Alexander Wolff - Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure

Grateful acknowledgment is given for the following:

Photographs on by Heinz Kluetmeier. Used by permission.

Photograph on by Miguel Angel Fornis. Used by permission.

Map on courtesy of University of Kansas Office of University Relations. Used by permission.

Photograph on courtesy of Appalachian State University Office of Sports Information. Used by permission.

Parts of this book originally appeared in Sports Illustrated, Sports Illustrated for Women, PhillySport, Princeton Alumni Weekly, and Attach magazines.

Copyright 2002 by Alexander Wolff

All rights reserved.

Warner Books, Inc.

Hachette Book Group

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New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

First eBook Edition: May 2010

ISBN: 978-0-446-56131-0

The In-Your-Face Basketball Book
with Chuck Wielgus

The Back In-Your-Face Guide to Pick-Up Basketball
with Chuck Wielgus

Raw Recruits
with Armen Keteyian

100 Years of Hoops

A March for Honor

For Vanessa
and with her

When the individual was permitted to move about anywhere, so long as he did not have the ball, the game became spirited and kaleidoscopic.

DR. JAMES NAISMITH

There is no truth but in transit.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

T he caf shimmered with chrome and glass. Like so much of modern Shanghai, the decor seemed to hold in contempt anything more than a few years old. But the man seated across from me appeared immune from the cutting-edge scorn of the place, even as his appearance evoked a time long past.

Bai Jinshen has one of those furrowed faces that tend to soak up and neutralize their surroundings. Lineage grounded him, too: During the 19th century an ancestor lived in Beijings Forbidden City, serving in the court of an emperor of the Qing dynasty. Bai himself had learned basketball from American missionaries while growing up in Tianjin during the 1930s before going on to play for and coach the Chinese national team when it suited up for the greater glory of Mao Zedong and the revolution. If basketball in China has a birthplace, Tianjin is it: The Tianjin YMCA was the site of the first game played in the Middle Kingdom, and a factory in that northeastern city produced the countrys first basketball.

A basketball has eight slices, Bai was telling me. Four slices belong to yin and four slices belong to yang. We call the yang side hardware. Hardware includes body strength, skills, psychology, and teamwork. We call the yin side software. Software includes coaching, development of young players, support staff, and education. Four and four. Eight things.

If Id handed him a basketball just then, Bai might have picked up a knife and peeled the balls pebblegrain rind into a seamless coil.

Because a basketball is like the earth, it spins every day. And because it spins, it must develop. And for it to develop, those of us involved with the game must think forwardthink progressively. And if we think progressively, we can control the games progress. In our life and work, if we think, we gain insight. Everybody has curiosity. Which leads to interest. And if we devote ourselves to that interest, our ability increases.

So you see, it all starts with thinking.

Despite his blood ties to the Qing dynasty, Bai did not look back fondly on its reign. The Qing eliminated the Ming reforms and spoke of the foreign devil at the very time the West was quickly developing. Yes, the Qing united the country. But during its rule China was left behind.

I am 66 years old. I once learned from my parents and teachers. Now I learn from young people like my son. They understand things more quickly than I do, and theyre more tolerant than I am. In the past dozen years the Chinese people have opened their eyes and started to accept different ways of thinking. Of course, buying Air Jordans and Bulls T-shirts arent really ways of thinking. But one of the motivations of human beings is to pursue things in their headsto imagine. Some of these imaginings are just illusions, but others can keep you going. And during the 1990s, after Chinese television bought the rights to the NBA, thats what started to happen here. On the surface, you could see kids trying to copy Michael Jordan. But at a deeper level, when children open their minds to fantasies, their minds are being conditioned. They become more receptive to other things as well.

A basketball court sits just beyond the Tiananmen Gate in central Beijing, on the threshold of the Forbidden City, the very ground where Bais ancestors once troda court from which NBC broadcaster Ahmad Rashad and a crew, filming a segment for NBA Inside Stuff, had recently been chased away by guards who mistook cue cards for propaganda. I asked Bai how he felt about the game to which he had devoted his life, as player and coach and philosopher, having a place in his countrys hallowed seat of power.

It makes me happy, he said.

In Shanghai that evening, listening as a man told me how the simplest of games was changing the world, I lost his words in a contentment of my own. Kierkegaard, the favorite philosopher of a more familiar basketball thinker, Dean Smith, once remarked that a man is no happier than when his wish coincides with his duty. I was that man. Wish and duty had fused into a compulsion, one that had carried me half a world from home, and would take me many other places as well.

I had bought the Russian nesting dolls from a street vendor in St. Petersburg. Over the years, as they peered at me from a shelf in the study of my Manhattan apartment, Id come to appreciate their tidy hierarchy. The Michael Jordan figurine enclosed the Magic Johnson. The Magic Johnson enclosed the Larry Bird. For an argument over where these basketball greats rank you once had to flick on sports-talk radio or go down to the corner bar. Yet here some faceless Russian artisan had thrown in his two kopecks worth and underscored for me a truth: Scarcely a century after basketballs invention in Springfield, Massachusetts, by an aspiring clergyman, NBA iconography and schoolyard dreamers are commonplace in virtually every country on earth.

Midlife crises come in many guises, but mine, after two decades spent writing about the game and nearly twice that long playing it, took the form of an imperative. I needed to do what ballplayers do. I needed to move, to pick up, to goto watch and play and puzzle out basketball wherever I found it. Just as removing the top of each doll revealed another inside, I would set out in search of the truths at the core of the game.

As a student at Princeton during the late 1970s, I learned much from two teachers, each of whom grew up in eastern Pennsylvania under hardscrabble circumstances. As it happened, the twosociology professor Marvin Bressler and basketball coach Pete Carrilwere friends, drinking buddies who could often be found at a tavern on the edge of campus, as likely to be discussing international trade policy as the best way to break a zone trap. Carrils class I only audited, watching his teams as they won a couple of Ivy League championships. But I actually took Bresslers course on the sociology of education. As plans for this book took shape I ran into him on campus, and there he told me a story.