by Jim Yardley
“Tim,” shouted Ren Hongbing in English, as the crowd exploded. “I love you!”
Pickett was not himself. He moved in a daze, holding his head. Then he grabbed his tweaked ankle. He missed badly on a shot. Kobe got fouled hard, and the arena was boiling. More plastic bottles were tossed onto the floor.
“Please stop!” Ren Hongbing announced. “You are Shanxi people!”
Five minutes, twelve seconds left. The Brave Dragons led 94–92. Tuck had an awkward left-handed shot and had missed most of his 3-pointers, but now he made one to put Shandong ahead. Pickett could not respond. The crowd was chanting “Tim, Tim!” but he was staggering around as Shandong made another 3-pointer to lead 98–94. Weiss called a timeout. Little Ba checked in for Pickett, who took an ice pack and sat down on the floor near the bench. Boss Wang was pointing at him, furious, gesturing for him to return to the game.
Mack Tuck walked over to the Shanxi bench and confronted Boss Wang.
“Leave him alone!” Tuck screamed. “He’s hurt. He would play if he could. You come in here and play! You come in here!”
One minute was remaining. Shandong led 101–96. Unthinkable news rippled across press row: Bayi had lost. The path for the Brave Dragons was almost cleared. Olumide was fouled and got two shots. He made both. The score was 101–98. Shandong called timeout with forty-nine seconds left. Coach Liu and Weiss were on the court together, talking to the players as Boss Wang remained on the bench, legs crossed. The coaches were calling for a press.
Shandong inbounded the ball and struggled to move it across midcourt in the required ten seconds. Mack Tuck picked up his dribble and was swarmed. He was trapped, with nowhere to go, but he had to hurry. And that was when the season was decided: Tuck took a step. Then another step. And then a third. No call! Weiss was shouting for a travel, but the whistle didn’t come. Tuck tossed the ball down the court ahead of the defense for an easy layup. Shandong was now ahead 103–98. Thirty-six seconds were left.
Boss Wang walked down the sideline to the game commissioner. He was shouting at him, screaming, and the fans were screaming behind him. Then he drove his foot into the advertising board in front of the scorer’s table. The sound was as sharp as a gunshot. The deluge followed: plastic water bottles, lighters, crumpled paper cups, even cell phones. Fans were screaming and throwing everything in their pockets.
The referees tried to keep the game going. Pickett, back in the game, missed a 3-pointer. More bottles banged onto the court. A Shandong player was fouled and went to the free throw line even as ball girls and ball boys were on the court with brooms, trying to sweep up the mess. More cups and bottles rained down.
“You are Shanxi people, right?” Ren Hongbing asked, desperately. “Please stop!”
But Boss Wang’s signal had been clear. The game was fixed. The fans behind the basket in Brave Dragons jerseys were pelting cups on the floor as a chant filled the arena. “Hei Shao! Hei Shao!” Black whistle! Black whistle!
The Shandong coach pulled his players off the court. Police trotted onto the floor and formed a perimeter. Pickett was on bended knee. Ball girls were frantically pushing brooms over the court. Weiss was waving to the fans, gesturing for them to stop. Twenty-seven seconds remained and Shanxi trailed by only five. There was still a chance. But this was almost a riot. The Shandong player shot his foul shots as the ball girls kept sweeping. The deluge of plastic kept falling.
Now the refs wanted to run out the clock, so the game and the cleanup were under way at the same time. Tuck had to shove a ball boy out of his way as he ran down the floor. Tracy was sitting in the penalty box shielding a friend’s child, trying not to get hit by any objects. There were maybe forty people on the court, not counting police, and finally the clock expired. Shandong won, 107–101.
The police began to move out the crowd. The arena was suddenly silent, except for the sound of cups and lighters hitting the court.
Trust is the essential intangible of any human experiment. Trust accrues from shared experience, mutual respect, and common purpose, and if it germinates, if it takes hold, it can create a reservoir of goodwill as strong as the foundation of a building. You give the benefit of the doubt to someone you trust if something goes wrong, if something seems a bit fishy. But someone you don’t trust falls into a different category. You might think the worst of that person when something goes wrong, if something seems strange, even if you cannot prove it, even if it is not true. One thing Tim Pickett had never earned from his Chinese teammates, rightly or not, was trust.
The players trotted into the locker room after the buzzer sounded. Police were still on the court and had blocked off part of the hallway outside the locker rooms. The Shandong team was trying to leave the arena, but Shanxi fans had surrounded their bus, screaming and throwing things. Inside the locker room, the Brave Dragons were already furious when Boss Wang arrived in a rage and confronted Pickett, pointing at him and accusing him of throwing the game. A teammate shouted in his face, “Fuck you! You got paid!” Boss Wang kept shouting, and Pickett shouted back, furious that the team was turning on him.
“You guys can’t even understand each other,” Garrison said, intervening. “Let me translate.”
But Boss Wang punched Garrison twice in the kidney and shouted for Pickett to leave. Big Sun started edging Pickett out of the room, when Olumide walked through the door and defused the situation by speaking to Big Sun.
“I told him not to touch him,” Olumide would tell me the next day.
The foundation of the building had crumbled. Pickett and Olumide walked back to the pink sofas on the court. When Weiss returned from the news conference, he went to find them and took a seat beside Tracy on the team’s empty bench. His eyes were red. Tracy was at the verge of tears. Everyone wanted to leave, but they had to wait for the bus. The bus never left until Boss Wang finished screaming, and behind the closed door of the locker room, he was still screaming.
In the silence, the Shandong players walked onto the court. One player was piggybacking an injured teammate. They were sneaking out of the arena through a side entrance where a different bus was waiting.
“Call my translator!” Mack Tuck shouted to Pickett. “Am I gonna come to you or are you gonna come to me?”
“Tell them to bring the money!” Pickett yelled back, sarcastically.
Ten minutes passed. A few members of the cheerleading team had changed into street clothes and were sitting on the sideline. Then the sound of a door and Boss Wang strutted onto the court, shouting at Olumide and Pickett to return to the meeting. They walked back to the locker room with Weiss, but the meeting was over. The Chinese players were gone.
Boss Wang sat down beside a few of the cheerleaders. He was grinning, seemingly embarrassed, and then he started to laugh. Everyone laughed with him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
TENTH PLACE
The next morning, it seemed the season was over. The Brave Dragons had missed the playoffs, probably to the relief of CBA officials, who couldn’t have relished the prospect of a nationally televised home game in Taiyuan, given the near riot of the previous night. The league levied a fine of 150,000 yuan, or about $22,000, the third fine of the season against the Shanxi team for fan infractions or owner misbehavior. Technically, a third fine represented a red line that, if crossed, could have meant expulsion from the CBA. Boss Wang and Zhang Beihai were summoned to the league office in Beijing to do their penance.
The next morning, Olumide was on the telephone at his desk in Little Nigeria, trying to finalize where next he would take his talents. He usually went to Puerto Rico, which amounted to detox after China, with fewer games, less pressure, and plenty of time to sit on the beach. “It eees like a vacation!” Olumide said. But agents had also contacted him about teams in Belgium, Israel, and a new option, Iran. An Israel-Iran bidding war seemed possible. He was open to either team. Now all he wanted was to get out of Taiyuan. He was still owed the final payment of his contract and he wasn’t planning to
do anything that might give cause for him not getting it. Practice was in a few hours.
“If they ask me to run 100 miles today,” he said, “I’ll run it.”
Everyone awoke with a bitter aftertaste. The petri dish now seemed cracked into two pieces. The Chinese players had already built a circumstantial case against Tim Pickett. Most of them would tell me later, privately, that they believed Pickett had faked his injury. No one had any proof, but the players were still suspicious because Pickett had eaten with the Shandong players and because he had admitted that the Shandong translator offered him money not to play.
That was enough to convince them. Pickett was furious. Yes, he had eaten with the Shandong team, but only because he was supposed to eat with his brother-in-law, Mack Tuck. When he arrived to collect him, Tuck was already eating at the hotel with his teammates. He simply sat at Tuck’s table. Yes, the Shandong translator had offered him a bribe not to play—but he said he refused. Losing had cost him money, he said, since Boss Wang had offered him a quadruple bonus for a win and since his contract would have paid him a bonus for making the playoffs.
“I just want to get my money and get out of here,” Pickett told me later. “This place is crazy. I’ve never been in a place like this before.”
Olumide now found himself in an unlikely position. Pickett had frustrated him as a teammate. He thought he was selfish, gunning too much and passing too little. During one game, Olumide had shouted toward the Shanxi bench: “He can’t shoot all the time! We’re all here! We’re a team!” But if he resented Pickett on the court, he disliked the idea of ganging up on him off it. He thought Pickett was immature and had disrespected his Chinese teammates, but that they, in turn, were now too eager to make him a scapegoat. He thought they might try to gang up on him later, so he put out the word: Do not touch him. That would be enough.
“Five more days,” he sighed as he gathered his shoes, ready to go down to catch the bus to practice, checking himself. “No, four more days.”
The Chinese players were already circled around Coach Liu when Weiss, Olumide, and Pickett walked into the gym. A few players nodded at Olumide. No one acknowledged Pickett. “Last night, you had a great game,” Liu Tie said, speaking softly. “We lost, but it was the best that you have executed. Although we lost, do not be sad or disappointed. We will take our victory.”
Liu nodded to Weiss and asked if he wanted to say anything. Weiss did. He stood with his hands behind his back, speaking as Garrison translated. He told the players that he admired them for overcoming so much adversity. They had to adjust to three different leading scorers as well as four coaching changes between himself and Liu Tie. They had shown resilience and character and he told them to be proud of their effort. He then smiled and alluded to the owner’s postgame tirades. “Liu Tie has the toughest coaching job in the world,” he said. “Mine wasn’t quite as bad because I didn’t understand Chinese.”
Everyone laughed.
Two games remained, one in Qingdao and the other in Hangzhou. Months earlier, Boss Wang had announced his goal for the season at Media Day: tenth place. In private, he had promised to pay the Chinese players bonuses worth 20 percent of their salaries if they finished tenth. Now, they still could, if they could win their last two games.
The team had won 24 games and lost 24. There was something to play for, after all.
The air smelled of the sea. A morning fog rolled over the city, shrouding the red-roofed buildings of the old German concession, but now the sun was shining down on Qingdao’s No. 1 bathing beach. No. 1 was the city’s most famous beach, a horseshoe of orange sand along the Yellow Sea where summer crowds easily reached 70,000 people on a narrow strip less than a third of a mile long. It was still chilly enough in mid-March that the crowds were small, and I found Weiss and Tracy in what might be described as the Muscle Beach section. Nearby on the sand were a few sets of dumbbells and barbells. Eight muscular guys in tiny bathing suits were standing in a circle, doing headers with a soccer ball. Their average age was probably fifty-five.
Garrison was down the beach, searching for shells to give his girlfriend, as Tracy and Bob were watching the middle-aged musclemen jab their heads at the soccer ball. The hangover from the Shandong loss had still not dissipated, and Tracy was especially melancholy. What had been the experience of a lifetime, a chance to dive into another culture, another world, had suddenly exposed how difficult it was to truly do that. Things seemed soured, as if a trust had been broken, or, worse, as if maybe it never had been truly earned. She didn’t want to leave China with anyone doubting how much she loved the people she had met.
We bought soft drinks and sat on a bench near the barbells. Only gradually did we notice the man looking at us. He had thick salt-and-pepper hair, combed to the side, Western-style, and he kept staring at us, edging closer, until finally he was standing beside us. He was wearing a tiny, gold-colored bathing suit and was probably in his early sixties. I asked in Chinese if he were from Qingdao. Yes, he came to the beach every day, he answered, and then began speaking in very rough English. He was interested in philosophy and developing a moral outlook on life. Tracy wondered if he were a philosophy professor. I wondered if he were a member of the banned antigovernment spiritual sect, Falun Gong, secretly canvassing for new members.
We kept looking at the ocean. Ten minutes passed. We weren’t certain quite what to do with him. He kept staring at us, smiling, yet quizzical. He was examining us more than befriending us. Finally, we noticed Garrison in the distance and found our excuse to leave. Tracy and Bob started walking, and I stayed behind to wish the man well.
“May I ask you one more question?” he asked, suddenly speaking in broken English. “Are you a wesp?”
“A what?”
“A wesp.”
I cupped my ear and leaned toward him. He repeated the question, and I told him that there was no such thing in English as a wesp.
He seemed disappointed, so he spit out the letters one at a time. “W-A-S-P.”
I had misunderstood. He slowly elaborated on his question. “Are you a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant?” he asked.
“Yes, I am,” I said.
He seemed immensely happy, as if he were a birder who after years of searching had finally spotted a very rare species. I mentioned that Germans had helped found Qingdao a century ago and wondered if he might have some German somewhere in his blood. He knew nothing about the Germans who had once built many of the yellow houses still ringing this beach. No, no, he answered. His mother came from the countryside, as did his father. They were just Chinese peasants. Nothing rare about them, he said. He thanked me and walked to the edge of the water. He lifted his arms into the sky, arched his head upward, and let the warm rays of the sun fall over him.
I caught up with Bob and Garrison, while Tracy slogged through the shallow water to join a couple throwing a stick to a golden retriever. I could see them nodding and laughing, somehow communicating despite being unable to communicate, and Tracy tossed the stick to the dog for half an hour before returning. The game was in a few hours, and we were about to leave, when we heard someone shout.
“Hey, Bao-bu Wee-Suh! Jia you, Shanxi!” Hey, Bob Weiss! Let’s go, Shanxi!
Weiss turned to see a Taiyuan contingent running across the beach. Red Guardian was in the lead, and Red Heroine was right behind him. Ren Hongbing was parking the bus. Forty-six fans had driven fifteen hours overnight for a game that supposedly no longer mattered. They were elated, laughing, pulling off their shoes to let the sand seep between their toes. This was the first time many of them had ever been to the beach or seen the ocean other than on television or in a photograph. Wang Hui, a doctor who walked with a cane and wore a team jersey, hobbled toward Weiss, hurriedly stabbing his walking stick into the sand, a huge smile on his face.
Everyone hugged and posed for photographs and laughed at the improbability of it all.
“How can we leave them?” Tracy asked.
Wingtips rose dur
ing the pregame meeting to deliver a message from Boss Wang to Tim Pickett. The owner wanted Pickett to know how much he personally liked and appreciated him. Pickett was a great player, the owner thought, and the team wanted him back for next season. Then Wingtips sat down.
“Amazing what he’ll say to try to win one game,” Weiss told me later.
Practicality was trumping enmity. Pickett was threatening to sit out, arguing that his head was still ringing. The distrust had softened a little. A teammate approached him at practice to apologize, but Pickett walked away. The owner and the general manager wanted to win the last two games, and not having the team’s leading scorer would be a big handicap. Zhang Beihai had asked Weiss to persuade Pickett to play for the sake of the team. Weiss had discarded any pretense of a pep talk.
“Are you going to play?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Pickett had answered.
“Well,” Weiss said, “if you don’t play, they may not pay you.”
Pickett would play.
It would be one of the team’s best performances. Five players scored in double figures, led by Pickett with 41 points. But the highlight was the Taiyuan crazies. The forty-six Taiyuan fans sat behind the basket with matching team scarves tied around their heads, Samurai-style. Ren Hongbing stood at the edge of the group, shouting out cheers, beating a small drum, and when the Brave Dragons started moving into a big lead, he even led the Taiyuan fans in the Wave.
When Bob Weiss coached in the NBA, a friend in the league had once offered him a little pep talk, a rationalization really, about overcoming the disappointment of losing a game in the final seconds. The friend said: What if you froze the game right before that deciding moment? How would the game then be remembered? If you felt good about how your team had played before that final shot, then shouldn’t you also feel good about your team after that shot? No matter whether it went for or against you? The game itself, after all, is much more than one shot.
