Basketball Legend: When Pride Still Matters-Chapter 481 - 331 The Chosen One and the Prophet

Chapter 481: Chapter 331 The Chosen One and the Prophet

The 2006 free agency was quite uneventful, as the top prize Ben Wallace had already determined his next destination before entering July.

Apart from Big Ben, another hot free agent, Al Harrington, also made a quick decision, transferring from Atlanta to the Golden State Warriors.

Then, with Nene and Jason Terry staying on, and Peja leaving the Pacers for the Hornets, there actually were no more big-name players on the free market.

Beyond the routine signings of free agency, there were few thrilling trades.

The only trade since the end of the season that shocked anyone was the Bucks acquiring the draft rights to LaMarcus Aldridge from the Knicks in exchange for three players and a first-round pick.

For a team that had just climbed from the bottom to the peak, they had no need to take risks, but they did so anyway.

This move was interpreted as: Milwaukee didn’t know how to keep Frye satisfied, so they would rather break up a lineup that had been proven successful to acquire higher talent to please Frye.

Sports writers always have the most dramatic internal monologues.

Just as the high-profile players were choosing their new teams, Yu Fei, who had been suffering from a chronic groin injury, announced, “Due to a groin injury, I will miss this summer’s Team USA… Regardless, I stand with Coach K and all the staff of Team USA.”

To some Americans, the reality that the best basketball players in the world might never play for their country had already been accepted.

Yet for others, why wouldn’t an embodiment of the American Dream like Yu Fei want to fight for the Star-Spangled Banner?

So his groin injury must be real.

Yu Fei let the outside world make all the noise it wanted but did not bother to say much more about it.

However, Yu Fei’s announcement that he would miss the Dream Team was not the team’s biggest news of the month.

Following closely was the Dream Team leader Kobe Bryant withdrawing from the Dream Team due to knee surgery.

Kobe’s withdrawal quickly sparked a variety of speculations.

Like Bill Simmons, a die-hard Celtics fan who loved stirring the pot, he wrote in his article, “Listen, I absolutely believe Kobe’s knee is injured, but does he really need surgery? Just after Frye missed the Dream Team again? Just after the national team determined three captains? If you’re Kobe, after such an amazing season, and the man most qualified to lead you refuses to join the Dream Team, but the captains are three youngsters, you’re named a leader but don’t have a real personal status, would you still want to continue on this team?”

A significant portion of Simmons’s article belonged to malicious speculation, but it was all based on existing news.

For instance, the point that Kobe was not a captain of the Dream Team was highly controversial.

Two years ago when the Dream Team suffered a defeat in Athens, James, Anthony, and Wade clashed with the veterans but openly expressed their desire to redeem themselves in the coming years.

At that time, Coach K was an assistant coach for the Dream Team, and the sense of responsibility from these three young men left a deep impression on him.

As the older generation of stars consistently refused the Dream Team’s summons, and with Yu Fei missing out due to injury, Coach K decided to appoint James, Wade, and Anthony as captains for the new Dream Team.

It just so happened that shortly after this decision, Kobe withdrew from the Dream Team due to knee surgery.

This was natural fodder for the conspiracy theorists among the American public.

Even though both the Dream Team and Kobe publicly stated that the rumors were baseless, various pieces of news had brought a lot of attention to the Dream Team even before the final roster had been set.

During this time, Yu Fei was busy with business matters.

Reebok needed to maximize the profits from his legendary season, and Yu Fei likewise needed to expand the influence of his personal brand.

Yu Fei was training intensively while navigating New York.

Subsequently, Yu Fei became famous on Wall Street for his off-the-court investments, and even Warren Buffett, known as “Oracle of Omaha” by stock traders, took an interest in him.

At that time, Reebok’s president Paul Fireman was working there, and at a gathering where Yu Fei was mentioned, Buffett expressed a desire to meet him.

Fireman was happy to facilitate the meeting.

In late July, in association with Reebok and the Bucks, Yu Fei went to participate in a charity game, thus raising funds for the people in the famine-stricken Western China, war-affected Middle East, Africa, and other regions, which was a popular topic on the Chinese internet at the time.

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Before the charity game started, Yu Fei met Buffett through Fireman’s introduction.

Buffett greeted him with a pleasant smile and basketball-related jokes that seemed offhand, but Yu Fei knew they had definitely been prepared in advance.

That’s because Buffett’s joke went like this, “You remind me of a young me when I also played basketball; I used to play guard on the court, but as a guard, my free throw percentage was even worse than Shaquille O’Neal’s, so I knew early on that I wouldn’t make it in this line.”

Yu Fei burst out laughing.

Then, he presented Buffett with a Bucks jersey and a lifetime season ticket on behalf of the team.

Buffett accepted the gifts.

The two started chatting intensely, and Fireman, who had arranged the meeting, could hardly get a word in. He was surprised because Big Fei and Buffett seemed like an impossible pair.

Big Fei was 24 years old this year, and Buffett was 75. Big Fei was a basketball player from Kent, Washington, while Buffett was a stockbroker from Omaha who later became an investor. Big Fei was a controversial figure, domineering on the court and wildly unrestrained off it, rumored to have had a fling with Sha Wa and a close relationship with Paris Hilton. Buffett, on the other hand, was an acknowledged investment guru, whose only consistent hobby was golf, a game not many in the world qualified to play with him—his golf buddies were mainly celebrities like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

The biggest difference between the two was that although Yu Fei had reached his peak, he had merely started his professional career from a lifespan perspective, whereas Buffett had already reached the pinnacle of his.

Yet, looking at this unlikely old-young combo with half a century between them, Fireman could sense the strong connection between them—the Oracle of Omaha and The Chosen One—sharing many logically similar internal links in their divine characters.

By the end of the meeting, Buffett’s impression of Yu Fei had greatly improved; the young man didn’t seem as hard to converse with as the outside world had portrayed.

Because of this, Buffett gave Yu Fei some earnest advice.

He thought Yu Fei should invest in some low-cost index funds in the future, maintain cash flow, but most importantly, rather than being a part of popular culture, he should own a part of America—such as considering the acquisition of shares in the brands he currently endorses like Pepsi and Gatorade. In Buffett’s view, the stocks of these long-standing companies would only become more valuable in the future.

As they parted, Yu Fei said, “Can I invite you to Milwaukee for a game next summer?”

“Why summer?” Buffett asked with a smile.

Yu Fei replied, “Our home stadium’s heating system is not good, so it’s not suitable for watching games live in winter.”

“No problem,” Buffett said. “I’ll wear the jersey you gave me.”

Then, Buffett also made a small request: he liked to kick off the annual shareholders’ meeting in Spring in Omaha with an amusing video to entertain the thousands of attendees. He thought it would be entertaining to have a one-on-one basketball match with Yu Fei in the video.

Yu Fei said that was nothing; consider it arranged!

“But there’s one condition,”

Buffett looked extremely serious.

“What is it?” Yu Fei asked.

Suddenly, Buffett laughed: “You have to let me win.”

So long as Buffett didn’t drop dead from some malady while shooting the video, Yu Fei had no problem with letting him win, even if it was as if he were beaten up in “The Art of War” by the various masters at Master Ma’s hands.

“You know, even though I grew up in America, my roots are still Chinese,” Yu Fei, who seemed to be suffering from intermittent Alzheimer’s, claimed, “Respecting the old and nurturing the young is a traditional Chinese virtue.”

In late July, Yu Fei started this year’s Asia tour.

Regretful about missing the Dream Team due to an injury, he made Japan the last stop on his tour this year.

There, he would cheer for the Dream Team as a spectator.

In the meantime, Team USA was finalizing their preparations for the World Championship.

The worry was that their warm-up games weren’t as overwhelmingly dominant as the fans had anticipated.

FIBA has many rules that differ from the NBA.

Bosh couldn’t grasp FIBA’s strange interference ball strategy, and James was called for a technical foul after instinctively calling a timeout in an incident—a no-go in FIBA games where players cannot call timeouts.

Team USA looked talent-packed but poorly synergized, and their loose free-throw accuracy didn’t make them seem like a technically adept team.

Many observers raised questions about them.

As co-captain of the Dream Team, James least wanted to hear “Does Frye’s absence have a significant impact?”

“I don’t see what this has to do with Frye,” James said. “Because of groin injuries, Frye and Kobe won’t be here. But even without them, Team USA is still the best team in the world, I guarantee we’ll get better. What we need is patience.”

“Don’t judge us until all this is over!”

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