Purchase
A Chinese Basketball Team, an American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing
Knopf
February 2012
On Sale: February 14, 2012
320 pages ISBN: 0307272214 EAN: 9780307272218 Kindle: B0051ANPWO Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction Sports
The wonderfully original story of a struggling Chinese
basketball team and its quixotic, often comical attempt to
right its fortunes by copying the American stars of the
NBA—a season of cultural misunderstanding that transcends
sports and reveals China’s ambivalent relationship with the
West.
When the Shanxi Brave Dragons, one of China’s worst
professional basketball teams, hired former NBA coach Bob
Weiss, the team’s owner, Boss Wang, promised that Weiss
would be allowed to Americanize his players by teaching them
“advanced basketball culture.” That promise would be broken
from the moment Weiss landed in China. Desperate for his
team to play like Americans, Wang—a peasant turned steel
tycoon—nevertheless refused to allow his players the freedom
and individual expression necessary to truly change their games.
Former New York Times Beijing bureau chief Jim Yardley tells
the story of the resulting culture clash with sensitivity
and a keen comic sensibility. Readers meet the Brave
Dragons, a cast of colorful, sometimes heartbreaking
oddballs from around the world: the ambitious Chinese
assistant coach, Liu Tie, who believes that Chinese players
are genetically inferior and can improve only through the
repetitious drilling once advocated by ancient kung fu
masters; the moody and selfish American import, Bonzi Wells,
a former NBA star so unnerved by China that initially he
locks himself in his apartment; the Taiwanese point guard,
Little Sun, who is demonized by his mainland Chinese
coaches; and the other Chinese players, whose lives
sometimes seem little different from those of factory workers.
As readers follow the team on a fascinating road trip
through modern China—from glamorous Shanghai and
bureaucratic Beijing to the booming port city Tianjin and
the polluted coal capital of Taiyuan—we see Weiss learn
firsthand what so many other foreigners in China have
discovered: China changes only when and how it wants to change.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
|