by Jim Yardley
So now the game hung on the final shot. Ten seconds remained. If you had asked Bob Weiss at that moment about his team’s performance, he would have felt pretty good. This was a game the Brave Dragons were supposed to lose badly. After their victory in Qingdao, they had traveled to the city of Hangzhou for their season-ending game. The Hangzhou team had already qualified for the playoffs and had whipped the Brave Dragons earlier in the season. Really, no one placed too much faith in Boss Wang giving out bonuses for finishing tenth. This was playing out the string. Yet the players came out with unexpected emotion. Hours before the game, Weiss had called a meeting that everyone assumed would be to review game film. Instead, Tracy had presented a twenty-minute slide show of the season after first reading a letter to the players. When they turned on the slide show, there was the season: photographs of every player and coach, including the departed Donta, Bonzi, and Big Rus. Zhang Beihai. Boss Wang. Trainer Yuan. The accountant. The ladies who swept the courts. The angry old guy who opened the gate. Even me.
“Your warmth, kindness, and love have filled each day with laughter and tears,” Tracy had read aloud, before choking up and handing the letter to Garrison so he could finish translating it. “I will miss each of you so very much. Each of you, in your own special way, has given me a clear memory of China. You are not just an experience I have had, but are now a part of who I am.”
Then just an hour before the game, Boss Wang rushed into the locker room. No one had known whether he was coming, and his sudden arrival apparently surprised the female general manager of the Hangzhou team. She hurriedly presented him with a gift of Longjing tea, wrapped in newspaper. He considered it an unconscionable affront.
“If she didn’t know I was coming and had apologized for not having a gift, then that would have been fine,” Boss Wang told me later. “But she thought that was a gift! That team looked down on us. They didn’t think we were good and didn’t take us seriously. I told our players that we had to fight. We had to beat them!”
Love or fury. Compassion or vengeance. How could anyone know which speech worked?
But while the Hangzhou team had not expected much of a contest, the Brave Dragons came out as if they were playing for first place. Little Ba and Duan streaked down the court, slashing to the basket. Olumide was a rebounding machine. The Brave Dragons fought to within a point and then had the ball with less than twenty seconds remaining. Liu Tie called a timeout to design a play for Pickett. The ball was inbounded to Pan, who dribbled at the top of the key, waiting for the play to develop. But the pass was never made to Pickett. Pan later said that the defender had blocked off Pickett, and maybe that was true, but it was certainly true that the game would not now rest in Pickett’s hands.
Pan kept dribbling as the clock ticked down. He had seemed to wither as the season wore on. No one took more criticism than Pan; he needed to be Chris Paul or Steve Nash, but he wasn’t. Yet when he judged his own game, he could be merciless, too. He needed to direct the team better. He needed to handle the ball better. He needed more confidence. Now, as his teammates moved around the court, he looked in vain for someone open. Thirteen seconds were left. At ten seconds, Pan made his move, down the side toward the basket. The defender pressed against him, but Pan kept going. Now he had jumped into the lane, into the banging bodies of the big men, having taken the game into his own hands. He leaned into his defender and then separated himself, tossing the ball one-handed toward the goal. Weiss and Coach Liu stared at the basket. The Brave Dragons rose off the bench. Boss Wang looked and waited. The ball clanged off the rim, bouncing along its edge. The big men stared up at the basket, positioning, jostling, waiting. The ball seemed to linger. Until it fell in.
When the buzzer sounded, the Brave Dragons screamed and shouted and piled onto a joyous scrum at midcourt. They celebrated as if they had won a championship.
Or maybe they celebrated because, finally, the season was over.
EPILOGUE
The Shanxi Brave Dragons finished the 2008–09 season in tenth place, with 26 wins and 24 losses, one of the most dramatic turnarounds in the history of the Chinese league. A few days after the season finale, more than a hundred hard-core Brave Dragons supporters filled a German-themed bar in downtown Taiyuan for Fan Appreciation Day. The Brave Dragons cheerleaders led a few cheers, and someone opened a few bottles of baijiu. Ren Hongbing blasted music and introduced Boss Wang as “the Mark Cuban of China,” a comparison with the NBA’s most controversial and mercurial owner that may or may not have been a compliment. Ren Hongbing’s siblings Red Guardian and Red Heroine led the crowd in chants of “Jia you! Jia you!” Once the speeches began, Kobe thanked the fans for their support, Zhang Beihai proclaimed the season a major success, and Bob Weiss, now something of a folk hero in Taiyuan, offered a few words, too.
“I want to thank you as fans,” Weiss began, as Garrison translated. “You are the wildest fans in the league. I know this because we have the most fines!” There was a silent moment as Garrison translated the joke and then the crowd laughed, if a little nervously. “Thank you for your support,” Weiss concluded. “I saw you in many different cities. And you truly did help us when we played at home.” Then he told another joke about how they helped by chucking lighters—but Garrison smoothed that one over in translation. There was more music, and enough baijiu flowing that a misty Pickett confided to me that he might come back next season if Olumide and Weiss came back, too. When the party finally broke up, Ren Hongbing played a techno rendition of the dance classic “Please Don’t Go,” and none of the players did. They loitered around the bus for about an hour as Boss Wang chewed out the general manager about something.
The following season Boss Wang broke up the nucleus of the team. Liu Tie left to coach a lower-division team in western China; he knew Boss Wang had soured on him and he also knew that he wanted to work for a different kind of owner. Liu Tie had started the year as a despot but had tasted humility. He and Weiss departed as friends, if not necessarily future coaching partners. Tim Pickett failed to catch on with an NBA team and became a high-scoring guard for another team in China. Olumide also returned to China, though not to the Brave Dragons. His old team decided he was big enough, after all. Olumide helped lead the Liaoning Pan Pan Dinosaurs back to the playoffs and also helped them deliver a few payback pastings to the Brave Dragons. He continued playing around the world, diving for loose balls and performing like a warrior for any team willing to pay his price. I can still hear him telling me how the Chinese system left players without ohpe. He never lost his.
Bonzi Wells was still in Muncie, hoping to make it back to the NBA, and also salvage his reputation. By 2011, Bonzi was coaching local teenagers and described himself as humbled to a hometown sports columnist. “Being humbled was the best thing for me,” he promised. A few months later, his alma mater, Ball State University, inducted him into the school’s Hall of Fame. Boss Wang’s experiment with Bonzi initially persuaded the Brave Dragons to bring back the player Bonzi had replaced, Donta Smith. In Australia, Donta had led his team to a championship and been named most valuable player of the playoffs. He returned to Taiyuan, but he and Boss Wang soon clashed, and Donta moved to a different Chinese team. The Brave Dragons started the 2009–10 season with three wins and 10 losses and were again reduced to an inept afterthought when Boss Wang shook things up: He signed Stephon Marbury, a onetime NBA all-star who had bounced between different teams and experienced an especially turbulent tenure as a New York Knick. In his NBA career, Marbury had earned tens of millions of dollars while gradually devolving from a major star into a major head case. He had squabbled with coaches and posted some strange YouTube videos, including one in which he supposedly ate Vaseline. He was so unpopular with the Knicks that the New York Daily News described him as “the most reviled athlete in New York.” Boss Wang was not deterred; he told reporters that Marbury’s signing was “a reward to our fans.” It could have been another Bonziesque mismatch, yet Marbury embraced Taiyuan, which em
braced him back. Marbury’s main purpose in China was to promote his Starbury line of basketball shoes; Boss Wang had apparently promised to help him crack the China market and hook him up with a local manufacturer. Yet Marbury played hard, didn’t complain, and didn’t hesitate to sign autographs or pose for photos with fans. Though the Brave Dragons finished the season with a losing record, Marbury described his Taiyuan experience as “nothing but love,” and agreed to a three-year contract that would supposedly keep him in Taiyuan until 2013.
Instead, Marbury returned to Taiyuan and was summarily dumped without a contract by Boss Wang. Marbury was crestfallen, reportedly sobbing in his hotel room, though soon enough he signed with a new team in southern China and continued his pursuit of a global shoe empire. Money was reportedly an issue in dropping Marbury. By 2010, Boss Wang had fallen off the Forbes rich list in China, though it was hard to say if he had gotten appreciably poorer or if others had simply gotten richer. I last saw him at the practice gym a few days after the tenth-place-clinching win. He played a few games of pickup ball with the players—somehow managing to win every game—and then he stripped off his shirt, lines of sweat dripping down his chest, still relishing the comeuppance his team had delivered to the Hangzhou general manager and her shoddily wrapped gift.
“That team looked down on us,” he said. “They didn’t think we were good, and they didn’t take us seriously. And I know they got to the referees. But we beat them. That game made me feel better about the whole season.”
He paused and smiled. “I like revenge on people who disdain me and look down on me,” he said.
We walked to the canteen, and Boss Wang bent over a bowl of noodles. He had barely eaten during the past four days. He almost never traveled with the team, and I imagined him racing frantically around China in his Mercedes, chasing his team, so possessed and focused that he would forget to eat. Earlier that season, I asked the basketball insider Xu Jicheng about Boss Wang, and Big Xu smiled. He knew the stories, as did almost everyone in the league, and knew how strange Boss Wang must seem to a foreigner (and to many Chinese), yet Big Xu considered him more a symptom of the moment. He was part of the first generation of Chinese that had tasted money and were able to use it to pursue their dreams, dreams often shaped by the West. He wanted to use modern methods, Big Xu said, but he remained an old-school Chinese boss. He believed in toughness, in hard work, and that his word should be unchallenged, since it was his team. It was a generational thing, Big Xu thought. The next generation would be better.
The NBA still saw China as integral to the league’s future but was beset by problems there and at home. In July 2011, the NBA locked out its players after the expiration of the league’s collective bargaining agreement. Negotiators for the players’ union and the owners hunkered down for a fight, and without anything to do, a few NBA stars decided to tour China. Paul Pierce of the Boston Celtics played a few exhibition games and was seen coughing on the court from the cigarette smoke. Other NBA stars like Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul toyed with jumping to the CBA for the season, until CBA officials banned teams from signing any NBA players who had not been free agents before the lockout. This was a pity, because Boss Wang had reportedly offered a contract of $1.5 million per month to, yes, Kobe Bryant. Doctored photos of Bryant in a Brave Dragons uniform had circulated on the Internet. I can only imagine Kobe and Boss Wang playing one-on-one.
By November 2011, NBA owners and players finally cut a deal to end the lockout, salvaging most of the season. As for the NBA’s ambitions in China, the league still continued to do a fine job of selling air. The NBA remained the most popular sports league in China, and continued to sell corporate marketing partnerships, television contracts, and jerseys. It still had perhaps the best model in professional sports for extracting money out of almost anything, even if the Great Recession made it harder to extract money from people who had less of it. But the NBA was facing other challenges in China. The once-grand vision of NBA Cities and hundreds of NBA stores never really materialized; fewer than a dozen NBA stores were opened, and not a single NBA City was built. The league’s plan to manage a network of arenas across China also soured. It had stadiums in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou but no more. Nor did it have regular basketball games to put in those stadiums. The NBA’s plans for a league in China were put on indefinite hold. Like the YMCA a century earlier, the NBA was learning its limits in China, or at least it should have been.
The CBA improved its financial position, partly because of Ma Guoli’s ability to pull in more sponsors. The Guangdong team continued to dominate on the court. It won the championship after the 2009 season, followed by successive championships in 2010 and 2011. Bayi continued its steady decline and became a national embarrassment in August 2011 when the players got into an ugly brawl during a “goodwill” exhibition game against the visiting collegiate team from Georgetown. No one in the CBA would have been surprised that the fight was sparked, partly, by the fact that the officials appeared to be blatantly cheating on behalf of Bayi.
The biggest news in Chinese basketball was Yao Ming’s retirement from the NBA in 2011. Only 30 years old, Yao could never overcome nagging injuries. If this placed him in the company of several other oversized NBA centers who succumbed to injuries, Yao also was beaten down by years of endless practices and games in the Chinese system. He was truly a great basketball ambassador and his retirement signaled a new era in Chinese basketball, as more people began arguing that the old system needed to be changed. Yao himself may end up being part of the solution; the Shanghai Sharks, faced with ruin, had sold marketing rights and management control to Yao before his retirement. Yao hired an American coach for the Shanghai team, overhauled the roster, and the Sharks made the playoffs for two years running. The American coach needed a good interpreter, and the Sharks hired Garrison Guo, who skipped from Taiyuan to Shanghai with glee. He had a new girlfriend who was now his fiancée. He was also the interpreter for China’s national team.
Bob and Tracy Weiss did not return to Taiyuan. They spent the following season in Seattle, finally managing to sell their home. Bob was tickled that the buyer was a doctor originally from Taiwan. He was still feeling the tug of China when the Shandong Lions offered him their head coach job for the 2010–11 season. Weiss jumped at it, and he and Tracy spent the season in the eastern city of Jinan. Weiss’s assistant turned out to be Mack Tuck, the brother-in-law of Tim Pickett and the villain of the crushing loss that had ended the Brave Dragons’ playoff chances. Tuck turned out to be a great guy. The Lions were facing a rebuilding year, having lost several of their best players, and they started poorly. But slowly they improved, moving into playoff position behind a slick Chinese player named Sun Jie. His Chinese coaches had deplored Sun Jie as too rebellious, too American, but under Weiss he became one of the top scorers in the league. Then, with four games remaining in the season, Sun Jie went down with an injury, as did the team’s top American player. The Lions lost all four games and slipped out of the playoffs.
Tracy finally managed to make good on her rescue list. She adopted a puppy in Jinan, a nine-month-old golden retriever named Bode, and took him back to Seattle. She and Bob have friends across China, including Joe, who quietly left the Brave Dragons after their season and was now working, happily, as an interpreter for another team. Weiss was sixty-nine but didn’t seem interested in retiring. He had feelers out for a possible assistant’s position in the NBA, but he also thought he might keep coaching in China, assuming a team needed a former NBA coach who understood the place. When Weiss returned to Taiyuan as head coach of the Flaming Lions, he brought Boss Wang a nicely wrapped gift, a framed photograph of Boss Wang and his grandson. Weiss considered it a gesture of appreciation.
The Chinese owner seemed touched and had something for Weiss, too: an offer. He said Weiss was the only coach he could trust. He wondered if he would consider returning to the Brave Dragons.
Weiss listened, mildly flattered.
He said he was
keeping his options open.
My final day with the Shanxi Brave Dragons came after the season-ending win against Hangzhou. I had finished my last talk with Boss Wang, and the players had left the practice facility for a short break. The gym was strangely empty, the orange dormitory silent. Outside, the wind was blowing and the air was still cold and the only sign of life was inside a small cage, left on the ground near the front gate.
It was Hoppy, the flying squirrel saved by Tracy. She had asked the team to release him back into the mountains. She wanted him to be free. But he was still in his cage, making one mad flip after another, his tiny feet sticking each landing, flipping and flipping and flipping, to the point of exhaustion.
Bob Weiss and Brave Dragons owner Boss Wang had never spoken or met when Weiss arrived in Taiyuan to coach the local team. First impressions mattered, and both men came prepared with gifts. Boss Wang presented a box of tea. Weiss offered bourbon.
Taiyuan is the capital of Shanxi Province, which is the coal heartland of China. Coal has brought riches to some people in Taiyuan, but it has also draped the city in a gray curtain of pollution.
Boss Wang did not want the Brave Dragons players exposed to any of the temptations of Taiyuan, so he converted an old factory outside the city into a dormitory and training gym. The Chinese players lived eleven months of the year in the concrete dormitory, living two to a room. The gym was a huge warehouse in the rear of the compound. In winter, it was so cold that players needed to wear coats when they were not practicing.
A Taiyuan street scene
Forever caught in the middle between two cultures, the team’s interpreters—Joe and Garrison Guo—were the bridge that bound together the foreigners with the Chinese. Here, Bob Weiss and Joe field questions during Media Day at the Yingze Hotel in Taiyuan, a few days before the season-opening game.
