Chaos Is a Ladder

Late at night, the desk lamp in Jerry West's office was the only light burning in the entire administration building. He had just hung up the phone on Marc Iavaroni. Iavaroni was no longer complaining—this was a plea that verged on collapse. The locker room had completely spun out of control, the SSOL system had failed outright, and he begged for a "real point guard," or he could not go on coaching. He had even vaguely mentioned resigning. Almost at the same moment, several new emails popped up one after another on the computer screen. The emails came from the team's PR staff and the assistant coach West trusted. They documented in detail everything that had just happened: the out-of-control confrontation, Iavaroni's unhinged accusations, Gasol's humiliation and silence, and how Xu Ling had forcefully stepped in, seized control of the situation, and finally forced Iavaroni to apologize. West leaned back in his chair, fingertips pressed together, his sharp gaze seeming to pierce the darkness as he studied the team roster and rapidly sized up the events of the night. Iavaroni could not steer this ship. The SSOL system was the root of the failure, but he had come cheap, and the owner, Heisley, would never willingly pay the buyout to fire him. Besides, if they did fire Iavaroni, who could they find to take over as head coach? Gasol had already made up his mind to leave. Forcing an All-Star whose heart was not in it to stay would only speed up his devaluation. If he was to be traded, then trade him they must—and quickly. Rudy Gay, in truth, was the biggest problem of all. He was talented—if he could ever cash in on it, his ceiling would be very high. He had once been so humble that he had fooled everyone, West included, into overlooking what many scouts had warned again and again: "Rudy Gay lacks the drive to become a great player." Now he was the genuinely harmful tumor inside the Grizzlies—unable to give his on-court teammates any emotional lift, unable to help the team on the defensive end, needing the second-most shot attempts on the team each night just to put up 18 points inefficiently. He was erratic from three-point range, and that meant no matter what system the team ran, opponents could load their perimeter defense onto Xu Ling. In the past three games, if he had played the role of secondary scorer in even one of them, the Grizzlies would not have dropped three straight. Xu Ling. The shadows on West's face seemed to deepen—Memphis's only hope, with his superb leadership and his willingness to shoulder responsibility, had already shown more than enough of the potential to become the cornerstone of the franchise. West drew a deep breath and returned Iavaroni's call first. "Marc, forget that Phoenix stuff. From here on, we're going to play ugly basketball—the kind built on defense and grinding for rebounds—and we're going to put the ball in Eli's hands as much as possible and let him decide the games. Your job is to hold the locker room together until the trade goes through." Iavaroni understood perfectly well that accepting this arrangement meant conceding that his tactical authority had been completely hollowed out. But did he have any other choice? Iavaroni murmured, "Understood." Then West called Gasol and cut straight to the point: "Pau, it's time. As of today, I'll push for a trade with everything I have. I promise you I'll send you to a team that can contend. But until then, you have to play better. The better you play, the better your chances of getting out of Memphis." Gasol took this in calmly, asking only in return, "This time, will the owner agree to it?" Had the owner, Michael Heisley, not blocked it by force earlier, Gasol would have been gone last season. Heisley's reason for insisting he stay was simple: the Grizzlies' market was already bleak, the hugely popular Shane Battier had already been shipped out, and if they now traded away their No. 1 star as well, how would they protect their record? What would they use to get fans to buy tickets? But now things were different. More and more people poured into the arena in Grizzlies No. 1 jerseys, chanting "Eli is our lord." Gasol's status as the face of the franchise had, in truth, long since changed hands. "He'll agree," West said with conviction. "He has no reason to object." In that instant, Gasol grasped what lay behind those words. After ending the call with Gasol, West pulled up Rudy Gay's name in his contacts—but his finger hovered over the call button, unwilling to press it. Xu Ling and Gay had been like fire and water since before the season even began. West had spoken with him once, and it had not been a pleasant conversation. He remembered warning Xu Ling to "pretend everything was normal." So how was it that, when the moment truly came, he himself had nearly forgotten that? Was now really the time to start loudly shopping players? Gasol was certain to leave, and Gay was still, on paper, a player the team was building around—if they were going to trade him, they should strike when his value was at its peak, not now. The team was already mired deep in the muck; if, at a moment like this, one more man with a restless heart and an uncertain future were added to the roster, how would they ever climb out? West quickly scrolled the screen and found Xu Ling's name in his contacts. He did not call. He sent only a short message: "Chaos is not a disaster. Chaos is a ladder." What that chaos was, Xu Ling had no idea. When he woke up, he found that last night's locker room conflict had been leaked in full. Not only had ESPN reported on the Grizzlies' locker room infighting on the strength of an inside source, but a swarm of hard-to-verify sources and outrageous rumors had begun to spread far and wide. First came the report from ESPN's star reporter Marc Stein: "A fierce argument erupted in the Grizzlies' locker room after their third straight loss; head coach Marc Iavaroni clashed seriously with star Pau Gasol, and rookie Eli Xu was drawn in, trading words with both sides." The report stated plainly that "the conflict involved fundamental doubts about the team's tactical system." Then the bizarre rumors multiplied, and Xu Ling unexpectedly became the eye of the storm: "According to insiders, the conflict nearly got out of hand at one point; while trying to break it up, Xu Ling's 'movements got too big'—he even grabbed whatever was at hand (rumored to include a pool cue and a folding chair) and accidentally injured Gasol, leaving the latter 'bleeding from the head' and rushed to the hospital for stitches!" More absurd still: because Xu Ling had once posted a joking tweet during training camp—the "Memphis Three Sticketeers"—plenty of fans unaware of the facts quickly dug up the old tweet and piled on with mockery: "After all that, it turns out you're the real perpetrator of locker room violence!" Pau Gasol did call in to ESPN himself to publicly clear up the supposed "beaten into the hospital by Xu Ling" incident, but he did not deny that the conflict itself had happened. Next, Grizzlies vice president Dick Versace held a press conference and issued a statement widely deemed limp and unconvincing: "There was indeed a heated internal discussion about how to win. That is a normal part of professional sports. The rumors of a bloody locker room are entirely groundless." Last, Xu Ling's agent Leon Rose vowed to sue the rumormongers for defamation, but even that threat fell a little flat, since in any country it is extremely difficult to make a charge of defamation stick. And just then, word got out that the Grizzlies had begun listening to trade offers for Pau Gasol and were actively exploring every possible deal. It all seemed to fit together. Maybe there was no bloodshed, but the conflict had indeed happened. And to outsiders, the heart of it was clearly Xu Ling and Gasol—one a red-hot young superstar, the other an All-Star in his prime who seemed to have been written off; one favoring a freewheeling, up-tempo perimeter game, the other a traditional interior man used to grinding the pace down and setting up in the half-court. For two men like that, would it not be stranger if they didn't clash? What was more worrying, behind the arena of public opinion there seemed to be an invisible force, ceaselessly gathering and amplifying this negative coverage until it swelled into a tide of doubt aimed squarely at Xu Ling. When ESPN's Chris Sheridan touched on the matter in his daily column, a barb lurked beneath the words: "Whatever the truth, a conflict of this magnitude breaking out in the locker room is itself proof that the Grizzlies are a team slipping out of control. We pointed out long ago that the SSOL system simply does not fit the Grizzlies' current roster. Forcing Eli into the point guard spot has badly thrown the team's offense and defense out of balance—which is exactly why his individual numbers look so good while the wins refuse to come, and quite possibly the root of the locker room's endless friction." Fittingly ironic, the piece had originally been meant as a roundup of NBA rookies' performances to date. Yet when it came to Xu Ling, Sheridan sidestepped the rookie's individual performance and instead dwelt at length on the team's troubles; then, when he reached Kevin Durant later in the piece, he abruptly "remembered" that this was supposed to be a rookie feature. Not only did he gush over Durant's recent string of 20-plus-point games, he even set out to defend the SuperSonics' sorry record: "Let's set the wins and losses aside for a moment. Kevin Durant has no All-Star teammates around him and no system that suits him—he is carrying the team on his back all by himself. You cannot ask more of a rookie than that. KD never says much; he's just a pure-hearted boy with a backpack who treats basketball like oxygen. I am convinced he will be this season's Rookie of the Year." Sheridan then claimed on Twitter that he had received thousands of "hate emails" from Memphis, some of which even warned him, "You'd better not show your face in Memphis, or you'll meet a violent end like Martin Luther King." Aside from lending a Memphis already branded as "all bluster" a few more shades of ill repute, the tweet accomplished nothing. But the fact that Sheridan chose to make it public at all showed that he held a prejudice not only against Xu Ling but a lack of even basic respect for the entire city of Memphis. For many of the Grizzlies' players, they had still not grown used to the intense scrutiny the team now faced. Once a franchise no one paid any attention to, they now landed on the national headlines again and again, generating a buzz that could even rival spotlight giants like the Lakers and the Knicks. Just what kind of honor was this, really? The atmosphere aboard the flight was unusually oppressive. No one openly demanded to know how the news had leaked—anyone might have done it—and the man bearing the greatest pressure through the whole affair was, without a doubt, Xu Ling, at the very center of the whirlwind. But Xu Ling himself showed no intention of hunting down the culprit. He kept his earphones on and his eyes shut the entire flight, resting, as though none of the outside clamor had anything to do with him. The other players exchanged looks, their eyes threaded with suspicion, as if each of them wanted to drag out with his own hands the mole hidden among them. But this was bound to remain an unsolvable case. When the Grizzlies' chartered plane landed at the New Jersey airport, the players had barely stepped out of the arrival gate when a large crowd of reporters who had long been waiting surged forward and instantly hemmed Xu Ling in. Questions about the infighting, the tactical rifts, the loss of control in the locker room came at him one after another. Under the surging barrage, Xu Ling kept his face calm and merely repeated the same thing in different forms: "I'm not going to talk about locker room matters." "The team's internal issues are ours to handle." "Sorry, I can't go into the details." "The only thing I care about is the next game." "None of this is worth discussing in public." Without giving the reporters a single word of substance, he climbed onto the team bus and left the airport with the rest of the squad. Nine at night Continental Airlines Arena This arena, standing here since 1981, had watched the New Jersey Nets rise from a doormat cursed by fate into the Eastern Conference powerhouse that reached the NBA Finals two years running. Jason Kidd deserved to be remembered in this building forever—in the decades before his arrival, the Nets had won just one playoff series. Though he never brought the team a championship, those two straight trips to the Finals had already become the most precious memory in the hearts of New Jersey basketball fans. Yet with the core of the roster aging, the former Eastern power had long since lost its glory. Over the past few seasons they had been stopped in the first round of the playoffs time after time. However fine a team, if it cannot keep winning, it can fall apart in the blink of an eye. When warmups ended, the starting lineups of both teams filed onto the floor. The Nets' star forward Richard Jefferson came over to Xu Ling and asked, mockery in his voice, "If you lose again tonight, will I be reading tomorrow about you killing someone in the locker room?" Xu Ling didn't look at him, answering only flatly, "Instead of fretting over our locker room, you'd better worry about whether you can score on me tonight." Once the game began, Jefferson seemed set on establishing his dominance over Xu Ling right away, calling for the ball to go one-on-one. In the quick pick-and-roll possession that followed, he used his experience to shake off his defender and bore straight down on the basket, already releasing what he was sure was a certain layup. In a flash, a figure erupted upward from the side and behind! Xu Ling arrived as though he had read the play in advance, and with a clean chase-down block hammered the ball out over the baseline! The entire Continental Airlines Arena burst into gasps. Then Xu Ling caught the ball at the top of the key. Against Jefferson's tight, body-to-body defense, he ripped through two quick crossovers and suddenly burst forward, muscling into a hard drive. Jefferson lunged sideways with everything he had to cut him off, but Xu Ling barreled through him with his body and, as Jefferson watched helplessly, drove straight into the paint and rose into the air. "BOOM!!!" Xu Ling threw down a thunderous one-handed power dunk; as the rim roared under the impact, he hung from the basket and looked down at Jefferson, who still had not snapped back to his senses.