But Yao didn’t even make it to Indianapolis. Two weeks ago the Chinese authorities barred him from going, telling him that he needed to rest up for the grueling two-a-day Olympic workouts that begin this week. “He is a member of the national team, so he has to obey its decisions, without any conditions,” said Xu Minfeng, spokesman for the Chinese Basketball Association. Yao, who loses his “junior” status this year, can’t hide his disappointment. “This was my last chance to play in that game,” he says, lounging on a bed in his hotel room after scoring 29 points in the Chinese league’s season finale last week. Asked about the NBA draft, he shrugs dejectedly: “I don’t want to talk about impossibilities. I have to face reality.”
Hoop dreams, Chinese reality. So far, the two haven’t exactly gone hand in hand. Another immensely talented Chinese player, 7-foot-1 Wang Zhizhi, was drafted last year by the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, but his team–run by the People’s Liberation Army–refused to let the 22-year-old player go. The saga of these young stars would seem to be, as one American sports executive put it, “just another case of an old-style communist system that controls its athletes and keeps them behind closed doors.” But it’s more complicated than that. The race to get the first Chinese player into the NBA underscores China’s struggle to expand capitalist freedoms without losing control. It also reveals the frustrations and cultural collisions that can result when slick global businesses try to move aggressively into the Middle Kingdom. Behind it all: two athletes who simply want to play with the best in the world.
China is basketball’s final frontier. “The NBA has players from all over the world,” says Cheong Sau-Ching, spokeswoman for NBA Asia in Hong Kong, “but this is part of the puzzle that’s missing.” The allure, of course, is more than two stars with NBA potential. There are 1.2 billion other (and more diminutive) reasons. Soccer is still China’s top spectator sport, but basketball now has more participants–some 100 million play hoops regularly–and the game’s fashion and fancy moves have captured the imagination of China’s urban youth. NBA games, shown twice a week on state-run CCTV, already reach 250 million homes. And Western companies are trying to feed the frenzy. The Hilton hotel chain sponsors the Chinese pro league. IMG, the U.S.-based sports-marketing firm, runs it. And Nike, besides hosting amateur events around China, sponsors four pro hoop teams, including–naturally–Yao’s and Wang’s. But everybody knows the sport would really take off if there were just one Chinese player in an NBA uniform.
There have been opportunities before. Nearly a decade ago, a Chinese player tried out for the Atlanta Hawks–but busted his knee during the first workout. In 1995 a sharp-shooting Chinese guard named Ma Jian was the last player cut from the Los Angeles Clippers. Ma is still one of China’s best players, but he won’t be at the Olympics: he has been shunned from the national team for trying to make it without official permission. Wang Zhizhi heard on TV last June that he had been drafted in the second round. “I was amazed,” he says. “They didn’t even know me!” China’s sports authorities were indignant that the NBA could draft players without their permission. “The officials lost face,” says the NBA’s Cheong. “They thought it was like a military draft. They said: ‘Why didn’t you go through us first?’ "
The Americans weren’t much better prepared. They didn’t seem to fully appreciate the fact that Wang’s boss was the patriotic PLA, or that Wang himself was an Army soldier. When the Mavericks’ then-owner, Ross Perot Jr., came to Beijing to sign the prospect, he met with Wang–and even got him to wear the Mavs’ signature cowboy hat. But the PLA team’s general manager refused to meet with Perot, much less let the American purloin his star player. (As in other parts of the world, only the club has the formal authority to release a player from his contract.) Wang, who still likes to wear his Mavericks sweat pants, knows China doesn’t have the competition–or the coaching–to push him to the next level. But he is philosophical. “China is trying to catch up with the world in everything,” he says. “In basketball, I have a duty to help my country.”
The prospects seemed brighter for Yao Ming. The son of two basketball players–his mother is 6 feet 4, his father 6 feet 10–Yao was sent to a special sports academy at 13, when officials measured his knuckles (a common practice in China) and predicted, with uncanny accuracy, that he would grow to be 7 feet 4. Two years later, Yao signed on with the Shanghai Sharks, a professional club that is jointly owned by government and private interests. Terry Rhoads, sports-marketing director for Nike China, remembers the first time he saw Yao. The Sharks had just signed with Nike, so Rhoads and other Nike personnel were gathering at Shanghai’s Jing-an stadium to meet the players. “When Yao Ming walked into the gym, our jaws dropped,” he says. “I thought: ‘He’s huge, but does he have any skills?’ " Yao stayed out by the three-point line and calmly drained one shot after another. Rhoads turned to his colleagues and said: “We have just seen the future of Chinese basketball.”
Yao is still a bit gangly, and his ball-handling is weak. But he runs, shoots and blocks as well as many NBA centers. And the mellow giant is gaining intensity. During his one trip to the United States, in the summer of 1998, Yao remembers his American youth-team coach warning him that the whole team would be punished if Yao didn’t dunk the ball every time he touched it. In a recent game, a 6-foot-8 PLA guard soared over him for an electrifying dunk. Yao (in his lucky NBA socks) lumbered back down the court, muttering expletives in Mandarin. He demanded the ball down low, then spun quickly and slamdunked it. Even with such fierce exchanges, Yao knows he won’t become the best if he stays in China. “The U.S. game is so much faster,” says Tom McCarthy, who runs a sports-marketing firm in Hong Kong. “He doesn’t learn enough tricks in China.”
But Yao can’t go to the U.S. as a college student–his pro status makes him ineligible–and his first flirtation with the NBA was a disaster. A year ago, a U.S.-based sports-management firm named Evergreen signed an agreement with Yao that promised to plow more than a third of his future earnings back into the Shanghai Sharks, according to an Evergreen representative. (The NBA doesn’t allow more than 4 percent to be withheld from a player’s contract, so the agreement might not have held up.) The Sharks’ management was eager to endorse the deal. But Yao’s parents felt pressed to sign late one night, and Yao himself was barely consulted during the process. The family, humiliated, vowed not to cooperate with Evergreen again.
Repairing the tense relations required the patience of two new characters: NBA agent Bill Duffy and Taiwanese high-tech tycoon Daniel Chiang. For the past six months, Duffy and Chiang–who were brought together by Nike–have tried to maneuver around the minefields. The Chinese tend to view the NBA in extremes–as a “barbarian” invasion or the road to fabulous riches. The managers of the Shanghai Sharks, a cash-strapped club, seem willing to cut a lucrative deal. But top government officials are scared to lose Yao for the Olympics and other competitions. The local sports commission (which owns part of the club) doesn’t want to lose him for another reason: its budget is determined by how well the team fares in the national league. Sighs Duffy: “It’s a long learning curve for everybody.”
It just got longer. Thenational coach, Jiang Xingquan, moved up the Olympic training schedule by a week, putting it in conflict with the Hoop Summit. Yao was told that, having just finished the league championship, he was too worn out to go to Indianapolis. “I’m not that tired,” said Yao later, flipping through the channels on his hotel television. What really made him exhausted, he said with a smile, was thinking about Jiang’s punishing practices. “Yao Ming is a young athlete, so we can understand if he feels disappointment,” says the basketball association’s Xu. This week, instead of doing private workouts for NBA teams, Yao is in an empty gym in Beijing, strapping on his enormous shoes for five months of intense Olympic training. Like Wang, Yao is proud to play on the Chinese national team. He knows he will have another chance to impress the world in Sydney. The NBA, however, will just have to wait.
