Beijing businessman Ray Zhang will catch the Vancouver Canucks when they play at the city’s Wukesong Arena this weekend.
But two days ahead of flying from Vancouver to Beijing to get to the exhibition game, he’ll be on the road from Duncan to Chilliwack with the Cowichan Capitals, the B.C. junior team he bought for “around $1 million” last year.
“I’ll get back in the evening,” for the Canucks’ game, says Zhang. “Beijingers are pretty good as fans of NHL hockey.”
There are companies and wealthy individuals in mainland China interested in investing in ice hockey the way some of them have, for years, made purchases of European soccer teams.
The most prominent is Zhou Yunjie, a billionaire who owns a metal-can-making company, ORG Packaging, that is the presenting partner of the NHL China Games 2017.
Zhou played goalie as a kid growing up in Beijing in the 1970s and, in addition to hosting exhibition games, has committed to building rinks and an NHL museum in China. His company has a sponsorship deal with the Boston Bruins.
It’s interest that comes as there is significant Chinese government support for raising the profile of ice hockey ahead of Beijing hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics. But it is also interest tempered by Beijing’s announcement at the end of August 2017 of new restrictions limiting how Chinese companies can invest in overseas real estate, hotels, entertainment and sports clubs.
How the two forces shakeout at these highest levels remains to be seen in coming years.
To understand some of the many potential nuances from a B.C. vantage point, sit and watch a Cowichan Capitals home game with Zhang at the Island Savings Centre in Duncan, home of the world’s largest hockey stick and a giant puck, both relics from the Canada pavilion at Expo 86.
Zhang looks out from a box suite, noting the tactics of a new coach, musing over the improvements. He’s taking video snippets of his son, Simon Chen, who plays on the team.
Even though he brushes aside any lofty comparisons, his motivation for buying the Cowichan Capitals and how things have gone, so far, in his own words, offer a glimpse of how the worlds of hockey in China and North America might meet in coming years.
Zhang recalls he was hanging out with some other “ice hockey dads” at a restaurant in Beijing when he first heard about the opportunity to buy the Cowichan Capitals.
He travels extensively for work, but had never been to B.C. One of the five other parents at the table “brought us the news about this BCHL (British Columbia Hockey League) team that was for sale. I said, ‘we can think about it’ and we all started to talk about it on a WeChat group.”
Zhang runs a Beijing business that exports machinery. He says he knew from contacts and friends of the B.C. junior league’s reputation for producing and feeding players into U.S. college hockey programs.
“The next day, I thought, ‘why not?’ I had never thought of it before (that night), but then I thought ‘why can I not do it?”
His wife, Chen Hong, jokingly asked if it was just all beer talk. It was she who inadvertently planted seeds for their son’s love of the game, dropping him off at an ice rink in a Beijing mall when he was six-years-old. Later, she accompanied him to Halifax for a short stint at a hockey school.
Their son, who takes his mother’s last name, played hockey in elementary and middle school in Beijing, but as he got older, it was obvious that despite many practices, there were not very many opportunities to learn what can only be gained by playing scrappy games.
For one thing, says Zhang, many kids, pushed by their families to prepare for standard, academic exams, start to focus more exclusively on studying.
Eventually, numbers started to dwindle to the point that Chen could only play competitive games if he played with much older players and retirees. “People in their 50s and 60s, who are actually not too bad” says Zhang, explaining there is a notable gap of keen players because as China opened its economy in the 1970s and 80s, there was also a plan was to focus investment in sports “where it’s easier for Asians to get gold medals. They decided on diving, badminton, volleyball for women. Hockey didn’t get much attention.”
“By my son’s time (in the early 2000s), some kids started playing it again, in shopping malls and at international schools. It was seen as a healthy thing to do,” says Zhang.
In 2012, Chen moved from Beijing to start grade nine at Brooks School, a U.S. prep school in North Andover in Massachusetts. He went out for the hockey team, not understanding, says Zhang, that most of the players had already been recruited ahead of the actual tryouts. Still, he managed to eke out a spot on the second team.
There are lot of things like this about the whole hockey system in North America that have taken them some time to decipher, says Zhang, sighing at the rather longer road his son has chosen compared to some of his peers.
“My son isn’t like other Chinese people’s kids,” says Zhang, describing his determination to play hockey. “I used to think, ‘your size is not tall. Chinese people would just say, ‘have a bit of fun’ and then, that’s it.”
But “he loves hockey” and, as parents, they are compelled to support their son’s career dreams of playing for China at the 2022 Winter Olympics, says Zhang. “It’s a healthy thing to support. He’s really happy.”
And that is how they came to be majority-owners of the Duncan team.
“How can we give him the experience of playing more games?” says Zhang, adding that even though he son dreams of going to an NCAA school in the U.S. and eventually playing for China, “I just want him to go to university.”
He realizes the controversial optics of a father buying a team so his son, who only scored one goal last season, can play. The leap from playing at a U.S. high school to a junior A team is a big one in some eyes.
“Some local people think I was doing this to more easily immigrate or that I was buying a plaything, a luxury experience, for my son,” says Zhang. “But when they see how hard he works, and what he wants to do and how this helps him to do it, they start to see beyond,”
Ponying up the money to buy the money-losing Duncan team wasn’t difficult, says Zhang, but the four-month ordeal from signing a deal in May 2016 to finalizing it in August was a complicated one.
“Not a lot of Chinese people could easily get through it without just giving up. You can’t just do things the way you think. You have to understand the other side of things, the culture. You have to have trust and respect,” says Zhang. “I had to fire two of the lawyers we used.”
With that behind, he’s starting to think beyond opportunities for his 20-year-old son, who will, hopefully, he says, head to a university program next year. There are many other Chinese hockey players who would benefit from playing with a Canadian junior team.
“You have to communicate with other players and understand how things are done from experiencing them,” says Zhang. There are also just many practical aspects to glean such as your various options and which road to take, he adds.
“We are just starting to think of what we can offer. It’s not that easy. We have to find a program that is good in order to do it really well, something that fits,” says Zhang.
