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‘Know anything about these knuckleheads?’: How Trump helped free the UCLA basketball players detained in China



MANILA, Philippines — President Donald Trump found out about the great UCLA-China basketball episode of 2017 when members of his staff saw it on CNN just before Trump’s dinner with the president of China in Beijing last week.

They learned that three American college basketball players — representing a storied sports program visiting China for an early-season game sponsored by one of China’s largest companies — had been arrested on Nov. 8, accused of stealing designer sunglasses at a high-end shopping mall.

The alleged offence was hardly life or death. But what begun as a simple accusation of celebrity shoplifting threatened to escalate into a full-blown international incident just as Trump arrived in China on a 12-day mission through Asia, his first foreign trip to the region.

“These are law and order guys; they have pretty swift justice,” John Kelly, the president’s chief of staff, said of the Chinese authorities in an telephone interview later. “An awful lot of American kids don’t realize that the kinds of things that in United States society we tolerate with a slap on the wrist, a lot of countries they take very seriously.”

In addition to Trump, the weeklong diplomatic drama involved the players themselves, who remained detained at their hotel in the provincial city of Hangzhou for most of the week; UCLA, an elite American university with an international reputation; and the Chinese retail giant Alibaba, which sponsored the team’s visit.

In other cases, detained Americans have become geopolitical pawns, often trapped in a kind of legal limbo for months or years.

And in a few instances, the outcome has been horrific, as in the case of Otto Warmbier, an American student in North Korea who was tortured and later died after being detained on charges that he tried to steal a poster from his hotel.

But just as concern deepened about the fate of the three young athletes in China, their detention abruptly ended, aided, it seems, by Trump’s direct intervention with the country’s president, Xi Jinping. On Tuesday, the three players, including star freshman LiAngelo Ball, the brother of the NBA rookie Lonzo Ball, were allowed to leave their hotel and board a flight back to California.

“The three UCLA men’s basketball student-athletes involved in the incident with authorities in Hangzhou, China, are on a flight back home to Los Angeles,” the Pacific-12, the athletics conference to which the university belongs, said in a statement, adding that “the matter has been resolved to the satisfaction of the Chinese authorities.”

“We want to thank the president, the White House and the U.S. State Department for their efforts towards resolution,” the statement said.

Kelly, who arrived back in the United States with Trump Tuesday night aboard Air Force One, provided details about the president’s diplomatic outreach on behalf of the UCLA players.

“Our president said to Xi, ‘Do you know anything about these knuckleheads that got caught allegedly stealing?’” Kelly said. Unaware of the episode, the Chinese president dispatched an aide to get more information. “The president was saying, ‘It’s not too serious. We’d love to see this taken care of in an expeditious way,’” Kelly added.

The three players had been accused of shoplifting from a Louis Vuitton store next to their hotel in Hangzhou, in eastern China, where they were preparing to play in a tournament. (Playing without the three freshmen, UCLA defeated Georgia Tech, 63-60, in Shanghai on Friday.)

Kelly said Trump’s intervention, as well as diplomatic efforts by State Department diplomats, led to the reduction of the charges to the equivalent of misdemeanours as well as the release of the three players to their hotel, where they were placed under temporary house arrest. It was there that Kelly talked to Chris Carlson, an associate athletic director at UCLA, and to the players on the phone the next day.

“To say the least, they were very apologetic,” said Kelly, who pointedly did not ask the student-athletes whether they had, in fact, attempted to steal the merchandise they were accused of taking. “They were just profuse in their apologies for embarrassing the country and embarrassing the team.”

Kelly told the players that Trump had intervened on their behalf and that he was “very optimistic that this would be taken care of in short order.”

In China, where the justice system has a very high conviction rate, theft can bring punishment ranging from a few days to years in prison. Kelly said that had the players been charged with the equivalent of felonies — because of the high cost of the merchandise — they could have received prison sentences of five to ten years.

“I bet they learned a lesson in their lives,” he said.

Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about the players and their situation until his overseas trip was winding down. He did not tweet about the case as the players sat trapped in their rooms. U.S. officials did not put out any statements about the situation.

But once he was headed home, Trump provided the first indications that the actions of the three young men had prompted a conversation at the highest of levels.

“I will tell you, when I heard about it two days ago, I had a great conversation with President Xi,” Trump told reporters during a brief conversation Tuesday before the students were formally allowed to leave their hotel. “He was terrific, and they’re working on it right now. And hopefully everything is going to work out.”

Trump called the alleged actions of the basketball players “unfortunate,” and grimly noted the toughness of the Chinese judicial system. “You know, you’re talking about very long prison sentences,” the president told reporters. “They do not play games.”

Trump has made much of his personal rapport with Xi, who hosted a lavish state visit last week for the president in Beijing. The two leaders met again at an economic summit meeting on Sunday in Vietnam, where Trump raised the case of the detained basketball players.

“He’s been terrific,” the president said. “President Xi has been terrific on that subject.”

The warm presidential relationship appeared to pay off with the release of Ball a freshman guard; and Cody Riley and Jalen Hill, both freshman forwards. Trump emphasized that it was a “very, very rough situation, with what happened to them.”

The highest-profile of the three who had been detained was Ball, the middle of three sons in a basketball-playing family so well known that it has its own reality show on Facebook, “Ball in the Family.” The eldest brother, Lonzo, plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, and the youngest, LaMelo, is a high schooler who has committed to play at UCLA. Their father, LaVar, has become a public figure, and has started a sports-apparel company, Big Baller Brand, to market both his sons and the family name.

The UCLA team’s trip to China had been seen as a way to raise the profile of the university in that country, possibly attracting students who have well-to-do parents and who want to study abroad. Many U.S. universities in recent years have increasingly relied on tuition payments from foreign students.

The arrests of the three young men could have derailed efforts to bridge the cultural divide. Hours before their release, Trump told reporters that the incident “was not something that should have happened.”

But even then the president seemed to know something positive might be in the works. Asked if he expected to see the basketball players coming home soon, he answered: “I hope so. I hope so.”

Just hours later, they were on a plane, too.

Original source article: ‘Know anything about these knuckleheads?’: How Trump helped free the UCLA basketball players detained in China



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