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

last updated 8 January 2015

Jeremy Lin, pro basketball’s overnight sensation, never could have emerged from China, said Brook Larmer in The Washington Post. Jim Yardley’s “rollicking” new hoops book never mentions the California-born, Harvard-educated Asian-American starting point guard for the New York Knicks. But as Yardley chronicles the ups and downs of the Shanxi Brave Dragons, a misfit team trying to climb out of the cellar of China’s government-controlled pro league, the “inventive, take-charge” style of American players like Lin raises a key question: Since China is home to several hundred million basketball fanatics, how could it be that the country has never produced a world-class point guard? That winds up being more than a sports conundrum.

Cultures do clash in this “very funny” book, said Jay Jennings in the San Francisco Chronicle. Yardley frames the story as a fish-out-of-water tale starring Bob Weiss, a former NBA head coach who’s been hired by the Brave Dragons’ owner, Boss Wang, to inject American-style swagger into a listless team. From the start, much is lost in translation. When one player leaves practice, Weiss gets only this explanation, supplied by a translator: “His ass is blue.” Troubled NBA veteran Bonzi Wells is brought in to boost scoring, then goes AWOL. Wang, a steel magnate, fires and rehires Weiss regularly, once within the same day. All the while, the Chinese players battle an organizational mind-set that discourages the type of improvisational play that they see in the NBA.

There’s your answer to the point-guard question, said Vadim Rizov in the A.V. Club. As Yardley shows, Chinese owners and coaches value discipline over creativity. Their players “run hours of drills flawlessly, but collapse whenever they have to make a decision.” Yardley finds deeper lessons as well, said Curt Schleier in The Seattle Times. Boss Wang’s ambivalence about Weiss becomes a metaphor for China’s ambivalence about the West. Though attracted to the American way, the Chinese also consider it a threat to their values.