As she was talking, Susan kept glancing at her dog Fortuna, whom she had brought with her from Alaska to donate to the Women’s Sports Foundation for a benefit auction. Fortuna is six years old and raced in the 1984 Iditarod, but now, according to Susan, she wants to be a pet. To us she didn’t seem to like being in New York any more than Susan did, but she looked happier once she’d discovered the nice sled dog living in the Plaza Baroque Room’s mirrored columns. “She misses her friends,” Susan told us. “She thinks she’s finally found another dog.” She leaned over. “Hey, Fortuna, good girl,” she cooed. “Good girl!”
Susan is thirty-two and has a long black braid and very pale blue eyes. For a normal day of mushing, she wears polypropylene underwear, layers of Thinsulate and GoreTex outer garments, a beaver hat, a wolverine muff, wolfskin gloves, and sealskin mukluks. For the press conference, she wore jeans and a cotton T-shirt that said PURINA PROPLAN, which is a type of dog food put out by one of her sponsors. For the foundation’s evening black-tie cocktail party, she said, she was going to wear a long gingham skirt, a black satin shirt, and an ivory miniature-dog-sled-and-team necklace. “I do own long skirts—I need them for the Iditarod awards banquet in Nome, for one thing,” she explained, and then said, “Oh, shoot! I wish I’d brought my qiviut dress.” She was wearing that dress—qiviut is the underwool of the musk ox—last March when she received first prize for the 1987 race, and also the year before when she picked up the trophy for the 1986 Iditarod. That was the race in which she set the world record (eleven days fifteen hours and six minutes), and it made up for the previous year, when a rogue moose attacked her team, killing three of her dogs and forcing her to drop out. “No one was going to beat me in 1986,” she told us. “I was really determined.”
Susan said that her first dog, Cabee, was a Labrador mix, and her second dog was an Alaskan Husky, and all her dogs since have been Huskies. She first mushed dogs in Massachusetts, where she was born, and she kept at it when she moved to Colorado and shared a house with a woman who had fifty Huskies. By the age of nineteen, she was sure enough of herself to know that she wanted to live in the wilderness with a lot of dogs, and that there was nowhere in the Lower Forty-eight that would satisfy her. “At first, I wanted to build wooden boats,” she went on. “I really loved carpentry, and I wanted to sail around the world, because at the time I thought the ocean was the only place I could go to get away from people. But then I tried to figure out what I’d do with twenty or thirty dogs on a small boat.” When she moved to Alaska, in 1975, she lived in a “fly-in”—an area accessible only by plane. Then her work as a dog breeder, trainer, and racer made living near a road necessary, so she and her husband (they were married in 1985) and the dogs moved to a slightly less remote spot, 150 miles north of Fairbanks and twenty-five miles from the closest village (Manley, pop. 62). She still hunts moose for food, but now there’s a gravel road to her cabin. “Where we’re living is very downtown to me,” she said. “We chose it because it’s good for mushing. There are very strong winds and it’s stormy, and that’s good, because it’s the kind of weather you get during races. I just don’t like city living. We do have a radio, and David likes to listen to it, but I don’t. He likes to read newspapers. I like to burn them for firewood.”
Someone passed out auction brochures—Fortuna was listed under the heading LUXURIOUS FUN—and then a man who was wearing a World Boxing Hall of Fame tie clip and belt buckle, and who had the cauliflower ears of a boxer, grabbed Susan by the elbow and said, “Are you the girl that did that thing on the dog sled?”
She nodded, and said, “Eleven days on a sled in the Alaskan wilderness.”
The man turned to someone walking past and exclaimed, “I couldn’t do the thing she did! I can go into the ring and get bashed up, but I couldn’t do that thing she did!”
1987
HOME AND AWAY
PETER HESSLER
Little Fatty kept leaving it short. Twice he dropped the basketball on the way up, and the third time, when Yao Ming finally lifted him above the rim, he held the ball too low. His name was Sun Haoxuan; he was four years old, weighed fifty-nine pounds, and had been selected by an advertising firm that had recently scouted Beijing kindergartens for a fat boy with round cheeks and big dark eyes. There was a substantial talent pool. In Chinese cities, rising standards of living have combined with the planned-birth policy in a way that recalls the law of conservation of mass: There are fewer children, but often there is more child. It’s common for adults to refer to these kids as Xiao Pangzi—Little Fatty. “Get Little Fatty ready!” the director shouted whenever he needed Sun Haoxuan. “Move Little Fatty back two steps!”
We were at the Beijing Film Studios, where Yao Ming, the starting center for the Houston Rockets, was shooting a television commercial for China Unicom, a telecommunications company. The script was simple: fat child meets seven-foot-six-inch basketball player; basketball player lifts fat child; fat child dunks. What had not been factored in was Little Fatty’s behavior. He squirmed away at every opportunity; sometimes he pointed directly at Yao Ming and announced, with an air of sudden revelation, “Yao Ming!” For half an hour, the adults in the studio—cameramen, assistants, tech guys—had been silently aiming ill wishes his way, and maybe that was why, on the fourth take, Yao stumbled and accidentally rammed Little Fatty’s nose against the rim. The sounds came in quick succession: a soft thud, a dropped ball—bounce, bounce, bounce-bounce—and then the child began to wail.
The boy’s mother rushed over, and Yao Ming stood helplessly, shoulders slumped. Somebody wiped Little Fatty’s face—no blood, no foul. On the next take, he finally dunked the ball, and there was a thin round of applause. Yao wandered over to the edge of the set, where I was standing, and said, in English, “Weight training.”
After a sensational rookie season in the National Basketball Association, Yao, who is twenty-three, had returned to China in early May with one clear objective: to lead the national team to the title in the Asian Basketball Championship, which serves as the regional qualifier for the 2004 Olympics. Usually, China dominates Asian basketball, but this year, because of political problems, Wang Zhizhi, the country’s second-best player, had not come back from America. Yao Ming had become involved in a high-profile lawsuit, which was interpreted by the Chinese press as a clash between the rights of the individual and the authority of the state. Increasingly, Yao’s world was divided: There was the sanctity of the sport and, off court, a whirlwind of distractions, ranging from the burdensome to the bizarre. When I had last visited him, in July, he was staying with the Chinese team in Qinhuangdao, a seaside town that was hosting an exhibition game against a squad from the United States Basketball Academy. Yao didn’t play—he had just received eight stitches in the eyebrow after a teammate elbowed him in practice. Before the game, a China Unicom representative with a digital recorder coached Yao through a series of phrases that would be sold as alarm messages to mobile-phone subscribers. “Wake up, lazy insect!” Yao said obediently, and then his bandaged brow dipped when the woman asked him to repeat it (“More emphasis!”).
That evening, the Chinese nearly threw the game away—in the final quarter, they couldn’t handle a full-court press from the ragtag American team. “I think the center needs to come to half-court against the press,” Yao told me afterward, in his hotel room. Liu Wei, the Chinese point guard and Yao’s best friend, was sprawled on one bed. Yao sat on the other bed, which had been crudely extended: The head consisted of a wooden cabinet covered with blankets. We spoke in English; he talked about the NBA off-season news that he had culled from the Internet. He had not spoken to any of his Houston teammates since returning to China. “Did you hear about Rodman?” Yao said. “He might come back. I can’t believe the Lakers got Payton and Malone. I can’t believe they only spent six million. If Kobe is OK, it’s like a Dream Team.” The names sounded foreign and far away—Mark Cuban, Shaq, Kirilenko. “AK-47,” Yao said, using the sports-talk nickname for Andrei K
irilenko, a Russian forward on the Utah Jazz. Yao smiled like a kid at the sound of the phrase. “AK-47,” he said again.
Yao Ming weighed ten pounds at birth. His mother, Fang Fengdi, is over six-two; his father, Yao Zhiyuan, is six-ten. Both were centers: He played for the Shanghai city team, and she was on China’s national team. Chinese sports couples aren’t uncommon—Yao Ming is dating Ye Li, a six-two forward on the women’s national team. When Yao was growing up, the apartment directly overhead was home to the Sha family; the parents had both been point guards for Shanghai teams. “My mother and father were introduced by the basketball organization,” Sha Yifeng, a childhood friend of Yao Ming, told me. “In the old days, that’s how they took care of your life.”
Today, Yao’s parents are in their early fifties, trim and black-haired, and they carry themselves with the physical dignity of athletes. But they speak about basketball with detachment. Neither played the game as a child; sports were a low priority for China in the 1960s, particularly during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. Later, officials began to restore the national sports system, scouting for height to fill out the basketball rosters. Yao Zhiyuan began to play at the age of nineteen. Fang Fengdi was discovered at sixteen. “To be honest, I didn’t much like it,” she told me, when I met them both in Shanghai. “I wanted to be a dancer or an actress.” By 1970, she was traveling to games around the world with the national team. “I didn’t think of it as something I did or didn’t want to do,” she said. “I thought of it as a responsibility. It was a job.”
In China, competitive sport is a foreign import. Traditional physical activities like wushu and qigong are as much aesthetic and spiritual as they are athletic. Chinese historians say that modern sport began after the 1839–42 Opium War. In the following decades, as foreign traders and missionaries established themselves in treaty ports, their schools and charitable institutions introduced Western competitive sports. American missionaries brought basketball to China at the end of the nineteenth century.
During the early 1900s, as the Chinese struggled to overcome foreign occupation, they began to see sports as a symbolic way to avenge the injustices of the past century. The goal was to beat the foreigner at his own game. After the Communists came to power, in 1949, they established a state-funded sports-training system modeled on the Soviet Union’s. Promising young athletes were recruited for special “sports schools.”
When Yao Ming entered the third grade, he was five-seven, and Shanghai’s Xuhui District Sports School selected him for its after-school basketball program. Recently, I visited Yao’s first coach, Li Zhangming, who, like a traditional Chinese educator, spoke of Yao in completely unsentimental terms (“He didn’t much like basketball. He was tall, but slow and uncoordinated”). After our conversation, I wandered around the basketball courts of Shanghai’s No. 54 Middle School, where the Xuhui Sports School holds some of its practices. I watched a group of young girls performing basketball drills, then introduced myself to the coach, a tall woman named Tao Yanping.
“I was a teammate of Yao’s mother,” Tao said. “I went to their wedding. I remember giving them towels and thermoses—things you gave newlyweds back then. See that girl there?” She pointed out a red-faced child, the tallest on the court. “Her mother was also my teammate. That girl is in the third grade. Her mother is 1.83 meters tall, and she made the national team.”
I asked Tao how she recruited. “We go to the schools and look at the children’s height, and then we check their parents’ height,” she said.
The two-hour practice consisted mostly of ballhandling drills. Tao was attentive, shouting commands at her charges (“Little Swallow, you’re traveling! Who taught you to do that?”). At the end of the practice, tall parents materialized at courtside. Zhang Jianrong, a woman who was nearly six feet tall, told me that basketball was just a healthy activity for her daughter; the girl’s studies were more important. Like the other parents, Zhang was a basketball mom in a country that selects its basketball moms by height.
The method of early recruitment is a product of China’s inability to provide every public school with coaches and sports facilities. The system has proved effective in low-participation, routine-based sports like gymnastics and diving, but when it comes to basketball it may be China’s greatest weakness. In America, where community leagues and school coaches are plentiful, athletes emerge from an enormous pyramid of participants. Some, like Allen Iverson, rise to the top with remarkable passion and creativity—but if a recruiter had shown up at the Iverson home when Allen was in the third grade, he would have found no father and a short mother who had given birth at the age of fifteen. It’s significant that China has yet to produce a great male guard—the position requires skill and intensity rather than height. All three Chinese players in the NBA are centers, and two are second-generation centers. The Chinese national team is notorious for choking in key games, partly because the ballhandling is inconsistent. Players rarely appear to enjoy themselves, and their character has not been formed by true competition; even as free-market reforms have changed many Chinese industries, the sports world is a throwback to socialism, with its careful planning and career stability. Once, when I asked Yao Ming how many Chinese would be in the NBA in a decade, he said only three or four.
Throughout Yao Ming’s childhood, his parents emphasized that basketball was a hobby, not a career. “When I was small, I always wanted to be famous,” Yao told me. “I thought I’d be a scientist or maybe a political figure. It didn’t matter, as long as I was famous.” In sixth grade, he grew taller than his mother. He surpassed his father’s height in ninth grade. By then, he was already under contract to the Shanghai Sharks youth team. When he was seventeen, and seven-two, Yao Ming joined the Chinese national team. Relatives told me that it wasn’t until then that his parents resigned themselves to his career as a professional athlete.
Once, I asked Fang Fengdi if there had been a moment when she first sensed that basketball inspired Yao Ming. It was the only time she really smiled when discussing the sport, and I sensed that she was talking about herself as much as about her son. She said, “The Harlem Globetrotters came to Shanghai when he was in elementary school. Tickets were really hard to get—I was able to find only two. I remember thinking, Americans are good at enjoying themselves! Those players took a normal sport and turned it into something else—a performance. Afterward, I could tell that it made a deep impression on Yao Ming.”
The first male player to make the jump from mainland China to toplevel American basketball was Ma Jian, a forward who played at the University of Utah for two years in the 1990s. Ma noticed that during Utah’s pregame meetings, an assistant coach sometimes wrote a W or a B on the chalkboard next to an opposing player’s name. “The white players were shooters,” Ma explained to me, when we met recently in Beijing. “If he put a B there, we knew they were athletes.” Ma never saw a C on the board. In 1995, Ma tried out for the Los Angeles Clippers. “The first time I stepped onto the team plane in the preseason, I saw the blacks sitting on one side and the whites on the other. I looked at myself—should I go on the brothers’ side or the whites’ side?”
Last year, after the Rockets selected Yao Ming with the first pick in the NBA draft, it was less than a week before somebody in the league made a remark that could be construed as racist. During a television interview, Shaquille O’Neal, the NBA’s dominant center, announced, “Tell Yao Ming, ‘Ching chong yang wah ah so.’” O’Neal’s joke went largely unnoticed at the time, but it was resurrected in January of this year, when a columnist for Asian Week attacked O’Neal for it.
The column sparked a media frenzy shortly before Shaq and Yao’s first on-court meeting. But Yao immediately defused the controversy. “There are a lot of difficulties in the two different cultures understanding each other,” he said. “Chinese is hard to learn. I had trouble with it when I was little.” The NBA released a statement pointing out that the league included players from thirty-four countrie
s. By game time, the issue was all but dead. The Rockets won by four points, in overtime; O’Neal outplayed Yao, but Yao had a spectacular start and held his own. Afterward, O’Neal told the press, “Yao Ming is my brother. The Asian people are my brothers.”
In February, I spent most of the month following Yao’s games, and people repeatedly brought up the O’Neal incident. None of the black fans I talked to had anything bad to say about Yao—many believed he brought something fresh to American sports. “It’s not like normal, where people say, well, he’s a black athlete, so he moves like this, or he’s a white athlete, so he shoots like that,” Darice Hooper, a physical therapist who was attending the All-Star Game, in Atlanta, told me.
The Only Game in Town Page 55
