Chapter 40 Visualization

Thanks to his connection with Nate Thurmond, Gan Guoyang became a familiar face around the Warriors.

In early November, the Warriors' games were mostly held at their home arena in Oakland and surrounding cities, giving them generous stretches of time for practice.

If the schedule fell on a Saturday or Sunday, Gan Guoyang would wake up early to help Gan Youwei with chores around the restaurant.

Afterward, Gan Youwei would prepare a dozen exquisite Chinese bento boxes by late morning, which Gan Guoyang would pack into a large food container and take on the bus to the Warriors' training center as a midday meal for the players.

The bento boxes featured fresh, high-quality ingredients meticulously cooked by Gan Youwei, and everyone in the Warriors organization praised them endlessly.

These lunches essentially served as Gan Guoyang's "tuition fee" for training with the Warriors, allowing him to absorb knowledge from professional-level training.

As for Gan's Restaurant, basketball would eventually elevate its reputation, making it a sacred pilgrimage site for many fans and tourists.

Neither Gan Youwei nor Gan Bingguang would have ever imagined that playing basketball could promote restaurant business much more effectively than being a chef.

Because of his growing reputation in San Francisco and his frequent appearances at the Warriors' training camp, Gan Guoyang got to know the Warriors' owner, Franklin Mieuli.

Among sports executives, this owner was a maverick. Eccentric in personality and unique in his sense of style, the bulky man never wore formal suits. He was almost always seen in a jacket, leather coat, or striped floral shirt, topped with his trademark plaid deerstalker hat and a full beard, making him look like some Italian-American film director from Hollywood.

Mieuli was a sports enthusiast. He used to work as a beer sales manager, and through his job, he had business dealings with the 49ers, which eventually led him to oversee sports programming on the radio.

This opened up connections in the San Francisco sports circle for him, and later he became a minor shareholder of the 49ers.

In 1962, he joined forces with more than thirty partners, scraping together a mere 860,000 dollars to buy the Warriors.

Later, due to poor management and the departure of Wilt Chamberlain causing a sharp drop in attendance, other minor partners pulled out. He bought out their shares and became the principal owner of the Warriors.

Under his stewardship, the Warriors experienced a relatively successful decade in the 1970s, capturing an NBA championship trophy, and now the team had entered a rebuilding phase.

After watching Gan Guoyang practice a few times, Mieuli developed a genuine and strong interest in him. He took Gan Guoyang aside privately and asked him if he wanted to skip ahead and play in the NBA directly.

If the Golden State Warriors could sign such a talented Chinese player, their popularity in San Francisco would undoubtedly skyrocket, helping solve the crisis of declining attendance and TV ratings currently facing the Warriors and the entire NBA.

However, Gan Guoyang very sensibly rejected Mieuli's temptation, stating that he was still too young and needed to go to college rather than plunging headfirst into the murky waters of professional sports.

During his time freelancing at Warriors practices, Gan Guoyang witnessed firsthand how the glamorous robe of the NBA league was crawling with all sorts of lice.

Bernard King candidly told Gan Guoyang that he had once been plagued by alcoholism and scandal. Although he had walked out of that shadow now, he did not advise Gan Guoyang to enter the league too early.

He also mentioned that perhaps over half of the players in the league had experience with banned substances, over two-thirds suffered from alcoholism and gambling, and over ninety percent were promiscuous and debauched.

"If you haven't built a strong foundation for yourself, it's best not to enter this giant vat of dye. Washing away certain things is not that easy."

Bernard King offered these earnest words of wisdom to Gan Guoyang. Since arriving in the Bay Area, he had turned over a new leaf and started afresh.

However, Gan Guoyang's lack of eagerness to join the league wasn't out of fear of being corrupted by the league's culture; he had confidence in his own willpower.

His concerns stemmed rather from basketball skills and experience. He knew that once he entered a professional team, the opportunities to improve his game would shrink drastically.

Coaches on professional teams could never guide your fundamentals with the meticulous care of high school or college coaches, nor would they teach you various tactical systems to build your foundation.

Everyone on a professional team was there for a job. Coaches faced immense pressure to win games, not to focus on learning and development; basketball was played to win, so whoever got results played.

After going head-to-head with the Warriors' professional players, Gan Guoyang's confidence in himself grew even higher. He believed that currently, serving as an interior secondary option and an elite defender on a professional team would pose no problem for him.

Yet his goals extended far beyond that, so how could he rashly step into the professional arena for transient petty gains and momentary superficial fame?

Furthermore, the Warriors' current roster simply had no spot for him, and he had no intention of backing up Joe Barry Carroll—a guy whose average training time in the Warriors' gym might not even equal Gan Guoyang's.

Gan Guoyang's strength continued to grow steadily, and the gap between him and his teammates widened further.

However, he had not told anyone about his training with the Warriors, so the teammates on the Lowell High team had no idea that their leader's skill level had leveled up once again.

Gan Guohui only knew that for the past few weeks, whenever he woke up around noon on weekends, Gan Guoyang would be missing, assuming he had run off on a date.

Even Bellman had no idea that the team's training fanatic did not rest on his days off, but instead went off to a professional team for private tutoring.

Mainly, sports media was not sufficiently developed back then, and the NBA was still largely ignored by the general public. Unless someone paid close attention to relevant news, it was hard for anyone to notice that in the corner of a certain newspaper's sports section, a reporter had recorded as a novelty item: "Gan, the Chinese center from Lowell High, is practicing alongside players at the Warriors' training facility."

On November 13th, the regular season for the CIF San Francisco Section high school basketball tournament officially tipped off at Kezar Pavilion.

Running from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, there were two games in the morning and two in the afternoon, held consecutively.

It was clearly a wise move when the Overseas Chinese High School rented Kezar for a preseason game with Lick-Wilmerding back in August.

From October onward, various league sports competitions arrived in a continuous stream, and Kezar's schedule was packed to maximum capacity.

In addition to boys' and girls' basketball games across various age groups, the CIF league also held volleyball, badminton, boxing, and indoor track events in this old venue, requiring everyone to wait in line.

The Lowell High game was scheduled for the two o'clock to three-thirty afternoon slot, against the mediocre Balboa High School.

Balboa High was a historic public school in San Francisco, but the school's athletic strengths lay in football and volleyball, while their basketball team's caliber was quite average.

Serving as the first stepping stone on Lowell High's path forward, Gan Guoyang held nothing back during the game, dominating both ends of the floor from the very first minute.

In high school basketball games, if there was a wide gap in strength, the score differential could become quite absurd—after all, student teams could vary wildly in quality.

The boys' games were slightly better, but the girls' games were even more terrifying, with score gaps sometimes reaching sixty, seventy, or even breaking into triple digits.

Balboa High was slightly better than Lick-Wilmerding, but in Gan Guoyang's eyes, they were all the same—too short and too slow.

When he anchored the paint, scoring became exceptionally difficult for the opponents.

However, what surprised Bellman was Gan Guoyang's offense.

During a half-court post-up play against a defender a head shorter than him, Gan Guoyang actually executed a quick catch-and-turnaround jumper for two points.

Bellman had never seen this technical move in games or practices before.

Previously, Gan Guoyang's post scoring primarily relied on plowing into the paint for layups or dunks.

This sort of nimble, quick turnaround jumper was something Bellman and his teammates were seeing for the very first time.

The score gap was blown open to twenty points by halftime, prompting Bellman to call a timeout and substitute Gan Guoyang out.

He asked, "Did you just use a turnaround jumper? When did you learn that?"

Gan Guoyang replied, "Just recently."

"Recently? What the hell, why didn't I ever see you practicing it?"

"I used visualization techniques."

"Visual... what? What the hell are you talking about?"

"It's a technique professional players use to improve their skills. Uh... it means imagining it in your mind."

With a face full of question marks, Bellman cursed, "Gan, if you're bullshitting me again, I'm going to hang myself right outside your family's restaurant."