At the Real.Q restaurant, Cole and Yang Shuai were sampling Lexington-style barbecue.
Winston-Salem was famous for tobacco — it even carried the nickname "Camel City" — but its food was authentic too.
As one of North Carolina's most genuine styles of barbecue, the pork was smoked slowly over a low fire, then chopped and tossed in a distinctive tomato-vinegar sauce, and served with red slaw and cornbread, thick with smoky flavor.
"Skip has already agreed to offer the scholarship. Stephen will be one of us next season." Once a mouthful of barbecue went down, Cole told Yang Shuai the team's final decision.
Hearing it, the weight finally lifted from Yang Shuai's heart.
Cole had said before that Prosser was a coach who set great store by defense, and Yang Shuai had worried that might lead him to pass on Curry. Now it seemed Prosser merely prized defense — he hadn't reached the point of stubbornness.
"But Ishmael Smith has turned down our invitation," Cole went on, with a trace of regret.
Smith and Curry were players of two entirely different styles — one a playmaker, one a scorer — styles that complemented each other, so recruiting both at once had been feasible. Especially now that this season was ending: the team's leading scorer, fourth-year guard Justin Gray, who averaged 18.2 points and 4.3 assists, would be leaving as well. The need in the backcourt was great.
"What a shame," Yang Shuai said, though the result didn't really surprise him.
Smith's and Curry's styles complemented each other, but both stood 1.83 meters tall, and a backcourt that size could hardly take the floor together in NAA games. Rather than stay and compete with Curry for the starting spot, it made more sense to go to a school that could offer him a more stable role.
"So what's your next move?" With Smith refusing to come, Cole could only keep pinning his hopes on Yang Shuai. After all, during Curry's tryout he had asked whether Yang Shuai had other candidates in mind; Yang Shuai hadn't answered directly, but he had nodded.
"Next week I'm going to Lawndale, in Los Angeles." Yang Shuai had long since made his plan.
Los Angeles had many satellite cities, and next to big names like Long Beach and Inglewood, Lawndale truly drew little attention. Even so, Cole knew at once who Yang Shuai was going after: "The player you want to recruit is Russell Westbrook of Leuzinger High School?"
"You know him?" Yang Shuai's face lit up. If Cole knew Westbrook, this would go a lot more smoothly, just as recruiting Curry had.
Cole shook his head. "He scored fifty-one points against Carson High School this January."
Yang Shuai's heart lurched at that.
He had already looked into Westbrook's situation somewhat. Before his junior-year season, Westbrook had decent physical tools, but he stood only five foot eight and weighed just 140 pounds — even smaller and slighter than Curry. In high school he could only come off the bench; he was practically a nobody.
But in the summer after his sophomore season, his height shot up to six foot two, and his play rose right along with it.
In his junior-year season he averaged 25.1 points, 8.7 rebounds, 3.1 steals, and 2.3 assists, leading his team to a 25–4 record.
On the strength of that showing, his highest ranking among the major media outlets was 137th — near the front of the three-star high school recruits, approaching four-star territory.
Now, with a fifty-point game added on top, recruiting him was bound to become far harder.
Keep in mind, an NAA game lasts only thirty-two minutes; even Kobe Bryant, renowned as a scorer, managed only one fifty-point game in his entire high school career.
And the worse news was still to come.
"I hear ULA is recruiting him now," Cole said, taking out his phone to check.
That meant if Yang Shuai wanted Westbrook, he would have to take him right out of ULA's hands.
After putting the phone down, Cole gave Yang Shuai some very practical advice: "If you have other recruiting targets, you could consider giving up on him and going after someone else."
ULA's prestige stood shoulder to shoulder with Duke's and UNC's. Just as Yang Shuai had said at his interview, how many reasons did Westbrook have to give up ULA for Wake Forest University?
"I still want to try," Yang Shuai said after thinking it over for a while.
The situation was harder than he had expected, but at this point in time there was no better candidate than Westbrook.
Cole gave him a firm nod. Most of a scout's work was fighting other people for players, and what it demanded was exactly this kind of courage to rise to a challenge. "Starting today, you're the regional scout in charge of recruiting players on the West Coast."
NAA scouts had three levels. The lowest was the junior scout, usually called a scout's assistant, who mostly just helped out. A regional scout, as the name suggests, was a full-time scout responsible for one region — and the "scouts" fans talked about day to day were precisely these people. Generally, scouts of that kind weren't students, so Cole was clearly making an exception here.
It wasn't only because of what Yang Shuai had just said; more than that, Yang Shuai had brought the school Curry, making good on what he had claimed at that interview. In Cole's eyes, Yang Shuai had long since stopped being an ordinary student — he was already better than some regional scouts.
The sudden promotion caught Yang Shuai somewhat off guard, though he also felt lucky to have a boss like Cole, who didn't play by the book.
"I'll get him." His answer was exactly the same as it had been back then.
Looking at that ever-confident face, Cole smiled too and raised his glass in a toast: "All the best. Keep in touch."
When the weekend came, Yang Shuai boarded a flight to Los Angeles.
But he didn't go to Lawndale. He went "home."
The original owner's parents were both Chinese, running a Chinese restaurant in San Gabriel. When they were young, influenced by Yilin magazine, they had been duped by an agent into going to America; by the time they wanted to go back, there was no going back — to get that green card, they had poured in every cent they had.
The good news was that the original owner hadn't been on good terms with his parents once he grew up, which was why, even with home on the West Coast, he had gone all the way to North Carolina for college. So Yang Shuai didn't have to worry about being found out.
But after two days at home, he found the restaurant's business wasn't good; it could go under at any moment. The original owner's parents made their living from this restaurant, and it was also what had kept the original owner clear of America's all-too-common student-loan crisis — so this was anything but good news for Yang Shuai.
Not that he could do much about it. He hadn't been a chef in his previous life, and every dish at the place had already been adapted to American tastes; even knowing some dishes of the future would change nothing.
Early Monday morning, before the rush hour, Yang Shuai took a taxi to Lawndale. He picked Monday rather than the weekend because he had no idea where Westbrook lived; only at school would he have a chance to find him.
An hour later he appeared at Leuzinger High School's basketball practice gym.
America's basketball system was mature, and the players inside it pushed one another ruthlessly. If you weren't willing to give up study time to train, the others would pull a little further ahead of you every day — and day by day it would add up until you were left far behind.
Quite a few students were training in the gym, but Yang Shuai didn't see Westbrook among them. He asked around and learned that Westbrook was in class.
That took Yang Shuai a little by surprise, but at least he managed to find out Westbrook's classroom.
After waiting nearly an hour by the classroom door, Yang Shuai finally saw that face — still green, yet bearing an uncanny resemblance to Raphael, the "second turtle" of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Smiling, he stepped up and introduced himself — and Westbrook's reaction surprised him again.
"I've got to get to training now. Could we talk after that?"
Compared with Curry, who was every bit the student, Westbrook came across as far more mature.
Yang Shuai nodded. He had already waited this long; a little more wouldn't hurt.
He followed Westbrook back to the gym, and was quickly stunned by the intensity of the training.
After a simple warm-up, Westbrook went straight into five hundred shots — and after that came a large amount of strength work: pull-ups and push-ups.
That workload might be nothing in the NBA, but Westbrook was still just a high schooler.
By the end of the hour-plus session, Westbrook was drenched in sweat.
"Sorry to keep you waiting." Westbrook came over and sat down beside Yang Shuai.
"Do you train like this every day?" Yang Shuai handed him a bottle of water he had just bought from the vending machine in the gym.
"Thanks." Westbrook took the water, then shook his head. "More on weekends."
Yang Shuai gave him a thumbs-up. Truly worthy of the monster who, in the NBA, came back from every major injury like a machine sent back to the factory for an upgrade — that durability was of historic caliber.
And between never skipping class, that mature air, and the high-intensity training, Westbrook truly did stand out as a different breed from his peers.
"Russell, how much do you know about Wake Forest University?" Once the brief pleasantries were done, Yang Shuai went straight to the point.
"Tim Duncan, Chris Paul, the A League, and... more than a hundred years of school history." Westbrook counted off on his fingers everything he knew.
North Carolina was on the East Coast and Los Angeles sat in California on the West Coast, with the whole country in between; for Westbrook to know that much was already quite something.
But his next words sent a chill through Yang Shuai's heart.
"I'm already set on going to ULA."
"I don't mean to take up your time — I just feel I ought to spend some of it explaining why I chose ULA," Westbrook went on at once.
If he had simply wanted to turn Yang Shuai down, a single sentence would have done it — but Yang Shuai had come all this way, and that would have been far too disrespectful to him.
For Yang Shuai, this trip was a complete failure. Not only did he fail to convince Westbrook, but the team's scout status was also revoked — he was demoted back to junior scout, a role of fetching coffee and organizing files. Cole said there was nothing he could do about it; the school board had decided.
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Chapter 5