Alex Scales: Standing tall in Shanghai
NBA dreams take former Oregon star around the world — and out of his element
by DAN WASHBURN
SHANGHAI — Alex Scales was surrounded. Moments after the Shanghai Sharks defeated the Zhejiang Horses, a huge push of people had its favorite foreign player corralled. His head and shoulders poking through the throng, Scales was at the mercy of the masses. If the crowd moved, he moved too — a bust bobbing on a sea of black hair. They wanted autographs and photos. He wanted a way out. It was the only time Scales looked lost on the basketball court that night.
After two seasons playing in the fledgling Chinese Basketball Association, Scales has become somewhat of a minor celebrity in China, a hoops crazy country with an estimated 200 million people involved in basketball at one level or another. This season, although his Sharks went a disappointing 8-14 and finished 10th out of the CBA’s 12 teams, Scales was an All-Star and the league’s second leading scorer, averaging 25.2 points per game. Two seasons ago, playing for the Jiangsu Dragons, the 6-foot-4 guard won the league’s slam-dunk contest and his explosive, exciting style of play earned comparisons to Kobe Bryant.
But for Scales, a 25-year-old former All-Pac-10 First Team player at the University of Oregon, the fame is all foreign to him. He can’t understand what’s written about him in the local papers. He can’t communicate with his fans. He signs autographs that most people in Shanghai can’t read. And while it’s flattering to draw comparisons to one of the NBA’s most gifted players, Scales would prefer to be known as an NBA player himself. And he has come excruciatingly close to realizing that dream. Last fall, he was on the Houston Rockets’ preseason roster — right alongside former Shanghai Shark Yao Ming — only to be cut seven days before the start of the regular season.
That’s when Scales, taking big Yao’s advice, signed on for his second tour of duty in China, his NBA ambitions once again ironically sending him thousands and thousands and thousands of miles away from the NBA — and home. Since graduating from Oregon with a Sociology degree in 2000, Scales has adopted the nomadic existence shared by so many of his non-NBA basketball brethren. With pro leagues everywhere from Iceland to Australia, never has it been easier to earn a living playing basketball. Before 2000, Scales’ only trip outside the United States was a junior high school vacation in the Bahamas. Now he’s played professionally on teams in Italy, Argentina and Brazil. But he’s spent most of his career in, of all places, China.
“I never had the idea to play in China,” said Scales, who signed on with the NBDL’s Huntsville (Ala.) Flight less than a week after returning from Shanghai in early March. “It was always NBA, NBA and more NBA. I took the option to play out here, but I didn’t think China was going to be like the way it is. Everything was shocking.” Scales grew up in Racine, Wisc., and attended college in Eugene, Ore. Combined population: 230,000. His first stop in China, back in 2001, was Nanjing. Population: 6 million. Nanjing is a country village compared to Scales’ latest stop in China. Some estimates say Shanghai’s population is fast approaching 20 million. Shocking, indeed.
And Scales, unlike many expatriates living in China, did not make the big move Eastward because of a keen interest in Chinese culture. He came for the money (foreign players can earn anywhere from US$10,000 to US$35,000 per month playing in the CBA) and the exposure (thanks to the success of Yao Ming, NBA scouts are now paying quite a bit of attention to professional basketball in China). So, not unlike most CBA import players, the then 23-year-old Scales arrived in China with no friends, no Chinese language skills and a longstanding aversion to Chinese food. You can see why the CBA tends to have a high turnover rate when it comes to keeping foreign talent.
“It’s definitely a hard adjustment, but they have to do it,” said Detroit Pistons international scout Tony Ronzone, who has coached in the CBA and, back in 1997, was one of the first NBA scouts to visit China. “If they don’t, some other American will do it. It’s a great job for them.”
Scales stuck it out — averaging more than 30 points a game for Jiangsu helped a little — but there were times when he wondered whether he could last the entire season. In Nanjing, Scales had started to settle in. He found some Western-style restaurants that served food he could stomach. He had pieced together a daily routine. But after one month, the team moved him outside the city — to “the middle of nowhere,” according to Scales — to a place closer to the Dragons’ stadium, but far away from anything that reminded Scales of home. From then on, Scales’ diet basically consisted of fried rice and fried shrimp.
“They tricked me,” laughed Scales, who in Shanghai sticks to restaurants with familiar names: the Hard Rock Cafe, Tony Roma’s, TGIFriday’s and a local place called Malone’s American Cafe. “It’s like somebody just took all of your stuff away and you can’t do anything. You’re just sitting there and you’re lonely. At one point, I didn’t have another American on the team. It was the same thing every day. I’d go to the internet bar, come home and try to catch a game on TV — and I wasn’t understanding none of the Chinese language — and practice. That’s it. Do that every day for five months, you got no life. You just wonder, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I’m not having fun. All I do is work and come back and sit here in the hotel.”
Ah yes, the hotel. The room was tiny, and Scales didn’t fit on his bed. He laughs about it now. “When I had to roll over, I had to roll over on the same spot,” Scales chuckled. “But you’ve just got to look at it like you’re over here for a reason. I’m getting paid doing what I love to do. The living conditions just aren’t the best. I thought if I can survive here, I can survive anywhere. I just stuck it out. And as the days started winding down, I was ready to go home.”
Scales stayed in the States for the 2002-2003 season, averaging 19.7 points per game for the Grand Rapids (Mich.) Hoops in the Continental Basketball Association. While the overall level of play in the American CBA is better than the Chinese league, which is considered a notch below big-time college basketball in America, the money doesn’t come close. In just one month in China, top players can earn the same amount as they would in an entire season playing for one of the American teams. By the time Scales got cut by the Rockets in October, all the top European leagues were already well into their seasons, so Scales decided to head back to the land of small beds and fried rice. But this time Scales made sure he was playing in Shanghai, which he calls “the closest thing you can get to the States” in China.
And at Shanghai’s Hard Rock Cafe this February, eating a steak and watching a tape-delayed NBA game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Philadelphia 76ers, Scales looked comfortable. This time it was the 6-foot-10 guy sitting in the seat next to him who looked lost — and rather sleepy. His name was Brian Lewin, a journeyman player from America and a late-season replacement on the Sharks’ roster. Days earlier, he was playing in Mexico for the Juarez Gallos of the American Basketball Association. After a call from his agent, Lewin found himself on a 20-hour series of plane rides to meet up with his new team for a game in China’s remote Jilin province, which shares its southern border with North Korea.
“It was cold, real dark and desolate,” said Lewin, 28, a one-time Harlem Globetrotter. “It was cool, though. It was a life experience I can tell my kids about. But I was exhausted, man. And the hotel I was staying at was freezing. I couldn’t even sleep.” Lewin, still jet-lagged, was making up for lost sleep at the Hard Rock, however. Several times throughout the evening, he leaned back in his chair and dozed off, resting his head on one of his huge hands. But, shortly after dinner, something Scales said woke him up.
“Damn,” Scales exclaimed with a look of surprise on his face. He glanced at Lewin and then back at the television, where a familiar face was staring back at him. Maurice Carter, with whom Scales had played at a free-agent camp in Seattle two years ago, was shooting free throws for the Lakers. LA had just signed him to a 10-day contract. “That’s when I know my time is coming,” Scales said. “Too many cats have been called up this year. That’s good, though. That’s good for him.”
If Scales had signed his contract with Shanghai a little later, or if the Portland Trailblazers had called a little sooner, Scales very well could have been one of those cats who got called up this season. According to Scales’ Phoenix, Ariz.-based agent Todd Eley, the Trailblazers phoned expressing serious interest in his client not long after Scales was on his way to Shanghai. “I was in the air already,” said Scales who in March resurfaced in NBA rumors involving Portland. “It was frustrating. Because you never know what could have happened.”
So, as the NBA season tipped off, Scales was wearing a jersey that read “Shanghai Sharks.” He was back in the CBA: where the two foreigners allotted to each team are only allowed to play a combined five quarters per game, where Chinese players live two to a room at the team training facility, where courts are never heated and coaches often roam the sidelines in winter parkas, where the dance teams smile and giggle a lot but never seem to move in synch. “It doesn’t matter,” Scales said. “Basketball is basketball. If an NBA team wants you, they’ll come get you. They know where you’re at.”
Scales is part of a new breed of foreign player in the Chinese league. In the past, image-conscious CBA teams would only look at players who had NBA experience on their resume. Gradually, they are starting to take on younger players who are still hungry, who are still gunning for a shot at the NBA. “Alex is unlike most players they have seen in China,” said Bruce O’Neil, a Seattle SuperSonics scout who runs the Eugene, Ore.-based U.S. Basketball Academy, where Chinese professional and national teams often train. “He has the talent and the leaping ability and the excitement that really gives the people a glimpse of what somebody close to being an NBA player really looks like.”
Scales is not an imposing presence. His lean, muscular upper body sits atop two skinny legs — chopsticks with calves. In fact, it’s the impression that Scales is too small for the NBA shooting guard position that has helped keep him out of the league thus far, even though he averaged 10 points a game for the Rockets in the preseason. In Shanghai, he was able to work on his point guard skills and show, again and again, that he can stick the long-range jumper.
His Chinese language skills were another story. “All I need to know is how to get home,” Scales said. “If I can get home, I’m good.” Home was a comfortable apartment — with a bed that Scales could fit on — in one of the ubiquitous high-rises on Shanghai’s south side. It was largely undecorated, as though the occupant knew he wouldn’t be staying for long. On the floor was a copy of “Lonely Planet China” that looked brand new. Scales said he always planned on packing it for road games, but for some reason never did. Stacked neatly beside the entertainment center and Scales’ large collection of black-market CDs and DVDs, were boxes and boxes of new athletic shoes. Easily Scales’ favorite Shanghai activity was going to the famous fake market on Huai Hai Road — where product origins are often as ambiguous as their prices — and bargaining with the shopkeepers for the best deals on sneakers.
“I do what every other foreigner does,” Scales said of his life in Shanghai. “I try to get some American food in me, I go to the markets. I see what the latest DVDs are. And I watch all the people stare at me like I’m an alien.” Inevitably, Scales said, people end up staring at his size 13 feet. And it was those size 13 feet — or, more to the point, 15 new pairs of size 13 shoes — that created quite a dilemma for Scales in March. The season was over. It was time to pack up his life again, and this time Scales wasn’t sure if he had enough space in his suitcase. Time was ticking down on his most recent stint in China. Scales’ next stop, as usual, was unclear.
“I had a good time in China,” Scales said on the eve of his departure. “It’s funny to say, but it’s going to be missed. Just because of some of the things that you go through, things that you see and you can express to other people, but they won’t understand unless they were there. Will I be back? I don’t know. I just know that what I want to do won’t allow me to come back. I want to play in the NBA. That’s my goal. And they understand that. Who wouldn’t understand that?”
Action photos by Guo Yijiang.
ALEX SCALES
Height: 6-4
Weight: 185
College: Oregon ‘00
Born: July 3, 1978 in Racine, Wisconsin
High School: Racine Lutheran (Wisconsin)In the Pros: 2003-2004: Was one of the final cuts of the Houston Rockets prior to the NBA season, after averaging 10 points per contest in three preseason games. Playing for the Shanghai Sharks, was the Chinese Basketball Association’s second leading scorer, averaging 25.2 points per game. Was named a CBA All-Star for the second time … 2002-2003: Named to the All-Continental Basketball Association Second Team after averaging 19.7 points and 3.8 rebounds with the Grand Rapids Hoops … 2001-2002: Averaged more than 30 points per game for the Jiangsu Dragons and won the Chinese Basketball Association’s slam dunk contest … 2000-2001: Played with Livorno Basket in Italy and the NBA Ambassadors in the Liga Sudamericana competition.
In College: Averaged 15.3 points and 5.1 rebounds in two seasons at the University of Oregon after spending two seasons at San Jacinto Junior College … earned All-Pac-10 First Team recognition as a senior after averaging 16.3 points and 4.3 rebounds … received Pac-10 All-Newcomer Team honors as a junior with averages of 14.3 points and 5.9 rebounds … averaged 12.3 points in two seasons at San Jacinto College near Houston, where he was teammates with current Houston Rocket Steve Francis as a freshman.
Notable: Great grandson of legendary blues guitarist Albert King.
chinese basketball growing and growing and growing and …
by DAN WASHBURN
Four years ago, China wasn’t even an afterthought for most NBA teams. Then came along a young man named Yao Ming. Now NBA scouts visit China by the dozen — no one wants to miss out on a chance to land the next Chinese superstar.
“Teams are starting to get clued in,” said Detroit Pistons international scout Tony Ronzone who, while with the Dallas Mavericks in 1997, was the first NBA scout to enter China. “Most teams are still behind, but they are starting to realize that they need to come over here.”
Ronzone estimates that over the next three years at least four Chinese players will be drafted by NBA teams.
Two of the most hyped prospects are 7-footers Yi Jianlian and Tang Zhengdong. Yi, just 16, plays for the Guangdong Tigers and has already been dubbed by some in the Chinese media as “the next Yao Ming.” Tang, 19, plays for the Jiangsu Dragons and was named MVP of the CBA All-Star Game this season.
Yet another 7-footer, 21-year-old Xue Yuyang of the Xinjiang Flying Tigers, was selected in last year’s NBA Draft. The Denver Nuggets own the rights to Xue, but the CBA has refused to let him go.
This is the fear with drafting Chinese players — they may never play for you. Right now, China is more worried about making the CBA a money-earner and building a medal-contending national team for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Many believe the latter is a definite possibility.
“It’s going to take years to get to the elite status,” said Bruce O’Neil, an NBA scout who runs the U.S. Basketball Academy in Oregon, where Chinese professional and national teams often train. “But they’ll be able to, on any given night, beat anybody in the world here shortly.”
And what is shortly?
“Within the next five years.”
6 Comments
I was invited to play in the CBA, from Hong Kong.
yo Dan this is the one and only Scales hit me up and let me in on whats going on. The sharks dont want me back so i guess i wont see ya this season. I hope all is well hit me up when u get the time.
Dan, Good story on Alex Scales!
HI Scales,
I’m living in New Berlin, WI, 30 miles north west of Racine. I have visited Racine many times in the last several years. The Downtown has been transformed. It’s becoming a very charming place especially by the lakefront.
Nanjing is my hometown; I lived there till the mid-80th. I’m sorry to hear that finding some decent American food wasn’t that easy there. Do you cook? Making a hamburger, or grill a steak is not all that difficult. Don’t tell me the only thing you can do is playing basketball.
As far as be staring at, enjoy it while you can. I don’t think you can get the same treatment while you are walking on the streets back in the States.
Well, Good luck in you NBA quests.
love this story~~~
alex scales is an impressive guy on the court he has work hard his whole life to become an NBA player.I dont see how he isnt already in the league. To me he can play all over the floor he a great shooter and leaper. Come on guys look at the stats he’s doing his thing out there somebody needs to give him a shot at the league i think they would be pretty impressed.
Hey what up alex this is yo cuzzin jeremy you probaly dont rember me though but yea i live in racine and i go to horlick and i play on the football team and im gonna try out for basketball but yea me n your other cuzzin isiah haven’t seen you in along time well talk to you later bye.
Jeremy