Yang Shuai nodded. Things were far worse than he had expected, but it wasn't time to give up yet.
"I have a brother I'm extremely close to — Khelcey Barrs. A six-foot-six, two-hundred-pound beast of a player. You may not have heard of him, but he was a better high schooler than Kevin Durant." Westbrook spoke slowly, turning the plastic wristband on his wrist.
Yang Shuai searched his mind for everything connected to Westbrook. He truly had never heard of the man.
You could say he knew of a high schooler better than Durant — Greg Oden, the top high school player in the nation in the class of 2006. And he knew, too, that Oden would be the first overall pick of that same draft class, ahead of Durant.
"He lived right across from me. We left home together every day, trained together at the gym, played together. He wore number 3, I wore number 4..." Memory filled Westbrook's face as he spoke, but his eyes drifted, almost without his knowing it, to the plastic wristband, and his hand went still.
Yang Shuai followed his gaze. The wristband had turned to face front, and on it were engraved the letters "KB3".
The initials of Khelcey Barrs' name were KB — and the 3 had to be Barrs' jersey number.
"He got injured?" Yang Shuai ventured. In America, talented players who never reached the NBA because of injury were nothing rare.
"No." Westbrook shook his head, and the memory on his face slowly gave way to grief. "The summer after our sophomore year, he left me forever."
Yang Shuai froze. He hadn't expected it to be something like this.
He reached out and patted Westbrook on the shoulder.
Westbrook drew a deep breath, then turned to look at Yang Shuai with earnest eyes. "KB already had his offer from ULA by our sophomore year. Playing at ULA together was the promise we made back then. He's gone now, so I'll carry him with me and see that promise through."
As Yang Shuai looked at the steadiness in Westbrook's gaze, images flashed through his mind.
The time Durant left for the Warriors and Westbrook called it a "betrayal" — afterward, every matchup between them crackled with hostility. The time Daryl Morey made his controversial remarks, and Westbrook walked into the arena wearing a Tang suit.
Westbrook was a man ruled more by his heart than his head.
Yang Shuai had prepared plenty of arguments on the way over — that at ULA Westbrook would only ever come off the bench, that at Wake Forest he would get a much bigger role. Now, all of it had lost its meaning.
After Westbrook had been this open about why he had chosen ULA, any attempt to talk him out of it would have been heartless.
After leaving Leuzinger High School, Yang Shuai took a cab back to San Gabriel.
He didn't have the luck he'd had that morning, though. The cab got stuck on the elevated freeway.
Morning and evening rush hours come with every big city, but Los Angeles has a midday rush too.
"Welcome to Los Angeles — a city of dreams and gridlock. Out here, no car means no legs, and if you've got a car, your legs get broken on the road." The driver was a talkative Mexican. As he talked he rolled down his window, shut off the engine, and lit a cigarette.
Yang Shuai rolled his window down as well and stuck his head out.
As far as the eye could see, the elevated road was packed with cars, one pressed against the next like sardines jammed together in a can.
People were climbing out of their cars here and there to stretch and get some air. They seemed to have long since made their peace with this.
Yang Shuai opened his door and climbed out too.
Gazing into the distance, he saw two entirely different worlds.
On his left lay Beverly Hills, one of Los Angeles' most famous districts. Even from afar he could pick out brightly colored supercars lining the streets, and even the palm trees along the roadside looked like carefully pruned works of art.
On his right, a few blocks away, downtown Los Angeles was a sprawl of tents in every color. If he narrowed his eyes, he could just make out several figures lying beside the road, motionless, like mannequins someone had thrown away.
It wasn't as striking as India's scenes of slums and wealthy quarters divided by a single line, but the gulf between rich and poor still stood sharp and unmistakable.
And the original owner's family sat somewhere between the two states: on the left, a heaven in plain view yet forever out of reach; on the right, a hell one careless step could drop them into.
Going by what he had felt these past two days, the hell on the right was the closer of the two.
If the original owner's parents' Chinese restaurant went under, what awaited this family would be more than a slide down the social ladder, and more than a matter of student loans — it would be a crisis of survival.
Horns blared around them without pause. Yang Shuai kicked irritably at the toe of his shoe.
"Amigo, back in the car!" the Mexican driver called, poking his head out.
Yang Shuai turned and saw that the traffic ahead had begun to flow, like a school of fish that had found its way out.
He let out a long breath and climbed back in. "Take the next exit off the freeway. I need to get back to Lawndale."
The family the original owner was born into wasn't something he could change. Looking on the bright side, he counted himself lucky that he hadn't transmigrated straight into a homeless drifter scraping by on the streets of North America.
What he could do — his realistic goal for the present — was to do the job in front of him well, then fight his way into the NBA.
Only in the NBA could the work experience from his previous life be put to its fullest use.
To reach that goal, he would have to help Wake Forest University return to the tournament — even stage a breakthrough that stunned everyone.
And to manage that, one Stephen Curry would not be enough.
In the original history, Curry had led his team into the tournament's Elite Eight, but that came in the weaker Southern Conference. In the A League, Yang Shuai didn't believe Curry alone could pull it off.①
In other words, Westbrook was a man he had to win over.
By the time Yang Shuai made it back to Leuzinger High School, it was three in the afternoon. He grabbed some bread to quiet his stomach, then headed for the gym.
The gym was far livelier than it had been that morning. Students crowded the sidelines, and a five-on-five scrimmage was in full swing on the court.
American high schools let out early, and after-school scrimmages like this had become part of the daily routine — for varsity players especially, a fine chance to turn games into practice.
Yang Shuai soon picked out Westbrook on the court. He didn't even have to look. He had barely found a spot along the sideline when Westbrook exploded past his man and threw down a soaring dunk right in front of him.
Boom!
The dull thud of the ball hammering the rim rolled through the gym.
After he landed, Westbrook pounded his chest and roared, and the sideline crowd caught fire in an instant.
Even from a distance, Yang Shuai felt the blood in his own body stirring beyond his control.
Westbrook's explosive style of play was intensely contagious.
Taking the chance, Yang Shuai studied the details of Westbrook's game.
Beyond his outstanding physique and explosive style, Westbrook at this stage was defined by one more thing: speed.
His speed wasn't the same kind as Ishmael Smith's, though. Smith gave the impression of an antelope; Westbrook was more like a lion — fast, and with a surge of raw ferocity running through the speed.
And the man could really jump. He didn't just jump high — he got off his feet in a blink. That showed not only in his dunks but in his battles for rebounds and his help-side shot-blocking on defense.
On the court, he seemed to be everywhere at once.
But his weakness was just as obvious: his shooting was bad.
Every one of his mid- and long-range attempts rattled off the rim, and his straight-up-and-down stroke looked stiff.
It wasn't that Westbrook's training had done nothing — much like LeBron James, he had a problem with body coordination.
His flexibility was lacking as well. His wrist wasn't supple, so rather than releasing the ball he seemed to hurl it at the rim.
That might well be why, for all his explosive athleticism, he had ultimately failed to rank even among the top 100 players of his own high school class.
Yet by the end of the game, Yang Shuai was more convinced than ever, because measured against the talent Westbrook was showing, a weak jump shot was a flaw he could absolutely live with.
From the individual workout he'd watched earlier, Westbrook was already attacking that weakness with real precision, too.
When the game ended, Westbrook walked straight over to him.
An Asian face drew the eye along the sideline — Westbrook had spotted him during the game.
"Why are you back again?"
"Can I buy you dinner?" Yang Shuai asked.
Westbrook hesitated a moment, but in the end he nodded.
He wasn't sure why Yang Shuai had left and returned, but only a fool turns down a free meal.
Los Angeles was a vast melting pot of immigrants, and that had made it a crossroads of cuisines from every nation. What was most popular here wasn't steak or burgers, but tacos, pho, ramen, bibimbap — food like that.
They found a taco shop nearby.
Yang Shuai told Westbrook to order whatever he liked. Westbrook didn't stand on ceremony and ordered five in one go.
When they arrived, he made short work of two of them, like a whirlwind sweeping the table.
Athletes burn through far more energy than ordinary people, and a high schooler still growing could eat more than at any other time.
He took a long pull on his drink, let out a burp, and reached for the third.
And it was right then that Yang Shuai, finally unable to hold his tongue, made him stop mid-reach.
"Russell — do you want more people to know KB3's story?"
①: The NAA Tournament — March Madness — fields sixty-eight teams in all. Thirty-two are conference tournament champions from the thirty-two D1 conferences; the remaining thirty-six receive invitations from the committee based on their season performance.
Chapter 6