Brave Dragons
by Jim Yardley
The wonderfully original story of a struggling Chinese basketball team and its quixotic, often comical attempt to right its fortunes by copying the American stars of the NBA--a season of cultural misunderstanding that transcends sports and reveals China's ambivalent relationship with the West. When the Shanxi Brave Dragons, one of China's worst professional basketball teams, hired former NBA coach Bob Weiss, the team's owner, Boss Wang, promised that Weiss would be allowed to Americanize his players by teaching them "advanced basketball culture." That promise would be broken from the moment Weiss landed in China. Desperate for his team to play like Americans, Wang--a peasant turned steel tycoon--nevertheless refused to allow his players the freedom and individual expression necessary to truly change their games. Former New York Times Beijing bureau chief Jim Yardley tells the story of the resulting culture clash with sensitivity and a keen comic...