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◼SPORTS January 27, 2020investors. They came home empty-handed, but the trip
helped persuade Tsai to throw in his lot with Ma. “When you
take a trip together, you stay in the same room, you chat and
just develop this bond,” Tsai says. “I realized this is really
what I want to do.” That fall, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and
a handful of other investors agreed to put $5 million into the
company, and Tsai quit his day job to become Alibaba’s chief
financial officer.
From the start, Tsai and Ma complemented each other.
Ma overflowed with antic energy. Tsai channeled it into some
semblance of order. “He is a very professional guy,” Ma says
by phone from China. “For me it’s more like a street guy.”
When Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange
in 2014, raising a then-record $25 billion, Tsai arranged the
daisy chain of contracts necessary to create a variable interest
entity, which allows foreign investors to hold stakes in Chinese
companies without owning the underlying shares. “He thinks
more about the procedure, detail, all those things,” Ma says.
“I think more about the vision, about the future, about the
big picture.”
As Alibaba evolved into China’s dominant e-commerce plat-
form and one of the world’s 10 most valuable companies, Ma
became the country’s entrepreneurial face, a symbol of its
success and confidence. In 2017, at Alibaba’s famously lavish
annual party, he dressed up as Michael Jackson, complete
with sequined glove, and danced to Billie Jean, a performance
that’s been viewed millions of times on YouTube. Tsai pre-
fers to stay in the background. “I do dress up,” he says of the
parties. “During our 10th year anniversary, I dressed up as
Marilyn Monroe. It was a pretty bad rendition, so that’s why
we don’t talk about it.”
He mostly works behind the scenes, serving as Alibaba’s
primary bridge between East and West, mixing with elites
in New York or San Francisco, Hong Kong or Hangzhou. “I
remember one of the several trips I went on to the States with
him, some of the potential investors got upset with me because
of the way I talk,” Ma says. “Joe is the guy getting all of those
things smoothed up.”I
n September, when the NBA’s owners formally approved
Tsai’s bid to take control of the Nets, Silver said his exper-
tise would be “invaluable in the league’s efforts to grow
the game in China.” Tsai, who’d already been on the board of
NBA China, the subsidiary that runs the league’s affairs there,
was added to the league’s media committee, which advises
Silver on rights deals and digital plans. “It was a no-brainer,”
says Silver. He describes Tsai, not long after they first met,
pulling out his smartphone to play NBA highlights on Alibaba’s
streaming service. “He demonstrated how you could click on
a highlight and buy the shoes.”TheNBAhasbeenintheChinesemarketsince1987,when
Silver’spredecessor,DavidStern,showedupattheofficesof
ChinaCentralTelevisioninBeijingwitha videotapeofAll-Star
Game highlights. CCTV, a state-controlled propaganda arm,
offered about an hour of sports programming each week,
including bullfighting and horse racing. According to Brave
Dragons, a book by New York Times journalist Jim Yardley,
Stern waited for two hours before anyone met with him. But
later that year, the NBA began mailing videotapes to Beijing,
where they would be edited into 15-minute highlight reels and
aired about a month after the games had been played. CCTV,
which hadn’t even shown ads until 1979, sent back a share of
the minuscule proceeds.
The relationship got a major boost in 2002, when Houston
drafted Shanghai-born, 7-foot-6-inch center Yao Ming first
overall. The Rockets immediately became the People’s
Republic’s favorite team. Two years later the NBA sent them
to play preseason contests in Beijing and Shanghai, eventually
making games in China an annual rite. These have lately been
complemented by barnstorming offseason tours on behalf of
sneaker brands by the league’s biggest stars.
The NBA is now one of China’s most beloved Western
imports, and the country is by far the league’s most import-
ant overseas market. In July, Chinese internet giant Tencent
Holdings Ltd. agreed to pay $1.5 billion over five years to
stream NBA games, three times more than the previous deal.
The league says that between Tencent and CCTV’s live games
and (now much timelier) highlight shows, 800 million people
in China watched NBA programming last year. It also reports
that business there saw double-digit growth every year of the
past decade.
Morey’s tweet threatened to undo the relationship. In the
week after he sent it, CCTV and Tencent halted NBA broad-
casts, Chinese sponsors dropped deals with the Rockets, and
team merchandise disappeared from Alibaba and other online
stores. Trolls swarmed Morey on Twitter. Politicians jumped
into the fray. Behind the scenes, Silver told reporters, Chinese
authorities had asked for Morey to be fired.
In an effort to contain the damage, Rockets owner Tilman
Fertitta posted a tweet saying the general manager didn’t
speak for the team. Morey tweeted a mea culpa, of sorts, say-
ing he hadn’t intended to offend and was “merely voicing
one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated
event.” The NBA’s own statement called it “regrettable” that
Morey had “deeply offended” fans in China, leading some to
accuse the league of bowing to Chinese authoritarianism.
Before Tsai boarded his flight to Shanghai to see the Nets
play the Lakers, he says, he sent the league a copy ofthelet-
ter he was planning to post on Facebook. “They basically
said, ‘Look, Joe, you have to say what you have to say,’” he“I feel free to speak my own mind
and indeed did so”