So, What's the Price?

Coach Knight didn't look at him again, and he didn't roar again either. After that icy threat, he merely made a curt gesture to his assistants, and practice continued under a suffocating, high-pressure silence. There was no storm of the kind everyone had expected, and that sudden, ordinary "calm" only left the freshmen more frightened than before. Beside Xu Ling, the freshman point guard Charlie Burgess (Charlie Burgess, PG) seized a dead-ball gap, let out a breath like a man who had escaped death, and said in a voice barely audible: "Eli, do you have any idea how crazy what you just did was?" Xu Ling only looked at him quietly and said nothing. Burgess said, "Nobody talks to The General like that!" "If you're right," Xu Ling said, "he wouldn't have come to TTU." On the other side of the floor, Knight walked to the sideline with his face black as thunder. His son came trotting up to him like a puppy with its tail tucked between its legs and said, "Dad." Knight promptly fixed him with an even sharper glare. Pat knew that during working hours he was supposed to use titles. "Coach, Eli—he—" "Cut the chatter and get me his file!" Knight snapped. Pat immediately handed his father the freshman folder he had put together. Knight flipped straight to Xu Ling's page, read a few lines, and said, "A 198-centimeter center?" "Who does he think he is, Ben Wallace? Larry Johnson?!" Pat, who handled overseas recruiting, hurried to speak. "His height is short, but Eli's wingspan is long and his athleticism is outstanding. As soon as he adjusts to the pace of Division I, I'm sure he'll be a serviceable frontcourt reserve." A reserve player? Knight thought back to the way Xu Ling had talked back to him just now. A reserve dared defy him like that? What kind of half-assed school was this?! What kind of half-assed team was this?! What kind of half-assed era was this?! Then Knight saw that thorny freshman walk straight over to the guards' line. "What is he doing over there?" Knight frowned, a flicker of surprise entering his voice. Just then Xu Ling picked up a ball, barely went through any preparation, and rose lightly into his shot. As a modern-day sniper who could hit one deep three after another when he was hot, the NCAA's standard three-point line in 2006 felt to him like a comfortable long two. Swish. Nothing but net. But what caught Knight's eye was not the result. It was the shot itself—a fluidity that was close to instinct, from gathering the ball to the flick of the wrist, the whole motion finished in one breath, without a single wasted pause or hesitation. That was muscle memory soaked into the bone, the instinct of a shooter forged by tens of thousands of repetitions. Knight had given his entire life to basketball. He could not possibly misread that. He didn't look at Xu Ling again. Instead he whipped around toward his son, his voice compressed with incredulous fury: "You told me he was a paint scorer who couldn't shoot?" Pat was startled by the sudden interrogation and hastily explained, "The scouting report—the report said so! I saw him play in Hong Kong, and back then he really was an inside player who relied on his athleticism and his wingspan—" "Screw the report!" Knight cursed under his breath, his gaze locking onto Xu Ling once more, sharp as a blade. Now the freshman who was supposed to be a "paint scorer" was showing off, right in front of him, flawless accuracy from way out. Knight fell silent, those hawk-like eyes fixed on Xu Ling, his thumb rubbing absently at his chin. In that day's freshman scrimmage, Xu Ling had played out of the center spot, but his game had been entirely that of a guard. If his shooting had been a pleasant surprise, his ball-handling was downright alarming. Pat Knight, who was mainly responsible for overseas recruiting, promised his father with a red face: "He absolutely did not have this skill before he came to the United States! In every bit of tape I got hold of, he never showed it once!" "That doesn't matter anymore." Knight's eyes stayed nailed to the figure on the floor, his tone absolute. "Keep your eyes on him. Double his workload. If he wants to play the two, he'll have to cut some weight." What did a two-guard with that kind of skill and that kind of size mean to TTU? It meant that at last a beam of light had broken into the darkness. Right when the core, Jarrius Jackson, was about to become a senior and the team faced a severe transition crisis, this Chinese freshman who had appeared out of nowhere was exactly the future star TTU needed most. It hadn't been part of the plan, but it was a colossal stroke of luck. Even as the coaching staff rushed to turn its scrutiny onto Xu Ling, Xu Ling himself was sharpening that vague confidence into something keener and steadier in his battles with his own class. Besides his roommate Roderick Craig, who had already been sorted out, there was one more freshman who wanted to test him: Decensae White (Decensae White, SG), the most highly regarded member of TTU's freshman class this year. Well before Xu Ling stunned the gym, White had been expected to become a star under Knight. His high school was in a region with weak competition, and he had naturally dominated the high school basketball there, but because the region was so weak, he never came onto the college scouts' radar and, naturally, never made any national top one hundred. That kind of star buried in a weak region was exactly the sort of player a strict coach like Knight could mold. White, too, saw himself as the leader of the freshman class. Yet Xu Ling had beaten him completely on the very first day of camp. In the freshman scrimmage, Xu Ling scored 28 on White while holding him to 7 points on under 30 percent shooting. It was that matchup that made Xu Ling realize he was absolutely capable of making a name for himself in the NCAA. Confidence has to be accumulated. The raw talent of Xu Ling himself and the skills from his previous life had produced a perfect chemical reaction, but Xu Ling still had to map out his future step by step. His classmates were beaten. Next came the upperclassmen led by Jarrius Jackson, then the tough teams of the Big 12 Conference, and then—if there was a then—he'd be able to lay a hand on the threshold of the NBA. A prospect like that filled Xu Ling with drive. He craved training and competition the way he craved oxygen. After practice ended that day, in the locker room, the senior big man Darryl Dora watched Xu Ling with a goofy look on his face. "Maybe you really can." One thing that amused Xu Ling about the TTU basketball team was that there were only two seniors on the roster, one nicknamed J.J. and one nicknamed D.D.—and unfortunately, in Chinese both nicknames pointed unambiguously at male genitalia. "Can what?" Xu Ling asked. "Start as a freshman, the way J.J. did." Dora then deliberately shot a glance at someone else. "What do you say, M.Z.?" Martin Zeno, a junior guard and the team's notorious upperclass bully, had always looked down his nose at everyone and enjoyed tormenting the younger players. He gave a cold snort and swept a contemptuous look over the freshmen. "What's the point of being king of the trash heap? This freshman class is a pile of mud that'll never stick to the wall!" "What did you say?" Decensae White, whom Xu Ling had thoroughly schooled in the one-on-one, was already a powder keg by temperament. He blew up on the spot and looked ready to go off. When it came to a completely baseless accusation, Xu Ling—who didn't hesitate to talk back even to Knight—naturally wasn't going to let it pass just because the man was a so-called upperclassman. "Mm," Xu Ling said, nodding thoughtfully, as though Zeno had offered a very valuable observation. "You sound so confident. You must have led the team on a rampage last season, right? (15-17) My apologies for not realizing sooner." There was no trace of anger in Xu Ling's tone, even a touch of pure "curiosity," but the words themselves were like a cold, soft-bladed knife, precisely puncturing the bubble of Zeno's arrogance—everyone knew what a disaster of a season TTU had just had. Zeno's face flushed crimson in an instant, like a man with a hand clamped around his throat. He had already been one of the team's key players last season, and Xu Ling's words had landed squarely on his sorest spot. "You—" Zeno didn't get to unleash any more upperclassman authority. Captain Jackson walked in, his presence like a wall, and in one motion smothered the sparks starting to fly around the locker room. "Listen up! As captain, I have only one requirement—we have to be a friendly team. Not the best, but friendly! Understand?" The curse that had reached Zeno's lips was glared back down his throat, and he could only shut his mouth sullenly. White gave a snort and said nothing more. Xu Ling, for his part, acted as if nothing had happened and turned to Jackson to ask his own question. "Captain, why do we have so few upperclassmen?" Dora cracked up at that. In the corner, the sophomores looked like they were enjoying the show. Jackson put on a mysterious smile, wearing the expression of a devoted Huang Xiaoming impersonator—that greasy, smoldering smirk paired with a face that had nothing to do with handsome left Xu Ling baffled. Jackson didn't answer. Instead he said, "Because there are too many cowards in this world." Since the upperclassmen weren't going to give him an answer, Xu Ling decided to find it himself. Back in his dorm, he went online and looked up TTU's recruiting over the past few years. Ever since the 2003 class produced Jarrius Jackson—a program-building core who started as a freshman—Knight had built the team around him, though the results were poor. By Jackson's junior year, TTU was already preparing for the handover that had to come, so in the 2005 class they fanned out everywhere and brought in eight players in total. A year later, five of those eight had chosen to transfer, one had given up basketball, and only two remained on the roster. It's worth remembering that this was not a dozen years later. Back then, NCAA players could neither sign endorsements nor transfer as they pleased without limit. In that era, players were utterly powerless. Never mind income—if they were unlucky enough to fall for a recruiter's pitch and only discovered once they arrived on campus that the place was nothing like what they'd imagined, most simply endured it in silence, because transferring meant sitting out a year. Under rules like those, a coach's authority was as unquestionable as a king's. So why had those men preferred to spend a year on another school's bench rather than stay at TTU? Xu Ling had already seen Knight's temper today, and given the fearsome reputation of college coaching's vice-GOAT, he believed what he'd seen was only the tip of the iceberg. ※※※ The sun in Lubbock seemed especially vicious, but it was nothing compared with the searing energy surging inside Xu Ling. While his roommate Roderick was still deep in sweet dreams, Xu Ling quietly got up. He would run alone along that familiar red dirt path through the dorm district. The coaching staff had told him he needed to cut weight—his current weight was too much of a burden on a backcourt player, and it would hurt his lateral quickness and his perimeter defense. He had accepted the advice. But where ordinary people slimmed down by jogging, athletes needed a scientific plan to do it. For Xu Ling, morning runs were just one step in building up his conditioning. Afterward he would rest for half an hour, then eat breakfast, then go to class; after class he started shooting drills, the team's collective practice came in the afternoon, and in the evening he trained strength. Strangely, head coach Bob Knight rarely appeared during this stretch. His assistant coaches were the ones planning the sessions. But Captain Jackson said the coach was watching them in secret from somewhere inside the TTU training facility, and that the ones who slacked off, the ones who made mistakes, the ones who fell short, would pay for it when the season began. Hearing that, Xu Ling couldn't help serving up the classic BBC question: "So, what's the price?" Jackson said, "You'll find out sooner or later." Half a month passed like that.