When Weiss signed on to consult with the Shanxi Brave Dragons in 2008, he was looking forward to an adventure. He just didn’t know how odd the adventure would be. His employer, a blustering newly monied steel magnate named Boss Wang, had assured Weiss that his role would be to help the Brave Dragons and their Chinese head coach learn the NBA game. But before he had even reached Taiyuan, the bleak and polluted home of the Brave Dragons, Weiss was informed that Boss Wang had fired the Chinese head coach and that the job was his. Very shortly thereafter, it wasn’t. Then it was again.
An owner given to firing coaches on a whim and interfering with the day-to-day operations of his team might have made Weiss feel at home. He had worked for the Seattle Supersonics. But the basketball culture in the CBA, China’s top league, presented Weiss with several surprises. His players lived in dreary dormitories. Their practices had been “about punishment rather than improvement.’’ The arenas were filled with cigarette smoke, and when US players who’d been rented to improve the Chinese clubs complained that they couldn’t breathe during games, the Chinese officials laughed at them.
Beyond all that, the central government regarded pro basketball less as profit-driven entertainment than as an extension of China’s mission to develop medal-winning athletes and teams. As representatives of the NBA, Commissioner David Stern among them, found when they explored the possibility of muscling in on the CBA and running it for profit, the Chinese government was not inclined to embrace that particular manifestation of capitalism or give up control of basketball operations to US businessmen.
