Brave Dragons

by Jim Yardley

  Bonzi Wells sat in the back row of the bus, staring silently out the window.

  “You aren’t in Taiyuan anymore, Bonzi,” Weiss said, admiringly.

  We were the hicks coming to the big city. We had coal dust on our shoes. Except logic was strangely reversed: We were the team with the big payroll. We had signed the expensive foreign players. We had the fat-cat boss with the fat-cat wallet. Strangely, Shanghai was one of the most cash-poor teams in the league. It could afford only one foreigner and had gotten him at a discount. The Sharks had the league’s worst record and were mostly ignored by the Chinese press, other than an ugly postgame brawl earlier in the season in which the Sharks’ captain, an Olympian named Liu Wei, led his teammates to attack Gabe Muoneke, the foreign star of the league’s other doormat, the Yunnan Bulls. Suspended for 10 games and fined 50,000 yuan (about $7,700), Liu was not especially repentant, citing a Chinese aphorism to suggest that the league had taken action only because of his fame and because Muoneke was a foreigner.

  “A big tree catches the wind,” he said.

  What made the pathetic state of the Sharks especially bewildering was that Shanghai was the greatest city in China, a financial powerhouse, sophisticated and cosmopolitan, dripping with disposable income. Kids played basketball across the city. The NBA was enormously popular, and Nike and Adidas regarded Shanghai as a marketing laboratory and as probably the greatest basketball market in Asia. Nike plastered billboards of Kobe Bryant outside the Grand Gateway Mall in the city’s Xi Jia Hui district and along the swank shopping street of Huaihai Road. Adidas was running a campaign with Dwight Howard. Yet the Shanghai Sharks struggled to attract 1,000 fans for home games. There was even talk that the Sharks might simply cease to exist.

  It didn’t make sense, because Shanghai was Yao Ming’s hometown, home to millions of basketball fans, and the Sharks were his former team. How could they be so bad on the court and so impoverished off it? The answer was that the people who ran the team couldn’t care less about whether they won games or attracted fans. The people who ran the team were the city leaders of the Communist Party, who also ran Shanghai.

  “This is where Yao Ming lived.”

  Yu Xiaomiao stood in Room 302 of a pink concrete dormitory of the Shanghai Sports Institute, one of the city’s eight government athletic training centers. Around the corner from a decaying textile mill, the Sports Institute was in the city’s Xuhui district, far from the moneyed glamour of Pudong and the French concession. Xuhui could have been any Chinese city, a knot of drab streets lined with yellowed concrete apartment blocks, a sameness born of the necessity of warehousing people, which was how most people lived in Shanghai, wedged into small spaces.

  Yao’s room was small, maybe fifteen feet by ten feet, and empty except for two metal desks and two chairs. The Sharks still lived in the dorm, along with other athletes using the training center, but Yao’s room had been converted into a front office. It was an innocuous, charmless room that still evoked a wistful nostalgia from Yu Xiaomiao.

  “Now that Yao Ming is gone,” Yu said, “no one comes. It’s because of our record.” He paused, smiling in advance as he made a gentle joke. “Now we feel lonely.”

  Yu was in his sixties, with salt-and-pepper hair, dressed in khakis and a knit sweater, the preppy Westernized appearance favored by some Shanghainese. His father had managed the city’s sports programs under the Nationalists, including the basketball gym on Tibet Road built decades ago by the YMCA. When the Communists took over in 1949, Yu’s father kept the same job, under different bosses, and Yu became one of the city’s top basketball players until he was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution for reeducation with the peasants. When he returned, Yu taught physical education at a local university and became an official in the city’s sports bureaucracy. He joined the Sharks in 1996 and served as “team leader” during Yao’s era.

  His nostalgia for Yao was hardly surprising. Before Yao, the Sharks were mediocre; with him, they became a league powerhouse. Twice, Yao led the Sharks to the finals against Bayi, losing each time, before finally beating them for the championship in 2002. Until then, Bayi had won every title since the founding of the league, and China’s former president, Jiang Zemin, once the party secretary of Shanghai, had described Bayi as the flag of the People’s Liberation Army.

  “How could you pull down the flag?” Yu said, repeating the question that hung over the league in that era.

  It took Yao Ming.

  When he left for the Houston Rockets, the Sharks sank back into mediocrity, and then worse. Yao still visited his old dorm, his old team, whenever he returned to Shanghai. For his marriage, Yao invited his old teammates and coaches to a reception at one of the gilded banquet halls of the Portman Ritz-Carlton hotel. But without Yao on the court, the Sharks had little except his close friend, Liu Wei, the point guard. At one point, the league almost relegated the Sharks to a B-level league as penalty for poor performance. By this season, the Sharks were widely regarded as a joke.

  “Yao Ming was like a very large piece of jade,” Yu said. “We were selfish. We didn’t want him to go. And his teammates wanted him to stay so we could win more championships. But all the officials wanted him to go abroad because it was an honor to Shanghai to send out this basketball talent. So now we are last.”

  We walked out of Yao’s room and Yu locked the door. The hallway was narrow and dimly lit, and it was easy to imagine Yao Ming hunched over, trying not to bang his head against the low ceiling. The Sharks players lived on this floor, one below the coaches, sharing rooms, meals, and a curfew. In the most vibrant city in China, with a nightlife that pulsed early into the morning, the Sharks lived under guard, an existence little different from that of the Brave Dragons, except that temptation was closer.

  “Their lives are boring,” Yu said as we walked out of the dorm. “This is the early stage of China’s basketball reforms. So we don’t want to let them completely free yet. They would go to bars, to Internet cafés and would be drunk.”

  Professional basketball had come to Shanghai not because of the impulses of the marketplace, or to please the city’s legions of basketball fans, or because companies like Nike considered the city a big pot of gold, but because the Communist Party bureaucrats who ran the city did not want to lose face. When the Chinese Basketball Association was created in 1995, Shanghai was not included, an omission noticed by a high-ranking city party chief named Gong Xueping. Shanghai would be embarrassed if it was not part of such a high-profile initiative, and Shanghai’s party bureaucrats would be especially embarrassed. Even in those days, in the mid-1990s, when Shanghai was a symbol of a changing China, the impulse that mattered in the birth of the Shanghai Sharks was the incentive structure of Communist Party officialdom.

  Like someone rummaging through the garage for spare parts, Gong set about conjuring a team from available government resources. First, he needed players, so he visited the city’s sports bureau. Shanghai had the equivalent of a provincial team that competed in government tournaments, and Gong gave the sports bureau an ownership share in the Sharks in exchange for players, as well as room, board, and practice facilities. But the sports bureau team was not very good, so a handful of players were also recruited from a defunct army team in Nanjing and, for a foreign flourish, an Eastern European forward was lured out of the Russian league.

  Next, the team needed publicity. Gong had headed the city’s branch of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, a job that gave him regulatory power, and influence, over the city’s state-controlled media. He contacted Oriental Television, which would later become the government-owned Shanghai Media Group, or SMG, the second most powerful channel in China, after CCTV. Prodded by one of the city’s most powerful officials, SMG also agreed to take a stake in the team and to televise games. Finally Gong cajoled the city’s airport authority into taking the smallest stake, 10 percent, in exchange for providing free airfare to away games.

  Gong had
performed a bureaucratic miracle. He had massaged and manipulated a Communist Party bureaucracy with little interest in basketball into sponsoring a professional team organized around the pretense of operating like a commercial enterprise. The Shanghai Sharks made their debut in the second season of the CBA.

  The Sharks seemingly had everything necessary to become one of the league’s top teams in a city known for entrepreneurship and savvy management. Instead, the team was a disaster. Gong had not created a basketball team but had engineered a bureaucratic Frankenstein’s monster.

  The man placed in charge of the team as general manager was Gong’s former classmate, an ex-television cameraman named Li Yaomin. Li had no experience in sports management but he did have the spirit of a promoter. In the early days, when the team struggled to attract fans, Li once drove out to People’s Square and offered to take people by bus to the game. He had the team install tollbooths outside the arena where fans could toss in coins for a ticket. He was a natural showman, but despite his instructions to run the team as if it were a private enterprise, he soon discovered that the Sharks actually operated as a neglected appendage of the government.

  Or, more precisely, it was an appendage of three government agencies enlisted more out of bureaucratic obligation than any desire to create a real commercially oriented sports team. When other teams began hiring foreign players at higher salaries, Li wanted to go after top talent. But he had to ask permission from both the sports bureau and the television station, neither of which had the interest, or understanding, to improve the team. When one of his top Chinese players became unhappy with his salary, Li wanted to give him a raise. Instead, he was traded. When Li tried to sell advertising to local companies, he was thwarted by the CBA’s monopoly over marketing contracts.

  The Sharks became an inadequately marketed team with mediocre talent trying to lure fans in a city with little patience for mediocrity. Basketball was popular in Shanghai but bad basketball was not. SMG began to show the games at irregular hours, Li said. At one point, Li said he sold only twelve tickets for a game, with only seven of those people showing up. “Actually, about 100 people were at the game but only those seven paid,” he recalled. “We had given a free tour to some PLA soldiers to get more people for the game.”

  The hope was Yao Ming. When Yao was born in 1980, he weighed eleven pounds, twice the size of the average Chinese newborn, and the news was quickly relayed to sports administrators. His parents were former players from Shanghai’s men’s and women’s teams who had been nudged toward marriage by coaches. The couple named their newborn boy Ming, which means bright, but one former Shanghai coach had thought the more appropriate name should have been Yao Panpan, or Long Awaited Yao. “We had been looking forward to the arrival of Yao Ming for three generations,” one retired coach said.

  Yet though Yao became the sports bureau’s most precious asset, the family suffered for several years. Like so many people of her generation, Yao’s mother, Fang Fengdi, had been one of the legion of Red Guards who heeded Mao’s call for revolution by berating teachers, intellectuals, and some party officials. In Shanghai, Fang had led a public denunciation of a party official, Zhu Yong, who spent five years in a reeducation camp, enduring considerable hardship. After Mao’s death, and the end of the Cultural Revolution, Zhu was politically “rehabilitated” and became a sports administrator, a position that enabled him to inflict a measure of revenge on Yao’s mother. She had once been captain of China’s national team, which normally would have assured her a good job in the sports system, but Zhu assigned her a menial position. The family barely subsisted, making it difficult to feed such a large boy.

  The tension between Yao’s family and the sports system never quite eased, but by age thirteen Yao joined the sports bureau’s junior team. He was 6′5″, awkward and painfully thin. He had disliked basketball until his mother took him to see the Harlem Globetrotters. It was the first time he had seen people having fun on the court. Yao’s interest in the game grew as he grew. By seventeen, he was over seven feet tall and joined the Sharks.

  “Yao Ming was a once-in-a-century talent,” Yu Xiaomiao recalled. “The government officials paid lots of attention to him.”

  Yao became part of what was marketed as the Great Wall of China: Wang Zhizhi, the star of Bayi, at 7′1″; Mengke Bateer, then playing for the Beijing Ducks, at 7′1″; and Yao, the youngest and greenest at 7′5″. Crowds started coming to Sharks games just to see the team’s giant young center. By his third season, Yao led the Sharks to the finals against Bayi and established a personal rivalry with Wang Zhizhi. Ratings rose on television, and party bosses at SMG and the sports bureau were suddenly willing to invest more in the team. Players saw their salaries jump sharply; in Yao’s final season, when the Sharks won 20 consecutive games, Li said players earned bonuses for every victory of about 3,500 yuan, or almost $500. Add it up and the bonuses totaled more than the salaries for most Chinese players.

  By the beginning of the 2001 season, Yao appeared to be headed to the NBA. Wang Zhizhi had already signed with the Dallas Mavericks and Mengke Bateer would spend half a season with the Denver Nuggets. But Yao was considered the most valuable prize. By spring of 2001, after leading the Sharks to a second consecutive trip to the finals, Yao and his family wanted to apply for the NBA draft. But at a news conference in May, Li Yaomin announced that the Shanghai Sports Commission was not ready to let Yao leave. The team’s director gave several reasons for the decision, including one that might have seemed minor to anyone unfamiliar with the Chinese system: Yao’s obligation to represent Shanghai in an upcoming domestic tournament, the Ninth Chinese National Games.

  “We all know that this year is the year of the Ninth National Games,” the director said, “and Yao Ming was nurtured by Shanghai single-handedly, so of course Shanghai hopes that Yao Ming can contribute.”

  The Chinese National Games mattered to Chinese sports bureaucrats because their careers depended on them. For participants, the National Games were equivalent to national championships, but for sports bureaucrats, winning medals brought prestige, bigger budgets, more resources, and promotions. Whichever provincial sports bureau won the most medals was essentially doing its patriotic duty, which created a very different incentive structure for popular sports like basketball: the Shanghai Sports Commission wasn’t especially motivated by ticket sales or marketing or creating an exciting environment for Sharks fans. Medals were the motivation.

  It also meant the Chinese Basketball Association existed at the bidding of the National Games. Many CBA teams were still controlled by provincial sports bureaus, so the teams, minus their two foreign players, represented their provinces in the National Games. Even most private teams had an arrangement; the Guangdong Southern Tigers, for example, had a contract to represent Guangdong Province in the National Games. To accommodate the tournament, the CBA revised or abbreviated its schedule so that provincial teams could train. There was no question what mattered more.

  For officials in Shanghai, losing Yao before the Ninth National Games in November would have meant losing any chance for a medal. He played the entire tournament, leading the Sharks to the finals against Bayi, which represented the army. Playing Bayi meant another confrontation with Wang Zhizhi, who was ordered to skip the NBA training camp of the Dallas Mavericks to play in the tournament. In the deciding game, Yao dominated but Bayi won by a single point. Shanghai’s sports bureau got a silver medal.

  Five months later, Yao led the Sharks to their CBA championship victory against Bayi, and team officials unexpectedly announced that he would be eligible for the NBA draft in June. Li Yaomin made all sorts of demands, angering the NBA and Yao’s family, but Yao would make it out. Shanghai basked in the honor of his selection, as did the Sharks, but the team was already an orphan in the bureaucracy. “The government did not care about the team anymore,” Li said. “We were in a weaker position with the government. If we wanted something, they said no. And the television station only gave
us a fixed budget every year.”

  At the training center where the Sharks lived, the team’s status sank immediately as money and resources were shifted to Ping-Pong and the volleyball teams, considered better medal contenders. Yet if sports officials were not willing to invest in the team, they were not willing to sell it, either. When Yao had played, the Sharks had had private suitors, some of whose interest was mostly in attaining the rights to the star center, yet even after Yao left, the Sharks were considered a very desirable property. The private owner of the Fujian team had expressed interest, as had foreigners, but the bureaucracy seemed paralyzed by the prospect of selling something considered a state asset: Who would represent the province in the National Games? What would happen to the jobs of the sports officials who ran the team? How much should they sell it for?

  The Sharks instead went searching for money and found it in the pockets of one of China’s richest men, Zhou Furen. A basketball nut worth more than $2 billion, Zhou had built a steel and fertilizer conglomerate in Liaoning Province and wanted to buy the team outright. Short of that, he agreed to sponsor the Sharks for 15 million yuan a year, or about $2.2 million. The deal gave him marketing rights but no ownership stake, an arrangement that eventually frustrated him. Zhou was among China’s growing class of entrepreneurs—he was an acquaintance of Boss Wang’s—and he bristled at the resistance put forward by Shanghai’s sports bureau. He wanted to fire a coach, but the sports bureau refused. He had ideas about developing players, but the sports bureau would not listen. He was paying for a team that he could not control and could not market.

  “The development of the CBA is similar to the development of the economy here,” Zhou told me. “We need a better system. Now we have a market-oriented economy, which means we need to have a commercial league.”