by Jim Yardley
“I should have become more of a student of the game,” Pickett would tell me. “But I realized that too late.”
He spent twenty-two games in the NBA Development League, not playing especially well, still stung by getting cut from the Hornets. He felt the D-League was beneath him, and the pay was terrible. So he went to Europe the following season, first to France, later to Italy, where he played well but flunked a drug test for marijuana. He was expelled and embarrassed and returned determined to prove he was a good player and citizen. He later jumped to the same Bulgarian team as Donta Smith but he hated Bulgaria. His life was complicated; he had a fiancée and a daughter in Texas and another daughter in Italy, and he needed to keep playing ball. His soon-to-be brother-in-law, Mack Tuck, played in China for the Shandong team.
“He said, ‘You gotta come to China. It’s the next step to the league.’ ”
Pickett liked that teams played three times a week in China. He wanted to show he could be a winner, a star. He thought China might finally deliver him to the NBA.
“I came here to market myself,” he told me. “That is my plan.”
The Brave Dragons planned for him to score about 30 or more points a game and help the team make the playoffs. A successful season was still within reach, as was a playoff berth. Fifteen games remained, and Pickett had already impressed Weiss and the other coaches during workouts. He seemed comfortable working within an offense and getting his Chinese teammates involved. He was a little inscrutable but seemed friendly enough. A little breath of optimism seemed to blow through the team. Everyone assumed he would blend in better than Bonzi.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CAST-OUTS
Leaving behind the cold, dry misery of Taiyuan, we stepped out of the Xiamen airport into the moist, enveloping air of the south China coast. It was February 12, but it could have been spring. My body felt like a dying plant unexpectedly sprinkled with water; corpuscles tingled and unclenched in the wet air. The skin breathed again. Tomorrow, the team was playing the Fujian Sturgeons. The players collected their baggage and boarded a chartered bus for the city of Jinjiang. I was taking a side trip, and a small, wiry man in a neat burgundy shirt and tan slacks was waving a sign with my name. He was a driver for the Yuanchi Rubber Sporting Goods Company, and we accelerated onto the highway through the green hills of Fujian to visit the factory that made 10,000 Spalding basketballs every day.
This part of Fujian was like northern California. We glided past a gated compound of tile-roofed Mediterranean-styled villas and then moved through an industrial zone, crossing the Ma River where, in the distance, I could see groaning orange machines lowering metal containers onto barges, yet another cog in the great Chinese export machine. We sliced through more humped, green hillsides, a few scarred by bulldozers, a handful sheared into quarries, and continued past a showroom for Infiniti, then a showroom for Ford, and finally the rising towers of another unfinished apartment complex, this one encircled by towering orange cranes. A highway sign in English and Chinese announced an exit for “Future Coast.” We took it.
Fujian has always chased the future, though Fujianese were famous for going somewhere else to find it. Fujian was the locus of China’s illegal human smuggling trade, where farmers or other idled workers paid smugglers known as snakeheads to transport them overseas for work. Illegal Fujianese migrants settled Chinatown in New York and continued seeding themselves around the world, despite the inevitable hazards. In 1993, the freighter Golden Venture ran aground near New York carrying 286 smuggled Chinese workers, most from Fujian. Ten people died. Then, in 2000, the bodies of fifty-eight Fujianese were discovered inside an airless tomato truck in England. Yet these periodic tragedies did little to deter migration. In 2004, smugglers posted fliers on one Fujianese island promising work and money in the new land of opportunity called Iraq. A handful of men jumped at the chance and were promptly kidnapped after crossing into the Iraqi war zone from Jordan. Their later release averted a diplomatic crisis with China.
The road to Future Coast soon delivered us into the countryside where we passed roadside clusters of three-story concrete houses, each in a different stage of construction. These houses were monuments to the Fujianese diaspora; when someone leaves for overseas work, he or she sends back remittances to family, often to build a house. When money arrives, the family pays for construction—maybe a new second or third floor—until the money runs out. The house exists in a state of suspended animation until the next wire transfer arrives from London or Vancouver or New York. These houses were far grander than those of the people who remained to farm or work in nearby factories and served the same purpose as the fliers circulated by snakeheads. Their message was to go.
We diverted off the road to Future Coast and climbed into the hills. This was where the factories were located, nearly all of them flat-roofed, tile-covered concrete buildings, one indistinguishable from the other, including the Yuanchi Rubber Sporting Goods Company. The factory manager, Alan Lin, greeted me in the factory courtyard. He was from Taiwan and his family owned the conglomerate that owned Yuanchi. His family had gotten into the rubber business in 1949, after fleeing the mainland following the Chinese civil war. They first produced rubber frogs that hopped, and later moved into sports balls after being contacted by Spalding. Spalding, maker of the official ball of the NBA, had already figured out that the future of manufacturing was in Asia.
When James Naismith invented basketball in 1891 as a tool of muscular Christianity, the commercial impulse inevitably followed his game. After all, someone had to make and sell the ball. Naismith had initially used a soccer ball, but within a few years, as basketball’s popularity ensured its continued existence, he began looking for someone to make a ball specifically for his sport. He found A. G. Spalding.
Albert Goodwill Spalding was a baseball pitcher, eventually elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, who opened a sporting goods store with his brother in 1876. His company not only manufactured sports equipment but invented it; he standardized the baseball, produced the first baseball gloves, manufactured the first football and the first volleyball, and, in 1894, made the first true basketball. It seems likely that the YMCA missionaries who brought the game to Tianjin arrived with a Spalding ball. Spalding did its manufacturing in the town of Chicopee, Massachusetts, not far from the YMCA’s teaching college in Springfield. For almost nine decades, Spalding made basketballs and other inflatable balls in Chicopee before the rise of Asia upended the economics of manufacturing.
“There was always the issue of how to get lower costs,” said Gary Gasperack, a longtime Spalding executive with extensive experience in Asia.
Spalding bounced between different corporate owners and ultimately became one of many examples of how companies that invented things in America could no longer afford to make them there. During the 1960s and 1970s, Spalding was owned by a conglomerate based in the Midwest that hewed to the era’s prevailing business ethos that big corporations should diversify their portfolio of companies to protect against overdependence on one category.
In the early 1980s, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, the former investment bank, assessed Spalding, which was facing competition from other sporting goods manufacturers such as Wilson, MacGregor, and Rawlings, and recommended major changes. Manufacturing was becoming a race to find the lowest costs and that race could not be won in America. Lufkin advised that Spalding continue manufacturing products where they had technical expertise and patent protection, such as the company’s line of golf balls, which were the first to use a hardened center rather than wound rubber. But other products needed to be outsourced overseas, almost always to Asia. Spalding had already outsourced some products, including cheap rubber balls, to Taiwan, India, and Pakistan, but now the company moved production of the high-end, laminated NBA game ball to a factory in South Korea.
“Korea had the necessary technical know-how,” Gasperack said. “They knew how to work with leather.”
While corporations li
ke Spalding were chasing the lowest price from country to country, the rising affluence that resulted in East Asia was stirring political change. South Korea and Taiwan were still soft authoritarian states, but rising wealth brought rising expectations and emboldened democratic movements.
Except in China. China then was much like North Korea today: poor, desperate, and disconnected from the world until Deng opened the door in 1978. Western companies were initially cautious about entering China; businessmen in Hong Kong and Taiwan provided much of the early foreign investment. By 1992, after Deng had made his Southern Tour, Taiwanese companies had begun rushing into the mainland. Labor costs had been rising steadily in South Korea and Taiwan, and Spalding, among many companies, started complaining about rising production costs to manufacturing subcontractors like Yuanchi.
“We said to them that we are going to have to do something,” Gasperack recalled. “You’ll need to find an alternative. Prices are going up too high.”
Alan Lin’s family signed its first agreement with Spalding in 1973 to make cheap rubber balls. Yuanchi had been dividing its manufacturing between factories in Taiwan and Thailand until a fire destroyed the factory in Taiwan, leaving the company struggling to meet its orders. Deng’s tour convinced the Lin family to get into China. Fujian was close to Taiwan, shared cultural and linguistic ties, and other Taiwanese companies were already opening factories there. Alan Lin’s uncle toured the province and, helped by a Taiwanese friend already doing business in Fujian, secured the land where Yuanchi now made balls. The land was cheap, and the labor was the cheapest in East Asia.
Basketball had come to China to spread the word of God. The manufacturing of basketballs now came to China in search of the lowest price.
In the early 1990s, Alan Lin imagined his life involving something other than rubber balls. He left Taiwan and his family to study interior design at Michigan State University. He graduated and moved to New York, experiencing a very different world, before he ran into immigration problems and had to leave America for lack of a green card. He needed a job, and his father and two uncles were running the family conglomerate. He moved between different factories before being sent to Fujian to oversee Yuanchi.
Lin was a small man with styled, spiky black hair. He was wearing a trendy pair of red and black Puma running shoes, courtesy of the family’s joint venture with Puma, and dressed in the athletic, casual chic popular in China. I had followed him into the administration building at the front of the factory complex to a second-floor conference room decorated with flow charts of the family’s corporate structure. There were no power offices or lavish meeting rooms, no displays of corporate ego. Yuanchi was about delivering low prices and quality balls. Period.
Lin seemed happy to have company. He had lived in a bedroom down the hall from his accounting office for seven years, apart from his wife and daughter, and when I asked about any hardship, he smiled and shrugged. He flew home every five weeks, spent a week with the family, and then returned. Many of his workers were migrants from inland provinces and lived in the concrete dormitory near the administration building. They got free room and board, contingent on keeping their room clean, and earned, on average, about 1,000 yuan, or $150, a month, which was above the minimum wage.
Gary Gasperack had told me that the basic process of manufacturing a basketball had not changed much from the 1960s, which was why chasing cost became the priority. Profit margins were thin, and Lin said this factory did not make a profit the previous year because rubber prices, tied to oil, were very high. Moreover, the global recession hammered exports; Lin said sales in the United States dropped by about 15 percent. Some exporters had to close and Fujianese officials, desperate to keep factories open, sweetened a program to give tax rebates to exporters and also canceled plans to increase the local monthly minimum wage. The flicker of good news was that domestic sales were rising and that 10 million Spalding balls were sold in China the year before. The problem was that very few of those balls were actually Spalding balls.
“We found in the whole China market that if you buy ten Spalding basketballs, only one is made here,” Lin said. “Nine are counterfeit. It is a very serious problem.”
Yuanchi hired corporate spies to locate counterfeit factories and tried in vain to take legal action. “But afterward,” he said, “they are still running.” Local officials protect the counterfeit factories to protect tax revenues; sometimes the officials get a cut of the profits. Laminated leather balls were more expensive and easy to copy. A counterfeiter might reduce costs by 20 percent by using cheaper rubber and by not paying a licensing fee to companies like Spalding or Nike. Then the counterfeiters sold the fake balls to retailers at lower prices than the real balls. A retailer knowingly kept a mix of real and fake balls and sold them for the same price.
“It is everywhere in China,” Lin said.
We left the conference room and walked into the huge workrooms where balls were made. Alan estimated that making a single rubber basketball took about twenty-nine minutes, a process that began in a large workshop where blocks of yellow rubber were melted into thin sheets that became the bladder of the ball. The ball’s valve, though, was created in a final workshop larger than a football field. The value was the brand. At one end of the workshop, two women were bent over a long rectangular glass table and carefully pressed pieces of gold-colored foil over the red outline of the Spalding name to create the company’s familiar red and yellow logo, which would be applied to the ball.
“That’s why we tell our customers that if you want to emboss your logo, it will cost you more,” said Alan. “It looks more expensive.”
We then walked through a room surrounded by the totems of American sports. There were boxes and boxes of Spalding basketballs, of various models and embossments, but also boxes filled with Nike balls. One box was filled with miniature black and yellow rubber Nike footballs. Another overflowed with orange and white footballs embossed with the familiar Longhorn logo of the University of Texas. Another had basketballs embossed with the word “Respect.” Maybe the child of some illegal Fujianese immigrant was playing with one in New York.
There also were balls embossed with the logo of the Houston Rockets, stacks and stacks of them. Before Yao Ming went to the NBA in 2002, Alan said the NBA struggled to sell branded balls in China. Few consumers knew the Spalding brand or connected it with anything desirable. But once Yao started playing, and the NBA started appearing far more frequently on CCTV5, Spalding’s sales jumped sharply in the domestic market. Counterfeiting was a major problem, but even fake Spalding balls helped spread brand awareness with the buying public.
Yao Ming had stimulated an entire economy. No wonder the NBA was so interested in having its own Chinese league. And no wonder China was so eager to master the art not just of making basketballs, but of making basketball players.
The small man across the table in Jinjiang, where the Brave Dragons were to play the Sturgeons, had a very long fingernail. He also had a flamboyant Elvis hairdo and was grinning and leaning back in his chair, seemingly bemused by our meeting. In ancient times, a Qing nobleman might grow out the fingernail of his pinky to demonstrate refinement and advertise that his station placed him far above doing any manual labor. Now, like so many things, the long fingernail was mostly a symbol of money, if nouveaux money. I later learned that the foreigners on the Fujian Sturgeons called this man Longnail, and Longnail was the Sturgeons’ Team Leader. He was once a party secretary in a small village outside Jinjiang who engineered a deal to sell village land to a local peasant. The peasant had started making zippers in a single room and wanted to build a factory. Outraged, and apparently cheated, the landless villagers tossed out Longnail, but the deal went through. The expropriated land was used for the first factory of what would become SBS, one of the world’s largest zipper makers. The peasant, Shi Nengkeng, eventually bought the Sturgeons and created a job for Longnail, who was now a made man.
We were in a cinder block conference
room in the underbelly of the Sturgeons’ stadium. Tipoff was eight hours away, and we were discussing security. Weiss, Garrison, Wingtips, and I sat opposite the Sturgeons’ coach, a police officer, Longnail, and an assistant manager. The game commissioner sat at the head of the table beside the referees.
“We will follow our normal principles,” the game commissioner said, opening the meeting. “To be serious, to be fair, and to make the game go smoothly.”
The morning security meeting was a ritual before every game in the Chinese Basketball Association. Attendance was mandatory for coaches. In Taiyuan, the meeting was conducted in the only heated space in the stadium, a large room with leather sofas dominated by a wall decorated by a floor-to-ceiling poster of a beach, with blue water, white sand, and swaying palm trees, If you posed for a photograph, you could convince someone that you had visited a tropical island rather than the coal capital of central China. To stay warm, Tracy often waited here before games. I called it the Hawaii Room.
When Bob Weiss attended his first security meeting in the Hawaii Room, he barely understood anything, other than the seriousness assigned to security in China. Everyone was grave. The game commissioner peppered various people with various questions. As the team’s official representative, Wingtips nodded at appropriate moments. Police officers confirmed that there were enough police; only later, as the season wore on, did the meetings become fairly pro forma. Now, though, with the Brave Dragons and the Sturgeons fighting for playoff spots, the game commissioner spoke with a deep seriousness.
“This is a critical time in the season,” the commissioner continued. “The rankings matter more and more, so the officials will take the game more seriously.”
The referees nodded wordlessly. No words were needed. The game commissioner was talking about corruption without talking about it. Fujian held the sixth playoff position, while Shanxi had slipped into twelfth place. The Tim Pickett experience was not off to a good start. The Brave Dragons had not yet won a game with him. But the teams were bunched together and a winning streak could quickly reverse the rankings. With so much at stake, owners had been known to buy referees, or at least rent them for a night. Before the season, league officials instituted a new policy that required referees to always travel in groups. If they did anything by themselves—say, go have a cup of coffee—they were required to submit a form of explanation to the league. The thinking was that if they were never alone, they would never sneak away to accept a bribe from an owner, a logic that ignored the possibility that an owner might simply buy all the referees.
