Xu Ling had originally hoped to use the intrasquad scrimmages to fight his way into a starting spot.
Nothing proves a player's level better than a game.
And yet, apart from the freshman scrimmage held at the start of the semester, the team had spent day after day sunk in training so monotonous it was punishing, and had never organized any form of scrimmage again.
Someone raised a question: burying your head in drills and nothing else could never produce results.
That remark enraged Knight.
Knight had been up in the stands at the time, and he roared down at the freshmen: "Nobody asked you to question my methods! You either grit your teeth and bear down, or you end up like Larry Bird and all the other soft-asses! Can't take it? Then get the hell out! TTU doesn't need transfers who washed out!"
In his previous life, as a kid born after 2000, Xu Ling knew a fair amount about the NBA.
He knew who Larry Bird was, but most of the time Bird was just a name to him, with one title attached: "the GOAT small forward before LeBron James." But that wasn't anything impressive. By the year Xu Ling transmigrated, the word GOAT had been deconstructed into what, exactly? The GOAT of living, the GOAT of fashion, the GOAT of load management, the GOAT of the offseason — there were even young players with genuinely scrambled cognition like Brandon Miller who thought Paul George was the GOAT of basketball. It had gotten that absurd. Who the hell knew how many niche GOATs there were by now?
But hang on — going by what Knight had just said, Bird hadn't merely played under him; he'd transferred out because he couldn't take his training?
Was it really that extreme?
No — wasn't that a stain on the man? What was the old fool so proud of?
Xu Ling simply listened. He saw no need to provoke the old man. The one who had raised the question was named Jay Mitchell, an older freshman out of a community college. As far as TTU was concerned, junior-college prospects were either brought in as instant reinforcements or used as practice bodies, and they never made the roster.
In fairness, if Xu Ling had been in Mitchell's position, he might well have reacted the same way.
Because Mitchell was already locked in to redshirt for the new season. No matter how hard he worked, he could never become a real player on the active roster.
So he genuinely needed to know what the point was of being dog-tired every single day without ever getting to face the regular players.
Knight's roar cut off all further questions. Nobody said another word.
Burying his head and grinding was the only way forward.
Over the course of a full month and a half, Xu Ling's weight dropped from 99 kilograms to 95. That weight was solid even by professional standards.
TTU's training was brutal, but it gradually acclimated Xu Ling to the intensity of Division I, which was a great benefit to him. Along the way, they also forged friendships out of the shared hardship.
Xu Ling had three friends on the team he got along with well: besides his roommate Craig, there was fellow freshman Charlie Burgess (Charlie Burgess, PG), a point guard out of a community college; and sophomore Alan Voskuil, whose style of play reminded Xu Ling of the undersized two-guards of the small-ball era.
In the blink of an eye, the date was October 15, 2006.
In college basketball, no date matters more than October 15. From that day onward, teams across the country were permitted to hold formal, coach-led preseason practices. The players might already have been battling each other in private for ages, but October 15 was what marked the beginning of everything. Head coaches descended from the high seats of the stands — though sitting up there just to observe was itself a commonly overlooked NCAA rule — and walked onto the floor in person to teach, to instruct, and to roar without end.
Bob Knight arrived at the center of the Womble Practice Facility with a grave expression. All his players stood before him, and the air was thick with an unusual weight.
His manner was dead serious.
"I think you've all noticed," Knight said slowly, "that our captain, the great Jarrius Jackson, is not here today."
Some had noticed, in fact, but no one cared. In everyone's eyes, unless the sky fell, Jackson's starting spot and his status as the core of the team were unshakable.
"Now forget him! Because he has abandoned us!" Knight's voice shot upward, thunderous fury granting his prized pupil not the slightest mercy. "He looks smart! He plays the game smart as hell, too! But don't let him fool you! He's a fraud through and through! He fooled me, and he let every one of you down! From this moment on, we cannot count on him, not one damn bit!"
Just as the players were exchanging looks, trying to guess which unforgivable commandment Jackson had broken, Knight revealed the answer himself, and it left every jaw on the floor: "Your captain! The great J.J.! As of today, he is off the team indefinitely! Until that disaster of an academic record is no longer a pile of dog shit stinking to high heaven!"
Academics?
Xu Ling was dumbstruck.
"I am very disappointed in J.J.!" Knight said loudly. "He took a make-up exam a few days ago, and he blew it! That idiotic exam paper of his knocked nearly ten percentage points off TTU's overall IQ! May God have mercy on his soul!"
The captain missing team activities over academics reminded Xu Ling of someone he had once known.
Not someone from his own past, strictly speaking, but an opponent from his previous life, from the years when he was coming up — a kid named Pang Qingfang. To anyone who didn't follow Chinese basketball, the name meant nothing. But at thirteen and fourteen, he had been the most talked-about young basketball talent in the country. Back then Xu Ling, at sixteen, met the fourteen-year-old Pang Qingfang in a youth tournament and watched the younger boy pour in 40-plus points and overwhelm him on physical gifts far beyond the youth level. At the time, Pang Qingfang had looked like China's next NBA player. Then he went to the United States, and after that little was heard of him; the last news Xu Ling had of him was that he couldn't play Division I because of academic problems.
Still, Xu Ling believed Jackson would be back sooner or later. There was no chance he would miss his entire senior season over academics.
But until he returned, TTU's undisputed core was vacant.
And that, in fact, was the whole point of Knight's outburst.
TTU's coaching staff didn't like to organize intrasquad scrimmages to gauge players' level. Knight found the players he needed only through brutal training.
But players living together day in and day out — who had real game and who didn't slowly came out.
Among the freshmen, no one was Xu Ling's match, and Xu Ling's goal was to prove that he was one of the five best players in the Womble Practice Facility. Jackson's absence left the five short one man, and that handed him a chance to seize a spot for himself.
It was also exactly the opportunity his friend — and a player the coaching staff favored — sophomore guard Alan Voskuil had been waiting for.
From that day on, Xu Ling dueled Voskuil in nearly every facet of the game.
Unfortunately for Voskuil, Xu Ling was a two-guard whose talent would draw praise even in the NBA, and he was better than Voskuil in almost every facet of the game.
His dribble was more threatening, his passing vision wider, his wingspan longer. His athleticism, and his long experience playing inside, even let him fill in on the interior for a spell on a college floor.
In a way, Xu Ling owed Voskuil thanks.
Voskuil looked like an above-average NCAA backcourt player.
Beating him outright on the practice floor was a shot in the arm for Xu Ling.
Voskuil was deeply frustrated. He was sure he was no worse than that arrogant Martin Zeno, and without Xu Ling he had been confident of pushing for the starting two-guard job.
But now all his shine had been completely covered over by this freshman.
Bitterness and anxiety finally boiled over on November 10 — after the last practice before the NCAA season opener — when Voskuil loudly called for a mixed scrimmage between the freshmen and sophomores.
"Will the coach allow it?" sophomore forward Michael Prince asked anxiously.
"Sixteen minutes," Voskuil said. "Eight-minute halves. Just messing around. What do you think, Eli?"
Xu Ling knew that unless he crushed Voskuil in a real game, the other man would never let it go.
So he tossed his towel aside and said, offhandedly, "I've been wanting to kick your ass for a while."
TTU had exactly ten freshmen and sophomores, so the teams came together fast. The lone senior, Darryl Dora, bounced out laughing and declared himself referee.
The game began.
Xu Ling's team won the tip, and on the first possession the ball came swiftly into his hands.
Voskuil closed out on him at once. In training, Knight had rated him a defensive black hole who "couldn't guard my grandmother," but right now he poured every defensive technique he had ever learned into the effort.
And yet the gap was hopeless. He had no height, no speed, no explosiveness; in front of Xu Ling, everything he did looked like slow motion.
Xu Ling's defense wasn't top-level yet, but those long arms were like a venomous snake that had caught the scent of blood, always precisely sealing off Voskuil's sightlines and passing lanes.
Stopped once on offense, Voskuil anxiously called for a pick-and-roll. He thought he had finally shaken loose by half a body and let fly with a stop-and-pop jumper.
The next second, a shadow closed the distance from behind and launched into the air after him!
"Smack!"
Xu Ling swatted a clean chase-down block and sent the ball flying.
Possession changed hands, and Voskuil grew more frantic by the minute.
Xu Ling didn't choose to bully him with his body. Instead he paid him back in his own coin: he raised a hand and called for the same pick-and-roll, but the instant the screen formed, he used a huge lateral step-back Voskuil had never seen, opening two meters of space in a blink, and rose for an easy jumper.
"Swish."
Nothing but net.
"Alan," Xu Ling said mildly, "surrender and you keep half."
Voskuil shouted, "No way!"
Xu Ling began guarding Voskuil tight.
He gave him no room to catch the ball and refused to let him move where he pleased; the aggressive denial made even touching the ball a luxury for Voskuil.
When Voskuil finally got the ball off an off-ball screen and geared up to attack, Xu Ling spotted the opening and swiped the ball away with one hand.
The first half wasn't even over, but the duel between Xu Ling and Voskuil could already be written in stone. Before the words had faded, Xu Ling was already gone like an arrow loosed from a bow, racing up the floor. He took his teammate's pass, rose into the air, and hammered the ball through the rim with a tomahawk dunk of absurd extension and brutal force!
Yet before the ball had even hit the floor and bounced back up, a roar exploded from the sideline: "What the hell do you think you're doing?!!!"
Bob Knight stormed over, blazing, and bellowed: "Who told you you could play a game?"
Xu Ling stood where he was and said nothing.
Knight's fury poured out like high-pressure steam, all of it onto Voskuil.
"Alan! You'd rather piss me off than give up this little farce, all so you can prove to the whole world that you can't even beat some new kid off the street? Great! You've proved your incompetence perfectly! If this is the result of two years of training at TTU, then pack your bags and get the hell out of here! Right now, out of my sight, and never let me see that face of yours again!
"You destroyed your last chance with your own two hands! Useless! Completely useless! I'd love to crack open your skull and see what's in there! Get out! Get out right now! Get out of my gym this instant! OUT!!!"
If Xu Ling had known it would come to this, he would never have played that game.
And Knight's overreaction stirred a deep disgust in him.
He genuinely did not think there was anything wrong with players running a scrimmage among themselves after practice.
Just as he was about to say a few words, Knight stopped looking at Voskuil — whose face was ashen — altogether and turned straight to the assistant coach, roaring in an even more agitated voice: "To hell with Alan Voskuil! We don't need him! Don't waste another minute on this piece of garbage! We gave him two years, and this is the shit he pays us back with! I've had enough!"
Then Knight finally noticed the freshman who had played so well, staring at him with a look he had never seen in a player's eyes before — cold, appraising, carrying a thread of undisguised contempt.
"Rookie!" Knight said loudly. "Don't think beating Alan Voskuil, that piece of scrap, proves anything! You're a long way from there! Voskuil is nothing in college basketball! He's a pile of dog shit! If you let this go to your head, then get the hell out with him, and quick!"
In the NCAA, the head coach holds absolute authority.
Any college player with professional ambitions would hate to ruin his relationship with his coach. Xu Ling told himself the same thing — but at his core he was still that kid from the future, born after 2000, almost finished with college and with a mind of his own. He was not one of the meek student-athletes Knight was used to, the kind who took any beating and any curse without a word.
That long-accumulated loathing for a coaching style that ignored a player's dignity and heaped on humiliation finally burst the dam of reason.
A single line drifted from Xu Ling's lips, spoken mildly and cold enough to drop the temperature of the entire Womble Practice Facility below freezing: "Now I finally understand. This is why Larry Bird would never, under any circumstances, play for you. Back then he cast his no vote on you by transferring — so why did it take us thirty years to confirm that the vote he cast was the right one?"
1. American community colleges are a bit like China's junior colleges, though not exactly, since community colleges are an important talent pool for the NCAA and many of their players have reached the NBA, whereas you will essentially never see a junior-college player make it into CUBA, let alone the CBA.
2. A "redshirt" lets a player sit out official competition for a season in order to preserve his eligibility. NCAA rules normally give a college athlete four years of eligibility, but a redshirt allows a player five years on campus, using one of them without games to train and improve, recover from injury, or adjust to the college level.
3. Pang Qingfang is quite a figure himself: of all the athletes born in China in 2005, he broke out first. In 2019 he averaged 30 points a game on 80 percent shooting at the U14 level, and he looked full of promise. Then in 2019 he went to the United States and studied abroad for five years, collected a pile of full scholarships, and in the end went to a community college because of his grades.
Chapter 4