Chapter 3: So, What’s The Cost?
Coach Knight didn’t glance at him again, nor did he roar anymore.
After that ice-cold threat, he just made a brief gesture to the assistant coaches, and training continued under suffocating high pressure.
There was no expected storm, but this sudden, normal “calm” made all the freshmen even more panicked.
Next to Xu Ling, freshman point guard Charlie Burgess（Charlie Burgess PG） took a breath of relief during a dead ball like escaping death, and said in an almost inaudible voice: “Eli, do you know how crazy what you just did was?”
Xu Ling just quietly looked at him without responding.
Burgess said: “No one dares to talk to the general like that!”
“If you were right,” Xu Ling said, “he wouldn’t come to TTU.”
On the other side, Knight walked to the sidelines with a dark face, only to see his son run to his side like a dog with its tail tucked and say: “Dad.”
Knight immediately glared at him with an even sharper look.
Little Knight knew that during work, he had to use the title.
“Coach, Eli he.”
“No nonsense, give me his info!”
Knight barked.
Little Knight immediately handed the organized freshman files to his father.
Knight immediately flipped to Xu Ling’s info page, glanced at it a few times, and said: “198 cm center?”
“Does he think he’s Ben Wallace or Larry Johnson?!”
Little Knight, in charge of overseas recruitment, hurriedly said: “Although his height is insufficient, Eli has a long wingspan and outstanding athletic talent. As long as he adapts to the D1 game rhythm, I believe he will become a qualified inside substitute player.”
Substitute player?
Knight recalled Xu Ling’s defiant attitude just now.
A substitute player dares to defy him like this?
What kind of trash school is this?!
What kind of trash team is this?!
What kind of trash era is this?!
Then, Knight saw that troublemaking freshman head straight to the guard line.
“What is he doing there?”
Knight frowned, a hint of surprise in his voice.
At that moment, Xu Ling picked up the ball, made almost no preparation moves, lightly jumped, and shot.
As a modern sharpshooter who could hit ultra-long three-pointers in a hot state, the 2006 NCAA standard three-point line felt like a comfortable long two-pointer to him.
Swish!
The ball went in off the net cleanly.
But what attracted Knight’s attention was not the outcome of the shot, but the shooting process—a nearly instinctive fluidity, from catching the ball to flicking the wrist, the entire motion seamless without any extra pause or hesitation. This was muscle memory ingrained in the bones, the shooter’s instinct forged from thousands of repetitions.
Knight had devoted his life to basketball; he absolutely wouldn’t be wrong.
He didn’t look at Xu Ling again but suddenly turned to his son beside him, his voice suppressing incredulous anger: “You tell me he’s a paint scorer who can’t shoot?”
Little Knight was startled by his father’s sudden questioning and hurriedly explained: “The scout report… the report says exactly that! I even watched his games in Hong Kong; he was indeed an inside player relying on athleticism and wingspan.”
“Fuck the report!”
Knight cursed under his breath, his gaze locking sharply on Xu Ling again.
Now, this freshman who was supposedly a “paint scorer” was demonstrating pinpoint long-range shooting from all angles right in front of him.
Knight fell silent, his falcon-like eyes fixed on Xu Ling, thumb unconsciously rubbing his chin.
In that day’s freshman scrimmage, although Xu Ling played center, his style was completely that of a guard.
If his shooting was surprising, his ball-handling ability was downright shocking.
Pat Knight, mainly responsible for overseas recruitment, flushed red and guaranteed to his father: “He absolutely didn’t have this technique before coming to the United States! In all the videos I got, he never showed it once!”
“That doesn’t matter anymore.” Knight’s gaze locked dead on the figure on the court, his tone resolute: “Keep an eye on him. Double his training volume. If he wants to play shooting guard, he needs to lose some weight!”
What does a shooting guard with such technique and size mean for TTU?
It means a beam of light finally piercing the darkness.
At the moment when core Julius Jackson was about to enter his senior year and the team faced a severe generational transition crisis, this Chinese freshman who appeared out of nowhere was exactly the future star TTU needed most.
This wasn’t a planned gain, but a huge surprise.
While the coaching staff quickly shifted their scouting focus to Xu Ling, Xu Ling himself was sharpening that vague confidence into something sharper and more certain through competitions with his classmates.
Besides his roommate Roderick Craig, with whom he had already settled the score, another freshman wanted to challenge him: Decensae White (Decensae White SG), the most promising in TTU’s freshman class.
Even before Xu Ling dazzled everyone, White was considered to become a star under Knight. His high school was in a weak conference, where he naturally dominated local high school basketball. Due to the lack of conference competitiveness, he didn’t enter college scouts’ vision and wasn’t ranked in the top 100 nationally, but this kind of star player buried by a weak conference was perfect for a strict coach like Knight to develop.
White also saw himself as the freshman leader.
However, Xu Ling completely defeated him on the first day of training camp.
In the freshman scrimmage, Xu Ling scored 28 points over White and held him to 7 points with under 30% shooting.
It was this matchup that made Xu Ling realize he absolutely had the ability to make it in the NCAA.
Confidence needs to be built up.
Xu Ling’s innate talent combined perfectly with his previous life’s skills to produce excellent chemistry, but Xu Ling still needed to clarify his future direction step by step.
Having defeated his classmates, next were the upperclassmen led by Julius Jackson, then the Big 12 league powerhouses, and if there was a then after that, he could touch the NBA doorstep.
This prospect filled Xu Ling with motivation; he craved training and challenges like oxygen.
After training that day, in the locker room, senior center Daryl Dora looked at Xu Ling with a silly grin: “Maybe you really can.”
What made TTU’s basketball team interesting to Xu Ling was that there were only two seniors on the team, one nicknamed J.J. and one D.D. Unfortunately, both nicknames pointed to explicit male sensitive body parts in China.
“Can what?”
Xu Ling asked.
“Become a starter as a freshman like J.J.” After saying that, Dora deliberately gave a look to another: “M.Z., what do you think?”
Junior guard Martin Zeno was the infamous bully senior on the team, always arrogant and liking to dominate and bully underclassmen. He snorted coldly, disdainfully glancing at the freshmen: “What’s the point of being king in a trash heap? This freshman class is just a bunch of hopeless mud!”
“What did you say?”
Decensae White, who had been harshly schooled by Xu Ling in bullfighting, was hot-tempered like a powder keg and instantly exploded, on the verge of acting out.
For such baseless accusations, Xu Ling dared to confront even Knight, so he naturally wouldn’t ignore it just because the other was a so-called senior.
“Hmm,” Xu Ling nodded thoughtfully, as if Zeno had offered a valuable viewpoint, “From your confident tone, last year must have been you leading the team to dominate everywhere, right（15 wins 17 losses）? My respects.”
Xu Ling’s tone showed no anger, even carrying a bit of pure “curiosity,” but the content was like an ice-cold soft knife, precisely puncturing Zeno’s arrogant bubble—who knew TTU had a disastrous season last year.
Zeno’s face instantly turned beet red, like his neck was being strangled. He was already a key rotation player last year, and Xu Ling’s words hit his biggest sore spot.
“You…”
Before Zeno’s senior authority could continue, captain Jackson walked in, his presence like a wall instantly suppressing the sparks in the locker room.
“Listen! As captain, I have only one demand—we must be a friendly team. Not necessarily the best, but must be friendly! Got it?”
Zeno swallowed the curse words on the tip of his tongue and could only grudgingly shut up. White also huffed and said no more.
Xu Ling acted as if nothing happened and naturally turned to Jackson with his question: “Captain, why does our team have so few upperclassmen?”
Hearing this, Dora chuckled.
The sophomores in the corner watched the drama.
Jackson showed a mysterious smile, his demeanor like a heavy Huang Xiaoming imitator, a greasy charming smirk paired with his far-from-handsome face, leaving Xu Ling baffled.
Jackson didn’t give an answer but said: “Because there are too many quitters in the world.”
Since the upperclassmen didn’t want to give an answer, Xu Ling decided to find it himself.
Back at the dorm, Xu Ling immediately went online to check TTU’s recent recruitment situation.
Since recruiting build-the-team core Julius Jackson, who became a starter as a freshman in the 2003 class, Knight actively built around him, but with poor results. When Jackson was a junior last year, TTU was already preparing for the impending generational handover, so they aggressively recruited eight players in the 2005 class.
A year later, five of those eight transferred, one quit basketball, and now only two remained on the team.
Keep in mind, this wasn’t like over a decade later when NCAA players could sign endorsements and transfer unlimited times. In this era, players were absolutely the weaker party. Forget income—if they unwisely believed the recruiters, arrived at school only to find it wasn’t what they imagined, most would silently endure because transferring required sitting out a year.
Under such rules, the coaches’ authority was like that of kings, beyond question.
What made those people prefer sitting a year on the bench elsewhere rather than stay at TTU?
Knight’s temper, Xu Ling had already witnessed today, and considering this vice-GOAT of college coaching’s notorious reputation, he believed what he saw was just the tip of the iceberg.
※※※
Lubbock’s sunshine seemed especially harsh, yet it paled against the surging hot energy inside Xu Ling.
While roommate Roderick was still in sweet dreams, Xu Ling had quietly gotten up. He would run alone along that familiar red dirt path in the dorm area. Because the coaching staff told him he needed to lose weight—his current weight was too burdensome for a backcourt player and would affect his lateral speed and perimeter defense.
He accepted the suggestion.
But while ordinary people lose weight with morning runs, athletes need a scientific plan.
Morning runs were one step in strengthening stamina for Xu Ling.
After running, he would rest for half an hour, eat breakfast, go to class, start shooting training after class, team training in the afternoon, and strength training at night.
Strangely, head coach Bob Knight rarely appeared during this period.
His assistant coaches planned the training.
But captain Jackson said the coach would secretly observe them somewhere in the Winchell Center（TTU training hall）; those slacking, erring, or unqualified would pay the price when the season started.
Hearing this, Xu Ling couldn’t help but deliver BBC’s classic question: “So, what is the price?”
Jackson said: “You’ll find out soon enough.”
Thus half a month passed.
