Brave Dragons

February 13, 2012
"We believe that by working harder, bit by bit, it's like water dripping into a cup. Over time, you finally achieve a full cup." Such is the philosophy of basketball according to Liu Tie, the unsuccessful coach of the Shanxi Brave Dragons, as reported by Pulitzer Prize-winner Yardley in this rags-to-riches tale of modern Chinese basketball. Ten years ago, when Boss Wangâ#236 on Forbes list of China's richestâacquired the bedraggled Brave Dragons, he set his sights on turning them into a fire-breathing dream team. A farmer's son, Wang escaped the poverty of the Cultural Revolution when he made the cut for the elite basketball team, and laterâas a "Red Hat Capitalist"âmade his millions in steel. Yardley, the former Beijing bureau chief for the New York Times, chronicles Wang's Sisyphean challenge beginning in 2008 when Wang recruited Bob Weiss of the Seattle Sonics to become the first NBA coach to lead a team in China. Weiss moved to Taiyuan, the infamously polluted Shanxi capital, where he soon became a local celebrity. The Dragons provide Yardley with a colorful cast of characters, including the notorious Bonzi Wells of Portland's "Jail Blazers," who came to China to play with the team. Despite rampant corruption among game officials and myriad cultural obstacles, Weiss remarkably fills Tie's proverbial cup in this engaging story that will appeal to sports fans and general readers alike.

January 1, 2012
A unique, engaging way to view the Americanization of China: through the introduction of an NBA coach to a professional Chinese basketball team. New York Times journalist Yardley honed in on a fantastically implausible, ultimately cautionary tale of how the Chinese and American ways often mix like oil and water. On one hand, the enthusiastic Chinese steel entrepreneur Boss Wang, owner of the Shanxi Brave Dragons, wanted to incorporate American-style basketball so badly that in 2008 he hired former NBA player and coach Bob Weiss to come to China and turn around his losing team. On the other hand, Boss Wang ultimately hired a Chinese coach to run the daily practices because of deep-seated fears about discipline, thus undermining most of what Weiss was trying to instill in his young Chinese players. Weiss inherited a team with the worst record in the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA); they were convinced they were "defective." Working out of a bleak warehouse in Taiyuan, once ranked as the most polluted city in the world, Weiss had to use an interpreter to communicate with the players and with his assistant Chinese coach, Liu Tie, who strong-armed the team during practices and simply kept them going all the time--not Weiss' style. Indeed, the basketball players had been selected early on in elementary school, chosen from X-rays of their skeletal structure determining projections of tallness. It was a motley team made up of misfits, such as a shortish Taiwanese player, nicknamed Little Sun, mercilessly taunted by Coach Liu for playing "Taiwan independence defense"; and several foreign hirelings such as NBA bad boy Bonzi Wells, who played a few games then fizzled. The Dragons didn't end so shabbily, although the lessons in teaching American marketing and know-how only went so far. An expert journalist compresses the culture class of nations into one palatable sports season.

(COPYRIGHT (2012) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 15, 2011

A former Beijing bureau chief for the New York Times, Yardley recounts how NBA coach Bob Weiss was hired to improve the fortunes of the Shanxi Brave Dragons, China's worst team, but ran afoul when he tried to grant his players the freedom and individuality necessary to achieve the "advanced basketball culture" he was supposed to be teaching them. A book about both sports and cultural differences; with a six-city tour.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2012
Yardley, who won a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on China's judicial system for the New York Times, thought he might tease out some of the vast cultural differences between the U.S. and China by spending a season with the woeful Shanxi Brave Dragons basketball team, who had just made history by hiring the first former NBA head coach, Bob Weiss, to manage a team in the professional Chinese Basketball Association. Yardley strikes gold here, showing readers a league in awe of the NBA model yet clinging to its own unsuccessful, hidebound ways; a team adrift because of its nouveau riche, wildly contradictory owner, Boss Wang (Weiss often being a virtual bystander during games); and a collection of often-incompatible Chinese and foreign players abused by Wang's draconian practice regimen, icy-cold and smoke-filled stadiums, incompetent and probably corrupt officials, and near-prison living conditions. From all of that, though, the Brave Dragons put together a decent season, and Yardley a memorable book. A worthy Chinese counterpart to Robert Whiting's fine account of the clash between American and Japanese baseball a generation ago, You Gotta Have Wa.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)