Jim Yardley - Brave Dragons: A Chinese Basketball Team, an American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright 2012 by Jim Yardley
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

All photographs courtesy of Tracy Weiss unless otherwise noted.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Yardley, Jim, [date]
Brave Dragons : a Chinese basketball team, an American coach, and two cultures clashing / Jim Yardley.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-95770-2
1. Shanxi Zhongyu Brave Dragons (Basketball team)2. BasketballChina. 3. Social changeChina.4. AmericansChina.I. Title.
GV885.52.S53Y37 2012
796.3236409dc23 2011023514

Map by Steven Shukow
Cover photograph by Simon Lee
Cover design and hand-lettering by Joel Holland

v3.1_r2

F OR T HEO

Teams in the Chinese Basketball Association usually have different English and Chinese names, which explains why the Shanxi Brave Dragons are more commonly known in China as the Shanxi Zhongyu. For the sake of this book, Ive favored using the English names, when possible.

Boss Wangs experiment was not working. From the moment he arrived in the mountains of western Oregon, he was displeased with what he saw on the court. He had sent his Chinese basketball team to America for a summer immersion program, figuring that since the best basketball was played in America, his players would improve there. So far, they were losing every game by 20 or 30 points against semipro teams on the West Coast. Boss Wang hated losing, truly loathed it, but the losing wasnt what most frustrated him now. What drove him crazy about his Chinese players was that they didnt play like Americans, no matter how hard he tried to alter their basketball DNA. In gathering up his team from central China and depositing them in the United States, Boss Wang thought the change in environment might help. But as he stood at the edge of the practice court, watching his Chinese coach run a scrimmage that seemed little different from a scrimmage in China, Boss Wang decided change was not happening fast enough.

Boss Wang was visiting the United States for the first time, having arrived in San Francisco after the eleven-hour flight from Beijing, and his son hoped he would spend a few weeks absorbing some American culture, maybe even drive cross-country. The son had hired a guide in Beijing who specialized in escorting Chinese bosses to America. The guide knew Chinese bosses liked to gamble in Vegas and tour the strip bars in L.A. The Statue of Liberty, the White House, and Disney World were perennials, too. He made the usual arrangements. But Boss Wang had little patience for any of that. He had a business deal to finalize back in China. He raced through six cities on both coasts in five days. In Portland, he bought a few pairs of $300 designer jeans. In Midtown Manhattan, he spent about $200,000 on jewelry. His biggest purchase was still pending. He was now convinced he needed to buy an American basketball coach.

Boss Wang was sixty-one, but looked younger, with tousled black hair that fell onto his forehead. He had a thick chest and thick hands, and his appearance was a little rough, unfinished. He didnt smile very often; he eyed most people as if they might take something from him. His son, Songyan, admitted that even now, as a grown man, he was still stopped cold by his fathers glare, or by his fathers voice when it splintered into sharp, angry edges. Boss Wang looked more like the son of a peasant farmer he was, rather than the steel baron he had becomeone of the richest men in China. Forbes had estimated his wealth at roughly $260 million and ranked him as the countrys 236th richest person, though gauging wealth with any precision is nearly impossible in China. What could indisputably be said was that money had showered down on China during the previous decade; it had sprinkled over hundreds of millions of people, enough to lift many of them out of aching poverty and push them, tentatively, into better lives. But for a smaller group, the money had poured down as if in a deluge, and this new Chinese class had become as fabulously wealthy as the most fabulously wealthy people in the world.

His team, the Shanxi Brave Dragons, had arrived in the United States a few weeks ahead of him. He had owned the Brave Dragons for several years but worried that he had inadequately immersed himself in the team. (His players and coaches felt quite the opposite.) Now he was selling his last steel mill in China in a merger, and given that entanglements had arisen about unpaid taxes, the deal resembled a shotgun marriage with the shotgun pointed at him. Still, he told friends the sale would be a relief. Now he could focus his energy and resources on basketball. The previous season, the Brave Dragons had won five games (two by forfeit) and lost 24, the worst record in the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA). What enraged Boss Wang as much as losing was how the team lost. Sometimes his players simply quit. Basketball is a fight, he told me later. You never quit. You never give up.

The Brave Dragons were based for the summer at the United States Basketball Academy, about forty-five miles outside Eugene, in the ridgelines of the Cascades. It is a beautiful, isolated place, embroidered with fir trees and overlooking the McKenzie River. The academy was a boot camp for international teams looking for a crash course on the metaphysics of the American game, yet one where a foreign owner did not have to worry that his players would be distracted by anything other than basketball. When he arrived, Boss Wang was assigned the John Wooden Cabin. Filled with memorabilia from Woodens coaching career at UCLA, the cabin was a tribute to one of Americas most famous college coaches, the academys holiest shrine. A special edition of Woodens book about life and basketball, Coach Woodens Pyramid of Success, rested on the coffee table like a Gideons Bible.

Boss Wang had never heard of Wooden. What he knew of American basketball came from what he watched on state television in China, which meant the National Basketball Association. His admiration of the United States was mostly admiration of the NBA, and how NBA players played the game. He had skipped a visit to Los Angeles when he learned he could not attend a game of the hometown Lakers; in New York, he dedicated much of his day to visiting the trophy hall of the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. He watched almost every NBA game on China Central Television(CCTV), studying how the players moved up and down the floor, how the best guards glided toward the basket, as if they were running along a conveyor belt embedded in the court. He stared into his television set and saw movement, always movement, and he studied patterns and clues to whatever formula was making that movement possible. Yet when he tried to impart his knowledge to his team in China, barking out instructions and then waiting to see his vision realized, the result inevitably disappointed him. His players never moved the way the Americans did on television. They never seemed to get it right.