Brave Dragons

by Jim Yardley

  “This is the worst nightmare,” he wrote. “Perhaps God had seen me playing so hard and wanted me to take a good rest.”

  The timing was terrible. Joy was playing well. In Guangdong, as a bench player, his confidence had suffered. At one point, the father of one of the team’s stars pulled Joy aside at practice to encourage him to be brave on the court.

  “You should be confident at all times,” the father had said. “Otherwise, you’ll never get better.”

  On his blog, Joy began writing about his self-doubt. He was curious and honest and almost goofily thoughtful. He wrote one post about the benefits of thinking like a dog. “We know that when a dog is chasing a Frisbee, he has only one thought in mind. Success. He wouldn’t think about his past failures. He wouldn’t lose sleep for a night or worry whether he would catch the Frisbee the next day. A man would be concerned about what other people would think about him if he failed to catch the Frisbee. He would also ponder who would be disappointed if he didn’t catch it.”

  He concluded: “Sometimes people should be willing to think as a dog. Have you ever seen a dog dismal or upset that he didn’t catch a Frisbee? Have you ever seen a dog give up because he had already tried once? I suggest, that as a dog does, when you are the victor, at least pat yourself on the head, or roar under the moonlight, as a reward to yourself, even if your achievement is tiny.”

  Soon the Web was writing back. “On our team, I must learn my position and what character I possess,” Joy wrote. “I can’t compete on offense with players from the national team and foreign players. Some bloggers said I should be more decisive and braver. Good suggestion.

  “Thanks for all the advice.”

  His breakthrough moment came the previous season when the Guangdong coach unexpectedly put him in the starting lineup of a game. At the end of the game, he scored eight points as the other team kept fouling him, assuming he would buckle under the pressure. But as Joy kept making foul shots, the home crowd began chanting “MVP! MVP!” He raised his fist in the air in triumph.

  The trade to Shanxi had initially stunned Joy. But then he thought that maybe this was his chance. “If your hard work could help the Shanxi team play better, wouldn’t that be an amazing experience? Wouldn’t that make you feel fulfilled and valuable?” he wrote.

  But now his foot was in a cast. He would not return for several weeks. And by then so much would have changed.

  Joy was not the team’s only invalid. A few hours after morning practice, I joined a medical expedition to the Shanxi Medical University Secondary Hospital. Big Rus hurt his ankle a week earlier and had yet to see a doctor. Trainer Yuan had assumed it was a sprain, and that the swelling would subside, except it had not subsided. His ankle remained as large and discolored as an eggplant.

  The trainer led our delegation. He seemed to have shrugged off the morning episode with Bonzi as we took the van to the hospital. Garrison had come along for interpretation. He was dressed in his latest fashion statement: a fur-lined sweater, a Chinese incarnation of a coonskin cap, and large aviator sunglasses. He had just reunited with his girlfriend, Amy, and was practicing saying “I love you” in Russian.

  The injury to Ruslan Rafaelovich Gilyazutdinov did not constitute a death blow to the team. He was still out of shape, and other than those few good moments in Donta’s last game, he had not done much. Despite being almost six feet ten inches, he could barely jump, making about half his dunk attempts during layup drills, which admittedly put him in the upper echelon for the team. Rick Turner had amused himself by keeping stats of dunking percentages during warm-ups; before one early game, discounting Olumide and Donta, the team had missed nine of thirteen dunk attempts. Uncontested.

  What I had come to appreciate about Big Rus was that, despite an abundance of empirical evidence proving otherwise, he remained convinced that he was an elite international player. He was never intimidated on the court and never hesitated to take the ball to the basket. If he was confronted with his limitations—say his inability to score in a game or his inability to stop his man from scoring—Big Rus usually identified the flaw not in himself but with factors beyond his control—the team, the coaches, maybe even the owner. He seemed stunned that they could not see in him what he saw, which was major league talent.

  “This is boooollsheeeeet,” he would say, smirking.

  The emergency room was a dimly lit corridor overcrowded with people. We were taken into a small room with three black pallets. On one, a woman was sound asleep as her husband checked messages on his telephone. Another belonged to a bedraggled, delirious man circled by family members. Big Rus heaved himself onto the third. A doctor ordered an X‑ray and sent us down the hall to the radiology department. We passed an old, hunched woman in a wheelchair who had been abandoned in the hallway; patients were diverting around her as if she were a stone in a moving stream. One man in a surgical mask was lugging a folding chair for waiting in lines.

  Big Rus was disgusted. Of all the foreigners, he was the most impressed with Taiyuan, but the hospital appalled him. Dirt and grime were smeared on the lime green walls. An old man shuffled by with a gash on his cheek that was dripping with pus.

  “Dat guy smehls!” Big Rus complained, scrunching his nose.

  What he actually smelled was the bathroom. He had taken a seat near the bathroom door. A toilet had flooded and urine had pooled on the floor. The other toilets were caked in grit and feces, and the odor was spreading through the corridor. Then a steel door slid open, and Big Rus was saved by radiology. He stepped inside and placed his huge purple foot on the X‑ray table. The X‑ray showed no broken bones.

  We followed Trainer Yuan out of the emergency room to a rear courtyard and walked to another wing of the hospital. Patients were coming and going, and cars pushed through a narrow parking lot. I suddenly realized that we had lost Big Rus. He had stopped to hold the door for a man who was piggybacking his sickened wife back onto the streets. Big Rus dodged an oncoming black Passat, and we managed to reach the other wing. When the elevator arrived, people poured out. I counted fourteen. The elevator was beeping. We tried to push in but the beeping continued, so Yuan and I took the stairs. It was five floors up, and at the landing beneath the fifth floor, Yuan paused to catch his breath.

  “China’s medical system for ordinary people,” he said, breathing hard, his thought incomplete.

  “Bu tai hao,” I offered, finishing for him. Not too good. He agreed.

  On the fifth floor, Yuan searched for a doctor, while Garrison, Big Rus, and I loitered in the waiting area. The wall was covered with a large propaganda display about hospital services. One photograph showed earnest, white-frocked technicians staring at computer screens as a patient was being placed inside an MRI machine. The patient was a stone-faced, angry man with a strangely swollen neck.

  “Rus, look,” Garrison said, pointing at the man. “Coach Liu.”

  Yuan returned and took Big Rus to see the doctor. I had not spoken to Liu Tie in a while, and I asked Garrison how he was doing. He said Liu was now just trying to preserve his job. His demotion taught him that he had much to learn about dealing with an owner, though this particular job was difficult no matter who held it.

  “It’s like a pair of shoes made of iron,” Garrison said. “It is going to be hard, no matter who tries to fit into them.”

  Yuan and Big Rus returned, clutching the X‑rays, and we waited for the elevator. It arrived and ejected another swarm of people. We joined the swarm getting on. The bell sounded. Garrison motioned for four people to follow him off the elevator into the hallway. I assumed he was going to take the stairs. But no; he lined up his four followers beside the elevator door.

  “Now, walk back on, very slowly,” he said.

  They were silent as they tried to slide weightlessly back aboard. The elevator was not fooled. The bell rang.

  Yuan and I took the stairs.

  The doctor had delivered bad news. Big Rus was out for three weeks.

  “
Boooooolsheeeet!” Big Rus declared as we were leaving the hospital. “One week and half. I’m going to call my father. He’ll know what to do.”

  When she had gone home for Christmas, Tracy had been surprised by how strange the normalcy of Seattle had felt. Where was the chaos? Where was the crazy energy? Where were all the people? She found herself missing Taiyuan, and missing the players. She was already emailing regularly with the handful who could write in English and to her they often seemed like typical adolescent boys. When she caught them eyeing a flight attendant in a tight skirt on a flight back to Taiyuan, she started laughing and they started blushing. While she was in Seattle, point guard Jin Jiming wrote confiding that he and another player had smuggled two puppies into the dorm and had named them Prince and Princess. Jin Jiming’s career with the Brave Dragons was basically over; he had been demoted to the junior team, though at age twenty he was too old to play for them. He was trying to get traded to another team and, as yet, Boss Wang had not released him. He had natural talent as a player but also a hot temper—he had been the one who chased another player with a brick a few months earlier—and the Chinese coaches had given up on him. Off the court, though, Jin Jiming was mild and achingly polite, and Tracy adored him.

  “I’m so glad you were back,” he wrote Tracy after she returned from Christmas. “We are in the gym Everyday. Prince and Princess just had bee vaccinated, so they could not have a bath. They don’t smell good, and a little dirty. If you don’t mind that, I will take you to play with them. They are dying to see you. And we really appreciate to take photo with you. See you this afternoon.” So that afternoon, Tracy slipped into the dorm and played with Prince and Princess.

  The Nigerians were having dinner at Mao’s House, which qualified as Taiyuan chic. It was across the street from the World Trade, a two-story restaurant with a giant bust of the Chairman in the first-floor lobby. The walls were exposed brick, and the main dining area had an understated elegance unusual for Taiyuan. It did not, however, have heat, so the manager had placed outdoor kerosene heating towers throughout the room. I had been invited as a friend and interpreter. We took a table and asked the waiter to roll a tower near Ana’s stroller.

  Olumide oversaw the ordering, which involved about twenty minutes of negotiations in Yoruba, English, and Chinese before food began to arrive. Soon afterward, a man in a red sweater appeared with a small box. He was middle-aged, with strings of hair pulled across his head, and he could not stop smiling. He was a fan. The box was Chinese rice liquor, or baijiu, and he wanted to share a toast with Olumide. He asked me to deliver a message: The success of the team was wonderful for Taiyuan. Taiyuan had too much pollution, and too many coal bosses, but the team was something that had lifted the city. He wanted to say thank you, and he wanted Olumide to know that he loved the way he played, the way he hustled and dove on the floor.

  As I repeated the message in English, a broad smile spread across Olumide’s face. He rose from his chair and took the man’s hand, and I snapped a photo of them. But the matter of the toast remained. Baijiu is alcoholic battery acid; Olumide rarely drinks. I improvised and explained that Coach Weiss forbade players from drinking the night before a game. Much was at stake against Beijing tomorrow, I said gravely, and Olumide needed to be sharp. The man nodded and left the box behind.

  More food arrived, and so did the fan, again. Now he wanted Olumide to meet his friends. We walked down a narrow hallway where the restaurant had rooms for private parties. The fan opened a door and Olumide ducked inside. At the sight of the Nigerian rebounding machine, everyone jumped from their chairs, men and women, an otherwise perfectly sane group of family and friends now giddy.

  “Drink! Drink!”

  “We must toast!”

  I offered up the no-drinking policy and Olumide posed for more pictures, wrapping his big arms around husbands and wives, his incandescent smile warming the unheated room. A few men toasted him just the same, slugging down shots of baijiu in his honor, and we left the room to a small round of applause as good wishes for the following night, when the Nigerian pride of Taiyuan would take on the Beijing Ducks.

  No one would be getting fired this night. Kobe was playing his best basketball. Before the game, Bonzi had lectured him at midcourt, and Kobe came out attacking, driving past Dontae Jones for easy scores. Bonzi was also a different player; he was passing, distributing the ball, even as he kept scoring with ease.

  I sat beside Journalist Li. He was curious if I thought the team was better with Bonzi or Donta. I made the point that Bonzi was an incredible scorer but that Donta was a better team player. He agreed but then started typing on his laptop. He tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a message in broken English on the screen: Engage Wells, Shanxi team maybe regret sometimes. Not engage Wells, Shanxi team maybe regret all life.

  The first quarter ended with the Brave Dragons leading the Beijing Ducks, 32–19. Beijing then made a run, but Bonzi found a teammate for a 3-pointer. It was going beautifully, until Bonzi grimaced and fell to the floor, clutching his ribs. Trainer Yuan hustled onto the court and helped Bonzi hobble off the court. He sprawled himself on the floor in front of the bench, literally at the feet of Boss Wang, who did not look down as Yuan massaged Bonzi’s ribs. At halftime, the Brave Dragons led 46–39.

  When the teams returned for the second half, Bonzi was healed. He scored on drives, buried midrange jumpers, and hit his 3s. With 2:32 remaining in the game, the Brave Dragons led 94–79, and the voice of Ren Hongbing echoed through the arena.

  “Chi fan le ma?” the deejay asked the crowd. Have you eaten?

  No!

  “Nimen yao chi shenme?” he continued. What do you want to eat?

  And the crowd yelled as one, “Beijing Kao Ya!”

  Beijing Duck!

  The final score was 98–83. At the postgame news conference, the room was filled with reporters, even a foreigner from Agence France-Presse who was writing a piece that would be distributed around the world. He asked Bonzi about his rib injury.

  “I’ve been playing the game long enough to understand injuries are just part of the game, and you just play through them,” he said. “I’ve got to be smart and understand my body.”

  He said he was also getting a better understanding of China.

  “I’ve been here about a month, so I’m getting accustomed to it,” he said. “It was a big culture shock at first, but I’m starting to understand my surroundings. Since I’ve been here, it’s been all business. I haven’t had any fun yet.”

  He smiled.

  “I’m looking forward to some fun.”

  Fun was on the way. The Brave Dragons won their next game against Tianjin and improved to 13 wins against 11 losses. Bonzi also seemed to be making a small effort at a charm offensive. Weiss had prodded him to work on fan interaction. At practice, a father and son had approached him for a photograph and autograph. There was a moment of uncertainty as Bonzi looked at the father. Then he smiled and posed for the photograph. No autograph, though. Miracles don’t happen overnight.

  He also had granted his first interview for a cover story in the Chinese edition of Sports Illustrated. The magazine dispatched a young reporter who could speak English, a woman whose English name was Coco. Photographers arrived at the practice facility and blocked off half of the junior team court. A large gray backdrop was erected at the foul line, so that Bonzi could pose in different positions—holding a ball, standing on an unseen ladder so that he could imitate a dunk, extending his arm in a defensive pose. Coco spent forty-five minutes talking with him beside the court. Her article would lean toward the misunderstood genre.

  The junior team was sitting on the sideline watching the photo shoot. But Coach Zhao was still running the fifteen-year-olds through some dribbling drills on the other half of the court. Each boy was dribbling two balls, between his legs, from the end line to the photo canvas, then back. The photographer had climbed onto a ladder to shoot downward as Bonzi posed in front of the gray ca
nvas, but just then the canvas rippled and the shot was ruined. One of the fifteen-year-olds had fumbled the dribbling drill and the ball had crashed into the canvas.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  YAO’S HOUSE

  How America is organized economically follows a logic many Americans regard as universal. Power, wealth, and expertise aggregate in cities, which produce money and innovation from the efficiencies of having so many people concentrated in one place. Usually, the bigger the city, the more power it has, whether politically, economically, or culturally. When professional basketball began taking root in the 1950s, there were teams in cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Syracuse, New York. But over time these teams moved to Detroit and Philadelphia and, eventually, every professional sports league basically reflected the economic hierarchy of the country. Like any other entertainment business, professional sports chased customers, whether as ticket buyers or television viewers, and the most customers were in cities with the most people. There were exceptions to the rule, and the hierarchy of cities was hardly static, given the periodic shifts in the economic landscape, but this was how the sports market worked.

  No city in China was bigger than Shanghai, with its roughly 22 million people. When the Brave Dragons arrived in the middle of January for a game with the Shanghai Sharks, our airport bus glided along an elevated highway as if we were arriving at the mezzanine level of the city of the future. Apartment towers rose in every direction. For miles we drove toward the old city, passing thousands of buildings, until we were above the low, pitched roofs of the old colonial enclaves, the concession districts once carved out along the Huangpu River by the French, British, and other foreign powers. Rising from the other side of the river stood modern China’s revenge: the jagged, futuristic skyline of the Pudong district, with the cantilevered Jin Mao Tower at eighty-eight stories and the shimmering blue sheath of the Shanghai World Financial Center at 101. Pudong had been a swamp when Deng Xiaoping visited during the 1980s and demanded that Shanghai develop faster. It had.