Brave Dragons

by Jim Yardley

  What most separated Winnerway from the rest of the league, however, was Chinese talent. They had more of it than any team in China. When I asked Liu how they got it, he placed his elbows on his knees, leaned forward, his face close to mine, and grinned.

  Before the season, I had watched Winnerway in an exhibition tournament, which was sponsored by the Asian Basketball Association, and included teams from Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan. I had finagled a seat on a VIP platform, not far from the commissioner of the Asian Basketball Association, Carl Ching. The ABA was the regional affiliate of FIBA, the global basketball body, which meant Ching was a powerful figure in Asian basketball. He also was reportedly one of the biggest crime syndicate kingpins in Hong Kong. He had denied these allegations but authorities in Australia and the United States had barred him from entering either country. When I first saw him, he was on the court before the game, a man in his sixties laughing and chucking set shots.

  I was sitting with Gary Boyson, an international scout for the Los Angeles Lakers, who was scouting Winnerway. Many of the team’s older stars were sitting out, so Boyson was taking notes on the teenagers who might one day become NBA prospects. Boyson was about 6′3″, heavyset with thick legs and thick fingers, and was draped in a very large, very purple Lakers shirt. International scouting had existed for years, but now the NBA teams were especially eager to find players from China, given the commercial jackpot created by Yao Ming. Having a Chinese star meant having a piece of the Chinese market and also helped advance the NBA’s ambitions in China. The previous season, Boyson had persuaded the Lakers to sign a raw Chinese player, Sun Yue, in the second round. (Sun never made it with the Lakers, though he became a starter on China’s Olympic team.) When I followed Boyson through the bowels of the arena, the effect was of riding the wake of a visiting dignitary. Heads turned at the sight of a man with the power to catapult a kid out of south China onto an NBA court with Kobe Bryant.

  During warm-ups, Boyson pointed out different players. There was Su Wei, 7′1″, once considered a possible heir to Yao Ming. He was twenty. Another kid, Wang Zheng, was even bigger, maybe 7′2″, and younger, barely seventeen. There were two point guards, Chen Jianghua and Liu Xiaoyu; a bruising eighteen-year-old power forward, Dong Hanlin; and a wiry, 6′9″ small forward, Zhou Peng, not yet twenty. None of them started yet for Winnerway, except for the point guards, who shared the job, but they probably represented the heart of China’s future Olympic teams.

  As the players trotted through layups, I asked Boyson how many of them might be good enough in the future to play in the NBA.

  “Maybe one,” he guessed.

  What about for a major college program in the United States?

  “Every one of them,” he answered more confidently. “These guys would win the NCAA.” Then he reconsidered. “Don’t say that. But they would make the Sweet Sixteen,” the top sixteen teams in the annual National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament.

  Winnerway’s talent could be ascribed to the same forces that had once transformed Guangdong Province. Deng had unlocked China at a fortuitous demographic moment, with untold millions of young people idled, impoverished, and bored in the countryside. Deng began to let them loose, and the millions of migrants who poured out of the countryside to fill Guangdong’s factories represented the competitive advantage that made China a manufacturing colossus. They were mostly literate and they mostly deferred to authority, meaning they were capable of learning to work on an assembly line and willing to do so for some of the lowest wages in the world.

  Basketball, technically, remained under the old system. Once a kid was identified as a prospect, he was funneled into a sports school and his rights belonged to the provincial team. If a province lacked good players, a team had to get creative. When Winnerway first got organized in the early and mid-1990s, the team hired veteran players, including some recent retirees from the national team who were no longer affiliated with a sports bureau. But by 1998, the team realized it needed to develop talent of its own. It was under contract to draw players out of the sports systems in Guangdong and neighboring Guangxi Province, which had produced the team’s current top star, Zhu Fangyu. But the local talent pool wasn’t deep enough to match Winnerway’s ambitions, so the team decided to do for itself what Gary Boyson did for the Lakers. The difference being that Winnerway was scouting kids as young as thirteen.

  To find players meant outmaneuvering the sports system. Most kids in sports schools were required to sign a contract at a certain age that transferred their rights to the affiliated CBA team. But Winnerway began searching for kids before they signed the contract, or for kids who had opted out of the sports school system altogether. Winnerway now had players from at least nine Chinese provinces. Family members were often relocated to Dongguan and given a job in the company. The team also offered a correspondence program with two local universities so that players could work toward a degree. Perhaps the biggest enticement was that anyone playing for Winnerway was likely to get a shoe deal with Nike, Adidas, or the Chinese sportswear company Anta. Shoe companies, eager to find the next great Chinese star, were banking that he would be playing for Winnerway.

  Liu Xiaoyu, the point guard, had actually recruited the team. Born in 1989, three months before the Tiananmen Square crackdown, Liu played in Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province. Jilin was an anomaly in that many of the best players attended regular high schools rather than government sports academies. A top student, fluent in English, Liu was recruited by the country’s top two universities, Peking University and Tsinghua University, and also invited, at age fifteen, to join the junior team of the Shanghai Sharks. He spent two days in camp with the Sharks but returned to high school after feeling lonely and overwhelmed. Less than a year later, though, Liu contacted Winnerway and met with the same scout who had found Yi Jianlian.

  “He said, ‘Hey, Yi Jianlian. I found him, and now he’s a superstar,’ ” Liu recalled. “Now he goes around saying, ‘I found Yi Jianlian and Liu Xiaoyu.’ ”

  Now Liu had a shoe deal with Nike and was one of the last two players cut from China’s Olympic team. His parents had moved to Dongguan and he had bought them a BMW. The general manager, Liu Hongjiang, said Winnerway paid Chinese players some of the highest salaries in the league, ranging from $50,000 for a bench player to as much as $300,000 for one of the team’s four Olympians. When it started investing so much in its Chinese players, Winnerway also began rethinking its approach to foreign imports. It stopped looking for Americans who would score 40 points a game and started looking for Americans who could tutor the team’s younger Chinese players and fit into the team. It didn’t want a hired gun scorer or a bad boy. Winnerway wanted a Good American.

  For the past decade, they had found one in Jason Dixon.

  Dixon was a star during his early years in Dongguan, a scorer and a rebounder, averaging more than 20 points and 12 rebounds a game, and the team depended on him the same way most Chinese teams still depend on their imports. His numbers mattered to him, because he played on one-year contracts, without any real job security other than a stat sheet that proved his value. But then, several years ago, the team’s management told him they wanted to showcase Yi Jianlian, which meant that Dixon would become the team’s designated rebounder and defender. The glory would go to the Chinese players.

  Dixon was a little wistful about it all. At 6′9″, thickly muscled with his hair braided into long black cornrows, Dixon was a formidable physical presence, if a quiet man. When the Chinese sports press lashed out at Bonzi and other Americans for shooting too much and passing too little, Dixon was often cited as the right kind of American, an import who knew his role and accepted it. Except Dixon was not actually very happy about it. “I don’t like it,” he admitted as we sat inside the Winnerway hotel. “I want to score.”

  Dixon was now the second-longest tenured player on the team, after Du Feng, the Olympian who was also an assistant coach. He set picks, guarded the other team
’s foreign big man, grabbed rebounds, and, when necessary, scored. He averaged about 15 points a game. When Bonzi was still playing and Winnerway needed more points inside, Dixon scored 32 points against Olumide, sending Boss Wang into a rage. But more often his role was to complement the Chinese stars on the court and tutor the young players in practice. His current project was the massive seventeen-year-old Wang Zheng, who Dixon thought had a chance at the NBA. “I’m telling you, Wang Zheng is going to be a beast!” he promised. “A beast!”

  Dixon arrived in China in 1997, playing for the Fujian team before eventually joining Winnerway. He had always considered himself a “small-time player,” having graduated from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in 1995 and then playing in Turkey, Cyprus, Israel, and Argentina before arriving in China. The quality of play was best in Turkey, and he liked Israel “once you got over the fear of the bombs and all that stuff.” But China became his career. He recalled that during the early days of the league, the team would travel to games on twenty-four-hour-long train trips.

  “The hotels were so terrible,” he said. “The beds were terrible. There were roaches.”

  He learned enough Mandarin to communicate with his teammates and began to understand why Chinese coaches often complained that Chinese players were lazy. “They are overworked, so they are lazy,” he said. “It’s like people who work in factories here. Because they are so overworked, they do as little as possible because they know that no matter how hard they work, there is always something else waiting.” Gradually, though, Winnerway changed as the team was more exposed to basketball outside China. He thought the head coach, Li Chunjiang, had improved dramatically after spending time in the United States with American coaches. The team’s weight training also improved, and the Chinese players became stronger, which gave them confidence. Before, he said, “all we would do were squats and a couple of curls. And then they were smoking cigarettes.”

  He knew his reputation but questioned whether being the Good American brought any real reward. Dixon’s wife and two children lived in Colorado, and he was gone much of the year while making a salary less than most foreigners. He was awed by Olumide’s supposed $350,000 deal. Every season began with uncertainty as to whether the team would keep him. The previous season, the team had signed a new corporate sponsor, which wanted to dump Dixon and bring in a bigger center. Dixon wasn’t certain he had a job, until the coaches overruled the sponsor and brought him back for the sake of team chemistry. He had held his own this season but the competition was improving.

  “I noticed this year that no one was double-teaming me anymore,” he said. “Then I realized everyone was seven feet tall and had played in the NBA.”

  Winnerway usually delayed hiring a second foreigner until midseason, when management had assessed the team’s weaknesses. This year, they brought in Smush Parker, a former Lakers point guard, because the team’s Chinese point guards were inexperienced and injured. Parker was probably the most talented player on the team but his minutes were restricted, except in the biggest games. His job was to help Winnerway win a championship and train the Chinese guards so they could help the team win championships in the future.

  Dixon was not certain about next season, but he had had one recent ego boost that week. A Chinese reporter had approached him about a retrospective piece, having discovered that Dixon ranked among the Top Ten scorers and rebounders in the history of the Chinese league.

  It seemed that a pretty good argument could be made that the Good American would belong in the Hall of Fame, if the league had one.

  The score was 62–34 at halftime, in favor of Guangdong. They had 17 assists. The Brave Dragons had one. This was the first time this season when the outcome of the game was determined in the first five minutes, or perhaps before the tip. The previous night, Coach Liu had prepared the team by showing film of the next opponent, the neighboring Dongguan New Century Leopards. When Bonzi was around, he kept the score close against Guangdong until the final minutes, when he was exhausted. The players may have hated him, but he gave them confidence. Without him, they looked scared even before the opening tip. They kept peeking over their shoulders to look at the Guangdong team warm up: four Olympians, a former Laker, and the best young players in China.

  I sat beside Tina, a nineteen-year-old editor for the website Netease. She covered the Guangdong team and made a point of showing me the young power forward, Dong Hanlin. “He’s got a great body,” she told me with a straight face. It took me a moment to understand that she meant just that: He’s got a great body for basketball, like a prototype, and that maybe he could be the next Chinese star to make the NBA. This was the parlor game in Guangdong: Who would be next? When the injured point guard Chen Jianghua entered the game, Tina nodded. “He will be the Chinese Allen Iverson,” she said, pausing to rethink her prediction. “Actually, his skills can’t compare with Iverson’s, so he’ll have to try harder.”

  The Brave Dragons put up a better fight in the second half. This was a homecoming for the exiled Guangdongers, Joy and Little Ba, and they played well. The crowd cheered when Joy came into the game, and Little Ba and Wei put on a nice shooting display in the second half to draw the Brave Dragons closer, if never too close. Joy’s girlfriend, whose English name was Michelle, was the head of the Guangdong’s cheerleading team and—Tina told me—the most famous cheerleader in China. In a lopsided game, the crowd seemed most excited when Michelle trotted out with her girls at halftime and started grinding to an English-language techno-disco song that needed no translation: “I’ll Lick Your Ice Cream, and You Can Lick My Lollipop.”

  The final score was 106–89, with Guangdong resting their starters for most of the second half. They could have won by 50, but I later learned that they pulled back out of respect for Weiss. Liu Hongjiang, the opposing general manager, was intrigued by the American coach and did not want to insult him.

  The Brave Dragons now had seven games left. They could not afford to lose many more.

  The following afternoon the Winnerway team gathered at their practice gym, a short drive from the team dormitory. The gym was a modernist glass and aluminum barn filled with natural light and surrounded by weeping willows and luxury high-rise apartments. I came on the bus with Liu Hongjiang and some of the younger players, but the stars arrived on their own. In the parking lot were a BMW, a couple of Audis, a Honda, a few Mercedes, and a Cadillac Escalade. I did not know of a single Chinese player on the Brave Dragons who owned a car.

  Practice lasted precisely seventy-seven minutes, with every minute accounted for. I sat beside Liu Hongjiang and soon a handful of other men arrived. A man in a blue sweater and wire-rimmed glasses studiously watched the players run full-court fast break drills. He paced, head down, and occasionally checked the whiteboard where an assistant coach was keeping results for every player during timed shooting drills. “That’s Liu Xiaoyu’s father,” the general manager said. A man in a zippered sweater standing by the door was the father of Wang Shipeng, one of the team’s Olympians, while other fathers also trickled in. Liu Hongjiang was enthralled watching Smush Parker run the break; the previous night, Parker placed a perfect transition bounce pass into the hands of a player streaking toward the basket who then flushed a dunk over Olumide. It would have been a routine fast break in the NBA, but it was the first time I’d seen it all season in China.

  “Our Chinese national team would be number four in the world if we had Smush Parker,” Liu said, excited, if overly optimistic.

  When I had asked him how long it would take for China to produce an NBA-quality point guard, he had replied ten or twenty years. Across the court, the small forward Zhu Fangyu was shooting 3-pointers in the timed drill. His form was perfect, the ball spinning tightly as it snapped through the net. He was the league’s reigning most valuable player and he had toyed with the Brave Dragons, at one point laughing while he made an open layup. “I want Zhu to go play in Europe,” Liu said. “His growth will be hampered if he stays here. He i
s well above other Chinese players.”

  Zhu fired another 3. The rotation was again perfect. Liu broke into a grin, unable to contain himself, proud of the talent assembled on this court. “This is the best of the best,” he said.

  Then he leaned over to me, and whispered in my ear. He wanted to know Weiss’s salary.

  “Is it a lot?” he asked.

  “How much is a lot?” I answered, and Liu started laughing.

  Winnerway was contemplating expanding its coaching staff. The head coach, Li Chunjiang, apprenticed in the United States and saw that NBA teams had position coaches and tactical coaches. Liu wondered if Weiss would be interested. I was not certain what to say but I offered that Weiss might be interested, that he had enjoyed Shanxi but that the team had issues. I mentioned that the owner was “unique.”

  Liu grinned and leaned in. His eyes widened and he spoke his first English word of the day to describe Boss Wang.

  “Crazy!” he said, laughing.

  Practice ended. The young point guard Liu Xiaoyu stopped over to say goodbye in his perfect English. Then he collected his father, and they drove off in their BMW.

  The Brave Dragons left Guangdong Province defeated. Their next game, against the Dongguan New Century Leopards, was more evenly matched until the final quarter when Boss Wang, having pushed into the huddle to take over coaching duties, decided to remove Olumide and Pickett from a close game. The foreigners were baffled and angry, equating it to quitting, but Boss Wang saw it as lodging a protest, having watched Olumide get hammered all night and concluding that the refs were cheating and the game’s outcome had already been decided.

  As in many other things in China, the Leopards represented an attempt to copy a successful experiment, in this case the Winnerway team. The Leopards players lived in a lakefront luxury residential complex owned by the team’s multimillionaire owner. They played in a new arena built by the owner, and their philosophy was grounded in developing future Chinese stars. Their 7′1″ power forward, Zhang Kai, was already likened to Kevin Garnett, the great forward for the Boston Celtics. Their point guard, Meng Duo, had returned from a summer of strength training in Las Vegas with the muscular upper torso of an NBA guard. Just twenty, Meng also had “a very good body.”