 
# Alone in the Furnace

TWO AMERICANS, ONE HOMETOWN HERO,  
AND A YEAR INSIDE THE CHINESE BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION

Luther Blissett
Alone in the Furnace

Blissett, Luther

Copyright 2019

First edition

(License notes) ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.

# Alone  
in the  
Furnace

LUTHER BLISSETT

# Chapter 1

## 'A Phone Call From China'

Despite the heavy jetlag, Charlie Mandt had quickly realized things were going to be different. Nineteen hours earlier, he was lugging bags onto a plane out of Atlanta, Georgia. Now he was in the arrivals section of Nanjing Lukou Airport, being stared at by curious locals. In the autumn of 1998, Nanjing was a historic city based in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu but it was not a common destination for foreigners. Eventually Mandt found his way to a desk where his passport was stamped and he walked down a corridor that led out into a new world. The airport was brand new, a reflection of China's sudden drive to modernize its cities after decades of underdevelopment. Mandt knew little of Nanjing's history or the sudden awakening of the Chinese financial juggernaut. Instead, the American was scanning the crowd, looking for anyone who looked like they worked for a basketball team. In time, someone approached him and spoke in blunt, accented English. ' _Come with us, please'._ It had not been hard for his minders to find Mandt. All they had done was to follow the trail of gawking children gathering around the baggage terminal.

Two weeks earlier, Mandt had been sitting in his house, calmly waiting for the phone to ring. At twenty-six, the 6"7, 240lb power forward was a valuable commodity. When he graduated from Grand Valley State University in 1992, Mandt did so with a degree in Communications and a reputation for putting up points in a hurry. In his senior year, he averaged 18.0 points per game and became the first ever GVSU player to be voted Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference player of the year. Most of the previous winners had gone on to play professionally, and Mandt wanted to follow in their footsteps. In the summer after graduation, Mandt signed for his hometown Atlanta Eagles in the United States Basketball League. The USBL was a blip on the American basketball map but the Eagles roster was still deep. One of Mandt's teammates, Darrell Armstrong, would eventually play fourteen seasons in the NBA. Scouts regularly attended Eagles games looking for diamonds in the rough. Soon Mandt received his own brush with the NBA, when the Atlanta Hawks brought him in for a brief preseason try-out. The Hawks were intrigued by Mandt's build and midrange game. They were less enamored with his height. At 6"7, they felt he was a small forward, which was news to Mandt, who had only ever played under the rim. But this was the NBA; Mandt would do whatever it took to make a roster. So in his first practice, Mandt found himself matched up against nine-time All-Star and future Hall of Famer, Dominique Wilkins. Things did not go well. Wilkins was the purest athlete of his generation. Mandt, though fearless and strong as an ox, was not.

After a week of getting dismantled by Wilkins, Mandt was told to go back to the USBL. It was a tough break although Mandt enjoyed the experience nevertheless. The facilities were slick and the locker rooms looked immaculate. Established players arrived in expensive cars and the training sessions dripped with urgency and expertise. Wilkins had even taken the young trialist to his house and gifted Mandt a pair of signature Reeboks to keep. This was a taste of primetime that Mandt would not forget. If he could get a tryout with the NBA straight out of college, maybe a couple of years playing overseas would help get an actual NBA contract further down the line.

The opportunity to play abroad arrived sooner than expected. Within days of returning to the USBL, a scout tipped off a team in the British Basketball League, who soon signed him on a one-year deal. His accommodation would be taken care of and the team loaned him a company car. The team also needed to win now and wanted to run the offense through Mandt. As far as first jobs went, Mandt had gotten pretty lucky—but so had the team who signed him. Although he did not return to America with a British championship, Mandt proved himself to be a reliable scorer and rebounder. That stint in the UK led to a contract in France. Offers to play elsewhere in Europe followed twelve months later. Understandably, Mandt had a lot to be happy about. He was living in rent-free apartments, driving company cars and making decent money. But at the same time, Mandt had not forgotten about his time with the Hawks. He was convinced he could be an NBA player. Mandt's chances were helped by the fact that professional scouting was not what it would eventually become. Players routinely fell through the cracks. All-Stars at the time like Charles Oakley, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman had all come from Division II schools. Another NBA star, John Starks, was plucked from the World Basketball League, a backwater league best known for prohibiting players over 6"5.

All those players had reached the NBA via unusual paths, and by the summer of 1997, Mandt, searching for his own breakthrough, was now in Los Angeles. Every year, the South California Pro League (SCPL) ran during July and was, at the time, the most prominent summer league in the country. It was also the best place for free agents to get onto the radar of NBA coaches. Some attendees had been in the NBA previously. Others, like Mandt, had gone abroad to make ends meet but still yearned for their own NBA opportunity. A number of freshly graduated college players were also in attendance, hoping to continue their own careers despite having gone undrafted. Amid the hullabaloo, many NBA teams would also give their recent draft picks a first taste of professional basketball.

All the NBA teams had their own rosters that included recent draft picks and some personally selected players. The teams representing the NBA franchises all played in the afternoon, so in the mornings, groups of agents placed all their unattached players together and played games against other teams controlled by other groups of agents. The crowds were often made up of scouts, coaches and representatives of teams based in America but also overseas. There was always a reason to play hard. Sometimes, someone got moved from the morning slot and placed onto an NBA summer league roster so they could be better assessed. Other times, someone might try to sign them for a team in Europe or South America. Every game was a potential job interview and the intensity of each game often caught new attendees by surprise.

Mandt had already played several morning games. He was running out of time to catch someone's eye but his upcoming contest was the most important one remaining. That day, Mandt's team were scheduled for the final morning slot before the NBA teams played. Scouts and general managers often arrived early to get good seats for the afternoon games. But as both free agent teams shifted onto the floor, Mandt spotted something he had not seen in previous visits to LA. Wearing the same uniform as Mandt was a tall player of Chinese descent. The latter spoke no English and carried himself with a calmness that contrasted sharply with the anxious American free agents. As everyone waited for the game to start, the stranger started high-fiving his teammates. Eventually, he reached Mandt, who decided to break the ice with a greeting, _'nihao ma'_ —or, what Mandt thought meant 'hello.' The Chinese player continued to high-five other teammates until he realized what had happened and turned to stare at Mandt. It was unclear whether the player was reacting to the imprecise grammar (Mandarin speakers almost never introduce themselves using the 'ma' in that context) or an earnest attempt to break the ice. Either way, Mandt had gotten his attention.

Soon, the ball was up in the air and everyone realized that this stranger could play. He passed the ball better than most NBA point guards and knocked down shots from almost any spot on the court. In an attempt to draw attention back to them, his American teammates started hoarding the ball. Mandt, however, saw an opportunity. He set screens and dished out passes whenever the stranger got open. Mandt was experienced enough to know that he needed to be a team player who worked both sides of the floor. The game soon finished and the Chinese player vanished as suddenly as he had appeared. Mandt did not think too much about it. He had played a good game in front of a large crowd. Agents and team managers were literally coming down from the stands to speak with players. 'As I walked across the parking lot, there were two or three people offering me overseas contracts right there', he recalls. Mandt, however, was not going to sign anything. He wanted to believe he had done enough to catch the eye of someone from the NBA and finally get the chance he had always dreamed about. It made no sense signing anything that might hinder a potential path to the big time.

A few days later, Mandt was back in Atlanta. The NBA had not called and neither had anyone else. He was starting to regret not taking the parking lot contracts seriously. A player of his caliber would inevitably get an offer somewhere, although the lack of certainty made his stomach turn. But as Mandt sat by the phone, an offer eventually arrived that was unlike anything he had ever received. The caller's accent was clearly not European. The man on the other end introduced himself as Mr. Ma, an official with the Jiangsu Dragons, a team in the Chinese Basketball Association. At first, Mandt thought this was a joke. He knew the Chinese played basketball and that a few of his SCPL cohorts had spent time playing in Indonesia, Hong Kong or Taiwan. But the Chinese mainland was a different story.

The caller got straight to the point. The CBA was very real, and Ma represented one of its better teams, the Jiangsu Dragons. They wanted the best overseas free agents they could find—and Mandt just happened to match this description. In calm, precise English, Ma said the team had seen him playing in the SCPL and thought Mandt would be an important addition to the Jiangsu roster. Ma also made reference to the mysterious player Mandt had played alongside with in the SCPL. The player was Hu Weidong, the Dragons' best player and a fixture on the Chinese national team. Ma, who by then had clarified he was the team's translator, then caught Mandt completely off-guard. He asked Mandt to name his salary. Typically, teams presented players with an offer and after a period of slight negotiation, the latter either signed it or moved on. Mandt had to think quickly. Deciding he had nothing to lose, he blurted it out—$10,000 a month, double his past salary. There was a pause. Mandt waited to hear a lower number thrown back at him. Instead, Ma calmly agreed, saying the team would get back to him shortly. After wishing Mandt a good day, the line went dead.

At the time, Mandt had no idea that this ten-minute phone call would alter his career for several years. Instead, as he returned his landline phone to the receiver, he was unsure if someone was pranking him. He paced up and down his home for the entire evening. When a contract arrived a couple of days later, Mandt took it to a friend for a second opinion. The wording was airtight; it was a legally binding promise for an awful lot of money. Mandt now had to make a decision. He could stick with what he knew back in Europe or take the biggest payday of his career and hope for the best. All the zeros on the page looked back at him. Mandt had to do it; he had to go to China. He faxed across a signed version of the contract and within a month, he was boarding a flight into the unknown.

Now Mr. Ma was sitting next to Mandt in a minivan driving him from Lukou airport to the Dragons' facility. As they turned onto the highway, Ma began to explain how events had come together. Hu Weidong, the Chinese player Mandt played with in the SCPL, had been touring the American west coast as part of Jiangsu's offseason training. By chance, an opportunity came up for Hu to scrimmage against Americans whilst the Dragons were staying in LA. Hu liked how Mandt played and asked that the team sign him immediately. As the journey went on, Mandt noticed they were driving further from the city center. He would not be staying in a hotel in downtown Nanjing, or even by himself. Instead, Jiangsu drove him straight to the team headquarters based on an industrial estate on the outskirts of the city. This was a stark difference from his tenure in Europe, where teams often housed their foreign players in a nice apartment away from the rest of the roster. Given the inevitable culture shock, teams knew their imports needed some personal space. Jiangsu, however, felt otherwise. The American would be staying in the player dorms, along with the local roster.

Mandt may as well have been stepping foot on Mars. The multi-level compound was a bleak, imposing structure. There was nothing to see or do for a considerable distance. Everyone ate in a vast mess hall and all the meals were cooked onsite. In addition to the Dragons roster, a number of youth team players lived nearby, albeit in a different part of the compound. It felt like a small basketball army was being assembled in secret while the rest of Nanjing went on living normally. Mandt had been able to blend in better in Europe but now, there was nowhere to hide. As well as being jet-lagged, the last few days of the ferocious Nanjing summer meant Mandt was sweating profusely. Everyone seemed to have a cigarette in his hand, from the guard outside the gate to the chef in the kitchen. It was impossible to escape the smell of body odor and cigarettes. The entire facility stank like a bad nightclub. He knew $10,000 a month was a lot of money but Mandt was going to be earning every cent of it.

# Chapter Two

## 'King Of The Dunks'

Charlie Mandt knew he was taking a massive step into the unknown. So when another American arrived a few days later, Mandt nearly fainted with relief. The other Jiangsu import was a smooth, easy-going mid-westerner named James Hodges. He spoke some Mandarin and carried himself like a man who was not easily ruffled. The local roster clearly knew who he was and were excited to see him in person. Yet behind the gentle smile was a ruthless competitor whose intensity had pulled him from small town America to the professional basketball circuit. When he was a high schooler in Beloit, Wisconsin, his college counselor told him he was not good enough for college ball. Ignoring her advice, Hodges made the team at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater as a walk-on in 1989. Soon he outworked everyone to become a starter. A sudden growth spurt added several inches to his frame and by his junior year, Hodges was 6-foot-6 and boasted a 42-inch vertical leap. No-one at that level could keep up with him. By the time Hodges left college, he had won a Division III national championship, twice led Wisconsin-Whitewater in scoring and rebounds, tied the school record for most points in a single game and set another for most career blocks. Even then, people again told him to give up on basketball. It had been a great run but now it was time to start a career. Instead, Hodges hustled his way into a stint abroad in France. Then came two seasons in Brazil and another in the Philippines.

In July of 1996, Hodges had taken a phone call from his agent, Charles Bonsignore, who wanted to talk about China. Bonsignore had made his name sending American players to Indonesia, whose domestic league was one of the first in Asia to sign foreigners **.** Now the Chinese Basketball Association was trying to find Americans to play in their own league. By the mid 1990's, American companies like IMG had also gotten involved in the CBA. The sports agency saw Bonsignore as a reliable operator who could provide talented American players to play in China. Critically, Bonsignore had taken time to understand the Asian basketball market and regularly visited his clients in those leagues. He knew that Hodges' all-action style would be a perfect fit for China and began to find suiters. One team, the Liaoning Hunters, seemed especially interested in Hodges and were willing to pay top dollar to secure his signing.

With the exception of Bonsignoire, few foreigners could vouch for the CBA or any of its teams, but Hodges was fascinated by what he was hearing. A guaranteed monthly salary of $12,000-- several times what the American might have earned in Brazil or elsewhere-- sweetened the deal. He did not know much about Liaoning other than the team was based in the northern city of Shenyang and had three players on the Chinese national team. But there was no time to think any further and Hodges knew it.

It was soon apparent Hodges had made the right choice. The Hunters were one of China's best teams. The team's point guard, Li Xiaoyong, was a canny playmaker that could score and pass. Alongside Li, thirty-one-year-old Wu Qinglong was the best wing defender in China and shot close to 40% from three-point range. Wu Naiqun, a powerful, no-thrills big man, rounded out the core trio of Hunters' local players. But with Hodges at the small forward position, suddenly Liaoning had their game changer. In Hodges' first season in China, Liaoning made it all the way to the CBA Finals and the American led his team in scoring. Hodges quickly showed he was a great fit with his local teammates, particularly Li Xiaoyong. If the defense drifted toward Li, the American would surge to the rim and throw down the alley-oop pass. If Hodges' became the focus, Li would calmly pull up for a jump shot. Even when Li did not make the shot, Hodges was still capable of wreaking havoc. 'Li could shoot 40% from the three-point line', recalls the American, 'but I would get the other 60% of those shots on tip-ins or put-back dunks'.

Life was also eventful off the court. Both Hodges and his American teammate Jim Havrilla, the other foreigner Liaoning signed that season, were overnight celebrities. The Hunters put both men in the best hotel in the city, which also happened to host the city's other foreign residents. The staff from Shenyang's tiny US consulate lived in one of the floors as did a Syrian vascular surgeon and a Russian cargo pilot who flew circuits between China and his home country. Most of the foreign residents had been there for a while and never seen anything like this before. Fans gathered round the hotel entrance at all hours of the day. People were always asking the residents about the basketball players and if they had seen them recently. Havrilla was the first of the Americans to fly into in Shenyang. He was immediately greeted by camera crews and rushed to a packed press conference. But Hodges' experiences were even more intense. 'When he was in a group, people left him alone', Harvilla recalls. 'But when he was alone, that's when people would come up to him'. One woman fainted on the sidewalk after shaking Hodges' hand whilst others gathered outside restaurants to watch him eat dinner. Locals frequently snuck past the front desk at the hotel and knocked on his door in the middle of the night. Yet somehow, Hodges was at ease with this attention. He made time for everyone and after a few months, he learned enough Mandarin to go on local television and answer a few questions without the help of a translator.

Hodges' popularity was fueled by his playing style but also how he took to life in an industrial city whose closest geographical landmark was the North Korean border. 'When I got off the plane, it felt like a time warp', recalls Hodges.

'The cars were all beaten up and had rusting paint; it felt like a third world country'. Hodges spent most of the journey to the Liaoning headquarters staring out of the window. There were few cars occupying the main road leading into the city. The other occupants crowding the lanes were on bicycles, rickshaws and donkeys. This kind of isolation, coupled with the intense adoration, would have broken other players. In private, he remarked about how overwhelming it was, but on the streets, Hodges was forever smiling and signing autographs. Havrilla had things a little easier because his wife had come with him as a traveling companion but Hodges had to make sense of the culture shock by himself.

In addition to the fan interest, the day-to-day basketball routine was far from glamorous. The Americans rarely had time to themselves and calling home by payphone became a critical way of knowing what was happening in the world. By then, China was subject to nationwide media censorship. In the beginning, the hotel left copies of USA Today by both players' door but anything deemed subversive was cut out or blackened with marker. CNN and the BBC were available on the hotel televisions but with similar restrictions about what was aired. Even then, access to those perks were fleeting. When Madeleine Albright, then the US foreign secretary, accused the Chinese government of human rights abuses, the newspapers stopped appearing. Soon after, the western news channels were cut off. Training was also unrelenting and repetitive. The team trained twice a day; once in the morning and then again in the late afternoon, five hours a day, seven days a week. Even on game day, teams trained in the morning. New Year's Eve was their only day off. It was also not uncommon for the team to travel to road games by train. In the morning, the Hunters practiced and then drove to the train station where a reserved carriage awaited. The players slept in bunks until they arrived at the host city, played the game and were back on the sleeper train within two hours of the final buzzer.

The Chinese players took pride in enduring these hardships but it soon became clear that they wanted to know how committed the Americans were. This was another quirk that the foreign players had not seen coming. It was no secret that the Americans were better paid than the locals. The senior players on the Hunters roster were forever respectful but something did not feel quite right. Things were only resolved towards the end of the preseason, which happened to coincide with the start of the brutal Shenyang winter. The training facilities were unheated, meaning players wore multiple layers during practice and sometimes wrapped water bottles in warm towels to stop them freezing over. At one point, the team took themselves outside the training facility and onto a frozen running track. Even though temperatures had plummeted several degrees below freezing, each player was given a winter coat and a pickaxe, and told to chip ice for two hours. The Americans did as they were told but both realized what was going on. 'They wanted to test us, they wanted to break us', Havrilla recalls. It was painful work but it had to be done to win over the Chinese players. As soon as they did so, the slight hint of tension was lifted. But it was another grueling part of Chinese basketball that no-one had warned Hodges and Havrilla about.

In-spite of all the issues, Hodges enjoyed his first year in the CBA. Chinese basketball fans were also big fans of the James Hodges experience. The 1996/97 Chinese Basketball Association season was the first time most CBA teams signed _laowei_ players and many of the imports boasted stellar resumes. The Sichuan Panda's Alan Ogg had averaged almost ten minutes a game during three NBA seasons with the Miami Heat, Washington Bullets and Milwaukee Bucks before signing in China. Havrilla spent time on the practice squads of the Cleveland Cavaliers and the New Jersey Nets. The Shanghai Sharks brought in Saulius Štombergas, who won a bronze medal winner with Lithuania in the 1996 Olympics. By contrast, Hodges' resume was spartan. He had never sniffed the NBA or stood on an Olympic podium. But what he did have was athleticism and showmanship. The arrival of someone capable of dunking like that was a watershed moment in a league where local players were coached to play an unflashy brand of basketball. The very concept of dunking was still a grey area in Chinese basketball. 'In a society like China, authoritarian control was often in conflict with individual admiration,' recalls Kai Chen, who played for the Chinese national team during the 1970's. Chen recalls once being scolded for dunking several times in a game, only to notice the same coach excitedly talk about those same dunks when he thought no one was looking. For a number of reasons, very few local players could throw down like Hodges. 'They weren't naturals' recalls Hodges. 'A few of them could dunk but needed a couple of steps. I just went straight up. The first practice I had with Liaoning, those guys looked at me like I was a ghost'. Despite the lack of homegrown athletes, dunks were still a recorded statistic within the CBA. Whether it was the occasional NBA highlight shown on state television or the proliferation of black-market VHS tapes, Chinese fans knew about the high-flying American style of basketball. But it was only when Hodges arrived in the winter of 1996 that CBA audiences got the showmanship they craved. 'The crowd just got electrified', says Hodges, recalling the first time he threw down an in-game dunk. 'It was like the whole building was having convulsions'.

Given his popularity and his on-court successes, by the summer of 1997, Hodges was confident that he was going to be offered a generous raise to come back to the Hunters. Liaoning were also keen. But when it came time, discussions ended almost immediately. The team's offer was a single season deal that paid $12,000 a month-- exactly the same as the previous year. Hodges felt that was unacceptable. He had led the Hunters in scoring and just made the CBA Finals. This justified a pay rise and better terms. The Hunters front office were not willing to budge. In a league with almost no free agency, it was possible that they did not understand the nuances of negotiating. Charles Bonsignoire, Hodges' agent saw things differently. 'At the time, Chinese teams thought there were a whole bunch of Michael Jordan's just walking around on the street'. Neither side was willing to back down. For a few days, Hodges thought he would have to play his basketball outside of mainland China that autumn.

However, as the Hunters sat on their hands, another CBA team emerged. The Jiangsu Dragons had already signed Charlie Mandt and wanted to add another American to their roster. Scarcely believing their luck, Jiangsu quickly offered Hodges $15,000 a month to play alongside Mandt and their own homegrown superstar, Hu Weidong. Hodges had faced off against Hu in Jiangsu province during the early stages of the 1996/97 season, putting up 26 points and 13 rebounds. Hodges was also intrigued by the possibility of playing with Hu, who was already a two-time league MVP in the CBA. Scoring-wise, the Hu & Hodges offense sounded unstoppable. It was still a tough choice for Hodges. He wanted to go back to Shenyang to be reunited with his flocking fans. It would also be tough to walk away from the on-court camaraderie he had established with Li. But ultimately, Hodges was stung by the Hunters' refusal to budge on their offer. As he prepared to fly back to China, he told Bonsignoire to send Jiangsu the good news.

Because of that decision, Hodges and Mandt were now looking at each other in the lobby of the Jiangsu Dragon's team compound. If Mandt was pleased to see Hodges, the feeling was mutual. Hodges was familiar with the rigors of Chinese basketball and how one needed at least one other American to get through the day. Both men were roughly the same age and also happened to be bachelors. Hodges was very much a 'work hard, play hard' individual and Mandt was happy to go with the flow. The two men quickly became inseparable.

Initially, Jiangsu's front office intended for them both to sleep in the same room, but Hodges refused. Hodges felt it was important that both Americans had their own place to sleep. The front office was confused at this request as all of the Chinese players had shared lodgings. It had not occurred to the team that the foreigners would want a different arrangement. But whilst Hodges' private room was being prepared, he spent his first couple of nights sleeping across from Mandt. Both men were tired but soon began chatting. Eventually, Mandt was gripped by a sudden impulse. He wanted to know how much Hodges was getting paid, and if Mandt should have asked for more when Mr. Ma had called him. As they laid there, Hodges began to grin. Mandt was already breaking one of Jiangsu's two golden rules. Both Americans had been explicitly told not to discuss their salaries with anyone. 'I probably wouldn't have asked James if the team officials had told me not to talk about money in the first place-- but then I had to do it', Mandt recalls. When Hodges confirmed that he was making more than Mandt, the latter cursed in the darkness. 'I knew I should have asked for more!'.

Besides the presumed differences in pay, other cultural clashes were inevitable. Hodges already knew what to expect but Mandt was experiencing it all for the first time. Both the Americans eventually had their own rooms but their Chinese teammates, Hu Weidong included, had at least one roommate. Sometimes the bench players took in a third person if an additional translator needed to stay overnight. The Jiangsu coaches also occupied the two rooms at the end of the corridor. Even the compound's team of cooks lived on site, although neither of the Americans knew where. Because the team compound was located on the edge of Nanjing's city limits, there was nowhere for players to go other than the practice facilities or their rooms. The roster would often spend their downtime sitting in the hallways or the dining area, talking to whomever walked by. This kind of living arrangement was relatively common for Chinese teams. The players saved money during the season by sharing lodgings and teams could keep everyone in the same place. The intention was to breed team unity and streamline the shuttling of players from dorms to the training facilities. It also functioned as a way of monitoring everyone and making sure no-one was getting into trouble.

The Americans found things rather claustrophobic at first but it was clear that the Jiangsu players had built a real sense of togetherness. Everyone lived together, ate together and shared identical daily routines. But the dorm culture within the compound was also chaotic. The Americans were initially surprised to see their teammates smoking in their rooms, in the dining hall, in stairwells, in the kitchen—anywhere on the grounds—and that it seemed perfectly normal. Everyone reeked of cigarette smoke. Hodges constantly complained about how the snarl of throat-clearing and tobacco-spitting seemed to echo around the corridors. Going for walks to escape the fumes, Hodges and Mandt often encountered the younger Jiangsu players hiding behind buildings dotted around the compound. Youth players were forbidden from lighting up so they simply smoked outdoors in the cold, where they assumed their coaches would not see them. Pranking also ran rampant. If rooms were left unlocked, players routinely stole their neighbors' clean underwear or moved furniture around. Sometimes it took days to realize something was missing. At night, the Chinese players in one shared room would regularly call their teammates in another using the landlines phones. They soon began calling Americans in the early hours to loudly curse them out in English before howling with laughter and hanging up the phone. Before arriving in Nanjing, the Americans had anticipated unwinding after tough training days by sipping beer in a bar and going back to their own apartments. Instead, they were playing cards in a dorm and figuring out how to disconnect the landlines in their room.

It quickly became clear that the dorm was the hub of everyone's lives and the Americans had been automatically accepted into this world. In a certain way, Hodges was relieved that he did not have to prove himself to his new teammates again. He had almost got frostbite in Liaoning before the Chinese players there regarded him as one of their own. Even so, the Americans still needed some time to themselves. Hodges eventually figured out how to call a taxi to the Jiangsu compound and tell the driver to take them into downtown Nanjing. Armed with his working grasp of Mandarin, Hodges took Mandt around the counterfeit markets in the city and came back with a PlayStation console. Because it played DVDs as well as video games, the two men quickly built up a vast library of pirated American films. "We had more movies than Blockbuster," jokes Mandt. As their teammates smoked and made small talk in the hallways, the _Iaowe_ i sat in their rooms and watched every major American film they could find. Mandt got Hodges into Nicolas Cage action movies. _Con Air_ and _Face/Off_ was especially popular.

Having mastered the taxi system, Hodges and Mandt also began to leave the compound more and more. This meant breaking the other golden rule handed down by the Jiangsu front office. The team did not want their expensive American free agents getting lost. For a couple of weeks, there was a compromise of sorts. Mr. Ma would ride with them on their outings into downtown Nanjing. But Hodges and Mandt soon realized Ma was reporting back to the front office about what they said or did. Instead, they asked a local player to write down the compound's address in Chinese characters just in case the taxi driver could not understand Hodges. Now they had that, the _laowei_ could sneak out and hail a ride from the side of the street. Soon Ma tired of tracking down the foreigners whenever the latter went missing. Instead, there was an unspoken understanding to stay out of trouble. Most of the time, the taxi went to the market but occasionally Hodges and Mandt went to a popular local nightclub where they would try to flirt with the local girls. 'They were very traditional', Mandt recalls. At one point, he took a shine to a woman he kept seeing around. She spoke enough English that Mandt asked her on a date. The woman refused; she needed permission from her parents. They would almost certainly not approve to her being courted by some random _laowei_ basketball player living on an industrial estate. When this situation occurred a second time within a few weeks, Mandt decided to stick to watching Nicolas Cage films in his bedroom. Another game changer occurred when the Americans spotted a McDonald's restaurant a few minutes' walk from the team's training facilities. They had been craving American food, and this seemed too good to be true. These outings allowed Hodges and Mandt to enjoy some comfort food, but they also helped keep their weight up amid the grueling training sessions that were now underway. With Hodges around to help, Mandt began navigating the menu, impressing the cashier with his requests for _rulao_ _hambao_ (cheeseburger) and _shu tiao_ (french fries) to go with his Sprite.

As they found opportunities to let off steam, Mandt was able to ask Hodges some questions about Chinese basketball. With one season behind him, Hodges had a better idea of how things worked. Like in America, there were four quarters of twelve minutes. That was pretty much where the similarities ended. By the 1997/98 season, the CBA was a twelve-team league. Each side played each other home and away. Although the twenty-game schedule would be shorter than what they had played in college—let alone the eighty-two game NBA regular season—everyone was going to be tired by the end of it. Traveling would be brutal. China was a vast country with occasionally underdeveloped transport links. There was going to be a lot of overnight train journeys and sleeping in bunks not designed for men their size. Even when they were not on the road, they practiced twice a day for at least six days a week.

Another thing that Mandt would need to get used to was the playing restrictions. In the CBA, foreigners were only allowed to play for a total of four combined quarters. For teams that had only signed one American, there was no issue; he simply played for as long as his team needed him too. Most CBA teams, however, had signed two foreigners to their rosters—the most the league would allow. This made things a bit more confusing. If both imports played at the same time, that counted as two combined quarters. Rather than be without both, most CBA teams stretched out the foreigners' time on the court. Almost always, a foreign player would check in for the other import. One of them would start the game and play the first twelve minutes. In the second quarter, the other would sub in. In the third quarter, one of the Americans would play a large chunk of time before giving way for a rest. When the fourth quarter came around, the Chinese coaching staff would delegate one American as a 'closer' to help the local players see out the final minutes of the fourth. From previous experience, Hodges knew this was disorientating for the foreign players as they were expected to immediately make an impact when they set foot on the court. Conversely, there would be long periods of time where they simply sat on their hands and watched the other import play. The foreigner restrictions hindered the local players too—particularly if the two foreigners played different positions. In previous seasons before Hodges and Mandt arrived, Jiangsu avoided this problem by using both their slots on American centers. That meant a simple like-for-like substitution that required no further tactical adjustments. But if teams signed an overseas wing and big man—which Jiangsu had done for the 1997/98 season-- that meant the entire team had to adjust to which foreigner was on the court. If Mandt, a low-post big man, was in the game, that meant one set of players orbited around him and his style. But if Hodges, a small forward, was playing, the Chinese players had to be switched to accommodate Hodges.

Neither man was exactly thrilled about this situation but there was nothing they could do. Instead they were just grateful for small mercies. The Americans could now leave the compound without too much blowback from the front office. They could not, however, stop their teammates from smoking an acre of tobacco on a daily basis or cursing at each other over the phone at 1am. The tactical quirks of the CBA were another thing that was completely out of their hands. All that could be done instead was to order another side of fries and figure out what DVD's they needed to buy from the market that week. Everything else would have to be endured with a knowing smile.

# Chapter Three

## 'Welcome to Nanjing'

It took a couple of weeks but the preseason soon became a grinding slog. The Jiangsu coaching staff were determined to run their players, American and Chinese alike, into the ground. When they were not running suicide sprints, the players practiced the same play until it was perfect. Those days began early, typically with the entire team being woken at 6:30am. Breakfast was served in the compound's dining facilities, and then everyone went back upstairs to change for practice. The team trained at another facility twenty minutes away from the Dragons' compound so a bus was waiting outside the dorms. Everyone was expected to eat, get dressed and board the bus as quickly as possible. The Chinese players, who had lived within this cycle for years, sometimes decades, would be sitting on the bus within thirty minutes of the morning alarm. Hodges, who already had one season in China under this belt, followed soon after. Mandt was always late, a situation that irritated the coaching staff greatly.

Practice began as soon as the team reached the training facility. Once that was finished, the team boarded the bus once again and drove back to the compound. Lunch was waiting for them, and everyone would go to their rooms to shower and change into a new set of shorts and a t-shirt. There was time for a nap, but some players simply lit up a cigarette and sat around in the hallways. The Americans, who noticed they were losing weight rapidly, did not rest up. To maintain muscle, they started to conduct their own private workouts between the official team practices. With no weights to use, Hodges and Mandt had to improvise. Soon, they began running laps whilst carrying smaller teammates on their shoulders. In the afternoon, the team boarded the bus again and returned for another practice session. It was often the same drills as they had done in the morning and in the days prior. When the bus returned for the final time each day, the compound's giant metallic gate slammed shut with a loud, metallic thud. By then, it would be dark. Dinner was laid out in advance so everyone showered for the second time that day and came down to eat. The routine went on for weeks and people lost track of what day it was. ``I've never been to prison and I never will,' recalls Hodges about those days. 'But that was the closest thing I ever got to it'.

Training and precise execution had always been important to Chinese coaches, and the Jiangsu staff were no exception. Going back decades, Chinese coaches had been influenced by their counterparts in the Soviet Union. This began soon after Mao Zedong's victory in the Chinese Civil War, when Moscow sent thousands of technocrats and intellectuals to support the newly established Communist nation in Beijing. Sports coaches were also flown out as part of this exchange of ideas. Even after the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, Chinese coaches continued to use the translated Soviet coaching manuals, in part because Mao's policy of self-isolation mean there was no new ideas to replace them. By the 1990's, every CBA head coach had played under and then learned to coach using methods borrowed from the Soviet system. Preseason was critical to reinforcing everyone's familiarity with those plays. Besides being extremely fit, coaches were obsessive about where each player needed to be at all times. The iconic Soviet head coach Stepan Spandarian-- whose dominant national team from the 1950's created the template still used by Chinese decades later-- once curtly told journalists after a particularly impressive victory, 'we won because we did what we planned to do.' That ethos still echoed throughout _lanqiu_ , the Chinese term for basketball. Nothing was left to chance. Every player was expected to execute the right move for every situation on the court. Although it starved the sport of individuality, such tactical discipline was seen as far more important than personal flair.

Like everyone else in the CBA, the Jiangsu coaching staff also had one eye on the league's mandatory pre-season fitness test. Every player had to complete a series of timed drills to demonstrate their fitness. Guards were mandated to run a six-minute mile; the big men got seven. It was never entirely clear who counted as "big men" or how those times had been decided upon. If someone failed to complete the timed run, they were suspended from playing. Foreigners, however, could not be failed regardless of their score. The previous year, one American player had failed the test, and his CBA contract was voided. Hoping to avoid further embarrassment, foreigners were now waived through automatically. But for the local players, there was no such out. They either passed the test or their season was over.

Although the Americans were loath to admit it, the seemingly endless preseason had helped the Jiangsu roster get used to one-another on the court. Some of it was about timing; the local roster needed to see how Hodges and Mandt moved in transition and what they did with the ball in their hands. For many of them, this was also the first time that the Chinese players had ever had a white teammate. Some of them, thanks to a specific diet of Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson VHS tapes, genuinely assumed Caucasians did not play basketball-- or at the very least did not think they were 'real' American players. For a couple of weeks, a somewhat bemused Mandt had to go especially hard in scrimmage games to prove that was not the case.

Critically, the Americans were also starting to see how much the team relied on Hu Weidong. Li Qingshan was listed as a point guard but he always gave the ball to Hu immediately. Yuan Zhinan and Wang Jinhua, the team's aging swingmen, were similarly differential. Two other guards, Ding Tie and Gong Yi, had also been brought up from the youth team and was clearly waiting for the older players to retire before they could claim their spots in the backcourt. Some of the frontcourt players could also shoot a little but their main role was to rebound and set screens for Hu. When Hu was off the floor—which both foreigners understood would be fleeting—they might have to take over the offense. But their main role, like that of the Chinese roster, was to compliment the talents of Hu. One either got open or did whatever they could to clear a path for Hu to get to the rim himself. Building the entire offense around one player seemed simplistic but the Americans could see why Jiangsu did what they did. Everything was easy for Hu. Whenever he drove to the rim, Hu finished through contact or used ridiculous angles to lay the ball off the backboard. His passing was crisp and accurate. His size and agility also made him a match-up nightmare. If he got paired up against a shorter guard, the 6"7 Hu could pull up and shoot over them. Larger players were quickly tied in knots by his speed and dribbling skills. He also played with a cold indifference to his teammates; everyone had a day in preseason when Hu made them look silly. Hu held rank over the coaching staff, too, who offered no protest whenever he removed himself from practice. Some days, it was obvious that Hu was bored by the monotony and there were stretches when he barely practiced at all. Privately, the Americans speculated that the blandness of the preseason drove him crazy and that was why he seemed apathetic about almost everything.

The Americans were also starting to sense how the coaches were going to use them in games. Mandt was being moved between the power forward and center positions; as long as he kept things simple, none of the coaches seemed to be concerned. But Hodges was more concerned about his role. He was running drills as power-forward rather than his preferred role out on the wing. They were trying to get him to post up, something he had never done during his entire professional career. The Jiangsu coaching staff clearly wanted to minimize the tactical adjustments when substituting Hodges in for Mandt (and vice versa). But Hodges had not joined Jiangsu to be played out of position. He had made his reputation in China as an all-action scorer. He collected rebounds and took them coast-to-coast. He was always in the right place to finish off fast breaks. He loved to cut in from the perimeter and slam home an alley-oop. But the Jiangsu coaches seemed to be re-imagining his athleticism as a defensive weapon. They wanted him to rebound and give the ball immediately to Hu. Hodges was obviously concerned but knew he had to bite his tongue for now. Complaining about the game plan so early in the season would not endear him to anyone.

As the preseason drew on, the Americans also began to spend more social time with the Chinese roster. Every CBA roster had a different approach to integrating their _laowei_ (foreigner) teammates. In Liaoning, Hodges had always been treated respectfully but with a clearly defined distance. The Chinese players lived in the dorms whilst the Americans stayed at their nearby hotel. There was a professional relationship that required everyone to work hard but little social bonding. By contrast, the Jiangsu players clearly felt that everyone was part of one big family. Most of this socializing took place in the cafeteria. Mountains of food would be laid out by the kitchen staff for breakfast, lunch and dinner. There, the Chinese players would loudly banter with one another. Most of them did so with a lit cigarette in their hands-- even if they still had another session to come in the afternoon. The Chinese players also delighted in watching their foreign teammates circumnavigate the local cuisine. If either American wanted to know the origins of the vegetables they were eating, the stock answer was always "from the river." Along with the greens, the Jiangsu team served up substantial amounts of meat and seafood. When the cooks prepared shrimp, it was a regional tradition to serve it live. Sensing this made the Americans uncomfortable, the local players made a point of putting the still-moving crustaceans in their mouths and let the writhing tail stick out their lips before swallowing it.

During mealtimes the Chinese players would call over the team's translator, Mr. Ma, and ask questions about the foreigners' lives. They wanted to know where Mandt and Hodges came from and what their lives were like before they came to China. Given their monkish existence within Jiangsu's basketball compound, they had little idea about how other people and cultures functioned. In time, some of the locals began to practice their English on the Americans. Sometimes Ma was not around so it made sense for the players to improve their second tongue. It was also a chance to practice something that was not basketball related-- a rare opportunity for a CBA player in Nanjing. The chats made for an interesting distraction from the twice-a-day training. Gong Yi, the teenage guard who had recently been moved up from the youth team, was especially enamored with Mandt. The two would sit and talk in English for as long as Mandt had time. Playing behind a veteran backcourt, Gong would not see much time on the floor. The young guard was determined to get something out of his season and his English improved at a rapid pace.

But there was still one person that seemed unmoved by the Americans, no matter how hard they tried to integrate. Even as the preseason drew to a close, Hu Weidong continued to regard the foreigners with distinct aloofness. Hu was not the head coach but he absolutely called the shots. Everyone in the compound, whether they were players, cooks or team officials, spoke to Hu with quiet respect. Some players made a habit of greeting the foreigners with a 'hello' or 'good morning' if they saw each other in the hallway or as they boarded the team bus. Again, Hu had no such interest. During practice, if Hu needed to talk with them, he communicated curtly via Mr. Ma. As soon as his point was made, Hu would walk away and do something else.

At times, one could sense the pressure on Hu's shoulders. He was the star player on the city's biggest sports team and his image stared down from billboards dotted all across Nanjing. Whereas the rest of the team was unfailingly friendly, Hu plainly did not care if they were happy in Nanjing or what their lives were like back in America. As long as the _laowei_ did their job, there was no other reason for Jiangsu's star to talk with them-- so he did not, often for days at a time. The persona of Hu was especially bizarre for Mandt. The American first encountered Hu as a mysterious stranger schooling seasoned pros in a half-empty gym in Los Angeles. Mandt had been told that Hu lobbied the Dragons front office to bring the burly _laowei_ to China. Now that Mandt was in the same building once again, he wanted to know why him and not someone else. But Hu showed no interest in talking about this or anything beyond specific basketball plays. It was another example of the power Hu held over everyone on the Dragons team, Chinese and American alike. Whether it was his game changing ability or the answers to Mandt's questions, Hu saw no reason to share it with others until he was ready.

# Chapter Four

## 'The Baby Giant'

The two Americans needed a second look to make sure they were not going crazy. James Hodges and Charlie Mandt were in Shanghai, a three-hour drive south of Nanjing. They were gazing at the goliath warming up by the opposite lay-up line. 'I had never seen a person as tall as that before', recalls Hodges. The seventeen-year-old they were looking at was already 7'3"—the largest person in a city of roughly twelve million. His arms seemed to stretch for miles but there was no muscle definition. When he moved, it came via ungainly strides, a sign that this boy was still growing into his massive body.

Jiangsu was in town to play the Shanghai Sharks, one of the few teams close enough to be considered a local rival. The Dragons' Chinese players were already pumped up for this game and there was little love lost between themselves and the Sharks. Tensions had gotten so high the previous year that Jiangsu fans almost charged the court after a Shanghai player hard-fouled Hu Weidong during a game in Nanjing. But besides the natural rivalry, the Dragons roster wanted to see the Sharks' vaunted new phenom.

At that time, no-one in America knew who Yao Ming was but everyone in Chinese basketball had heard whispers about him. The boy was descended from Shanghai basketball royalty. His mother, Feng Fendi, had been a star center on the women's national team. His father, Yao Zhiyuan, a long-time player with Shanghai's pro team, was the starting center when the team won a national title in the 1980's. When both players finished their playing career, they were paired up and encouraged by their respective coaches to marry. Height was an ongoing obsession within _lanqiu_ and it was common for such unions to be made between especially tall players. Yao was the product of such an arrangement and his birth had closely been followed by the Shanghai sports bureau. As soon as he could bounce a basketball, Yao effectively became state property. He was given year-round coaching, comprehensive medical care and a customized bed to ensure he slept well at night. Now seventeen years old, this was Yao's first season as a professional and Jiangsu were one of the first teams he played against.

Yao had made his debut a couple of weeks earlier against the Air Force Iron Eagles, a military team from the north of China. Shanghai won that game handily and whilst Yao chipped in with a couple of buckets, the game was over by half-time and the teenage watched the rest of the game from the bench. In truth, the Jiangsu contest was Yao's real debut. This was the first time he would compete against foreigners-- a critical distinction given that Yao's journey was not expected to stop at the CBA. He was seen as the future cornerstone of the national team and that meant competing against _laowei_ \-- specifically the Americans, whom Chinese basketball saw as the best players in the world. Like a young prizefighter encountering opponents of increasingly higher skill, Jiangsu's _laowei_ were seen as the first of many steps towards global domination for Yao. Whilst Hodges and Mandt seemed unaware of the stakes, the teenager's handlers had been anxiously waiting for this day for years.

Ironically, Yao already knew at least one of Jiangsu's Americans. He had been a ball boy for Shanghai the previous season and seen Hodges play in person. But Hodges was not the main opponent for Yao in the game. Mandt had already been told by Jiangsu's coaches that he would be guarding Yao for most of the game. A veteran of the overseas circuit, Mandt had lost count of the times he was matched up with a highly touted local prospect. He knew this was Yao's first head-to-head with an American center and was ready to make the younger man uncomfortable. Thanks to the decades of televised dominance by the United States national team, there was an aura to Americans. This unnerved young players and Mandt compounded this by being as physical as possible. Sometimes it was an elbow in the gut or a shove after the whistle. On other occasions, it was jamming a knee into the other player's leg as he posted up. Bullying a star struck prodigy was not nice but it worked. If they did not fight back, Mandt knew he had destroyed their confidence. When they did react to the big, bad Yankee, those same youths often took it personally. Instead of sharing the ball, they tried to go _mano-a-mano_ with the older, more experienced American-- with predictably dire consequences as a result.

As Yao prepared to contest the tip-off with Mandt, dozens of coaches and state officials were breathing a sigh of relief. Getting to this point had not been easy. Though highly regarded, Yao's mental toughness had been an issue during his childhood years. In response, his coaches trained him so hard that Yao would compare it to child labor. On occasions, those same coaches even invoked Yao's parents to make a point. During her playing career, Yao's mother was a ferocious, unfettered competitor that captained the Chinese national team. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, she had personally tortured two basketball officials for a perceived lack of loyalty to Mao Zedong. The aura that surrounded her contrasted greatly with that of Yao's father, who never played for the Chinese national team because he was perceived as soft-- something that one coach told the boy to his face. Yao had always been close to his father, and in his first season as a professional had chosen the same no.15 jersey as his old man. But he was never allowed to forget the weakness of his own father. It took time but slowly Shanghai's coaches turned the goofy teenager into the monster he never wanted to be.

Soon enough, warm-ups were over. There was a big crowd in the Shanghai Arena. Both his parents were in the stands. There was nowhere to hide now. It was sink or swim for the player dubbed 'Baby Giant' by his hometown newspaper. For much of the first quarter, Mandt did his best to manhandle Yao. Although Yao was six inches taller, the American was more experienced and ruthless. Over and over again, Yao was made to pay a physical price every time he came near Mandt. It was hard work, but Yao eventually rose to the challenge. Midway through the first half, he caught the ball with his back to the basket. Muscle memory from a thousand hours of practice kicked in. Yao spun around to face the basket, and with Mandt momentarily out of position, instinctively buried a mid-range shot before the American could get a hand up. Mandt remembers nodding to himself as he inbounded the ball. It was a nice move; maybe the rookie was up for the fight after all. Even then, Mandt dominated the early exchanges. When the American swatted away one of Yao's shots, he heard an audible groan from the crowd. Eventually, Yao was pulled out to rest. There was no point pushing it when the game was still in its early stages.

Elsewhere on the court, Jiangsu's veterans were dominating Shanghai's youngsters. Many of the Dragons' Chinese starters had been in the league for a decade or more. By contrast, almost all of Shanghai's best players left during the previous offseason and had been replaced with call-ups from the youth team. For much of the first half, Jiangsu out-thought and out-played their young hosts. Hu started especially strong, and he repeatedly drew the Shanghai defense towards him before finding an open teammate for an easy bucket. With the scoreboard moving along at a rapid pace, Jiangsu were up 45-37 at halftime and cruising. The score line could have been bigger but victory seemed close. The visitors had a young, nervous Shanghai roster right where they wanted them.

When the two teams returned for the second half, Jiangsu continued to pour it on. Hu was carving up the Sharks, getting his points when he could but also finding the open man whenever Shanghai send a double team his way. Meanwhile, Yao was still having problems keeping Mandt under control. The American was getting buckets on offense and menacing Yao on defense. With Hu dictating the game and watching on as his teammates made their shots, that should have been enough to gently ease towards victory. But the young legs of Shanghai never stopped running. The Jiangsu lead drifted into the double digits on several occasions but Shanghai always managed to reduce the deficit before it got too much. From the Jiangsu bench, there was a gradual sense of nervousness. Having led almost from the first possession, it seemed like complacency had sunk in. Shanghai should have been put to bed by now but the inexperienced Sharks roster was still hanging around.

Even then, with two minutes to go, Jiangsu had a six-point lead and a winning hand. The Dragons had slowed the game to a crawl and were trying to squeeze out a final bucket to kill the game off. But a defensive stop by the Sharks led to a score on the other end and it was as if a switch had been hit. Watching from the bench, Hodges could sense something was happening. His Jiangsu teammates were rattled. A few seconds later, Jiangsu missed another shot and Shanghai went back down the other end to score again. Panic was setting in and it only got worse when the Dragons failed to score on their third successive possession. The score was now 81-79 and the Sharks were only trailing by a bucket. The noise was deafening as Shanghai brought the ball down the court. Jiangsu's players could barely hear each other over the roar. There was no tactics anymore, just instinct and adrenalin. With the clock ticking down, Yao called for the ball on the block, feinted twice before Mandt took the bait and then laid the ball up for a vital two points. The game was tied.

With less than thirty seconds to play, the game was completely up for grabs. Jiangsu, having restarted with the ball, had the chance to retake the lead but once again watched their go-ahead shot bounce off the rim. It was Shanghai's turn to march back down the court and hit one final massive bucket and take the lead. Fittingly they did, and amid pandemonium, Jiangsu had to try and save the game. Instead, they blew their fifth and final opportunity to score. Scoreless down the stretch, they were doomed. The Dragons fouled to try and get the ball back, only for Shanghai to make both free throws. The game was over following an 9-0 run in the game's final two minutes.

When the buzzer sounded, Shanghai had pulled off a remarkable come-from-behind victory, 84-81. Mandt picked up 21 points and 10 rebounds, Yuan Zhinan scored 20 points and point guard Li Qingshan had 14 points. That should have been enough but somehow the team imploded at the worst possible time. A game that was supposed to test Jiangsu's championship quality had just been flunked in spectacular fashion.

For Jiangsu, the defeat was embarrassing. They had lost to a team of rookies. Three hours to the north, the fanbase back in Nanjing would be fuming. Inside the dressing room, the Americans were just as angry. Hodges was especially concerned by the reaction of some of the players. Some essentially shrugged about the loss, got changed and headed to the team bus.

By contrast, Shanghai were thrilled about snatching a victory against the odds. Mandt had done his best to knock Yao from pillar to post but the teenager held his nerve. He finished the game with 17 points, 7 rebounds and 3 blocks. Liu Qiuping, Yao's head coach even made a point of telling journalists that "Yao Ming was not afraid...he had a good showing." That Liu specifically talked about Yao's courage was significant. A former Shanghai captain and teammate of Yao Zhiyuan back in the 1980's, Liu had known Yao Ming since he was an infant. Liu was also the coach who told Yao that his father was soft. Now he was paying tribute to his player for showing toughness when it counted.

There was also time for one final meeting between Mandt and Yao. Frustrated and disappointed, Mandt was making his way out of the locker room when he came across Yao preparing to leave the arena along with his parents. With both men now in street clothes, the exchanges could be a lot more cordial. The teenage giant did not speak much English then, but he appreciated Mandt's attempts at small talk. The two even posed for a photo, with neither knowing that a few years later, Yao would be one of the most photographed men in the world. In that moment, Yao was just relieved he had played well against Mandt. In doing so, the baby giant had proven his readiness for the destiny others had chosen for him.

# Chapter Five

## 'Eight-One'

Jiangsu's Chinese players understood American curse words. Most of them would shout them down the phone to the _laowei_ in the middle of the night. But they had never encountered profanity at such volume or frequency before they met James Hodges. Hodges was especially incensed about the Shanghai defeat. In his eyes, the roster lost focus and allowed a less experienced team to snatch victory. For a player whose fanatical drive took him from Division Three college ball to the pro ranks, that was unacceptable. His teammates had to be more locked in when it was crunch time.

Hodges played angry for weeks after the Shanghai defeat. In consecutive home wins, he hung 32 points on his old team, the Liaoning Hunters, and dunked all over the Beijing Ducks during an 82-68 rout. At home, Jiangsu were unbeaten but they were terrible every time they travelled to another arena. Years of relying on Hu Weidong were starting to show. Many of the team seemed uncomfortable about taking big shots. Hodges was convinced this was why the team was now 3-3 instead of 6-0. But Hodges also knew better than to be the well-paid American calling out the local roster so early in the season. This was a close-knit team with established norms that would not change overnight.

There was, however, one fixture for which Hodges demanded absolute commitment. The Dragons' next home game was against the Bayi Rockets, who by every metric, were the best basketball team in China. Professional basketball had been played in China for fifty years and Bayi had won half of those titles. Such was their dominance, the Communist government often used the Rockets as the defacto national team, and sent them abroad to compete against the best teams in other countries. Their stranglehold on the championship was also underpinned by active state collusion. As hinted by Bayi's name ('Ba-Yi' means 'eight-one', a reference to the People's Liberation Army being founded on August 1st, 1927), the Rockets were the Chinese military's most important sports team. Because all Chinese government officials were linked or reliant to the PLA in some way, Bayi enjoyed enormous political support. Referees routinely favored Bayi and the team's connections allowed them to poach other teams' best players with few consequences. Incentives ranging from fur coats, sports cars and military pensions were all available to Bayi targets. It meant by the 1997/98 season, the Rockets roster was perhaps their best vintage yet. Like every other military team in China, the Rockets were forbidden from signing foreigners but it did not matter. No team trained for longer or harder. Leaving practice to drink water or seek medical attention was discouraged. It was also expected that Bayi ran the score up to reinforce their superiority. They had won two consecutive titles without losing a postseason game and boasted enough depth to defeat most opponents with just their bench. When one American playing in the league at the time was asked how his team prepared for Bayi, his response was simple: "you get on your knees and pray".

Although Bayi's roster was filled with Chinese national team players, the key to the Rockets success was their unstoppable front court. Liu Yudong, a mountainous 6'6", 250lb power forward, boasted a potent low-post and mid-range game. His fanatical obsession with playing through pain was also well documented. Upon retiring a few years later, Liu would remark that his most treasured souvenir was a bottle containing eleven of his own bone fragments that had broken off during games. According to Liu, the bottle "represented the quality of my will." Even if they dared, no one could hurt the Fujian native enough to make him quit.

Alongside Liu was a nineteen-year-old center who had only turned professional two years earlier. Like Yao Ming in Shanghai, Wang Zhizhi was the son of tall basketball players paired together with the hope that they would conceive an equally towering child. Both Wang's parents had played for the civilian side in Beijing and thus their son 'belonged' to that team. Also like Yao, Chinese sports bureaucrats celebrated Wang's birth. As he grew, Wang showed prodigious talent. Many felt Wang was the better of the two prospects. When both centers were still young, a visiting Beijing sports official even taunted Yao's mother, Feng Fendi, in front of her son; bragging that Yao was never going to be as good as his own city's phenom **.** Bayi, naturally, were interested in bringing both Wang and Yao over to the Rockets. In almost every case, Bayi got what they wanted. Entire families were set up for life by having a son wear the blood red jersey of the Rockets. So when the ever-formidable Feng defied the military recruiters and refused to move her son out of his home city, Yao became one of the few high-level prospects to ever turn Bayi down. But Beijing was less fortunate. In 1991, Wang's own parents smuggled their only child out of Beijing in the dead of night and handed him over to Bayi, much to the fury of Beijing's sports administrators. There was no way of getting the boy back as Bayi's political clout far exceeded theirs. Wang was now the property of the PLA.

Wang turned professional in 1995 and continued to learn voraciously. Within two years he was dominating men twice his age. His name began to appear on the databases of NBA teams. One American scout told Sports Illustrated that Wang was going to be the next Patrick Ewing. Jiangsu also had personal experience of how dominated Wang could be. The previous season, Wang dunked on a Dragons player so hard he almost shattered the rim. "I kept telling everyone he must have secretly been a black dude," laughs Kennard Robinson, an American player for Jiangsu at the time. "All I wanted was to see Wang's passport."

The Rockets were virtually unstoppable and only a handful of CBA players knew what it was like to beat Bayi. But one of those people was James Hodges. During the previous season with Liaoning, Hodges had scored 30 points and led them to an improbable win over the Rockets in the regular season. It had been Bayi's first loss in almost two years. Hodges openly despised Bayi, who he regarded as a boring basketball machine that got special treatment from the CBA. He wanted to secure another famous win over the Rockets, and he was going to make his new teammates believe they could do it as well.

So in the build-up to the game, everyone's ears rang to the sound of Hodges' voice. Over and over, the American bellowed that he had played all over the world—tryouts, pro leagues and anywhere else he could talk his way into. Hodges even evoked the Chicago Bulls—the team understood by his Chinese teammates as the best in the world—and insisted that the Dragons needed to believe they could even beat Michael Jordan and company. Tellingly, Hu Weidong seemed amiable to Hodges setting such a tone. At no point did the Jiangsu captain verbally defer to his teammate but there was no more sitting out; Hu ran every drill as fast as he could. This also set the standard for the rest of the team, all of whom fell in line. The Chinese players could not understand why this _laowei_ wanted to beat Bayi so badly but it created an edge that had not been there previously.

Regardless of Hodges' intensity, Jiangsu appeared to have little chance of winning. They were an inconsistent team whilst Bayi was coming to town with a perfect 6-0 record. The Chinese media believed a Rockets win was a done deal. Even Jiangsu's fans assumed the game was a lost cause. But as the contest came into view, the Dragons caught a break. News broke that Liu Yudong, Bayi's talismanic veteran, would be in the stands and not playing. The previous season, Liu had fought through agonizing pain in his leg on the way to a title. Soon after the play-offs—in which Liu averaged 28.6 points per game—he was essentially unable to walk. Bayi managed to make the power forward sit out, but his recovery was taking longer than expected. Not only had Liu missed the entire 1997/98 preseason, he was now missing real games whilst Bayi waited for his leg to recover. The Dragons took the news with a sense of relief. They still had to deal with Wang Zhizhi but the Rockets would still miss their go-to scorer. As the two teams prepared to leave their dressing rooms, Hodges made sure his teammates understood what was expected of them. The American was not buying the idea of a natural order, nor did it matter that the Dragons had not beaten Bayi for several years. Before each individual Jiangsu player left to warm up, Hodges shouted in their face that they were going to win the game that night.

Yet come tip-off, Bayi quickly got their offense rolling. Even with Liu Yudong in the stands, the Rockets still had two bread and butter options; finding Wang Zhizhi down low or letting their shooters spread the floor and make cuts to get open on the perimeter. Right away, Wang was getting buckets in a hurry. Where possible, he looked for a match-up against one of Jiangsu's local big men, who struggled to hold him back. He could also drift away from the paint and effortlessly knock down a mid-range jump shot. Naturally Bayi were also getting all the calls. Yuan Zhinan, Jiangsu's small forward, picked up three fouls early on and forced the Dragons to go to their bench for help. It all felt ominous in the early exchanges; as if the Bayi supercomputer was cycling through the options as it looked for checkmate.

But instead of folding, Jiangsu, excited and full of fire, gradually fought back. On the court, Hodges flew from basket to basket, swatting shots, hauling in rebounds and finishing strong on the other end. His bravado had clearly shaken something loose in the Dragons. They were getting in on the action, replying basket for basket, tough foul for tough foul. Bayi went in at the halftime break with the lead but Jiangsu still had a fighting chance. By now, Hu Weidong was making an impact too. The visitors were unsettled by Hodges constantly cutting inside. They could not afford to send a double team to Hu because the Jiangsu captain would quickly deliver the ball through the air to Hodges. As a result, Hu was being allowed to go one-on-one, which was exactly what Jiangsu wanted. Invariably the man guarding him was too small or too slow, allowing Hu to exploit the match-up before getting a bucket of his own.

Jiangsu knew they had to start the second half strongly and it did not take long for Bayi to lose control of the game. Their outside shooting was being bogged down by Jiangsu's intense perimeter defense and the only consistent scorer they could find was Wang Zhizhi. The teenage center was getting his baskets but he was starting to tire. When Charlie Mandt was on the court, he made the teenager work hard, and for every basket he made, another was blocked or rolled off the rim. Meanwhile, Hu continued to score almost at will. The Americans could sense that Hu was in his element now. This was his chance to finally beat Bayi and he was calling for the ball on every possession. With an increasingly vocal home crowd cheering them on, Jiangsu had to go for broke.

After four quarters of punishing basketball, the game drifted into the final minute of play. A couple of free-throws from Hu and a key low-post bucket from Mandt had helped give Jiangsu an 81-80 lead. There was only enough time for one or two final possessions. Bayi opted to run the clock down, try to regain the lead with their last shot and give Jiangsu no time to save themselves. Although they had screamed and heckled the Rockets for most of the second half, the crowd sensed an inevitable Bayi win. Whether through a referee's whistle or a timely shot from one of their many national team players, the Rockets always seemed to win in the end. But instead, and quite without warning, Bayi's lost their nerve. As the Rockets point guard brought the ball down the court, their players began to fan out. There was no telling who would be taking the big shot-- perhaps Bayi's players, unable to hear each other over the noise-- were unsure themselves. Suddenly, an errant pass fell into the hands of Li Qingshan, who immediately passed the ball along to Hu. The Rockets could only watch as Hu made an easy lay-up to put the score at 83-80. Pandemonium broke from the stands while the Bayi coaching staff reluctantly burned their final time-out to draw out a game-tying play.

On the other bench, everyone in a Jiangsu uniform knew what was coming. The Jiangsu coaches were talking frantically to the local roster whilst Mr. Ma continually shouted "no three, no three" at the Americans. Bayi had their backs against the wall. The Rockets had to make the next shot. Having picked up 17 points, 16 rebounds and 2 blocks, Hodges might have expected to finish the game. Instead, it was Mandt who was told to go out onto the floor. The team knew Bayi had to shoot from deep and they could not afford for the Rockets to snatch the offense rebound. As the taller, heavier player, Mandt was the better match-up to box-out Wang. Hodges, exhausted from his efforts, now had to look on from the bench and hope.

As he walked out of the huddle, Mandt scanned the dispersing Bayi line-up. In the days leading up to the game, he had listened to Jiangsu players explain how good Bayi were and all the titles they had won. Now the Dragons had their illustrious guests on the ropes. Jiangsu had choked a few weeks earlier against Shanghai but losing to Bayi would be twice as hard. The stakes could not have been higher.

Seconds after Mandt stepped onto the court, the ball was inbounded. Bayi's players stretched the floor once again but this time with purpose. Someone knew they were taking the final shot. Standing close to the rim, Mandt tried to read the play, but with bodies rushing this way and that, there were still no clues. Suddenly, a series of late cuts to the perimeter revealed the Rockets' hand, and instinct took over. Perhaps Bayi had not anticipated Mandt rushing out of the paint—or did not know the American could move that quickly. Whatever the reason, Mandt had spied a Bayi player setting his feet and leaked out to the three-point line to stop him. Amid the crowd noise, no one could have heard Mandt's palm slapping against the ball, but everyone saw the block itself. A desperate scramble ensued as Bayi tried in vain to chase down the deflected shot, but it was too late. Everything happened so quickly. Moments after Mandt's block, the final buzzer resounded. Jiangsu had won the game.

# Chapter Six

## 'Growing Pains'

It was only when they boarded the bus in the aftermath of the Bayi game that the Jiangsu players realized the scale of their achievement. It felt like the entire city was spilling out onto the sidewalks to celebrate. Hundreds were waiting for the team bus. Some cheered while others banged on the bus as it tried to force its way through the crowd. The Nanjing skyline also belonged to Jiangsu. Round after round of fireworks were exploding, drowning everyone in color. The celebrations went up a gear once the bus finally reached the team compound. 'It was like the Chinese players had won the lottery', James Hodges recalled. 'They were electrified. They just couldn't believe they had done it'. A massive feast had already been laid out to celebrate the victory. There was alcohol on the table, but players also went up to their rooms to get bottles of their own. Fistfuls of cheap cigarettes appeared from out of nowhere. In the meantime, the cooks kept the food coming. As his teammates made merry in the hallways, Charlie Mandt called everyone he knew back home, excitedly telling them who the Rockets were and trying to explain why the victory was so special. Other players, still in mild shock, quietly sat in their rooms to savor the moment alone.

As the evening slid into the small hours, a few Chinese players were reluctant to let the party to end. News arrived that the team's investors were throwing a party in the center of town. They wanted the players to join them for a few drinks. Mandt was already in bed and while Hodges was invited, he turned it down. 'The Chinese guys, they liked drinking to the max. They'd drink beer like it was the last thing on Earth', added Hodges with a laugh. He did not want to train with a roaring hangover so also went to bed. But among the group who left for the after-party was Hu Weidong. It was unclear how long the players were gone, but as they headed home, the driver of their car failed to spot another vehicle and ploughed straight into it. When the team were woken for practice a few hours later, it was to the news of the crash. Hu's leg had been mangled in the collision. It was not broken but he was in immense pain. Jiangsu's star player was immediately ruled out for at least the next game.

The Dragons' next opponent would be the veteran Guangdong Tigers—one of the best teams in the CBA—so the loss was huge. Wayman Strickland, the Tigers' American point guard, was also an outstanding scorer. Many predicted his duel with Hu would be the deciding factor in the outcome-- and come game time, Guangdong could scarcely believe their luck. Without Hu, Jiangsu's thirty-something swingman, Yuan Zhinan, was asked to be the offensive difference maker instead. It was quickly apparent that this was not going to work. Yuan regularly had double-digit scoring nights but he did it by playing off the ball. It was obvious that he could not carry the team like Hu could. Jiangsu's offense was predicated around a combo-guard making everything happen but without Hu around to dictate things, the team looked slow and lethargic. Hodges and Mandt did what they could but they were there to finish plays, not start them.

Watching from the stands, Hu was not happy. The frustration somehow outweighed the pain in his leg. He soon began making his way to the locker room and demanded to be put in the game. Down big at halftime, the Dragons players had entered the locker room themselves, and were braced for the wrath of the coaching staff. Instead, everyone watched with a mixture of awe and bemusement as Hu laced up his shoes and prepared to go straight into the game. No-one seemed to question why Hu, days removed from being in a car crash, was not being dragged back to the stands by team officials. Even the Americans, now largely numbed to the absurdities of Chinese basketball, were unmoved. "I just thought, "great, now we can actually win the game,'" recalls Mandt.

Whispers of Hu's unlikely re-appearance had made their way around the arena during halftime. Like something out of a Hollywood screenplay, Jiangsu's best player then walked out the players' tunnel in a desperate attempt to save his team. Hodges was not far behind and heard the deafening roar for himself. 'Those fans were excited. We had some decent players but everyone knew we needed him more than anything else. We just needed that presence'. The Tigers were just as stunned. Everything was different now—line-up dynamics, expectations, crowd noise. Suddenly the game was back on. Even at 50%, Hu was still formidable and suddenly everyone was getting open. As the Dragons stretched the floor, Mandt had room to work down low. Yuan, no longer the primary offensive weapon, could focus on hitting his shots instead of making them for others. Guangdong's double-digit deficit started to fade slowly. It had started a little late but the game-deciding duel was now on as Hu and Strickland took turns terrorizing the other team's defense.

Hu had managed to make the game competitive but the Jiangsu player was running out of time. Strickland helped Guangdong stay one bucket ahead and as the game drifted into its final phases, the visiting team slowed everything to a crawl. Every second that Guangdong took away from Hu Weidong was vital. In the end, the Tigers walked off the court with an 85-83 win, thanks largely to Strickland's 24 point, 10 rebound, 11 assist triple-double. Hu, now in more pain than ever, had to drag his broken body back home. The effort was inspiring but ultimately worthless.

In the aftermath of the Guangdong game, medical tests showed Hu had somehow escaped further injury. A few days later, he was officially restored to the starting line-up. The following week, the Zhejiang Squirrels came to Nanjing and Hu took out his frustrations on the visitors. Jiangsu won 85-64 and the Dragons' captain had 28 points in the rout. Having roasted Zhejiang, Hu then proceeded to torment other visitors to Nanjing. In the rematch against the Shanghai Sharks, Hu had a 19-point, 11 assist double-double and ran the pick-and-roll to perfection alongside Mandt. The American had 25 points, most of them against the still inexperienced Yao Ming, and Jiangsu avenged their earlier loss by winning 80-68. The Dragons then blew out the Shenyang Lions, a military team from northeast China and Jiangsu suddenly found themselves in the latter half of the standings with an 8-5 record.

But as exciting as Jiangsu could be, they remained mentally brittle. Road games were especially frustrating. No sooner had they destroyed Shenyang, the Dragons took a long flight north to face Hodges' old team, the Liaoning Hunters. Li Xiaoyang, Hodges' friend and former running mate had a 17-point, 17 assist double-double, and Liaoning won, 83-72. More losses piled up. Back in Nanjing, Jiangsu should have smoked the visiting Sichuan Pandas, who were bottom of the standings at that point. Instead, Sichuan won at the buzzer. Only another home win against a lethargic Jinan Army team kept Jiangsu from a .500 record with just only a handful of the regular season schedule left to play.

Understandably, the Jiangsu fanbase was nervous. Although the CBA was spread out across several months, the league had been structured so that every contest had real importance. There were only twenty-two games and every loss had a massive impact on a team's chance of making the postseason. A lengthy stretch of road games was also on the horizon, which was a major concern given the Dragons' woeful form whenever they left Nanjing.

Behind closed doors, the Americans expressed their frustration at how some of the local players behaved during games. When Hu's shot was not falling, the Americans felt some of their teammates would check out. Defeats against certain teams were dismissed as inevitable because the other side was traditionally better than Jiangsu. "They were like robots," Hodges surmises. "They just lived in those dorms with all those rules. They'd been told something so many times, they believed it." Both Hodges and Mandt felt something needed to be done. They felt powerless in some games because no matter how hard they tried to pump up their teammates, everything came down to Hu. "He was the only one of them that thought differently," Mandt recalls. If Hu got going, Jiangsu played beautiful basketball. But if he started slowly, heads dropped. The fact that Jiangsu played Hu days after being badly injured in a car crash confirmed the team had no other plan. Hu Weidong _was_ the Jiangsu Dragons.

As far as the Americans were concerned, one of the biggest problems was Jiangsu's head coach, Xia Hongfa. Whilst his scruffy, dour appearance gave him the air of a grumpy uncle, Xia was adored by the players. Compared to other coaches in China, most of whom saw themselves as drill-masters and enforcers, Xia was a teddy bear. "He was not as tough as he pretended to be", Mandt recalls; adding how the local players regularly took turns making Xia lose his concentration or try to make him laugh. Yet, this was in-line with the entire culture within Jiangsu, wherein everyone seemed to be one big family. Hodges and Mandt found the old man to be pleasant and agreeable but they still felt he was tactically inept. As far as they could tell, his job security was based around that fact that Hu Weidong liked him. Indeed, Coach Xie was obsessed with ensuring Jiangsu's star player had the ball in his hands. "Xia would only say three things to me in English; 'hello', 'goodbye' and 'set a screen for Hu Weidong', adds Mandt.

As far as the Americans were concerned, things were reaching a breaking point. The CBA had a ruthlessly short regular season and the team were losing too many games, especially on the road. The local players relied too much on Hu and the _laowei_ wanted to be difference makers in their own right. The only way to change all of this was for Coach Xia to change his tactics. For one, Hodges wanted to see more time at small forward. The previous year, he was the leading scorer for a team who made the CBA Finals. But Coach Xia wanted to deploy Hodge's athleticism as a frontcourt player that rebounded the ball and immediately gave it to Hu. Mandt also felt he was a more complete player than Xia realized. He could bang down low, shoot consistently from the three-point line and dish out assists to teammates. Instead, Xia used him in fairly formulaic fashion. 'It was a lot of cuts with Hu running everything. I was getting most of my points on the pick and roll or the pick and pop', the American recalls.

Xia plainly felt that the _laowei_ were there to play _lanqiu_ , and the idea that they should have plays called for them over the local star was lunacy. In years past, Jiangsu had signed defense-first American big men that set screens, rebounded relentlessly and let everything running through Hu. They were the perfect compliments to the system Xia wanted to run. But this time around, the Jiangsu front office found him a high-flying small forward and a center that wanted to score as well as play defense. There was an obvious disconnect between a veteran coach and his two foreign players. In the beginning, Hodges and Mandt had bitten their tongues, hoping the coaching staff would eventually try something different. Both the Americans believed that Jiangsu would only reach the play-offs if they let the local star occasionally take a backseat. The frustrations lingered and only got worse after each new defeat.

Eventually Mandt took matters into his own hands. At a team meeting, he brought along Mr. Ma to translate and, in front of everyone, asked Coach Xia why the Americans were not getting more plays. It was not a confrontation as much as a plea. Regardless, the room went silent once the comment was translated into Mandarin. Realizing what the American had just said, Hu suddenly began to gesture with his hands in the direction of Mandt, as if he was waving him away. He started tersely speaking in Mandarin to Ma, who translated Hu's comments back into English: "You will get your points if you stick to the offense we have." A second deafening silence then followed. None of the coaching staff said anything after Hu had spoken. The fact that Hu spoke on behalf of Xia and the coaching staff reminded everyone about who was in charge. Eventually a new subject was brought up and people moved onto to talking about that instead. It was now painfully clear to both Americans that the tactics were not subject to negotiation.

In the aftermath of that meeting, life surprisingly went on as if nothing had happened. No-one seemed to treat the Americans any differently. Mandt, resigned rather than angry, accepted that this was simply Jiangsu's way of doing things. Hu remained indifferent during practice and meal times, but showed no interest in making things harder for the foreigners _._ Ceding control to a _laowei_ clearly irritated him but having re-established his authority, it was back to business. By now, the brutal Chinese winter, was also in full effect and would not let up until March at the earliest. Jiangsu's home court, like all the CBA arenas, had no central heating. Both teams warmed up wearing coats and the frozen breath of players was visible from the stands. Road trips, particularly in the north, were incredibly treacherous. The team insisted that players not venture into the unforgiving cold unless they absolutely had too-- although, Mandt, naturally, would go rogue from time to time. On one occasion, the American left the team hotel for a short walk only to realize he was severely underdressed. Had a kindly stranger not gotten the American home quickly, the elements would have sent Mandt to the hospital. The coaching staff, though furious that the American once again ignored instructions, still obliged him to play in the upcoming game.

As temperatures continued to plummet, the Americans began to see why team unity was so important to the Chinese players. At times, it was the only thing keeping everyone sane. When they were not training or playing in a game, they were in Jiangsu's vast dining areas, trying to make everyone else laugh. It would have been easy for the locals to phase out the foreigners at this point. Instead the opposite happened. The Chinese players, having mastered Western insults, now wanted to teach local swear words to the foreigners. Mandt proved especially adept at cursing people out in the Nanjangese dialect, something he would do frequently to make people laugh.

The Chinese players had additional, more graphic ways of coping with their isolation. Hodges, who spoke decent Mandarin, often heard local players making references about flying. It took a while to realize that _'da fei ji'_ (literally 'hit the airplane') was a euphemism for masturbating—and that the players had assembled plentiful opportunities to knock their aircrafts out the sky. The previous year, Jiangsu had embarked on a preseason tour of America. On the final stop of the visit, several of the local roster left the team hotel for what they insisted was a gentle stroll around the college town they were staying in. It turned out that the players used the night walk specifically to take advantage of uncensored Western media. Somehow the group had managed to buy several hundred dollars of pornography, only to be caught with their bounty as they snuck it back into the hotel. Although the _laowei_ never saw the stash for themselves, both Mandt and Hodges were dimly aware of its existence, suggesting that the players had eventually been allowed to smuggle the illicit haul back to China.

When the magazines were not getting it done, the Chinese roster would also pay other people to misuse their airplanes instead. Many players went months without seeing their spouses and it was not uncommon for those same players to put on their winter coats and visit a nearby massage parlor. There, women with vigorous hands resolved their customers' sexual urges, and afterward the players came home as if nothing had happened. It was obvious that the coaches knew what was happening but did nothing to stop it. Whatever got people through the winter months was clearly okay with upper management. As with the print pornography, both the Americans politely declined to join their local teammates on their trips to the massage parlors. Instead, they watched DVDs and occasionally snuck out to McDonalds, although this often brought them into close contact with their adoring public. Despite it being the middle of winter, Nanjing residents were obsessed with soft serve vanilla ice-cream, particularly the kind sold at the city's McDonalds branch. Every time the Americans were there, someone came up to talk to them. It was no secret that behind Hu Weidong, Hodges and Mandt were the most popular athletes in the city. They were so distinct from the traditional Chinese athlete that local fans had dubbed their two foreign players-- one Caucasian and the other African-American-- 'the black and white superheroes'.

Hodges was popular because of his style of play and charisma, but Mandt, who was less athletic, remained equally endearing. During home games, whenever he hit a big shot, Mandt would jump in the air and click his heels together. The sight of a 6"9, 250 lbs. _laowei_ jigging back down the court was hilarious to fans. Footage of the celebration occasionally made it on the evening news. But during one particular visit to McDonalds, a middle-aged man and his son rushed up to Mandt. 'CHARLIE MANDER!', the older man shouted (Mandt when translated into Chinese characters was pronounced 'Mander') before jumping up in the air to do the famous move. But as the man landed, he slipped on the tiled floor, which had become slippery due to the winter slush, and hit the ground face first. A somewhat baffled Mandt helped pick the fan up, signed an autograph and eventually got back to eating his food.

In addition to the DVD shopping and the occasional visit to McDonalds, there was also ongoing English lessons. Gong Yi, the teenage rookie who rarely got off the bench, was getting especially good at conversing with the Americans. He no longer needed Mr. Ma to be around when he talked with Mandt. Having never left China, Gong was extremely interested in visiting America. 'Every day, he would come into my room and say "tell me something new about the USA"', Mandt recalls. But as his English developed, Gong also used his new skills for more than just travel tips. Gong was still below the unofficial age where he was allowed to smoke cigarettes by the coaching staff so he tried reasoning with the Americans to help him out. As none of the other Chinese players or coaches spoke strong English, Gong was able to publicly negotiate terms without anyone knowing what he was doing.

Cigarettes remained the de facto social currency around the compound, and soon Mandt began using them to curry favor with others. After especially good meals, he would thank the cooking staff, many of whom only smoked the cheapest brand available, by giving them each a packet of western cigarettes from the local market. On one occasion, Mandt discovered a brand with an indecipherable name on sale for $50-- an incredible fee given how cheap most things were in Nanjing. When Mandt mentioned this to Ma, the latter explained these were the brand favored by the Chinese Emperors, without ever explaining how he knew this or why such a brand would be retained in a Communist country. On a whim, Mandt once bought a packet and brought them back to show the local players. 'They went crazy; they all wanted to try one', recalls the American, whose popularity skyrocketed as a result of his unexpected purchase.

As the snow fell and the hours ticked by, lengthy conversations over cigarettes also revealed the vast differences between the American and the Chinese. Everyone was obviously a basketball player, but their journeys varied greatly. For Hodges and Mandt, sport had been an individual pursuit. If they wanted to get an athletic scholarship, they had to dominate in high school and keep their grades up. By contrast, Jiangsu's local players had no such control over their lives. This legacy dated back to the 1950's, when Chinese athletics began borrowing ideas from their Soviet counterparts. Known colloquially as the 'womb to tomb' system, the PRC began to identify athletes as infants, monitoring them as they grew and then re-routing the best to specialist sports schools once they reached a certain age. Often those same players become coaches at their old schools once they finished playing. The model was intended to establish a lifelong source of employment for Chinese athletes. The state would nurture them, place them into high-level competition and then, once they could no longer compete, have them harness the next generation of promising starlets. These schools had once been the bread baskets for the Soviet sports program, and it was the same for the Chinese well into the twentieth century.

To have reached the Jiangsu dorms, all of the local players had passed through the various provincial sports schools, which was very different to a regular high school. The priority was harnessing the individual's sporting talent, often at the price of anything above the most basic education. Young athletes were coached via hours upon hours of repetition. There was some opportunity for learning but fine-tuning one's jump shot was far more important than anything gleaned from a textbook. Those who continued to show progress were then filtered up the basketball pyramid and onto the Jiangsu roster.

Choice also separated the American players from the locals. Some Chinese families genuinely believed in dedicating their children to national sporting glory, but many sleeping in the Jiangsu dorms came from families who had passed along their only child for more pragmatic reasons. Plenty came from poorer families whose relatives could remember the horrors of the Great Leap Forward, wherein tens of millions starved to death after Mao Zedong's ambitious agricultural plans failed. The fear of going hungry was something that the state athletics program could capitalize on. As part of China's attempts to build a world class athletics program, sports schools could promise a young athlete greater access to the country's food stocks because he or she needed to grow big and tall if they were to win gold medals. One way or another, all of the Dragons team belonged to that legacy and had known little other than basketball and three square meals a day for most of their lives. Most saw their families sparingly during the seasons and had few friends outside the team. Younger players were dissuaded from having girlfriends or any other distractions from their sports careers. Neither Mandt nor Hodges could fully empathize, but with time, they understood that their teammates had grown up in a very different world. Though the Chinese wanted to win and celebrate the victories just as much as the _laowei_ , their primary focus was to survive each season. The former had minimal education and almost no real-world skills outside of being able to play basketball extremely well.

The Chinese players were also coming to terms with the Americans. The former clearly wanted Hodges and Mandt to feel welcome within the dorms. Because the local roster had spent months, sometimes years living apart from their families, they had created another family unit inside the Jiangsu compound. That was why, from the moment the _laowei_ had arrived, the Chinese players wanted them to feel part of that unit. That meant involving them in juvenile pranks or chain smoking at the dinner table for hours but things could also be gentler. At some point, the local players had figured out how to hack the compound's payphone system. When the coaches were not around, the Chinese showed the Americans how it was done. By folding a wedge of business cards into prongs and jamming it into the coin slot, Hodges and Mandt could now call home for hours without paying a single penny.

Coach Xia was similarly concerned about the Americans' well-being but in a slightly different way. Like Hu, he was unconcerned at Mandt's earlier attempts to change the playbook. But what truly irked him was that the Americans were going out by themselves too often. Eventually, Mandt, tired of being nagged about these adventures, sought out his coach to complain. A perplexed Xia was not buying Mandt's protests. Summoning Ma across to translate for him, the coach made it clear what his main concern was; "if something happens to you, what would I tell your mother?". Mandt, who was deep into his twenties and had lived by himself for almost a decade, was taken aback and did not know how to answer. Both Americans belonged to a team that saw them as brothers, whether the _laowei_ liked it or not. Above them, Jiangsu's head coach treated all his players like unruly nephews placed under his charge. It did not matter that the foreigners did not completely understand the system and would push the boundaries on occasion. Like any other family, everyone forgave each other's transgressions and moved on.

The Americans had not expected to find this culture waiting for them in Nanjing. Mandt, a veteran of the European basketball circuit, had never encountered something like this before. Hodges, when playing for his previous CBA team, was treated as a coworker rather than a sibling. When they first arrived, the culture in the dorms seemed both claustrophobic and unpredictable. Now, things were starting to make a little sense. The local players continued to involve them and help them stay upbeat. After a while, it was impossible for the Americans not to see the endearing side of it all, even if everyone smelled like cheap cigarettes. The results continued to be mixed and the Chinese players could still decide a game was unwinnable if Hu was not hitting shots. But off the court, a gradual sense of understanding was being forged amidst the snow and ice.

# Chapter Seven

## 'The Chinese Twin Towers'

Going to Beijing meant different things for different people. Tourists shuffled around the Great Wall or the Forbidden Kingdom. Bureaucrats glad-handed state officials and shored up political capital. Yet for basketball players, a trip to Beijing promised only a painful night's work. Not only were the Beijing Ducks well-organized and confident, they also had a young big man that was going places. Few outside of China knew much about Mengke Bateer but anyone who made a living in the CBA had a story to tell about the 6"11, 310 lbs. goliath. By then the Jiangsu Dragons had encountered all three of China's talented young centers at least once. Having twice played the Sharks, there would be no further encounters with Yao Ming during the regular season. There would be one more game against the Bayi Rockets' Wang Zhizhi, who was waiting for them in the team's temporary home of Chongqing. Thankfully, the upcoming game with Beijing was Jiangsu's final encounter with Bateer that season and all of Jiangsu's big men could not wait for it to be over.

Among the trio of promising Chinese big men, Bateer was the most aggressive. A blunt force weapon disguised as a basketball player, when Bateer smelled blood, he kept coming; charging into opposing players like an angry bull. Everyone, locals and _laowei_ alike, loathed playing against him. Bateer's bulk also inspired two unwritten rules. The first: be aware of the center's location during a pick and roll lest someone ran face first into a bone-crunching screen. And the second: if he got the ball in the low-post, never allow Bateer to lean back against the man guarding him. Once he did, his shoulders were so broad that he could rotate fully around his opponent before the latter could recover, leaving Bateer open for an uncontested lay-up. This lack of subtlety was not the only thing that marked Bateer apart from Yao and Wang, both of whom were already mixing up low post power with mid-range finesse. Bateer was also not the son of basketball players nor did he grow up in an urban environment. Raised in the steppes of Inner Mongolia, as a child Bateer wanted to be a traffic cop rather than a basketball player **.** His fate changed, however, when a local official visited his rural school and mistook him for a teacher. Bateer was eight-years-old and already 5"8—one of the tallest people in his remote village.

The boy's dreams of directing traffic quickly faded. Within two years, Bateer was sent to Hohhot, the region's largest city and the location of the provincial sports school. His stay there was a short one, though. Soon after arriving, Inner Mongolia dissolved much of its athletics program. In the flux that followed, the Ducks acquired Bateer and brought him to their own youth system in the capital. Now a full day's drive from home and able to only speak a couple of words of Mandarin, the youngster struggled with homesickness and attempted to run away. On at least one occasion, he was reportedly found sleeping by a railway platform having snuck out the dorms the night before. But no matter what Bateer did, his coaches had no intention of letting the youth return home. They wanted to pair Bateer with Wang Zhizhi, their other outstanding teenage frontcourt player, and rule Chinese basketball for a decade. When Wang was smuggled out of the capital at the behest of Bayi a few years later, Bateer was left as the team's best and only hope for the future. The boy from the Mongolian steppes had no choice but to accept his calling.

By the late 1990's, the CBA was full of gigantic Chinese centers but outsiders would have struggled to understand how special the big man was within _lanqiu_. From a practical basis, it was the simplest position to identify players for. But _lanqiu's_ love of size was as much about symbolism as it was practicality. When the PRC completed its reintegration into the international community in 1978, it did so after some one-hundred-and-fifty years of subservience, strife and suffering. Famine had haunted the country for decades; _'ni chifan le ma_ ', a common greeting between friends meant, 'have you eaten yet?'. At the time, 35% of the country, roughly 343 million people, were still illiterate. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese Communist Party wanted to project an image of strength and vitality instead. That was a lofty goal, especially in the early days of Deng Xiaoping's rule. The economy was in a precarious state after years of floundering Maoist policies. When the country's politicians met counterparts from other countries, it was challenging to convey the image of a buoyant nation. Most of the CCP leadership had endured childhoods of malnourishment followed by adulthoods toiling in factories and fields during the Cultural Revolution. When Deng made his historic visit to the White House in 1979, the far-from-statuesque Jimmy Carter towered over the 4'11" Chinese premier.

As Deng tried to wake the mainland from slumber, sport emerged as a way to stage manage China's perception. In the same year as Deng's historic meeting with Carter, the Chinese national team introduced Mu Tienzhu onto the world. A 7'6", 350lb behemoth, Mu was discovered working as a railway guard in his early twenties. With almost no basketball experience up to that point, Mu was a massive project in every sense of the word. It took years of coaching for him to be a passable professional player and he would not play for the national team until he turned 30. Aside from his technical deficiencies, Mu was also a heavy drinker, ill-tempered and uncooperative. He once went on strike to force the Chinese basketball federation to find him a wife. But when he took to the court, his strength and willingness to menace teams made him a walking advertisement for a resurgent China. In one notable game against Iran, a refereeing call infuriated the big man so much that he tore the backboard clean off its hinges before slamming it to the ground. The incident made the headlines of every Iranian newspaper the following day amid much marveling of the towering Chinese basketball player.

With Mu becoming the face of the team, Chinese basketball began to dominate in Asian competitions. Olympic success was the truest proof of China's growing athletic prowess, but Asia-wide performances mattered, too. Fittingly, the emergence of Mu coincided with Japan, China's most natural postwar rival, bringing through their own colossus, the 7"7, 331 lbs. Yasutaka Okayama. Both men were tall enough to dunk the ball without jumping, and the battles between Mu and Okayama defined those heated encounters. Although Japan won several FIBA tournaments prior to Beijing's return to the international community, now it was China's turn to be the top dog. China began piling up FIBA championships and beat the Japanese in three different regional tournaments during the early 1980's. Even as Mu began to age, China continued to use its centers as walking propaganda. When the mainland attended the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games-- its first Olympics in almost fifty years-- the first athlete Beijing sent out during the opening ceremony was the 6"8, 230lb center, Wang Libin. The imposing big man represented how China wanted to be seen. In the years that followed, Beijing continued to use tall basketball players as flag bearers. Several Olympics went by and whilst China produced countless gold medal winning gymnasts, swimmers and ping-pong players, none of them led out their country during the Olympics' opening ceremony. Flag bearers were drawn from basketball's big men. After Wang, the 6'10" Song Tao (Seoul 1988), the 6'8" Song Ligang (Barcelona 1992) and the 6'8" Liu Yudong (Atlanta 1996) all enjoyed the honor, leaving smaller, more decorated athletes to follow in their wake. Even Hu Weidong, easily the greatest player of his generation, was passed over because he was not imposing enough.

In time, the Chinese noticed further benefits to tall players besides their strength and imposing appearance. Increasingly dominant within Asian basketball, it was a different story when the national team played North American and European nations. Physically and technically, few Chinese guards could keep up with the best in the western hemisphere. But bigger players were able to compete, at least on offense. As the old adage went, height could not be taught and Chinese coaches realized that if their tall players had a mid-range game, they could simply shoot over the _laowei_. Many Chinese centers were taught how to shoot from distance before they were allowed to work on low-post moves. There was also a pragmatic incentive for Chinese big men working on their jump shot. "Outside scoring helped save energy and reduced the chance of injury," recalls Kai Chen, a power forward who played alongside Mu Tienzhu with both Bayi and the national team in the 1970's. "Self-protection and preservation was always at the back of everyone's mind. In China, there was no effective contractual relations between players and management so there was no health insurance." As there was no financial support if one suffered a career ending injury, there was no point spending the entire game getting bludgeoned under the basket. A good mid-range game prolonged the career of a Chinese big man. Accordingly, power forwards and centers were either coached how to shoot or taught themselves out of professional necessity.

To keep the big man production line flowing, bureaucrats and coaches scoured every corner of their respective provinces. The nationwide x-raying of young children also helped discover potential giants. If bone structure tests showed that an infant would grow to be tall, they would be watched for years to come. As with Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi, coaches continued to encourage taller players to marry and produce children of similar proportions. Guards and wing players remained important to the sports programs but a good center was priceless. In time, China fine-tuned a method for finding and training its big men. It started with identifying tall players and then syphoning them into the sports schools. Once there, they would receive daily coaching and were gradually honed into the big men required by the national team. They would practice hook shots for hours or refine their jump shot so they could calmly rise up and finish over a smaller player. There was also the constant cardio—regardless of the impact it had on the knees of tall and increasingly heavy players.

This system soon produced big men that dominated Asian basketball and attracted interest from NBA teams. Wang Libin was offered an NBA try-out in 1985 but turned it down to avoid being dubbed a defector. Song Tao, Wang's long-term rival in the national team, was drafted into the NBA by the Atlanta Hawks in 1987 but never played due to knee injuries. Then, in the mid-1990's, three top drawer prospects all emerged at roughly the same time. The 7'1" Wang Zhizhi and 6'11" Mengke Bateer already had two years of professional experience under their belts, and Yao Ming was midway through his rookie season. The trio were all under the age of twenty-three and regarded as the future of the national team. Their collective nickname, 'the Moving Great Wall', underlined what Chinese basketball loved most about them: their monstrous size and height. Results were important but so too was the symbolism of Chinese athletes literally looking down on their counterparts.

It was now the spring of 1998, and both Beijing and Jiangsu were getting tantalizingly close to a playoff spot. Both had been inconsistent for most of the year. No one was sure who would emerge victorious when the two sides met in the capital. What further added to the unpredictability was that it was the first game since the Chinese New Year break, an important local holiday that halted the league for an entire week. Hodges and Mandt were put up at a good hotel in Nanjing whilst the entire Dragons organization cleared out of the Jiangsu compound and traveled home to their families. Everyone was sluggish, thanks to both the pause in the season and from having enjoyed themselves too much. In theory, both teams would return in a similarly disheveled state but that was not the case. A couple of months earlier in Nanjing, Charlie Mandt made a point of destroying the Ducks. He scored 30 points in an 82-68 rout. He had also dunked on Beijing's American point guard Levan Alston as hard as he could. "I put him on my personal highlight reel a couple of times," the Dragons' big man wryly recalled; "I don't think he liked that."

But if the game in Nanjing had been an easy night for Jiangsu, the return fixture in Beijing was the complete opposite. The Ducks were determined to avenge the loss. To do that, they made the game into a street fight; slowing everything down and making Jiangsu battle for every possession. Bateer was less interested in the box score and more about knocking Mandt into the fifth row. With Bateer lurking, the American was held to 14 points whilst Hu Weidong got double-teamed from the opening tip-off. By contrast, Alston, who had graduated from Temple University only a year earlier, performed like a savvy veteran. Playing alongside him was Zhang Jingdong, a streaky shooting guard who had gone cold when Beijing last played Jiangsu but was now making up for lost time. When he was not coming around Bateer's screens and making shots for himself or his center, Alston knew Zhang was waiting to knock down a three-point shot. It was a multi-stage process but Beijing stuck to their plan. Tellingly, the Ducks' tactics seemed to unsettle Coach Xia. With his team struggling for momentum, the Jiangsu coach surprised everyone and played Hodges and Mandt at the same time. It was a last-ditch ploy and, given that CBA rules only allowed foreigners to play for a combined four quarters, Jiangsu would have to play a spell without both Americans. It still worked to a certain extent. Finally on the court together, Mandt and Hodges opened up the floor and made the game easier for Hu. If Beijing continued to double-team Hu, then Hodges could use his speed to get open. Mandt's ability to space the floor also meant there was further room for Hu and Hodges to work with.

It was, though, only a short-term solution. Once both Americans returned to the bench, Beijing regained the momentum. In keeping with the season-long tradition of the Dragons going cold during critical moments, only Yuan Zhinan, who scored 17 points, was able to offer Hu any kind of scoring support. Li Qingshan struggled whilst Ding Tie turned the ball over three times in the limited time he was on the court. Hu scored 18 points, but it took 16 shots to get there. Meanwhile, the Ducks defensive pressure meant he did not make a single three-point shot. Alston, meanwhile, had 18 points, 7 rebounds, 5 assists and 4 steals, as Beijing narrowly won, 75-73. The American's hustle in the backcourt, along with Zhang—who had 10 points and 5 steals—was the critical difference in a tight game from start to finish.

Jiangsu's regular season record sunk back to 9-8. It had been a clumsy loss, but the mood within the team remained upbeat. The Americans knew their next game was very winnable, even though it was on the road and only a few days after their defeat to Beijing. Other teams around them in the play-off hunt had also lost unexpectedly. With five games left to play, Jiangsu only needed one more win to make the postseason and their remaining schedule had more than one cupcake fixture left to play. The team knew the fan base back in Nanjing were annoyed at Jiangsu's chronic inconsistency but the players, particularly the Americans, were not giving it too much thought. 'We didn't pay any attention to what anyone said' recalled Mandt. In the meantime, having endured Bateer's attempts to shatter their rib cages, Hodges and Mandt could now enjoy a couple of days in Beijing. The highlight of a road trip was always the traditional postgame meal with the foreign players from the home team. After weeks of eating rice and basic starches, Hodges and Mandt were looking forward to shooting the breeze with Alston in an American chain restaurant. Having defeated Jiangsu earlier that evening, Alston was now escorting the beaten team's American players around the all-important eating and drinking locations in his neighborhood. Like Nanjing, Alston's home in central Beijing was near a McDonalds but also boasted a Hard Rock Café and a Chilies. To Hodges and Mandt, this seemed like an abundant oasis of western delights.

Jiangsu's front office also made sure to take the Americans to landmarks both had only ever seen in their high school textbooks. Like so many of their peers, both Mandt and Hodges wanted to travel across America as an NBA player. Now, in an alternate basketball universe, they were standing on the Great Wall, gazing out into the wilderness. The pair roamed the wall for hours, shivering furiously as they took in the snaking structure that ran for miles. It may not have been playing at Madison Square Garden, but it still produced a similar kind of wonderment.

# Chapter Seven

## 'Donkey Burgers'

Although the loss to the Beijing Ducks was embarrassing, Jiangsu soon recovered their momentum. Days after the defeat, everyone boarded a sleeper train down to Baoding, a nondescript city in landlocked Hebei province. Besides basketball, the city was known for three things; hosting a massive military base, brutal air pollution and the locals' love of donkey burgers. None of those things were especially appealing to James Hodges and Charlie Mandt. They were days removed from enjoying the perks of a major city; now they were in the middle of nowhere.

Most of the Jiangsu team shared the Americans' distaste for Baoding and could not wait to go home. Whilst the winter in Nanjing was no joke, it paled in comparison to what happened in Beijing and elsewhere in the north. Everyone was tired of being shuttled from one frozen Chinese city to the next, mostly in tremendous discomfort. It was not uncommon for the team to sit in overcrowded public train carriages. Often, if Jiangsu could not transport players using trains, they used a rickety carrier plane. The first time Mandt traveled in it, he noticed the plane had the floatation supports used for water landings. It probably was not intended for commercial purposes or for transporting a dozen giant basketball players across one of the largest countries on the planet. It seemed the only player who seemed to care about the upcoming game was Hu Weidong. The Dragons were in Baoding to play the Air Force Iron Eagles, another small market team whose roster was entirely dependent on a homegrown star. Liu Tie was a scrappy shooting guard whose upbringing in Inner Mongolia earned him the moniker, 'the Mongolian Steed'. Both Hu and Liu were talented scorers and unquestioned leaders of their teams. But this was where the similarities ended. Hu was quiet and reserved, whereas Liu's intensity was known around the league. The latter collected personal rivalries and seemed to revel in such conflicts. 'When he knew Liu was coming; that was a game Hu really got up for', Hodges recalled. Both Hu and Liu had turned pro at roughly the same time. Although they played different positions, they had spent years vying with each other for the league's scoring title. Neither of the Americans truly understood the personal history between the two men but it went back several years. In the 1995/96 CBA postseason, Liu torched Jiangsu in two consecutive games, outscoring Hu both at home and also in Nanjing. A year later, when Hu broke the CBA's single game scoring record, he did so against Liu and on his homecourt in Baoding. Local journalists referred the rivalry as China's version of the Michael Jordan/Clyde Drexler rivalry and now, deep into the 1997/98 CBA season, everyone wanted to see what was going to happen next.

When the two teams met in Nanjing earlier in the season, the Dragons won comfortably. Liu scored 31 points but it took him almost as many shots to get there. With Jiangsu locking down Liu's teammates, Liu did not have any support and tried to do too much. Hu did not score as many points but was content to let Liu lose the game by himself. There was now a growing feeling that Hu did not need to be at his best for Jiangsu to beat Air Force.

Right from the tip-off, Jiangsu beamed with confidence. They knew how to beat their hosts and stuck to the plan. Mandt overpowered the Air Force's young big men whilst Hodges were electric in the open court. After a couple of years in China, Hodges had developed a genuine dislike for the military teams. Philosophically, the American believed basketball was meant to be played in an entertaining fashion. Teams like Air Force, who espoused a brand of basketball that was dour even by Chinese standards, disgusted him. 'I loved it when I beat those guys and then their fans would come down from the stands for autographs', he later recalled. That Air Force game would be no different and Hodges quickly silenced the Iron Eagles' home arena with one booming dunk after another. Sensing his teammate was getting hot, Hu continued to throw the ball up like a quarterback and let Hodges take care of the rest. Sometimes it was a one-handed tomahawk, on other occasions Hodges would dunk through contact and get cheers of approval from the home crowd. By contrast, Liu, who scored 11 points on the night, watched on with a scowl.

Jiangsu left Baoding that night, having thrashed Air Force, 95-77. The Dragons, now 10-8 with four games to play, had booked their spot in the play-offs. There was still work to do before the postseason came along but it meant that the next month was going to be slightly less stressful. Although they would lose two further road games—an 89-71 loss to Guangdong and then a 102-73 blow-out to Bayi, there was still enough time to secure a winning record. Facing a woeful Zhejiang Squirrels team, Yuan Zhinan scored 25 points whilst Hu Weidong, Wang Jinhua, Ding Tie, and Li Qingshan all made their way into double-digits as part of a 92-72 win. A few days later, Jiangsu thrashed the equally bad Sichuan Pandas, 87-75. After several months of upheaval, Jiangsu eased into the postseason with a 12-10 record and a two-game winning streak.

****

Whereas Jiangsu was looking forward to another postseason run, Air Force's literal existence was up in the air. A number of other military teams that once ruled Chinese basketball could also hear their own death knell. That loss to Jiangsu at home ensured that the Air Force team would be among the bottom teams in the CBA at the end of the regular season. They were guaranteed to be joined by another army team, Shenyang Army. Jinan Army almost made it three army teams in the bottom four slots but narrowly won their last game of the season. Only the Bayi Rockets, the official side of the People's Liberation Army, had a winning record that year. All the other remaining military teams-- Air Force, Shenyang and Jinan-- had losing records and showed no signs of getting better. As with a lot of things, Hodges and Mandt could not have understood the rapidly changing basketball environment around them. Since the launch of professional basketball in Communist China back in the 1950's, the title had been regularly shared around various military teams. Following a lull in the 1960's and early 1970's due to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the army teams continued to win. There were brief lapses when civilian teams-- who were operated by provincial athletic administration rather than branches of the armed forces-- won the national title. But these were fleeting moments, and almost every year, the championship trophy was taken home to barracks in Guangzhou, Shenyang or Beijing.

Quickly, however, the old order was disintegrating. Until the early 1990's, army teams had several inbuilt advantages over their civilian rivals. The former enjoyed better facilities and could recruit players more easily. Playing for the army meant access to more food than the general population. High profile players were able to retire as officers in the People's Liberation Army without ever stepping foot on a battlefield. Military sides had also learned to manipulate the pipelines that produced Chinese players. Most teams were only able to field players brought up through their province's sports schools. This was designed to stop provinces poaching each others' players and ensure the widest possible player pool for the national team to draw from. But if a civilian and military team existed in the same province, the latter often got first choice over young players from the local sports school. For almost fifty years, most of China's best players opted to play for military teams. Such teams had the strongest rosters, won most of the championships and could ensure players had an easier life after their playing careers ended. It made no sense to shoot themselves in the foot by going elsewhere.

But by the mid 1990's, two unexpected occurrences changed everything. The first was the appearance of new revenue sources. All CBA teams received some funding from central and local state budgets as well as a nationwide sports lottery. But additional revenue was now arriving through private finance streams, namely Chinese and international businesses who wanted to sponsor a CBA team. Many, like Nanjing Iron and Steel, the company bankrolling Jiangsu, were based in specific regions and fancied their local team. International companies like Samsung and IMG had also been given permission to sponsor CBA teams-- albeit with some conditions. Bayi, as the unquestioned kings of Chinese basketball, were the most attractive target for sponsorship but the notion of an overseas company funding an army team was forbidden by the Chinese government. From an ideological perspective, it was unacceptable for an extension of the country's military to be funded by foreign investors. It meant that teams like Bayi, the Shenyang Lions, Air Force Iron Eagles and the other army teams missed out on the extra money coming into Chinese basketball. As a result, civilian teams could now outspend the army sides with regard to facilities, salaries and other perks. Bayi, thanks to their deep political connections were able to survive but less prestigious military teams became uncompetitive almost immediately.

The other major threat to the military teams was the arrival of foreigners. For decades, the only players who took part in Chinese basketball were native sons from the mainland. There was technically no rule against _laowei_ taking part. But given how Communist China walled itself off from the world for much of its existence, it simply had not occurred to anyone to sign foreign players. Every team had a Chinese-only roster until the 1995/96 CBA season, when the Zhejiang Squirrels signed an unheralded Uzbek power-forward called Mikhail Savinkov. He was spotted at the 1995 FIBA Asian Games and Zhejiang gave him a year-long deal to play in China. For a reported fee of $500 a month, Zhejiang had found themselves a bargain. Going on to average 12.5 points a game, Safinkov linked up so well with the team's star small forward Zheng Wu and center Yu Leping that Chinese media dubbed the trio, 'the three Musketeers'. Savinkov's arrival in the CBA was an instant upgrade to a so-so Zhejiang roster. At the time, teams restocked their rosters by coaching up players from their youth ranks. That process took time, but Zhejiang bypassed it completely by picking up the phone and signing a foreigner to a one-year deal. Almost all of the CBA teams recognized what Zhejiang had done and began to copy their approach for the start of the 1996/97 season. However, the CBA's remaining military teams-- Bayi, Shenyang, Jinan and Air Force—were not allowed to sign what their bosses deemed 'mercenaries'. In the same way that military teams could not be financed by foreign companies, they could not be staffed by foreign players either. It would have been hugely embarrassing if the best players on an army team were _laowei_.

Not being able to sign foreign players was the final blow to the dominance of the military teams. Whereas civilian teams were instantly upgrading their rosters with experienced Western professionals, the military sides were still having to slowly coach up young prospects. This disadvantage was further compounded when Bayi began cherry picking the best youth players from the smaller military teams. Bayi's looting, whilst shameless, went largely unchallenged. The team's status within Chinese basketball allowed them to pull rank and take the players it needed to survive this new era. If any of the army teams were to survive, it had to be Bayi-- who had won more national titles than the rest of Chinese basketball combined. But for every other military side, they were now living on borrowed time. With Bayi taking their best young players and the civilian teams now able to sign two foreigners each year, the other military teams were fatally weakened. Teams like Air Force were obviously uncompetitive and the writing was on the wall. It was clear that the PLA and the generals that controlled China's armed forces could not continue to fund underperforming basketball teams.

As they trudged off the court in Baoding, the Iron Eagles players must have also known the game was up. They had been around the higher tiers of Chinese basketball for decades and boasted one of China's best local players. As recently as the 1995 season, when Jiangsu only had local players, Air Force smoked them in both Baoding and Nanjing. But now Jiangsu were the stronger team. The 95-77 win, which sent Jiangsu into the CBA postseason, demonstrated the difference between the two sides. Each had an elite Chinese player, but Hodges and Mandt proved the difference for Jiangsu. The margin of Air Force's defeat to Jiangsu was almost twenty points and this represented a neat metaphor for how impactful the _laowei_ were within Chinese basketball. Within weeks of that loss, the Iron Eagles learned the team would be folded. All the roster, coaches and players alike, would be released, scattered to the wind and told to find new employers elsewhere. In less than two years, the Air Force Iron Eagles had gone from being a _lanqiu_ mainstay to a historical footnote.

# Chapter Eight

## 'Foreign All-Stars'

While the regular season had concluded, there was still work to be done before the play-offs could begin. It was now time for the CBA All-Star game. Scheduled to take place a few days before the start of the play-offs, it was hardly perfect timing for CBA teams. But in China, the basketball establishment made the rules. For the cream of CBA, there was no choice but to get on a plane and fly out to the league's showpiece event.

Like most aspects of the CBA, its All-Star weekend was a work in progress. The inaugural event in 1995 had been relatively tame. Two teams of Chinese players played a single game and everyone went home. The CBA had wanted something more spectacular and fan-friendly so began consulting with the league's American partners, IMG and Nike. Before then, the country's _lanqiu_ grandees were wary of their foreigner partners and their inclination to 'Americanize' everything. When Nike, who supplied the league's uniforms, gave out baggy shorts for the players to wear, the Chinese administrators reacted with horror. This was too flamboyant they argued. Only when the players' representatives insisted that longer shorts were easier to play in was the plan reluctantly approved. When IMG tried to give CBA teams western-style nicknames, some teams went along willingly. The civilian side from Beijing loved their new Ducks nickname-- a nod to the city's Peking duck signature dish. Others, however, were less than impressed and insisted on creating their own nicknames. But the officials who ran Chinese basketball needed the foreigners to help them jazz up the CBA All-Star event. They recognized it was bland and needed new ideas to help energize local fans.

So in 1996, Nike were given full control over the CBA All-Star weekend on a one-time-only deal. Things would be very different from the previous year. The American company wanted to show Liu Yuming, then the secretary general of Chinese basketball, how the CBA could be both a spectacle and a customer attraction. Nike pulled out all the stops, creating a weekend similar to its NBA counterpart, and they held the event to Shanghai (where the company's Chinese HQ was based) and attempted to create an up-tempo, more Westernized All-Star weekend. They flew in an MTV Asia presenter to emcee and added a dunk contest and three-point shooting tournament. It proved to be a wildly successful event. Fans got so excited that they literally broke down doors to get into the arena. When James Hodges won the inaugural dunk contest by leaping over a Liaoning mascot from the free-throw line, the American was met by a deafening ovation. In the All-Star game itself, Chinese and _laowei_ were allowed to play on the same teams, and players of every nationality were cheered lustily. Almost every event sold out and millions tuned in via state television.

But for the 1997/98 CBA All-Star Weekend, things had changed yet again. Liu Yuming was no longer the boss of Chinese basketball. Between the previous and upcoming All-Star weekends, Liu had gotten herself embroiled in a messy political dispute with other senior basketball officials. An exasperated Ministry of Sport had removed Liu and replaced her with Xin Lanchang, a career bureaucrat who preferred table tennis to basketball, to re-establish some stability. The departure of Liu would create profound consequences. She was friendly to the CBA's western backers and saw them as a modernizing influence within her sport. Xin was colder and less inclined to hear the _laowei_ out. Critically, the most important figure in Chinese basketball now regarded the league's foreign partners with distrust.

By the start of the 1998 All-Star weekend, Xin's changes were starting to be felt. Instead of Shanghai or another major city like Beijing, Xin had sent the event to the tough northern city of Shenyang. As people began assembling for the start of the event, it was also clear that the collectivist spirit of the previous All-Star weekend had been scrubbed out. The event dripped with nationalism. The names on the All-Star Game jerseys, local and foreign alike, were written only in Chinese characters. The official All-Star program also made an unexpectedly personal attack on John Spencer, the Sichuan Pandas' American center and a well-known _laowei_ player in the CBA. Spencer had previously played for Jiangsu but instead of re-signing for a second season, moved to the Pandas instead. The booklet wrote how Spencer disrespected the Dragons by "breaking his word" and seemed to imply the American jumped ship for the money. It was a remarkably aggressive tone for a program that would be handed to fans upon their arrival to the event.

The All-Star game itself was also going to be very different. Last time around, locals and _laowei_ played on the same side teams but for the upcoming All-Star game, everything came down to nationality. One side, 'the Chinese All-Stars', only featured local players whilst 'the Foreign All-Stars' was made up of imports from the various CBA teams. Instantly, the league's foreign sponsors knew this would be trouble. When Nike had taken control of the 1997 All-Star contest, they made sure that Chinese and foreigners played alongside each other. They knew what happened when local and overseas teams played a high-profile game on Chinese soil **.** Back in 1994, the NBA and Nike paired up to run a 'Hoop Heroes Summit' that featured several prominent American players taking on China's national team in an exhibition game in Beijing. In the build up to the event, Alonzo Mourning, the star name on the tour, had damned Chinese basketball with faint praise. 'We respect them for playing us so hard [but] hands down, there's [still] nobody that can stop us in the world—the universe'. Comments like that did not go down well, and the Chinese, in the words of one Nike executive, "came out like caged tigers". This was supposed to be a goodwill game but no-one had told the home team, who sought to bludgeon the NBA players at every opportunity. Mourning was especially targeted. There were multiple flashpoints that nearly led to punches being thrown.

A year on from the Shanghai All-Star game, Nike lacked any formal control over proceedings. Plenty of the foreigners now assisting the CBA had also been at that Hoop Heroes game. They knew a 'locals vs. foreigners' game was a recipe for trouble. But with Liu now ousted from power, the _laowei_ lacked a voice on the inside to reason with. So when the selection for the 'Chinese All-Star team' was announced, everyone could see what was going on. Liaoning's Li Xiaoyong was the starting point guard whilst Hu Weidong and Shandong's Gong Xiaobin lined up on the wings. Wang Zhizhi and Yao Ming were playing in the frontcourt. Backing them up were players like Air Force's Liu Tie and Beijing's monstrous big man, Mengke Bateer. The CBA had simply called up the entire Chinese national team and given them different jerseys. To make things even tougher on the foreigner team, only nine imports had been selected whilst the Chinese roster stood at twelve. Outnumbered and playing in a decidedly partisan environment, the 'foreign All-Stars' roster were being fed to the lions for the amusement of the CBA's local fan base.

Although everyone knew they were walking into a trap, the overseas players were willing to play along—at least for the moment. Getting flown to Shenyang and meeting up with the other imports was preferable to being cooped up in their lodgings before the play-offs. Now all nine foreign players were huddled around a table in downtown Shenyang, laughing and commiserating over drinks. The only reliable watering hole was a western-style restaurant with a Filipino band that played around the clock. It was far from luxury but no-one seemed to care.

But as they all sat at the table, James Hodges was clearly enraged by something. A couple of days earlier, the Dragons had returned from beating the Sichuan Pandas and closing the book on the regular season. This should have been a moment to celebrate but Hodges' week was about to be ruined. Hodges already felt marginalized by Coach Xia's tactics. His numbers were down but he was still turning offensive rebounds into put-back jams. Critically, this kept Hodges in contention to retain his 'King of The Dunks' title. The previous year, the American had won the award, given to the player with the most dunks in the season, when he was with Liaoning-- and he was convinced he had done enough to keep it now he was in Jiangsu. Even as he left town for the Sichuan game, Hodges was assured he was leading the league by a sizeable distance. When word came down that there was a new 'King of the Dunks', the American was furious. Wang Zhizhi, the young Bayi Rockets star, had somehow overtaken Hodges' almost double-digit lead. Something did not feel right and if the statistics were to be believed, Wang finished with 41 dunks, three more than Hodges. That total was substantially more than when the Chinese center won his first and only dunk crown back in the 1995/96 season with 32. When Hodges arrived in the CBA for the 1996/97 season, he threw down 41 dunks whilst Wang finished second with 27. For Wang to have won the title this time around, he would have smashed his own personal best by a considerable margin.

Hodges was both angry and suspicious. By relinquishing the crown, Hodges had lost out on a juicy cash bonus. But there was also an issue of fairness. Either the league tweaked its statistics or Bayi had pulled some strings. Coach Xia did not help when he tried to comfort Hodges, telling him that he could not win it every year and that it was someone else's turn **.** The American felt this was Xia's way of saying the league did not want their local players getting shown up by imports. Indeed, in the 1996/97 season, foreigners had led the league in almost all of the major statistical categories. This time around, Chinese players topped every single category. Shortly before the All-Star tournament itself, a journalist had even turned up in Nanjing looking for quotes to put into the event's souvenir program. Having found Hodges, the journalist wanted to know what the American thought about the loss of his title. "The nickname does not belong to one person," Hodges replied tersely, before adding, 'I will be back next year [to reclaim it]." The All-Star weekend program ran Hodges' comment untouched, prefixing it only by noting he was 'not without regrets' about the loss of his dunk crown. A few days had passed since Hodges found out about the dunk crown but he remained livid. His gripe was one of many complaints being brought up over beers and eventually talk turned to the All-Star game itself. Everyone could see that the CBA, as a crowd pleasing move, was sending the foreigners to be destroyed by the Chinese national team. But if the league assumed the _laowei_ would just lie down, they were in for a surprise. One of the binding traits among the group was that they had all spent their careers trying to beat the odds. Taking on the best national team in Asia was no joke. The Chinese team were heavy favorites and few locals believed the game was going to be competitive. Privately, most of the _laowei_ assumed they would lose badly too. But this was another opportunity to prove people wrong, and for that reason alone, the so-called 'Foreign All-Stars' all agreed that they were going to go down swinging.

Initially, the early phases of the All-Star weekend passed without trouble. Bayi's Zhang Jinsong won the three-point contest and then Hodges secured a second consecutive All-Star dunk title. Conscious of how he lost the 'King of the Dunks' crown, Hodges held nothing back. For his final effort, he brought Ray Kelly, John Spencer's American teammate from Sichuan, out from the crowd and sat him on a chair several feet in front of the rim. A short run up later and Hodges comfortably cleared both man and furniture on his way to the rim. It did not make up for the shenanigans with the King of the Dunks title, but the American had made his point.

But both Zhang and Hodges' victories were warm-ups for the main event, and it was only when the All-Star game got going that the overseas players truly understood something serious was going to happen. Initially, the foreigners had held out hope that the Chinese team might still treat the occasion like an exhibition game, with little defense and wide-open offense. Such assumptions were quickly dispelled once the Chinese All-Stars set hard screens and everyone guarded their man like a Finals game. This would be the tone for the entire game and the foreigners soon began to get equally physical. Both teams were also trash talking each other constantly. After years of foreigners playing in the CBA, the Chinese team were familiar with western curse words but some Americans could return the gesture in the local vernacular. "Me and John Spencer, we knew enough Mandarin to talk back," recalls Hodges with a laugh.

But by the time both teams went in at the break, the Foreign All-Stars were down big and could not get a single call their way. A hasty meeting of minds broke out in the dressing room. They had to go for broke now. Everyone was to get moving on the fast break and put a shot up as soon as possible. On defense, it was time to face reality. The referees were going to blow their whistles regardless, so everyone had to make the Chinese team earn their free-throws. 'If anyone came into the paint, they were getting whacked' recalls Spencer. The Chinese team would now have had to decide if driving to the lane was worth the heavy contact that followed.

Once the game restarted, it was clear that these tactics were going to be effective. Their increasingly up-tempo style unsettled the older Chinese guards. Beijing's Levan Alston, Liaoning's Marlin Kimbrew and Sichuan's Ray Kelly were all making their three-point shots. Every new play was a chance for Wayman Strickland, Guangdong's American point guard, to bounce a Chinese guard off a screen. On defense, the uneven calls were playing into the hands of the Foreign All-Stars. A regular season's worth of frustration was now being taken out on whoever dared come into the paint. It only took a couple of meaty collisions and some of the Chinese players were settling for a jump shot from distance. Slowly but surely, the foreigners were coming back into the game. As they did, the wall of noise cheering on the Chinese began to weigh heavy. There was growing impatience that the cream of the country's basketball system could not finish off a rabble of assorted _laowei_.

As the game drifted into its final few possessions, a perfect storm of nerves and nationalism hovered above the hardwood. With a less than ten seconds on the clock, the Chinese All-Stars had scored to go up 80-78. The next bucket was critical. As he prepared to collect the ball for an inbound pass, Spencer decided against calling a timeout and allowing the Chinese team to switch up their line-up with stronger defensive players. The ball was zipped over to Strickland to bring up the court. An excellent shooter, the guard was the best option for the game's final shot and the Chinese team responded by rushing him with defenders. Now finding his route blocked, Strickland looked like he was out of options. Then he noticed Kelly completely unguarded a few meters away. One frantic pass later and the Sichuan player was standing by the half court line with no option but to chuck up a Hail Mary shot. It took a step to steady himself but an instant later, the ball was out of Kelly's hands and headed toward the basket. The final buzzer sounded as the shot lingered in the air, leaving a captive audience to watch the ball eventually ease through the rim and onto the floor below. The bucket was good and the game was over. Somehow the unheralded _laowei_ had just beaten the Chinese national team with a half court buzzer beater.

As countless league officials shifted awkwardly in their seats, Ray Kelly was frantically doing the mental math. He knew what a partisan crowd sounded like when it did not get its way. So instead of celebrating the biggest moment of his career, Kelly sprinted towards the dressing room. Moments later, dozens of water bottles came crashing down onto the court. Other items began to follow as players, Chinese and foreigners alike, started running for cover. Realizing what was happening, Chinese state TV immediately cut the live-feed of the game. The crowd was furious and there was concern that people might start coming down from the stands. It took a considerable amount of time before police calmed the crowd down and the foreign players could emerge their dressing room. Yao Ming later recalled that the court looked like a swimming pool due to the number of water bottles thrown from the stands. Most of the crowd had been subdued or left the arena by then but the subsequent presentation of the winner's trophy did not pass without incident. In a moment of mischief, Wayman Strickland, who had earlier smuggled an American flag into the arena, now draped the Star-Spangled Banner over his shoulders as he walked back onto the court, much to the chagrin of the remaining audience.

The loss to the Foreign All-Stars and the crowd disorder that followed Ray Kelly's game winner was hugely embarrassing to the CBA. Had the local team won, those same fans would have gone home happy. But having lost, they pelted both rosters with whatever came to hand. Though Vaidas Jurgilas, a Lithuanian playing for Shanghai, had been on the foreigners' team, the All-Star game was understood by everyone to be a showdown between China and America. "'It was drop dead serious," notes Mandt. "The Chinese believed winning would be a way to show that local players were better than the Americans." The bureaucracy at the top of Chinese basketball had also tried to repackage the _laowei_ as an enemy that needed to be crushed. Whether it had been the rebuke of Spencer in the program or the 'locals vs. foreigners' format, the CBA wanted the Americans to be seen as bad guys by the home crowd. But having established the narrative, the foreigners had re-written the ending.

Quickly, the local fans turned on the CBA for the All-Star game disaster. Many were unhappy that the national team lost the game in the first place. Even more were furious at the CBA for turning the showpiece event into a propaganda exercise. _Basketball,_ one of the country's most popular sports magazines, was especially hard on the league, and decried the 'patriotic officiating' of the referees as "corrupt." This was not a side of Chinese basketball that local fans wanted the world to see. Twelve months earlier, the Shanghai All-Star weekend had made headlines for all the right reasons. Now the Shenyang All-Star game would linger in infamy as one of the worst moments in Chinese basketball history.

# Chapter Nine

## 'Shandong'

In the aftermath of the All-Star game, James Hodges and Charlie Mandt returned to their dressing room grinning ear-from-ear. The CBA had spectacularly failed to serve the _laowei_ up as cannon fodder. It would take years for the officials who ran Chinese basketball to live down the humiliation. Soon enough, a delegation from the Chinese All Stars also appeared to make sure the _laowei_ did not have any ill feelings. Later that night, a few of the Chinese players even joined the foreigners for drinks. The gesture was seen as proof that the Chinese players had no choice but to play the way they did. Anything less and they would have been condemned for not playing hard enough.

Hodges and Mandt flew back to Nanjing the following morning. It had been a long season and the injuries were taking their toll. Hodges had been hampered by a knee injury and missed a couple of games late in the regular season. Mandt was in an even worse state. An ongoing back injury was causing him real problems. Whenever Mandt complained of pain, he was sent to the team masseuse and eventually an acupuncturist. The American did not know it then but he had a badly damaged disk in his lower spine-- an injury that would typically have shut his season down right there. In time, Mandt began to think the problem was not as serious as it was and simply gritted his teeth. His career, like every American playing abroad, was built on reputation. Quitting days before the start of the postseason would have been a red mark on Mandt's name. For reasons of pride and pragmatism, Mandt had to play on.

When Hu Weidong, Hodges and Mandt finally arrived at the Nangang compound, they found the rest of the roster running until they could not stand. Despite months of heavy training, Jiangsu's coaches were concerned that any lull would create an unfocused team. This was another quirk that drove the Americans crazy. Their coaches were convinced that the longer teams trained, the better prepared the players were. Sometimes Xia was more concerned about giving off the impression the team was training hard so no-one could suggest they were less prepared than their rivals. Yet Xia's sudden intensity did have some justification. Jiangsu had finished with a 12-10 record. That was good enough for fifth place in the standings, which should have meant the Dragons played the Beijing Ducks, who were one place above Jiangsu in the standings. Jiangsu had beaten Beijing comfortably at home and lost narrowly to on the road; that was an ideal first round match-up for the Dragons. But the league had changed the postseason format and the bracket was scrambled. The ties were now decided on head-to-head results among the play-off team. Instead of facing a very beatable Ducks, Jiangsu would take on the top seed, the Shandong Bulls, in a best-of-three series. This was bad news as by the spring of 1998, the top seeded Bulls were in title contention thanks to a core of Chinese players in the prime of their careers. The roster was deep enough that Shandong had never signed a foreign player-- the only civilian team to make such a voluntary decision. That year, Shandong was so good that they become the first team to finish above Bayi in the regular season standings for several years. To make matters worse, history strongly favored Shandong. The Bulls had not lost to Jiangsu in almost a decade. Twelve months earlier, Shandong had faced Dragons in the opening round of the 1996/97 play-offs and swept them comfortably. Now they would come to Nanjing as the top seeded play-off side before having the final two games back in their home court.

On paper, the Shandong roster had answers to everything the Dragons could throw at them. Ji Mingshan was a hard-nosed center that could block shots and was difficult to push around. Shandong's defensive specialist, Ju Wusong, was coming into the postseason having led the league in steals for a third consecutive season. He would be tasked with guarding Hu Weidong for the entire series. On offense, the biggest threat was Gong Xiaobin. At 6'8" and 235lbs, the twenty-eight-year-old forward had led his team in points, rebounds and blocks that season. Like Hu, Gong was at his most dangerous when allowed to focus on being a scorer. The Shandong star was coming to Nanjing having already claimed both the regular season scoring title and the CBA's Most Valuable Player award. Both previously belonged to Hu Weidong but an inconsistent year from the Jiangsu captain opened up space for Gong to claim both awards. Having stolen his individual honors, Gong was now vying to humiliate Hu one final time by removing the latter's team from the postseason.

With Jiangsu needing focus, the return of their three key players was vital. In the build-up to the first play-off game, Hodges was, again, refusing to take no for an answer. He knew his Dragons team could win big games, even though some of the players doubted it. They had already upset the Bayi Rockets back during the regular season. It was time to make the Jiangsu roster believe once again. Hodges had himself endured a frustrating year. He had been largely played out of position and rarely started. The team declined to fight his case with the CBA about the 'King of the Dunks' debacle. But the play-offs were still the play-offs. He had gotten all the way to the Finals the previous year with Liaoning and wanted to repeat the trick with Jiangsu. So he roared at everyone to push themselves harder at practice. Everyone went to bed on time because Hodges made them. There was no more goofing around in the middle of the night. Scrimmages were tough. Players were cussed out in both English and Mandarin. In the background, Hu ghosted through training with his typical stoniness but his presence alone was motivation to others. When he was not lying on a treatment table, Mandt joked with his teammates over the dinner table and pumped them up during practice. He had always been the gentler of the two Americans; the good cop to Hodges' enforcer. But Mandt's good natured outlook was tinged with fiery intensity. Like Hodges, he had no intention of going home early. Both foreigners knew their future employment would be easier and more lucrative if they added a championship to their resumes. They could not afford to phone it in for the next couple of weeks.

As Game 1 loomed and Jiangsu fans shuffled into the Nangang Arena, the home team locker room seemed strangely at ease. The older players talked and took in the moment whilst the younger guys shook off their nervous energy. Hodges and Mandt were similarly at peace. After months of dealing with the minutiae of Chinese basketball, now everything seemed worth it. Having huddled around Mr. Ma as he translated Xia's pregame instructions, all the _laowei_ could do now was start walking out to the court. As they made their way down the corridor leading out into the floor, Mandt and Hodges savored the last few moments of solitude. They knew the arena was packed. The dull thud of drums was audible. Large swaths of the crowd were already chanting and singing. A couple of local players were already on the court and had been greeted by resounding cheers when they emerged. It was time for the Americans to walk into the light themselves. Within moments, the noise and the passion and the emotion would come crashing down on them like a rainstorm.

It was that atmosphere that drove Jiangsu on during the opening exchanges. The Dragons knew they had to come out swinging against their heavily favored guests. Like they had been with Bayi, Jiangsu were feisty, dishing out elbows and buckets in equal measure. Although a little startled, Shandong soon reciprocated. Everyone got what they were looking for. Meanwhile, Gong was slowly getting his buckets but it was not easy. Each time he got the ball, he found himself smothered by Dragons players. Anytime he drifted into the paint, Jiangsu fouled Gong hard. They wanted him to keep him on the outside. Gong was a proven scorer but not a reliable three-point shooter. The further from the rim, the more containable he could be. The physical nature of the game was bothering Shandong's star player, who was getting deeper into foul trouble as the game went by. By contrast, Hu was completely locked in. Every time Jiangsu needed something to settle their nerves, Hu would find a way to keep the scoreboard moving.

Jiangsu had the lead at halftime but no-one knew how the game would end, especially now that both teams were scraping for every bucket. Under the rim, Mandt was narrowly outplaying Ji Minshang, even as his body shock with pain. The Jiangsu big man still had the strength to give the game its' biggest moment, when he stole a few inches of space from Ji, collected an inbound pass and threw down a booming dunk. Even as the crowd roared, Mandt had no time to gesture to the crowd or even grimace in pain. With the season on the line, everything was strictly business now.

Come the final buzzer, an unexpected result shone down from the scoreboard. Shandong entered the game with the better roster and record, but Jiangsu played with the most desperation. The Dragons did everything to stifle the offensive potency of their guests. No lay-up went uncontested and no-one took a shot without at least one Jiangsu player in his face. Gong scored a game-high 20 points, but most came from the free-throw line. Meanwhile, the rest of the Shandong team looked like they had been in a street fight. Jiangsu's Ding Tie claimed five steals on the night, Hu and Yuan Zhinan both had four. Meanwhile, Hodges and Mandt policed the rim and contributed key rejections at critical times. Jiangsu came off the court with a narrow 58-56 win, showing they could beat the best team in China by slowing the game down to a crawl.

It had happened against Bayi in the regular season and now in the postseason, Jiangsu again surprised the CBA by conjuring up a victory against a favored visiting team. Perhaps Shandong had one eye on the next opponent and failed to take their first-round duties seriously. Whatever the reason, the Bulls now found themselves in a perilous position. As it was a best-of-three series, Shandong were in danger of being eliminated in their next game. This was hugely embarrassing for a team who had proven themselves the equal of the Bayi Rockets. The Jiangsu result changed all of that; Shandong's aura had been badly tarnished.

But with the tie now going back to the Bulls' home arena, there was still enough time to regroup. When the Dragons came up north a few days later, a humbled Shandong team was waiting. In-front of a packed arena, they tied the series with a clinical 73-52 victory. Now far away from home, the Dragons seemed uneasy. When they were in Nanjing, players were ready to put everything on the line. Now it was different. The defense was not as fearsome as it had been. On offense, shots were clanging off the rim when before they were going in. The team played like it had expended all its mental energy in their previous game. Moreover, Gong was now more clinical with his finishing, choosing his shots carefully and seizing on Jiangsu's hesitancy.

The emphatic loss not only tied the series but effectively shattered morale within the Jiangsu team. Soon a rumor began going around the Jiangsu camp that infuriated Hodges and Mandt. According to Mr. Ma, some of the Dragons roster felt that the earlier win over Shandong was lucky, that the Bulls were the better team and how there was little belief that Jiangsu could pull off a second upset victory. The Americans could not understand why parts of the local roster felt that way. They knew Hu and some of the other veterans would fight until the end but they were hurt that others lacked the same belief. It had been a long, tough season; perhaps they just wanted it to be over. But ultimately there was no way of knowing what was going on-- or even if Mr. Ma was telling the truth and not creating some kind of excuse for the flat performance in Game 2. All that could be done was to head into the deciding contest and hope for the best. As Jiangsu's deciding game arrived, almost all of the other quarter-final ties were set to be decided by one final contest. Liaoning were taking on Guangdong whilst Beijing and Shanghai had split their series and were in the capital for their final encounter. Only the Bulls' cross-city rivals, Jinan Army, had been removed from the postseason following a two-game sweep by the second-seed Bayi Rockets.

But whilst they had taken the series to its final game, Jiangsu seemed destined to follow Jinan out the door. The second game of their series saw the Dragons struggle to find their energy and the Dragons simply did not look as potent as before. Indeed, there would be no second impossible victory; having been shocked by the Dragons in their first encounter, Shandong made sure to finish the job in Game 3. The Dragons enjoyed some moments but, in the end, Shandong eased their way to a comfortable 68-54 victory. After disappointing in Nanjing, Gong was critical for Shandong in front of his home fans. Eschewing the three-point shot, Gong focused on getting as close to the rim as possible and ended up averaging 24 points for the series. By contrast, Ju Weisong followed Hu all over the court and held the Jiangsu player to an average of 10 points for the final two contests. The Bulls would now advance to a semi-final series with Liaoning, who themselves had eventually overcome Guangdong. Meanwhile, the Dragons' chaotic, eventful and breakneck season was now finally over.

# Chapter Ten

## 'The Chinese Jordan'

In the days that followed Jiangsu's elimination, no one was sure what to think. Both imports could now go back to their families but there was also a feeling of what might have been. The Americans believed they could have beaten Shandong and were hurt that parts of the local roster lacked the same desire. "James and I did our best," Charlie Mandt recalled, "but we needed the team to want to win also." The Americans wanted time to lick their wounds but they also had to pack their bags. Now that the season was over, there would be no more pay-checks. Within days of arriving back in Nanjing, flights were booked to send them back to America. All that was left was to fill suitcases and say their goodbyes. As they did, the _laowei_ realized this was not going to be easy. The local roster—particularly Gong Li, who'd spent hours with Mandt practicing his English—had grown fond of their foreign teammates. Saying goodbye was going to be tough.

Mandt and Hodges' shared adventure was also over. Over the last few months, the two men had become close. Whether explaining the nuances of the CBA or finding ways to make things interesting, Hodges always knew the answer. In turn, Hodges appreciated Mandt's willingness to go with the flow.

As teammates, this would be their last time together on the same CBA roster. Hodges was furious at how he had been utilized by Coach Xia. In his first CBA season with Liaoning, Hodges averaged 15.6 points and 6.3 rebounds whilst playing as a small forward. With the Dragons, Hodges played most of his minutes under the rim and his numbers had fallen to 10.3 points and 4.5 rebounds. Hodges felt Jiangsu screwed him over by trying to turn his athleticism into a defensive asset rather than an offensive one. Hodges vowed that he would never return to Nanjing as a Dragons player.

But before the Americans left for the airport, there was still one final thing left to do. Hu Weidong needed to be sought out for a handshake. For all their frustrations during the season, the Americans enjoyed playing alongside Hu. Both _laowei_ agreed that the Jiangsu star was the most talented player they had encountered during their pro careers. Mandt even made a point of telling Hu he would play with the Chinese guard, "anytime, anyplace, anywhere". Like all their previous conversations, Mr. Ma was needed to translate for the Americans. Ma made a point of spelling out Mandt's respect for Hu before the Jiangsu captain responded in his usual manner of speaking. "Charlie," Ma said, as Hu's words echoed through the team translator, "you told me this once already **."** It neatly summed up the attitude of Hu; aloof until the very end. Out of politeness, Hu held eye contact with the Americans until they left his dorm room. He did not have the time nor the desire to talk further. Whether it was these Americans, another teammate, a member of the Jiangsu front office or an official from the Chinese national team; someone always needed his time for something.

*****

Hu Weidong was born in 1970 in the north of Jiangsu province. A talented youth player, it had not been long before someone from the local sports bureau talked Hu's parents into sending their boy to Nanjing. He was quickly absorbed into the provincial sports school but within two years of Hu's arrival, the teenager was playing with adults in the CBA. By his twenty-first birthday, he was also playing for his country and by the start of the 1994 FIBA World Championships, Hu was already a key player. During that FIBA tournament, China qualified out of the group stages for the first time in their history. Not only did he lead the Chinese national team in scoring, Hu also set a tournament record by hitting nine 3-point shots in a group game against Croatia. A few months later, Hu guided the team to a gold medal in the 1994 Asian Games. Hu continued to make strides for the next couple of years but it was in 1996 that he truly became a superstar in China. At the end of the 1995/96 CBA season, Hu won his first league MVP award after averaging 27.8 points and leading the league in scoring. At the Atlanta Olympics that summer, Hu was the key player on a national team squad with an average age of just twenty-four. China had been placed into a group featuring three of the best teams in world basketball at the time; America, Lithuania and Croatia. They were outgunned, losing all three of those games by wide margins; 116-55 to Lithuania, 109-78 to Croatia and 130-70 to America. Yet thanks to Hu, China snuck into the quarter-finals due to head-to-head results with other teams. The Dragons star scored 22 points in the critical 70-67 defeat of Argentina and 15 points in 80-77 win over Angola. As a result of those narrow victories, China made it into the Olympic knockout rounds for the first time. A few months after his heroics in the Olympics, the 1996/97 CBA season got underway. Hu once again led the league in scoring and picked up his second successive league MVP crown. In the space of twelve months, Hu twice led the CBA in scoring, twice been voted MVP and dragged an inexperienced national team into the knockout phases of the Olympics for the first time. By almost every metric, it was the greatest individual run in the history of Chinese basketball.

Such remarkable achievements meant that Hu's most grandiose nickname-- _'the Chinese Jordan'_ \-- could finally be said with a straight face. It did not mean that Hu was as good as the Chicago Bulls star. Rather, the Jiangsu native was now China's very own Jordan; a one-in-a-generation player who seemed to make the impossible happen. Nike, who were heavily involved in the marketing of both Jordan and the CBA, also contributed to the growing mythology of Hu. In the mid-90's, the shoe company commissioned a series of commercials featuring three of the CBA's most well-known players; Hu, Wang Zhizhi and Bayi's point guard, Adiljan. Each player had their own individual commercial, all of which were different in tone. But whereas Adiljan was portrayed as a blindfolded kung-fu monk and Wang as a medieval gatekeeper, Hu was decidedly modern. Shot like a trailer for a Hollywood action film, the commercial began in a dilapidated gym with the player taking jump shots. At one point a successful three-pointer is accompanied by the sound of a shotgun being fired whilst the sentence, "Outside of the American West, China also has a brilliant shooter" flashed across the screen. The commercial ended with Hu staring defiantly into the camera whilst the shotgun was heard reloading in the background. Nike, who had aired adverts for Air Jordan shoes on Chinese television since 1994, were now encouraging audiences to see Hu as their own transcendent superstar.

However, such massive popularity came with consequences. Hu was saddled with expectations, which gradually debilitated his health. By the spring of 1998, he had been a professional player for thirteen years, yet was rarely allowed to rest for long. After months of grueling CBA basketball, the Chinese national team expected Hu to make himself available for their events. Jiangsu province's sports bureau also needed him for their own local tournaments that took place every four years. Politically, it was impossible for a player to say no to any of these entities. The sports province discovered Hu as a youth and felt entitled to call upon him when required. Jiangsu paid Hu his salary so expected him to play every game for them too. The people that ran the Chinese national team could blacklist him from professional basketball if Hu did not report to them. The pressure was relentless and all around Hu, players in their late twenties and early thirties were preparing for retirement. Some just wanted to be free from the controlling influences of China's basketball hierarchy. Others dreamt of a home with a wife and child rather than living out of a dorm room for most of the year. For many players, their bodies had simply been broken by repetition and overuse. At twenty-eight, Hu had the same wear and tear on his body as an American player ten years his senior.

Regardless, the player belonged to a generation who had no choice but to accept this life. Even if Hu wanted to, he could not force his way onto a different team or another league outside of China. Whilst every CBA player technically had a contract, free agency within Chinese basketball was ambiguous and enormously political. Players typically played for that side until they were traded or released. The only other way out was to call time on their playing careers but that was a dangerous proposition given that retirement from basketball did not mean retirement from working. Unlike the NBA, where its top stars were earning tens of millions of dollars, CBA players enjoyed a fraction of that earning power. Given many also lacked any real education—a result of leaving a regular classroom to enroll at their local sports school—the most obvious post-playing career path was coaching. This was a further hurdle given how few positions were actually available and that access to them depended on political relationships. In the past, the state found jobs for its best athletes but by the late 1990's, the sports ministry encouraged players to find jobs for themselves and offered them a cash settlement if they declined the help of the state. Work could still be found for a retired player, but it was often crushingly menial.

With all of these obstacles, it was impossible for Hu not to look at the new generation of Chinese players without a pang of envy. Yao Ming, the teenage prince of Shanghai, was already a favorite of Nike. It was whispered that the center was going to play in America one day. The same was also said for Yao's established but still painfully young rivals, Wang Zhizhi and Mengke Bateer. All three were lucky to have come of age during Chinese basketball's slow ascent into modernity. Wang had already signed an endorsement deal with Nike that paid $50,000 a year—an astronomical sum by the standards of Chinese basketball at the time—and Yao was soon be offered a similar deal. Hu's salary was never discussed, but neither of the Americans believed it to be very high. By contrast, Hu, along with other great players of his age like Liu Yudong, Gong Xiaobing and Liu Tie, could only gaze at those opportunities from afar. Travel and sponsorship opportunities existed, but they did not compare with those being offered to the CBA's emerging wonderkids. It meant that an entire generation of aging Chinese stars lived like hollow kings, ruling over realms they could never leave.

But as Hu prepared for yet another preseason, an offer of escape arrived from an unlikely source. By March of 1998, the CBA was over but the NBA remained in full swing. With a couple of weeks left in the regular season, the Utah Jazz were vying with the Seattle Supersonics for top spot in the Western Conference. Further to the east, Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls were cruising towards the number one seed in the East. Meanwhile, teams at the bottom of the standings started to examine a deep NBA draft pool that included Kansas' Paul Pierce and UNC's Vince Carter. A couple of teams were also looking to Europe for players, particularly at a lanky German teenager named Dirk Nowitzki.

Caught in the middle was the Orlando Magic. They were in a frantic scramble to make the play-offs and were only a couple of games back from the eighth seed. But they were running out of time and needed more firepower. Penny Hardaway, their star point guard, had spent most of the season injured. The Magic needed a scorer that could step in and help out the team for the last few games of the regular season. With their season on the line, John Gabriel, the Magic's general manager, took a phone call from Tom McCarthy, a former assistant coach with Boston College. A vocal supporter of Chinese basketball, McCarthy was now based in Beijing and active in a number of fields ranging from coaching and commentary, as well as working for the Magic as a talent scout. McCarthy's phone call occurred at a critical time between Chinese and American basketball. The NBA was increasing interested in the mainland, not only as a consumer market but as a potential goldmine for players. Wang, the young Bayi Rockets center, was the unquestioned hot ticket item, followed closely by Yao, who had trained with McCarthy at one of his coaching camps in Shanghai a few years earlier. It seemed inevitable that one of these Chinese prospects was going to the NBA in the near future.

The NBA had signed non-Americans in the past but never fielded a player from China. Some had come close, most notably Ma Jian, the first mainlander to play in the NCAA college ranks. After graduating from Utah in 1995, Ma got a try-out with the Los Angeles Clippers and his presence in the preseason brought thousands of Chinese-Americans to the Clippers' home games. Any call against the Hebei native ensured lusty boos from the pro-Ma audience. Reportedly, Ma wept uncontrollably upon discovering he was the team's final cut prior to the 1995 NBA season but the player had already made an impact. Ma showed front offices that Chinese talent was out there and their presence on an NBA roster would draw thousands of new fans to games. Forever looking to grow their audience share in a crowded market, the NBA took note. But as the interest in Wang and Yao grew, NBA teams understood they still had to wait a few more years before the young stars turned twenty-two and automatically became draft eligible.

It would be within the limbo that McCarthy sensed an opportunity for Orlando. His knowledge of Chinese basketball went far beyond teenage big men. The Bostonian knew a player old enough to go to the NBA right away and good enough to get the Magic those crucial wins. That player was Hu Weidong, who McCarthy first encountered back in 1992 during a scrimmage between the Chinese national team and an American exhibition side McCarthy had brought over. McCarthy was convinced the Magic could make a name for themselves by being the first ever NBA team with a Chinese player. "We talked with Tommy about it," Gabriel later told the Boston Herald. "The idea was to build relationships with people over there, and [McCarthy] thought the first step might be to give one of their players a trial run as a free agent."

Whereas Gabriel seemed cautious, McCarthy was convinced the move would be a huge success; "Hu could really shoot the three ball, plus it would have grabbed huge headlines for Orlando and made them an instant hit in China," he recalls. "The other point was that Amway, whose owners also owned the Magic, was our top sponsor in Asia for all these FIBA Championships. There were lots of cross promotional possibilities." McCarthy also had one final sweetener. They would not even have to wait until the draft. McCarthy was confident he could bring Hu over right away now his CBA season was over. The benefits to Orlando were obvious. For one, they could make a head start on cornering the vast Chinese market and potentially make the NBA play-offs at the same time. For a few days, every sports journalist in America and China would be talking about the Magic.

Eventually a prospective deal began to be fleshed out. Hu would come straight over to play for the Magic. In return, Orlando would give Hu a ten-day contract with an $18,000 salary. This was a win-win for both Hu and Orlando, but there were still some hurdles ahead. Hu was one of the biggest stars in Chinese basketball and such a move would have created an untested framework through which other CBA players might leave for America. Even then, McCarthy was convinced he could seal the deal. Through his work within Chinese basketball, he was close to Xin Lanchang, the new secretary general of basketball after the fall of Liu Yumin. Although he was viewed with unease by almost all of the CBA's foreign backers, Xin remained on friendly terms with McCarthy. A few years earlier, McCarthy ran several clinics for Chinese coaches at no charge to the league. Xin appreciated the gesture and looked at McCarthy differently from the other _laowei_ involved in the CBA. This gave McCarthy enough confidence that he could make this work. The American's hunch was soon proved correct; the CBA agreed to clear Hu Weidong to play in the NBA for the duration of that ten-day contract.

Things had even advanced to the point that McCarthy called Hu to update the player on proceedings. But as McCarthy relayed the information down the phone, something happened that would have shocked Americans like Hodges and Mandt, who only knew Hu as withdrawn and unflustered. Hu was an emotional wreck as he tried to explain what had happened. As McCarthy listened, Hu admitted that he had badly injured his leg in a practice session the night before. In a heartbeat, the deal was dead and with no time to wait around, Orlando walked away. Had he not have been injured, Hu could have become the first Chinese player in the NBA, adding one more accolade to an incredible career. Instead, his injury was a cruel reminder that lives could change on a moment's notice. As Orlando ended their interest, Hu was left to deal with a mangled leg and a broken heart. His most recent CBA season had seen him lose both a scoring title and an MVP crown. His team had crashed out of the play-offs once again. Despite his talent and reputation, Hu's future was now uncertain. A few thousand miles away, Hodges and Mandt were back in America, talking about Chinese basketball and life in Jiangsu. Hu, meanwhile, was living out their stories of brutal training and constant isolation. As the ferocious heat of the Nanjing summer started to wash over the city, the happiness of his old American teammates would have been of little comfort. Broken and marginalized, the greatest player of his generation was once again alone in the furnace.

# Prologue

## 'The End Of An Era'

In the years that followed, Chinese basketball would see more of James Hodges and Charlie Mandt but never on the same team. When Mandt returned to Georgia in the summer of 1998, doctors could not believe he had played for so long given his injured back. It would take an entire year to recover and that ended any hopes of returning to the CBA right away. Understandably, Mandt was heartbroken. It meant an entire year without a salary from professional basketball. It also deprived him of a return to Jiangsu, who were interested in bringing him back for the 1998/99 season. Mandt had enjoyed his time with the team. The roster looked like it could get back to the play-offs and possessed the league's best player on the roster. Moreover, Jiangsu paid him handsomely, on time and in full. It felt like a massive set back at the time. But while Mandt did not know it, fate had done him a favor. He had no idea that Hu was sidelined with a long-term injury. Soon after Hodges and Mandt departed from Nanjing, Jiangsu's front office also fired the fatherly but ultimately ineffective Coach Xia. Under a new coach and with Hu Weidong unable to play for most of the campaign, the Dragons struggled for much of the 1998/99 season, and missed the playoffs by a wide margin.

Hodges, on the other hand, was glad to be done with Jiangsu. He was never coming back to Nanjing unless it was with the visiting team. Ironically, the team that pushed the hardest to sign him was the Liaoning Hunters—who had nickel-and-dimed the American twelve months earlier. Much of the Hunters roster from Hodges' first spell was still intact, and Li Xiaoyong, the team's point guard, needed his old running mate to give the offense some extra bite. That second spell in Liaoning was hugely successful for Hodges. Averaging 17.6 points per game, the American guided Liaoning back to the Finals before losing (again) to Bayi in the championship series. Forever playing with a chip on his shoulder, Hodges also played hard against Jiangsu that season and averaged 21 points a game against his old side. Another slight was avenged when Hodges reclaimed his King of the Dunks title from Wang Zhizhi. A third successive dunk title at the CBA All-Star game capped off a tremendous comeback season. This time, having previously jumped over mascots and players, Hodges did a favor for the league sponsors by dunking from the free-throw line whilst holding a Motorola phone to his ear.

Hodges could have stayed in China for the rest of his career if he wanted too. From a financial perspective, it was the smartest choice. But word had gotten around about Hodges' high-flying style. One particular team wanted to meet with him; the Harlem Globetrotters. For a showman like Hodges, this was too good to be true. The CBA was great but it would have been hard to walk away from a guaranteed salary that kept him in America. A decade earlier, Hodges' high school counselor told him to give up on basketball. Now he was signing with the Globetrotters. Going forward, the CBA basketball would have to find someone else to steal the limelight.

At the same time as Hodges was leaving, Mandt was finally able to return to China. Jiangsu were excited to hear that the big man was healthy again and signed him to a fresh deal in preparation for the 1999/2000 season. Going into that year, Jiangsu had a clear plan for how they wanted the roster to look. The Chinese players would bring the ball up the court and the _laowei_ were tasked with getting rebounds and protecting the basket. Both import slots would be used on American big men. Mandt was the first, but the other addition was a junior college drop-out that no one in China had previously heard off. Chris Anderson, the future Miami Heat center and NBA champion, had been playing on a touring pro-am team in the summer of 1999. "He didn't like the food and he didn't like the women," recalls Mandt-- but Andersen was exactly what Jiangsu needed. With two outstanding rim protectors, Jiangsu's frontcourt could seal off the paint for most of the game. Andersen's springy athleticism also lent itself well to Hu Weidong's passing and the young Texan finished with the second most dunks in the CBA that season.

But off the court, things were less enjoyable. Jiangsu snuck into the play-offs as the eighth seed and there was a feeling that the Dragons had underperformed despite having Hu and Mandt back on the roster. As the unquestioned face of the team, no one would blame the Jiangsu captain for the collective inconsistency. Instead, Mandt became the scapegoat. Under Coach Xia's more benevolent regime, there would have been no such ill-feeling but things were different now. The new Jiangsu coaching staff felt Mandt had not lived up to his salary. Things came to a head when an assistant coach walked up to the American during mealtime and told him he was not worth the money Jiangsu were paying him. Whether this was a misguided attempt to motivate his player or a frustrated coach running his mouth, Mandt was furious. There was an awkward silence before Andersen, who happened to be sitting next to his teammate, looked over to Mandt. "Hit him," Andersen growled, making it clear that the coach deserved a lick for such blatant disrespect. Mandt rose to his feet, but instead of striking the coach, he picked up a glass bottle, hurled it across the room and watched it shatter against the wall. With the room sent into silence, Mandt had made his point. There would be no further confrontations between the coaching staff and Mandt, but everyone was on edge for the rest of the season.

When the Dragons eventually made it to the play-offs, they met Bayi in the quarter-finals and the Rockets swept them comfortably. Both Andersen and Mandt averaged almost 20 points and 10 rebounds each during that series but the writing was on the wall. With American scouts coming over to watch an increasingly dominant Yao Ming, Andersen was also getting on NBA radars. Within a year, Andersen was playing for the Denver Nuggets. Mandt, who was several years older, would not get his own invite to the NBA but his bridges were still burned beyond repair in Nanjing. He continued to play overseas for a few more years but never again in the CBA.

Even as Mandt and Hodges faded away, Hu Weidong continued to stick around for a few more years. By then, the CBA was dominated by Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi. For four years in a row, Yao's Shanghai Sharks team would play Wang's Bayi Rockets in the CBA Finals. But Hu would not go down without a fight. In the 2000/01 season, he averaged 16.6 points and dragged a 10-12 Dragons team into the play-offs. In the 2001/02 and 2002/03 seasons, Jiangsu would have qualified for the postseason had they not lost a wild-card game for the final play-off spot. On both occasions, Hu was the best player and leading scorer on a roster that had no business sniffing the play-offs.

Even as he went further into his thirties, Hu was still playing for the Chinese national team, shooting 40% or better from three-point range and remained able to carve open defenses with his passing. But injuries and other complications hindered him from getting another opportunity to go to America. Ironically, it was not until the NBA began pilfering China's golden generation that Hu would have his clearest shot at glory. By 2003, Yao was playing his second season for the Houston Rockets and Wang was with the Miami Heat, having already played three seasons with the Dallas Mavericks and the Los Angeles Clippers. Mengke Bateer, the third and final member of China's much vaunted "Walking Great Wall" was now playing alongside Chris Andersen for the Denver Nuggets. This left a massive talent void that Hu, easily the most established star still left in the CBA, hoped to exploit.

Luckily for the Jiangsu captain, the departure of the "Walking Great Wall" coincided with the sudden emergence of two young prospects from Dragons' youth system; hulking teenage center Tang Zhendong and pass-first point guard Hu Xuefeng. With two young stars to support him, Hu Weidong transitioned into a veteran scorer that no longer had to do everything for the team. In 2003/04, the team entered the play-offs as the second seed and finished above Bayi for the first time in their history, before being eliminated in the semi-finals. But in the 2004/05 season, there was a feeling of destiny surrounding the Jiangsu Dragons. By then, the CBA has drastically lengthened its season and the Dragons finished top of the standings with a 35-3 record. After sweeping both their quarter-final and semi-final opponents, Jiangsu were now in their first ever CBA final. This was meant to be Hu's moment of glory. Except it was not. Jiangsu fought gamely throughout a best-of-five series only to lose to the Tigers in a heart stopping Game Five loss. Jiangsu had a thirteen point lead with nine minutes to play in the fourth quarter, but in one of the most celebrated finishes in CBA history, Guangdong went on an unanswered sixteen point run to win the game and the title.

In the aftermath, Hu, announced his retirement after eighteen years playing for Jiangsu, and was immediately hired as the head coach. Jiangsu made the play-offs every season he was in charge of the team but Hu could never get all the way to the championship. After losing in the semi-finals twice in as many seasons, he resigned in 2008 but came back three years later as an interim coach before leaving once again. At various times, he returned to the team as an assistant coach, among other roles within the organization. Enigmatic and self-assured to the end, it is difficult to imagine a more painful but committed relationship than the one Hu wedded himself to in Jiangsu.

****

In the fifteen years since his playing career ended, Hu Weidong's name retains a powerful aura. Most local basketball publications list him as one of the five greatest Chinese players of all time along with Yao Ming, Wang Zhizhi, Liu Yudong and Mu Tienzhu. Whereas Yao is now the president of the CBA itself and Wang is a pundit that is also married to the daughter of a senior Chinese general, Hu rarely speaks publicly.

Charlie Mandt and James Hodges enjoyed long and lengthy careers as basketball players before retiring in the 2000's. Hodges is a basketball coach and agent. Mandt owns a small company and referees high school basketball. By chance, they both live in the same city in Georgia.
