Brave Dragons

by Jim Yardley

  Ogoh was a short, muscular man, soft-spoken with an appealing serenity who once played guard for the Nigerian national team. Like me, Ogoh was affixed to the Brave Dragons despite having no obvious or practical use. Technically, his role was Olumide’s personal trainer, as stipulated in a clause in Olumide’s contract requiring the club to cover certain expenses for said trainer. Yet I had spent months with the team and never actually witnessed Ogoh “train” Olumide. When I had once gently asked about the “training” regimen (which Olumide had described to me as very cutting-edge), Ogoh answered that most of the work was done during the “off-season.” This deepened the mystery since Olumide played basketball ten or eleven months every year on multiple continents, essentially eliminating the “off-season.” Whatever, I had concluded Ogoh’s role was that of friend and one-man posse. Wherever Olumide went, Ogoh went with him.

  The morning before the Beijing game, the team gathered for practice. I went on the chance that Boss Wang might show up and fire everyone. The team had lost a heartbreaker in Beijing two days after Bonzi’s debut in the blizzard in Tianjin. He had almost pulled out a miracle victory with a steal and the go-ahead foul shots in the final seconds—only to watch Beijing score the winning basket at the buzzer. This would be a home game, which would help, but Weiss was edgy at practice; he thought a mass firing was distinctly possible. I took a seat beside Ogoh and waited for Boss Wang the way you wait for an approaching hurricane, uncertain of the extent of the coming damage. But practice began without any sight of him.

  Weiss was working on transition offense, rotating the first and second teams. Bonzi’s leg was bothering him and he hobbled through the drills. Like Weiss, Ogoh did not blame Bonzi, solely, for the team’s problems. “A lot of the players are not getting as involved as they should be,” he said. “The only one putting in some effort is him.” He pointed at the skinny young guard Duan Jiangpeng. “The others are just content to watch. The others think: Hey, he is the great Bonzi. He should do all the scoring.”

  Weiss stopped the drill to chew out Big Sun for making a lazy pass. On the opposite sideline, Liu Tie was alone, pacing, head down, hands in pockets. He was quiet now, almost ashen, since his demotion. I knew he was proud and did not raise the subject but I heard from others that he was devastated. He thought he had earned the owner’s trust but had concluded instead that no one could earn his trust. Overnight, his relationship changed with the players. Now he was one of the guys. He played cards with Wei and Big Sun in the airport waiting room. Or he invited players out for dinner and told them not to worry about the curfew, just to relax.

  Now the first team was back on the court. Bonzi had lost ten pounds and looked thinner. He hated Chinese food in America and liked it even less in China; he vomited after one meal. His diet consisted of one Western-facsimile meal a day supplemented by Red Bull energy drinks. Between sets, he walked over and sat down beside me.

  I asked what he thought of his Chinese teammates.

  “He’s good,” he said, pointing at Duan Jiangpeng. At twenty, Duan was playing his first season in the CBA after being promoted from the junior team. He was 6′4″, maybe 175 pounds, and had emerged as the team’s best second option as a scorer. At the beginning of the season, Weiss and Turner thought he was too cowed to contribute much, but Duan had gotten better every week and was faster and better on defense than Wei and Zhai.

  “What about Zhai?” I asked.

  Zhai was running with the second stringers. He scored 22 points in Bonzi’s first game in Tianjin and I thought maybe he had regained his strut, except he had since done little as his confidence and minutes had dwindled away.

  “Who is that?”

  “The guy in the blue hoodie.”

  “He’s scared. They’re all scared.”

  Weiss called for the first string, and Bonzi walked slowly back onto the court. He had tweaked a knee, and after running a few offensive sets he took a seat under the basket to watch his teammates. Kobe took a pass and swooped in for an easy layup—which he missed.

  Bonzi glared at him. Kobe had become Bonzi’s pet project. Easily the most athletic Chinese player on the team, Kobe was the team’s defensive stopper who guarded the top foreigner in every game. When the team played Xinjiang, one of the league’s strongest teams, Bonzi thought his Chinese teammates were intimidated by the foreign players as well as Xinjiang’s massive Chinese center, Mengke Bateer. His message to Kobe had been simple: Don’t be scared. He tried to build him up, telling him that he might be talented enough for the NBA. He wanted him to be aggressive on offense and defense the following night against Beijing, when he would be matched up with Dontae Jones, one of the league’s leading scorers. Jones didn’t play defense and Bonzi thought Kobe could score against him.

  Kobe rebounded his missed layup, then put it in, and looked over at Bonzi for approval. Bonzi nodded and walked back over to join me on the sideline.

  “Half these guys don’t know how to play basic basketball,” he said, continuing where we left off. He had been impressed with several Chinese players on other teams, but he considered his teammates too young and too green.

  He was still startled that he was even here. “I didn’t know anything,” he told me. “They asked me in November. I said, ‘No, I don’t want to go to China.’ But they got me by saying I could get some of the Anta money back. And maybe some other deals. I said yes on Monday. I was on a plane on Wednesday.”

  He was stunned by how the Chinese players lived. “The life they live is so different,” he said. “The shit they have to do. There is a twenty-six-year-old Chinese guy who is thinking about retiring. They have to live here fifty weeks a year and practice with the same guys. That’s like prison.

  “I guess if they came to our place, they would find things that are different in our culture.”

  He watched the Chinese players as they ran up and down the floor, banging into each other. “If we had a good point guard, my life would be easier,” he said. “I’ve got to be the point guard. I’ve got to facilitate everybody. I’ve always just been a scorer. But that shit will wear me out, having to score 50 every night.”

  He said he wanted to build a rapport with his teammates but that it wasn’t easy. Language was the biggest problem, but he was also still incredulous about the touching. “I tell them, ‘You guys are crazy. You aren’t ever supposed to touch another man.’ It’s okay to give a five or a smack on the butt after a good play.”

  It was at this moment that Bonzi called for the team’s trainer, Yuan Zaibin, to massage his ailing leg. Barely 5′7″, with bottle-thick glasses, Yuan lived in the dormitory in a small bedroom attached to what constituted the medical wing: a single room with a massage table and some outdated machines used to apply sonic waves to an injury. He recently rented a small apartment near the facility for his wife and infant child. Yuan was one of the most popular people in the organization, forever upbeat, if not entirely trusted by the foreigners as a medical practitioner. When Weiss first arrived, a player left practice with an unknown ailment. Weiss approached Yuan for an explanation. The answer he got, which may or may not have been lost in translation, was “His ass is blue.” Weiss never did figure out the problem.

  But the suspicions about Yuan were really suspicions about the wholly different way Chinese coaches and players approached conditioning and caring for their bodies. In his early days running the team, Liu Tie had taken the team on a two-hour drive into the mountains west of the city, where the players unloaded at the bottom of a steep incline of stone steps leading to an ancient temple. Then Liu separated the players into twosomes and ordered one player to piggyback the other up and down the steps, running. To the foreigners, this was stupidity, an invitation for injury. To the Chinese, it was just another day at practice. Before every game, on several teams, you would commonly see the Chinese players in a circle for their stretching routine, while the foreigners did their own warm‑up drills. Sometimes a foreign player would shoot from inside the stretchi
ng circle of his teammates. It was as if they were different pieces of machinery.

  Bonzi had been checking his emails on his iPhone as we spoke and then put it in his lap, when Trainer Yuan arrived, smiling, and began rubbing Bonzi’s leg. He rubbed around the injured knee and then moved up toward his thigh and groin, rubbing, rubbing, his fingers kneading the muscles, when Bonzi suddenly jerked back and shoved him, cursing. It happened so fast that I was startled. So was Trainer Yuan, who assumed that Bonzi was joking the way Chinese players do. He playfully shoved Bonzi back. Now Bonzi was irate and shoved him even harder, and only then did I realize what had happened. The iPhone was on Bonzi’s lap, and Yuan had reached to move it. Bonzi thought Yuan was trying to grab his penis. I now tried to intervene—this was just a misunderstanding!—but Yuan’s face was starting to cloud as he pushed Bonzi back again, still playfully, but confused.

  “Get away from me, motherfucker!” Bonzi shouted and shoved Yuan to the floor. “Don’t touch me!”

  The gym went silent. Liu Tie and a few players were standing under the basket, gaping. The trainer was now furious. He jumped up, red-faced, shoulders pitched back, fuming, staring in fury at a man who outweighed him by 100 pounds.

  “Get away from me!” Bonzi yelled again. Yuan walked down the sideline and took a seat. He was enraged and glared silently at Bonzi.

  Bonzi leaned forward and glared back at Yuan.

  “What are you mad about?” Bonzi shouted. “Bring me some fucking ice! Ice!”

  Yuan rose from his seat and opened a cooler. He scooped out a small bag of ice and slowly walked toward Bonzi. Bonzi was the star player. Trainer Yuan was not. He bent down, placed the ice on Bonzi’s knee and wrapped it with tape.

  The gym was silent except for the sound of tape being ripped off the roll.

  When practice ended, Bonzi walked outside to the bus. “Coach,” he told Weiss, trying to make light of what happened, “I need to fill out a police report. I got fondled.”

  Soon enough, the story spread. Everything else about Bonzi had.

  He had no idea, of course. Any foreigner in China exists somewhere within a sliding scale of unknowingness. That many Chinese regard their culture as impenetrable from the outside is what makes China so seductive to some outsiders, those for whom China becomes the ultimate puzzle to be solved. For others unknowingness is almost self-defense, a coping mechanism. Then there are the innocents, tossed into the sea, ignorant of the language, unaware of what is happening around them, grateful that McDonald’s and KFC have made it over. Bonzi fell into this category.

  He knew he was a big story in China. He just did not know what those stories were saying. Almost none of the foreigners did. The Chinese government censored the Internet on any subject judged politically destabilizing by the Communist Party, but otherwise the Internet was a megaphone, a pulsating hive of chat rooms and discussion boards and news reports that constituted the central nervous system of the country. When Wells had first arrived in Taiyuan, a Titan Sports reporter had followed him and Zhang Beihai to the supermarket. It was as much an ethnological exercise as a journalistic one: When another shopper accidentally bumped a cart into the American star, Titan reported that “Bonzi did not get angry but made a gesture to let the person go through.”

  “I heard he had a bad temper,” the general manager told the paper. “I did not expect he would be such a gentleman.”

  The character study continued at lunch at a nearby KFC, where more unexpected evidence surfaced of his good nature: He had placed the trash from his meal on his tray and personally delivered it to the garbage.

  “He’s really not bad!” Zhang Beihai had exclaimed.

  The narrative had already been written before Bonzi arrived: Here was the Ugly American come to China, a man of prodigious physical talents, if also a prodigious temperament. Here was the American Id. He would be watched on the court, and studied off it.

  When Yao Ming first arrived in the NBA, the scrutiny was far greater. Yao was the top pick in the NBA draft, and scores of Chinese reporters had followed him to America, trailing him everywhere along with an American press that observed him with a skeptical fascination. Not one reporter had followed Bonzi to China, nor was any national prestige attached to how he performed, as had been the case with Yao. For those few American basketball blogs paying attention, Bonzi was just another past-his-prime star now looking for a paycheck overseas.

  But like Yao, Bonzi would be judged in his adopted country as an ambassador of sorts. Yao knew this, of course. The NBA was invested in his success and had helped prepare him. Even so, he faced stereotypes. He was the Great Wall of China, more robot than man, a freak produced on the assembly line of the Communist sports machine. What transformed his image was not just his eventual success on the court but the way he demonstrated his individuality. He was funny. He was not a robot. He was proof that Chinese were individuals.

  What awaited Bonzi was a Chinese press already conditioned to American players who typified the American stereotype of selfish and spoiled. Bonzi’s arrival was exciting because he conferred status on the Chinese league, confirming its rising global standing, which meant Bonzi would be examined as a cultural ambassador, too. This was an unspoken part of the basketball experiment in China: Could Chinese and foreigners play together?

  When Wells first postponed his debut, reports surfaced that “many people” considered him as shuadapai, or, roughly speaking, acting like a huge diva. His second postponement “only deepened the suspicion that he was just shuadapai,” Titan concluded.

  The big Web portals now posted reporters to cover the games or even attend practices. Autographs became fodder for blog updates: first, the exclusive that Bonzi didn’t seem interested in signing them, and later, once he had signed a few, the follow‑up revelation that he just wrote a lazy B followed by a squiggly line rather than a neat rendering of his name. (“I’ve always signed like that,” Bonzi protested later.) Then there was his relationship with the sporting press. Mutual loathing might accurately describe his relationship with many basketball writers in the United States. Now the Chinese press was eager for an interview, an exclusive, anything, but Bonzi was only talking during his postgame remarks. He even turned down CCTV. Whether he knew anything about CCTV, or understood the ramifications of turning it down, is unlikely. But that, too, became a story: Bonzi Turns Down CCTV.

  His inaccessibility transformed Wells into a test of Chinese journalistic manhood. Two weeks earlier, at the morning practice before the last-second loss to Beijing, a huddle of Chinese reporters had stared at Bonzi from the edge of the court. It was as if they were passing a bottle, gathering their courage. Bonzi was leaning against the scorer’s table, headphones on, when one of the reporters approached me. Did I think Bonzi would talk to him? Probably not, I answered. He stared at Bonzi and took a breath. He was a young guy. “If I do not try, I cannot respect myself as a journalist,” he said, and walked toward the scorer’s table. At almost precisely the instant the reporter reached the outer edge of Bonzi’s personal space, some sort of journalist radar must have pinged inside Bonzi’s head. He pushed off the scorer’s table, never looking up or indicating any awareness of someone approaching, and joined his teammates at midcourt. The young reporter returned to the huddle with his self-respect, if not an interview.

  Inevitably, Bonzi’s presence inflamed the sporadic media sniping about foreign domination on the court. “Foreign Players: The CBA’s Ball Hogs,” crowed Oriental Sports Daily, which catalogued Bonzi’s “cold war” with the media, his snubbing of CCTV, and his estranged relationship with his teammates. “Are the CBA’s Foreign Players Devils or Angels?” asked Guangzhou Daily, concluding that foreigners, with a few exceptions, could be royal pains in the neck whose ball hogging retarded the development of young Chinese stars.

  Bonzi’s media blackout had effectively reproduced the same alternating story lines in the Chinese press that shaped his public image in the United States. There were stories saying
he was a jerk. There were stories saying he was misunderstood. A few of his teammates tried to defend him.

  “The Internet says he is one of the NBA’s Top Ten most notorious personalities, ranking at number seven,” Joy told one paper, trying to be supportive. “It says he acts like a big celebrity. But that’s not the case. He’s actually quite a good guy.”

  Most of his other Chinese teammates were privately less charitable. They thought Bonzi was weird. They still couldn’t understand why he locked himself in his room.

  Nearly all the Chinese players had computers in their rooms that tethered them to the Internet, which, in turn, tethered them to the youth of China. There were more than 400 million Internet users in China, and when Joy was a reserve on the Guangdong team, he became one of the several CBA players to write a blog on the league’s website. He discussed everything from movies to diarrhea to night school classes to the Sichuan earthquake. His latest entry was about the Fujian game and how it would ruin his season. His headline was: “Crap—I Got Injured.”

  He had accidentally stepped on the foot of Fujian’s point guard and badly dislocated his ankle, damaging the ligaments. He had never been seriously injured, but now he was out indefinitely and would fly to Hong Kong for medical treatment. So much attention was focused on Bonzi, and his impact on the team, that few people considered the impact of Joy’s absence. He rebounded, passed, never made dumb mistakes, and hit open shots. He was what coaches call a “glue guy,” meaning he kept the team together. Now he was gone.