Elvis Has Left the Building, "My little good luck charm"

Before the game with the Beijing Ducks Wednesday night, the coaches had a pre-game meeting at 4. DT and BB were in their rooms resting, Tom had taken a nap when he got back from the ice park. I’m packing and trying to squeeze in some blog writing and burning some ice park photos onto a cd for DT and Rahrah. It occurs to me, I’m the only one not sleeping here. They’re tag teaming me. I brought two carry on bags to China, I’m going to take a bag back for Tom, so he won’t have to ship it or pay an extra bag charge. I went by DT and Rahrah’s room to pay them back some money they loaned me in the shopping district. Since I arrived in China, I haven’t been able to find a cash machine that will do anything but spit my bankcard back at me. The Canadian teacher I met when I first arrived, Nick, said the only bank atm that worked for him was Bank of China. I finally found a Bank of China within walking distance of the hotel. It was just above freezing, didn’t need to wrap my face in the scarf, and actually had a pleasant stroll. It was nice to be flying solo for once. And it was comforting to finally have my own source of funds. When I knocked on DT and Rahrahs door, I noticed a number of fire extinguishers in the hall. I made a joke about the hotel being worried about them. Dajuan explained that it was their fire escape system. He wasn’t joking. I took a photo of it. There are several fire extinguishers there and then to the right is a box that contains a fire-proof cable. You pull the cable out of the box, break the window (the old shattered glass thing), connect the cable to the hook in the floor to the right of the box and then climb down the cable on the outside of the building. Their room is on the tenth floor. Coach Tom, BB and I are on the 13th floor. I’m thinking about checking to see if there is a room on the second or third floor. The survival rate of a third floor fall from a building is about fifty percent. If you get above that, the odds of survial decrease dramatically.

We get down to the lobby for the team bus at 5:40. It arrives about five minutes later and we’re off. The team bus parks on the side of the arena and we walk through a back alley to enter. I got a photo, a little blurry, I tried to use a flash as little as possible. I was trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. The arena seems a little warmer than the first game. That could be because I’ve experienced the bitter cold of night in Changchun and anything is an improvement over that.

Not having to meet and greet before this game, I get a chance to explore the arena. I head up to the concession stand and buy two hat and scarf sets and a silk tigers scarf for 60 RMB. Roughly nine dollars. Total. Two hats, three scarves, nine dollars. The food concession tables are just open tables where they’ve taken two liter bottles of pop and poured it into cups. There’s wrapped clear bags of goodies. I’m not sure what they are, but they are colorful. The one thing most everyone in the arena has is sunflower seeds. At the end of the game when you walk around the stands, all you hear is crackling under your feet from sunflower seeds. I was told the top ticket to the game is 70 to 80 RMB. 11 Dollars. The Ducks have arrived and are warming up on the half court in front of the Jilin bench. I get a photo of the warm up from the corner of the arena.

When I get down to the bench again it’s old Seattle home week. The Ducks have two players with Seattle ties. The starting center 6’ 10” 240 pound Olumide Oyedeji was a second round draft pick of the Seattle Supersonics of the NBA in 2000. Tom introduces me to Oyedeji, who goes by Oly, and we talk about Seattle. He played 56 games with the Sonics over two seasons and played 26 games his final NBA season, 02-03 with the Orlando Magic. Here's Tom and Oly courtside before the game. The other center for the Ducks is also from the Pacific Northwest. Seven footer Michael Fey. Fey graduated from Olympia’s Capital High School and played four seasons for the UCLA Bruins from 02-06. Injuries and bad luck kept the footer from reaching what many people thought his potential should have been. Fey laughed when Tom introduced us, because he saw me wearing a University of Washington baseball hat and was wondering what was up with that. Our chat ended prematurely when he had to head off to the Ducks pre-game drills.

The Tigers used the same strategy of starting all Chinese players and saving the five quarters of foreigner time for Dajuan in the last three quarters of the game and BB for the full second half of the game. The Ducks start Oly and he proves to be a force in the middle. A monster. Beijing leads 20-14. The Chinese post, Bear is putting up a great battle, even though he’s seriously over matched. It’s a really physical game and Oly is working the refs like a pro. Not mad, just a serious flash on his face, then an eye roll and a smile. He’s really a polished pro working the officials.

I enjoyed watching Bear play in the first game I saw and he’s holding nothing back again. Despite his best efforts, Oly has over half his team’s points and seems to be getting every rebound in sight. DT hits the floor in the second quarter and the game changes. Beijing doesn’t have an answer for his slashing drives. In one sequence he drives the right baseline elevates and feathers in the shot. Oly comes from the oppposite block for help defense, gets there late and crashes into DT. Dajuan skids back along the baseline, where he just came from, and no foul is called. One of several times that happened but he still puts up 12 points in the quarter and the teams are tied 41 at the half. But the pounding is wearing on his psyche and he starts chirping at the refs. Oly on the other hand is still working the refs like a Vegas lounge singer who’s act is long gone but still has an adoring crowd. He just keeps showing them the love while discreetly pointing out what they need to look for. A veteran move. Oly has 20 of his team’s 41 at the half. DT has 12 in one quarter.

Babacar hits the floor in the third quarter. Surprisingly Michael Fey is still on the Beijing bench. BB is more of an offensive threat than Bear and Oly really has his hands full. He also has to concentrate on help defense when DT penetrates. This leaves an opening for Jilin’s top Chinese players Wang Bo. Bo is on the Chinese National team. The bad news is DT picks up another couple of fouls and after trying to make peace with the officials through Pancake the team interpreter at halftime, is getting irritated again. Oly just keeps smiling and singing his old song to the officials. At the end of three Jilin is up 72-68 and seemingly in need of just a couple of defensive stops to put the game away. At the end of three DT has 19, BB 9 and Oly has 33. Bo has become the unwatched player and has 21.

Oly has played all 36 minutes and is still out there as the fourth quarter gets underway. Early in the fourth quarter BB drives and out jumps Oly for the first time in the game. Oly’s legs are gone. DT penetrates and elevates a good foot over Oly as he drops another basket. Beijing is calling timeouts, I think they realize Oly is done and they try to give him a rest before their offensive sets, they need him. I notice that the Jilin coach doesn’t diagram any defensive sets when Beijing calls timeouts. He only diagrams when he calls an offensive timeout. Come to think of it, in two games the Jilin coach has never called a timeout when he had a chance to do so for a defensive set. Come to think of it the only coach shouting defensive instructions in both games was Tom.

And then disaster. With 6:54 to go in the game and Jilin leading, Dajuan gets his fifth foul. DT had started low on the left block come around a screen through the key and popped up high above the three point line to catch the pass. His defender had fallen onto his back when he started to move and the ref on the back-side of the play called an offensive foul. The crowd erupted and water bottles rained down onto the court. The players all huddled on the court, away from the officials, facing the crowd to watch for incoming projectiles. The coaches stood up and started waving at the crowd to stop. The arena was over half full for this game and it was a boisterous crowd. I got a video of the ‘bleacher bums’ waving their flag and chanting. It was pretty much non-stop. They cleared the court and things settled down. DT came to the bench and Pancake told him he was going back in two minutes later. DT asked Tom about the foul and Tom told him, that was the defender he had warned him about who flopped to draw fouls. It worked.

Jilin kept the lead until DT got back into the game. The Beijing coach had Oly lay off of Babacar and cheat to Dajuan’s side to block the lane, several times DT had penetrated and dished to BB for layins. There were a couple times when Oly got back to BB late and tried to block the shot from behind and got just enough of it to alter the shot. He picked up two fouls doing that, but they didn’t call a foul consistently so he kept doing it. There were ‘several blocks’ that could have been fouls too.

At 3:14 to go, with Jilin leading 93-89, DT picked up his sixth foul and was done. He was guarding the Beijing guard, who was holding the ball right out front. DT slapped it away and as they scrambled to grab it, he was called for a foul. It looked like less of a foul than anything called or not called that night. DT was not happy and Tom was trying to explain to him that with only one foul to go and the game on the line, he can’t take chances like that.

DT fouled out with 21 points in essentially one half of basketball. In this game, the fact he was in his first ever professional season got the best of him and his team. He’ll learn, he’s a sharp young man.

The turning point of the game came when Oly, stuck on 34 points, he had only scored one point the whole fourth quarter, was fouled with just over a minute to go. He scored to cut the lead to two and was at the free throw line. He was running on fumes and you knew his free throw was probably going to come up short, because he had been short on free throws the whole fourth quarter. Sure enough it clangs off the front of the rim and bounces right. Unbelievably, Beijing gets the rebound and scores to tie the game. Jilin comes down tries to feed the ball to Wang Bo on the left baseline, he drives and misses his shot, third consecutive time they had run that play with the exact same result. Oly got the rebound everytime. Beijing goes into their set and Oly scores to give Beijing a two point lead. The Jilin coach calls a timeout to diagram a play. In the second quarter of the game I watched him draw a play that had a double screen above the free throw line and a pass to a player who curls around the screen. I sat down next to Rahrah and said this should be interesting. When they inbounded the ball a shot went up within a couple of seconds, I turned to Rahrah and said, “That bore absolutely no resemblance to what he drew.” Tom later mentioned that about 80 per cent of the time that’s the case.

During the timeout the coach drew a play that looked similar to what Jilin had run the last three times down the floor. Just under thirty seconds to go in the game and the Tigers get the ball over mid court and the point guard, Hip-hop, stops to let some clock run off. He starts moving with ten seconds to go and ends up penetrating the lane, misses the shot and gets fouled. With five seconds left he makes his first free throw. Jilin down by one. The second free throw hits the right side of the rim and bounces to the left corner, Oly beats everyone to it and throws it long. Beijing grabs it and lays it in at the buzzer for a 99-96 win.

Water bottles rain onto the court. When I look up the refs are gone already. Tough loss. Oly finished with a monster, 38 points and 21 rebounds. DT had 21, Wang Bo scored 26, BB had 15 points. Beijing out-rebounded Jilin 36-22. They owned the boards.

BB, DT and Rahrah head to their rooms. Tom and I head into the lobby bar to grab another tuna fish sandwich and some fries. As we go over the game, it’s amazing how similar our philosophies are. Defense wins championships. I told him, my string as a good luck charm was over. He said if they had won, they probably wouldn’t have let me leave. He also said despite losing, it was one of the best games they had played all season.

We went up to the rooms and I finished most of my packing, it was 11:30. Wake up call at 5:30. It turns out the team is leaving on a road trip in the morning and has to be at the airport about the same time as me, so I’m going to ride the team bus to the airport. The bus will be at the hotel at 6:20am. It’s a forty-minute ride to the airport. The cab ride from the airport was 100 RMB. Roughly 14 dollars for a forty-minute cab ride. Everywhere we went from our hotel was less than ten RMB, or two dollars. Many of the cab rides were less than a dollar. Screaming deals. Most of the cabs are diesel Volkswagen Jettas. Volkswagen and Audi have a manufacturing plant in Jilin, which most likely explains the abundance of Jettas. That’s all the cabs are.

Thursday morning, I get packed and post my last blog from Changchun. Tom brings by the bag I’m taking back for him. DT, Rahrah and BB are already in the lobby when I arrive. Most of the players are sleeping as we get on the bus. As we drive to the airport the sun is coming up and I get a better view of the trip than the night I arrived.

The airport in Jilin is about the size of a commuter airport at a US city with a population of 500 thousand or less. The metro area of Jilin is 2.6 million. When their economy takes off and people can afford to fly, they’re going to need some serious infrastructure upgrades at the airport.

My flight leaves at 7:50 and we arrive at the airport just after 7. Got a photo of the departures drive as we’re unloading from the bus. I get checked in and through security by 7:30. Turns out, the team is taking an 8:20 flight to Beijing. I say goodbye to Tom and the other ex-pats and a few of the players and Pancake and head for my gate. Here’s a photo of Tom and Pancake sitting on the Jilin bench.

I settle into a window seat and get to watch the plane get de-iced. The flight is scheduled into Beijing at 9:40 a.m. My connecting flight to Vancouver is at 5:30 p.m., so I’m planning on doing some sightseeing and shopping. Babacar had Pancake write down the name of a shopping district for me. It just occurred to me that I’m probably not going to be able to post this until I get back to North America. Oh well. I’ll do another post of my day in Beijing.