men with the thunder sticks were screaming. A few fans were wearing Rockets jerseys. Bonzi was thick in the chest and shoulders, overweight by NBA standards, but more heavily muscled than anyone on the court. He outweighed the Chinese player guarding him by maybe thirty pounds. When he played in the NBA, Wells’s role was clearly defined: to provide a burst of offense, often off the bench, as well as rebounding and some tough defense. In Taiyuan, he had asked Weiss about his role for the Brave Dragons.

  “They expect the Americans to play forty-eight minutes and get 30 points,” Weiss had said.

  “I play about thirty minutes and get about 15,” Bonzi had replied.

  Now the ball was tipped and the game was under way. The Brave Dragons came down the court. The starting five were Pan, Joy, Kobe, Olumide, and Bonzi. They had barely played together. Pan pushed the ball across midcourt and passed to Wells. Everyone reflexively stopped moving and bore witness to the great star. He squared, launched his first shot in China, and missed badly.

  Gradually, he found his game. He made a steal for a breakaway dunk. He slammed down a dunk and made a 3-pointer. Olumide drew two defenders and whipped a pass outside to Bonzi for another 3. He had scored 10 points in ten minutes.

  Weiss was a different man. He stood the entire first quarter, barking at Pan or calling Bonzi over, intently focused on the game. Liu Tie did not leave the bench. He wore a parka to stay warm. Boss Wang sat beside him, jawing in his ear as Liu nodded silently. At one point, Boss Wang patted him on the knee.

  Bonzi was now shooting on almost every possession. Pan dribbled up the court, standing at the top of the key, waiting, until Bonzi came over and collected the ball. Everyone was frozen, intimidated, except Olumide, who was visibly frustrated as Tianjin crept back into the game, trailing 26–25. Timeout. Bonzi walked very slowly back to the huddle where the players were circled around Weiss. He was yelling at them with Garrison trying to keep pace before the team returned for the last seconds of the first quarter. Weiss had called a clear-out for Bonzi to operate on his own and try to beat his defender for the last shot, but Bonzi fell down and the quarter ended with the Brave Dragons leading 29–27. Bonzi claimed he was fouled and argued with a ref. Bonzi shouted in English. The ref shouted back in Chinese.

  A pattern took shape: The Greatest American Ever to Play in the Chinese league was scoring but laboring, too. He did not have a natural shooting stroke; he had a hitch in his motion, and at one point tossed up three bricks in a row from behind the 3-point line. He was shooting too quickly because he was exhausted and did not want to waste energy by driving to the basket.

  Still, as the game had progressed, he had put the Brave Dragons up 64–55 with a nice spin move. He hit a 3-pointer, missed one, and then hit one at the buzzer before the end of the third quarter. He had 30 points and the Brave Dragons led 82–67. His fans were beating their thunder sticks as the two teams walked out for the final quarter. Victory seemed secure.

  “Warning! Warning! Number 42.”

  The game commissioner pointed at Bonzi Wells. The commissioner had risen from his chair and stepped onto the scorer’s table. He represented the voice of authority. During a timeout, the referees had trotted over for a quick evaluation. If coaches wanted to argue a point, they walked down the sideline to plead their case with the game commissioner. Every game had a different commissioner, and tonight’s commissioner could have been a Vegas lounge singer: He was holding a microphone and wore a white dinner jacket, his hair swept over his forehead as he tried to restore order. Throughout the game, Wells had barked at the referees, complaining about foul calls until the commissioner had intervened.

  “Next time we’ll give you a technical foul,” the commissioner warned.

  Wells was dripping in sweat, furious. A player for the Tianjin team made two foul shots. As the Shanxi lead had evaporated in the fourth quarter, Bonzi grew increasingly agitated at the refs. He was getting no respect and no calls.

  “Always follow the rules,” the game commissioner intoned, stepping off the table.

  The Brave Dragons’ lead had shrunk to two points. There were twenty-five seconds left in the game.

  Bonzi brought the ball upcourt and was immediately fouled. He walked slowly to the foul line as his cheering section slammed together their thunder sticks. He had shot so many times that his arms must have felt limp.

  The referee handed him the ball. Journalist Li was typing blog updates as Bonzi bent his knees and flicked his first foul shot toward the goal. Good. The thunder sticks crashed together. Weiss watched from the sideline as Wells pounded the ball against the floor and stared at the basket. His wrist snapped. Good. Four-point lead.

  Now the Tianjin guards raced up the court, seconds ticking down, and one of them pulled up and fired a 3-pointer. Good. One-point game. But the clock expired. Shanxi won, 107–106. Bonzi Wells was 1-0 in China. On the bench, Boss Wang was grinning.

  The postgame news conference was conducted in a small room in the basement of the arena. Elated, Weiss offered some valedictory comments and praised Bonzi for playing almost the entire game, despite not having played competitively for so many months. Then Wells took the microphone and the Chinese reporters edged forward. He had scored 48 points in his Chinese debut, though he took 46 shots to do it. It was not always pretty.

  “It’s a whole new culture,” he said. “I’m just learning, but I’m going to get better every day. I really appreciate my fans. I’ve been here for about two weeks, and it just feels great. I haven’t felt this much love in a long time.”

  He thanked Weiss and thanked his new teammates. Then he pointed upward and thanked God.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MERRY CHRISTMAS

  The knock on Rick Turner’s bedroom door came about 1 a.m. He was watching the end of a movie and barely awake. It must be Donta, Turner thought. Donta had spent the evening packing for his morning flight to Beijing and on to Melbourne, home of his new Australian team.

  “Uhh, Rick? Could you come out here?”

  It was Joe. He was in the living room with the assistant general manager, the team accountant, and a bleary-eyed Donta. The team had not known Donta was actually leaving. His agent had arranged the flight, and Donta figured the agent could handle any other unfinished details, so he had planned to get up in the morning, get to the airport, and get out of China. But now the team had sent an official delegation to persuade him otherwise: They wanted him to stay in Taiyuan as an inactive player, a safeguard in case the Bonzi experiment blew up. He could practice and still draw his salary if he would just stick around. Donta had thanked everyone, but his answer was no, an unequivocal, emphatic no, which is why Joe knocked on Rick Turner’s door. He needed a lawyer.

  Turner stumbled out in a T‑shirt and camouflage boxer shorts. He was being asked to draft an agreement dissolving Donta’s contract. He had never studied law, but he could write in English, which was enough. He tore a piece of paper out of a notebook and began writing out the final terms, including a last payout for Donta. The accountant copied the agreement in Chinese and handed Donta a fat stack of 250 $100 bills. It was more than Turner had made in his entire coaching career.

  “I’d be lying if I said my mouth didn’t water,” Turner would later admit.

  Everyone shook hands, and as the Chinese delegation moved to leave, the assistant general manager turned for a final question. Could Turner move out? The apartment was too big and the team would rent
him a one-bedroom down the hall. Sure, Turner agreed, though it presented a problem. He was leaving, too, in less than five hours. He was going home for Christmas. He had finally gotten his meeting with Zhang Beihai, after sending a long email explaining why he needed to return, how his daughter’s birthday was on December 28, even as he emphasized that he would stay if leaving meant losing his job. Joe had repeated his warning. Leave and they will not let you come back, he said. Stay and they will not dare fire you. It was the Chinese way.

  When he got his meeting, Turner made his case. “I’d like to come back,” he said, “but I was told you don’t want me to come back.” No, no, not the case, the general manager had promised. He understood why Christmas was important, and the junior team’s schedule would not be interrupted by his absence. Another coach, Coach Zhao, had been working with the youngest kids, but he could help Joe with the junior team until Turner returned. All the general manager asked was that Turner make it back by January 5. Turner promised to return much sooner.

  The strange thing was that Turner really did want to come back. True, part of the allure was that he did not have a job in America. And, true, leading a team of Chinese teenagers who are not allowed to play games represented an especially devious form of coaching torture. But being here was a great adventure, a taste of another culture, a daily soap opera. It was misery, but it was fun, too. He thought he was getting through to some of the players, making progress, and it was still his team. His confidence remained intact. He believed he was a good coach. He had a track record to prove it. He just needed a chance. So far, coaching a bunch of teenagers inside a converted warehouse in the middle of China was the best chance he had gotten.

  He got his stuff together so the team could move him into the new apartment and soon afterward went to the airport with Donta. They shared a flight to Beijing and then parted. Tracy was also going to Seattle for Christmas and they planned to meet for a drink.

  In Seattle, Turner’s family gathered for the annual Christmas party. His daughter had a daddy on her birthday. Turner raced around town, trying to catch up with everyone he had missed during the previous five months and was having drinks in a bar with a friend the night before his return flight to China, when Bob Weiss’s number appeared on his cell phone.

  He was excited to answer it. Maybe Weiss had convinced the owner to let him return to the senior team. Or maybe Weiss was just passing along the latest nuttiness. The maybe he hadn’t expected was that Weiss was not bearing good news. Joe had just called him to say Turner would not be allowed to return. The team would put Turner’s belongings in a box and ship them back. Weiss apologized. He had not seen it coming, either.

  “I was supposed to be on a plane in less than twelve hours and the plug had been pulled,” Turner wrote later. He wondered if Zhang Beihai had lied all along, or if he had just changed his mind. He left the bar and returned home to find an email from Joe:

  Rick

  I just got a call from Mr zhang he wants me to tell you that the second team and the teenage team will merge to one team and coach Zhao and me will coach this team so they don’t need no more help. I hate be picked to tell you this I am sorry.

  joe

  Turner had wanted to take the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Beijing to Moscow once the season ended, and then jump on Eurail to London before flying back to Seattle. But now he was in Seattle and it seemed as if the last six months had never happened.

  The box of his belongings sat for weeks in the front office, untouched and pushed to the side, as if it contained hazardous materials. Rick was initially patient when his things failed to arrive in Seattle, writing polite emails. He was told the shipment was going out soon. It didn’t.

  Turner had left mostly clothes and a few personal things. He had finally gotten his Anta swag, the shoes, sweats and other freebies coaches live on. He wanted them. Finally, after another week of nothing in the mail, Turner wrote a furious email, angry and hurt, demanding his stuff.

  No one in the front office wanted to touch it because no one knew if the team would actually pay for the shipment. Finally, Joe took the box to the post office and paid the freight himself. The box arrived a few weeks later.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BODIES

  Men touch each other in China. The habit usually catches foreigners unaware. You might occasionally see two young men walking down a sidewalk, holding hands. Or maybe they are draped over one another, an arm hooked over a shoulder, laughing or whispering, sharing a small intimacy. Young women are the same, walking arm-in-arm or holding hands, sharing an umbrella, giggling in a protective cocoon of sisterhood. Usually, the men are from the countryside, where this kind of physical contact is common and without any sexual connotation. The anthropologist Susan Brownell, who ran track at Peking University during the 1980s, recalled communal showers where one female teammate pressed herself against a wall in the frisking position as another woman softly scrubbed her back. When Brownell attended student dances, men usually danced with men and women with women. This changed during the next two decades, as a nightclub in Beijing became little different from a nightclub in New York, yet even in 2008, the sight of men strolling down a city street holding hands was not that uncommon.

  Bonzi Wells had noticed. His teammates sometimes touched each other. Nothing remotely sexual, but still: touching. They gave each other neck rubs. They were always hanging on each other at practice, which made Wells uncomfortable. Then he walked outside onto the streets of Taiyuan and saw the occasional twosome touching each other, fingers loosely intertwined. It just seemed strange. He mentioned it to Weiss, to the other foreigners on the team, to me. He asked: Are all these guys gay?

  Bonzi was entering his fourth week in China and he had not yet assimilated himself into his new team or his new country. Two nights before, Bonzi played what Weiss described as one of the worst quarters of basketball he had ever witnessed. The Brave Dragons were on the road in Xi’an, and Wells was awful, especially in the first quarter. He had five points and five turnovers. The gym had been cold, and Wells had not bothered to warm up. He played with such a groggy lack of interest that Weiss benched him for part of the game. The Brave Dragons lost, and Boss Wang ranted for an hour in the locker room. He screamed and hollered and berated every Chinese player, as usual, but this time he screamed at the foreigners, too. When Olumide rose to confront him, the owner shouted for him to shut up.

  It ended there, but Boss Wang finished his screed with an ultimatum: Beat the Beijing Ducks in the next game or all the foreigners would be sent home.

  The team returned to Taiyuan the following day and Zhang Beihai and Weiss huddled in the lounge of the World Trade. Weiss fortified himself with two Manhattans. A kinship had developed between the two men. They were lashed to the same mast on the same battered ship, trying to ride out the same storm. Now the Bonzi experiment was turning into what the coaches had most feared. Boss Wang had believed Bonzi would elevate the team into the league’s elite, but the team had gotten worse: three wins and four losses since Bonzi arrived, with the Brave Dragons fighting for the final playoff spot.

  Bonzi had altered the chemistry of the team in a way that defied easy solutions. The team was worse with him but helpless without him. He was the only scoring option. Hardly anyone did anything on offense except watch Bonzi and wait for him to shoot. The Chinese players sometimes seemed terrified on the court. The two Chinese players most likely to score, Wei Mingliang and Zhai Jinshuai, both wing players, were now on the court less often because they didn’t blend smoothly with Bonzi. Donta Smith could move to point guard, creating minutes, and shots, for Wei, but Bonzi was a pure scorer.

  And he was scoring. That was what made it even more confounding: Bonzi was doing exactly what everyone had said he was supposed to do. If you discounted the ugly game in Xi’an, Bonzi was the league’s most unstoppable force. He had single-handedly beaten Fujian with 52 points, including 13 in overtime. He could be breathtaking to watch, and China was watching.
CCTV was now televising almost every Brave Dragons game. Crowds loved him. Ren Hongbing had confected a special medley for Bonzi by blending Peking Opera, American hip-hop, and Chinese pop.

  The chorus, roughly translated, was this:

  Bonzi, Bonzi, Bonzi!

  Kill, Power, Bonzi!

  “This may be the first time in the CBA that something like this was specially made for a player,” Ren proudly told the Chinese press.

  Weiss was frustrated but sympathetic to Bonzi. “It’s not his fault, game-wise,” Weiss said. “He is what he is—a scorer. Donta made all the other Chinese players better. He made Olumide better. He gave Olumide four or five dunks a game.”

  Olumide’s scoring and his touches on offense were down, as was his cheery demeanor. Before, he had been one of the biggest stars in the league, and the marquee player for the Brave Dragons, but now the attention, and the offense, had shifted to Bonzi. Bonzi had demanded, and gotten, first-class seats on airplanes. Bonzi had demanded, and gotten, a suite for road games. “Being the bad boy pays off,” Olumide had grumbled on one flight after Bonzi sat in first class. Eventually, wisely, Olumide used the situation to demand similar perks and got bumped into first class, too. But his falling numbers were another matter. Numbers represent food for a basketball mercenary.

  He was now joined in Taiyuan by a full complement of Nigerians. His wife, Miriam, and their infant daughter, Ana, arrived with his best friend, Ogoh, and Ogoh’s pregnant wife, Joy. Everyone lived inside Olumide’s apartment, which became the Little Nigeria of Taiyuan. Additional Nigerians would materialize, a favorite aunt or someone from the Nigerian embassy in Beijing, and the kitchen was stocked with bags of rice, different cooking powders, and boxes of frozen meats for preparing what Olumide called “hard-core” Nigerian food. Given that much of Nigeria is a tropical savanna with average wintertime temperatures of about 80 degrees, Olumide kept the apartment heated high enough that my glasses sometimes fogged over as I walked through the door.