Training camp had been underway for almost two weeks when Lin Qi gradually noticed something.
Kevin Garnett was always the last player to leave.
It wasn't just extra practice. Lin Qi meant... after all the training was over and even the equipment had been put away, this nineteen-year-old often stayed alone in the empty gym for a long time.
Sometimes he shot baskets. Sometimes he just sat on the sideline, holding a ball and staring blankly at the sixteen championship banners overhead.
Lin Qi hadn't thought much of it at first. Until late one night, after finishing some work for the data company, he passed the gym and saw that one light was still on inside.
Garnett sat on the floor with his back against the basket stanchion, clutching the receiver of a pay phone... but he hadn't dialed. He just held it, lost in thought.
Lin Qi stopped in the doorway.
At that moment, a strange, almost dizzying feeling welled up from deep inside him.
In another world, in another life, he had watched this man play basketball for twenty full years. He had watched his long years of lying low in Minnesota, watched him roar and pound his chest, watched him finally lift the championship trophy at thirty-one and scream "Anything is possible" into the camera, watched him retire and have his jersey raised high. He knew what kind of legend this man would become, knew his injuries, his tears, his stubbornness, his tenderness.
He was one of this man's most devoted fans.
But the person sitting on the floor before him now wasn't that legend. He was a homesick boy who had just turned nineteen, skinny as a bamboo pole, clutching a telephone receiver without daring to dial. And he, Lin Qi, was the president of basketball operations who held this kid's professional future in his hands.
Someone who had watched his idol play for twenty years had suddenly become that idol's "boss" in his youngest days... whatever lay between those two roles left Lin Qi standing in the doorway, momentarily unsure how to approach him.
He knew this man too well, to an almost presumptuous degree.
Yet he had to pretend they had only just met tonight.
That balance was harder to strike than closing any trade.
Lin Qi walked over anyway.
"Not heading back to sleep yet? There's practice tomorrow."
Garnett startled and hurried to his feet, hanging up the receiver. "M-Mr. Lin Qi, sorry. I'll leave right now."
"Sit." Lin Qi sat on the floor beside him. "Homesick?"
Garnett froze for a moment. His perpetually tense face relaxed for an instant, then quickly tightened again. "N-no. I'm doing fine."
Lin Qi didn't call him out. He merely followed the boy's gaze and looked up at the banners too.
He knew where this kid had come from... Mauldin, a small place in South Carolina; then a transfer to Farragut in Chicago; then, because his damned SAT score wasn't high enough to get into college, he had simply taken a gamble and become the first person in twenty years to jump straight from high school to the NBA.
If the gamble paid off, he was a pioneer. If it failed, he would be the cautionary tale of someone who "couldn't even get into college, yet was arrogant enough to skip a level, only to end up just another nobody." All summer, commentators across the United States had been waiting to see which he would be.
And now, this kid who had just turned nineteen was carrying that burden, truly leaving home for the first time, dropped all alone in Boston... a cold, old East Coast city where everyone spoke with an accent he wasn't quite used to.
On the court, he could use that reckless competitive streak to suppress his loneliness and fear.
But off the court, when the night grew late and the gym emptied, he was just a homesick nineteen-year-old boy.
Lin Qi had already known all this. But seeing this future legend sitting awkwardly beside him now, that disorienting sense of "I understand your tomorrow better than you do, yet can only pretend we've just met" still left a sour ache lodged in his chest.
"That phone," he said, trying to sound casual. "Who were you going to call?"
Garnett was quiet for a while before saying softly, "My mom. And a few childhood friends back in South Carolina." He paused. "But it's the middle of the night there too. I don't want to wake them. And... long-distance calls are pretty expensive."
Something stirred gently in Lin Qi's heart again.
This kid had just signed an NBA contract and would become a multimillionaire. But right now, he still carried the simplest habits of a small-town boy... reluctant to spend money on long-distance calls, afraid of waking his family in the middle of the night.
Cell phones were still luxury items at the time.
Although Motorola and Nokia had already introduced portable mobile phones, their high prices and the still-incomplete communications networks made them more like status symbols for businesspeople, government professionals, and the wealthy.
NBA players could certainly afford them.
But the problem was that most people simply weren't in the habit of using them.
In the league of 1995, newspapers, magazines, videotapes, and pagers were everywhere in locker rooms, rather than the cell phones everyone would carry later.
Cell phones wouldn't truly become widespread until the late nineties.
At least for now, once they left the gym, the vast majority of players still had to call someone's home landline to reach them.
In the United States of the nineties, interstate calls cost only ten to fifteen cents a minute. That would seem like pocket change in later years, and it wasn't much money for the American middle class even then, but for the household Garnett had come from, it was absolutely an expense that had to be counted out carefully.
Lin Qi knew better than anyone how poor Garnett's family had been during his childhood.
Just a few years earlier, this thirteen-year-old had been forced to enter the working world and take odd jobs to help support his family. He had bagged groceries at a supermarket, washed dishes and scrubbed toilets at small restaurants, and even worked hauling cargo at the docks under the blazing sun. When the whole family moved to Chicago during his senior year of high school, they could only cram themselves into a one-bedroom, low-rent apartment rife with gangs and drugs. A household like that had truly calculated its budget in cents. In their view of spending, long-distance calls had never been a necessity of life, but an unattainable luxury.
For a kid steeped in poverty for more than a decade, even suddenly becoming the third overall pick with the whole country watching, with a starting salary of over $2.1 million on paper, couldn't make his old muscle memory and ingrained sense of scarcity vanish overnight. At this turn of summer into autumn, before the season had even begun, there was no way the Celtics' finance department would slap the entire check down in front of him early. At most, he had received a small living-expense advance from the team. In essence, he was still a "millionaire on paper, poor kid in his pockets."
He carried an enormous contract, but his thinking remained stuck at "save every cent you can, and don't burden the family." That almost wrenching contrast was real enough to make the heart ache.
Lin Qi opened his mouth, almost blurting out, "You'll have more money than you can spend, more phone calls than you can ever make... but"-he forcibly swallowed the words.
He couldn't say it. He knew everything, yet he couldn't say any of it.
Lin Qi offered no grand lecture on the spot, nor did he make any promises. He only thought silently that perhaps it was precisely because this kid had experienced life's cruelty so early that he had forged that terrifying willpower and "iron-blooded" attitude he would have in the future.
The next day, Lin Qi quietly had team operations take care of a small matter.
On the third day, a telephone was installed in Garnett's empty apartment... a phone he could use for long-distance calls as much as he liked, with the bill going to the team. "Call whenever you miss home," Lin Qi said offhandedly when he told him about it. "Outside of practice, stop sitting alone in the gym in the middle of the night. It creeps me out. The team covers the phone bill... everyone on the team gets this benefit."
That was, of course, a kind lie. But it gave Garnett a way to accept without feeling indebted.
"Mr. Lin Qi."
"Yeah?"
Garnett opened his mouth, seemingly with a great deal to say. But this normally talkative boy finally managed only one sentence. "Thank you."
He didn't know where this kindness came from, nor would he ever know that the president of basketball operations before him had once, in another unreachable time and space, cheered for every one of his brilliant nights and sighed over every one of his regrets. He only knew that in this strange, cold city, when he was at his loneliest and least understood, this man hadn't treated him as a team asset.
Instead, he had treated him as a person.
That much, he could feel.
Lin Qi smiled and merely patted his shoulder. "Play well."
Lin Qi turned to leave, walked a few steps, and only then let out a quiet breath.
But only he knew that he was hiding a secret he could never tell anyone...
He hadn't just met this kid.
He had already "known" him for more than twenty years.