When I spoke with Li Yuanwei, of the basketball association, he emphasized that Coca-Cola was an important source of funding, and he hoped that the company and Yao would reach an agreement out of court. Li told me that Americans have difficulty understanding the duties of an athlete in China, where the state provides support from childhood. I asked if the same logic could be applied to a public school student who attends Peking University, starts a business, and becomes a millionaire. “It’s not the same,” Li said. “Being an athlete is a kind of mission. They have an enormous impact on the ideas of the common people and children. That’s their responsibility.”
Before I traveled to Harbin, in northeastern China, to attend the Asian Championship, I talked with Yang Lixin, a law professor at People’s University in Beijing. Yang was preparing a seminar on the Coca-Cola case. “Contact with American society probably gave Yao some new ideas,” Yang told me. “It’s like Deng Xiaoping said—some people will get wealthy first. Development isn’t equal, and in a sense rights also aren’t equal. Of course, they are equal under law, but one person might demand his rights while another does not. It’s a choice. In this sense, Yao Ming is a pioneer.”
Displaced people have always wandered to Harbin. During the twentieth century, they came and went: White Russians, Japanese militants, the Soviet Army. Even today, much of the architecture is Russian. Harbin’s symbol is the former St. Sofia Church: gold crosses, green onion domes, yellow halos around white saints. The city has one of the last Stalin Parks in China.
At the end of September, sixteen teams arrived for the Asian Championship; the winner would qualify for the Olympics. The squads came from shadowy lands. Most of the Kazakhstan players were in fact Russians whose families had stayed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Malaysian team had a peninsular range: ethnic Chinese, Indians, Malays. Qatar’s team included athletes from Africa and Canada—opponents grumbled that they had loosened the definition of a Qatari. The Syrian coach was a black man from Missouri; the Qatar coach was a white man from Louisiana. Iran’s coach was a Serb who told me that his playing career had been cut short; he pulled up his sleeve to reveal a cruel scar (“Not long after that, I started coaching”).
Except for the Chinese team, everybody stayed at the Singapore Hotel. Tall people in sweatsuits lounged in the lobby. The South Korean team included Ha Seung-Jin, an eighteen-year-old who is seven-three, weighs 316 pounds, and has basketball bloodlines—his father was once a center for the Korean national team. People expect Ha to be a first-round NBA draft pick next year. The league has never included a Korean. “I want to be a Korean Yao Ming,” he told me, through an interpreter (who added that the young player’s nickname is Ha-quille O’Neal). Ha was eager to play Yao; everybody expected China and South Korea to meet in the final. Last year, in the Asian Games, South Korea had upset the Chinese. Ha hoped to get Yao into foul trouble. “Yao Ming likes to spin to his right,” Ha said. “I’ll establish position there and draw the foul.”
The other seven-three player in the tournament was an Iranian named Jaber Rouzbahani Darrehsari. Darrehsari had played for only three years, since being discovered in the city of Isfahan, where his father sells fruit and vegetables in a market. Darrehsari’s wingspan is more than eight feet. Once, when he was leaving the court after a game, I asked him to touch the rim of the basket. He hopped ever so lightly, and then stood still: fingers curled around the metal, the balls of both feet planted firmly on the hardwood. He was seventeen years old. He had dark, long-lashed eyes, and he hadn’t yet started shaving—it was as if a child’s head had been attached to an elongated body with dangling arms. In Iran’s first two games, Darrehsari played only a few minutes; smaller opponents shoved him mercilessly. He looked terrified on the court. Sitting on the bench, he almost never smiled.
The Chinese team stayed at the Garden Hamlet Hotel, a walled compound reserved for central-government leaders. All summer, Yao had been unable to appear in public without attracting a mob. In August, the Chinese media reported that a medical exam had revealed that Yao had high blood pressure. His agents said the condition was temporary, and a message from Yao appeared on his official website: “I have been exhausted because of the poor security at the National Team games…too many public appearances and commitments by the Chinese National Team, and incessant fan disturbances at the team hotel.”
A few hours before China played Iran, one of Yao’s agents told me that I could meet with his client. Yao is represented by an entity known as Team Yao, which consists of three Americans, two Chinese, and one Chinese American. Half the team had come to Harbin—Erik Zhang, Yao’s distant cousin and the team leader; John Huizinga, a deputy dean at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where Zhang is a student; and Bill A. Duffy, who heads BDA Sports Management. They were accompanied by Ric Bucher, a senior writer for ESPN the Magazine, who had signed on to write the official Yao biography. A day earlier, Yao had agreed to a multiyear endorsement contract with Reebok. A source close to the negotiations told me that the deal, which is heavy with incentives, could be worth well over a hundred million dollars—potentially the largest shoe contract ever given to an athlete.
A guard let us into the compound; we walked through rows of willows, past well-kept lawns decorated with concrete deer. It was raining hard. In Yao’s room, there was little sign that the shoe contract had changed his life. The shades were drawn; discarded clothes were everywhere. Liu Wei, the point guard, lay in a tangle of sheets. The only difference from the day I’d seen Yao at his hotel room in Qinhuangdao was that this time they had put the wooden cabinet at the foot of his bed.
The night before, after China had defeated the Taiwanese team by sixty points, Yao had sprained his left ankle while boarding the team bus. Now Duffy, a former player in his forties, was examining him. The ankle was slightly swollen. He told Yao to ice it immediately after that night’s game. Yao answered that there was no ice at the arena.
Duffy looked up at him, incredulous. “They don’t have ice?” The games were being held in a converted skating rink in a sports complex less than two hundred miles from the Siberian border.
“No ice,” Yao said again, and then he spoke in Chinese to Zhang: “I’ve been getting acupuncture.”
After a few minutes, Team Yao left the room. Yao and I chatted about the tournament, and then I mentioned that his first coach had told me that Yao didn’t like basketball as a child. “That’s true,” Yao said. “I didn’t really like it until I was eighteen or nineteen.”
I asked Yao about his first trip to the United States, in 1998, when Nike had organized a summer of training and basketball camps for him. “Before then, I was always playing with people who were two or three years older than me,” he said. “They were always more developed, and I didn’t think that I was any good. But in America I finally played against people my own age, and I realized that I was actually very good. That gave me a lot of confidence.”
He talked about how difficult it had been when he first moved to Houston (“Everything about the environment was strange”), and I asked him about the differences between sport in China and in America.
“In China, the goal has always been to glorify the country,” Yao said. “I’m not opposed to that. But I personally don’t believe that that should be the entire purpose of athletics. I also have personal reasons for playing. We shouldn’t entirely get rid of the nationalism, but I do think that the meaning of sport needs to change. I want people in China to know that part of why I play basketball is simply personal. In the eyes of Americans, if I fail then I fail. It’s just me. But for the Chinese if I fail then that means that thousands of other people fail along with me. They feel as if I’m representing them.”
I asked about the pressure. “It’s like a sword,” he said. “You can hold it with the blade out or with the blade pointing toward yourself.” Then I mentioned Wang Zhizhi’s situation.
“There’s an aspect of it that I shouldn’t talk about,” Yao said
slowly. “It’s best if I simply speak about basketball. If Wang were here, it would be good for me. I just know that if he played I wouldn’t feel as if so much of the pressure was falling onto one person.”
I asked about the Coca-Cola lawsuit. “I always put the nation’s benefit first and my own personal benefit second,” Yao said. “But I won’t simply forget my own interests. In this instance, I think that the lawsuit is good for my interests, and it’s also good for other athletes. If this sort of situation comes up in the future for another athlete, I don’t want people to say, ‘Well, Yao Ming didn’t sue, so why should you?’”
No pregame national anthems at the Asian Championship. Before tonight’s game, the loudspeaker plays an instrumental version of the theme from Titanic. The Iranians look nervous. Sold-out arena: four-thousand-plus. The stands are full of Thundersticks—they are, after all, manufactured in China—but nobody seems to know how to use them. The lack of noise feels like intense concentration. The spectators cheer both sides—enthusiastically when the Chinese score, politely for an Iranian basket.
The coach plays a hunch and starts Darrehsari. On every possession, the Iranians avoid Yao’s lane, swinging the ball along the perimeter: Eslamieh to Bahrami to Mashhady. Mashhady to Bahrami to Eslamieh. Yao does not score for nearly six minutes. At last, he brushes Darrehsari aside, grabs an offensive rebound, and dunks with both hands. Tie game. Next possession: China leads. Next possession: bigger lead. Eslamieh to Bahrami to Mashhady. Somebody throws it to Darrehsari, fifteen feet out. Yao doesn’t bother to challenge. The shot develops as a chain reaction across the entire length of Darrehsari’s frame: knees bend, waist drops, elbows buckle, long hands snap—swish. Running back down the floor, he tries to fight back a smile. A few possessions later, he fouls Yao hard. Darrehsari is all elbows and knees, but for the first time in the tournament he looks like he wants to be on the court. The coach plays him the entire half. He scores four and leads Iran with four rebounds. After the halftime buzzer, his teammates clap him on the back.
Yao plays half the game: fifteen points, ten rebounds. He looks bored. China wins by twenty-four. Later, Yao tells me diplomatically that Darrehsari has potential. “It depends on environment,” Yao says. “Coaching, teammates, training.” For the rest of the tournament, Darrehsari does not play half as many minutes. The day after the China game, he beams and tells me, “It was an honor to play against Yao Ming.”
Before the final, China Unicom unveiled its new commercial at a press conference attended by more than a hundred Chinese journalists. Scenes flashed across a big screen: the ball, the boy, the giant, the dunk. Little Fatty looked adorable. Li Weichong, China Unicom’s marketing director, gave a speech. “In America, people talk about the Ming dynasty,” he said. “What does this mean? Now that Michael Jordan has retired, the NBA needs another great player. Our Yao Ming could be the one.” The press conference ended with the theme from Titanic.
South Korea and China played for the title on National Day—the fifty-fourth anniversary of the founding of Communist China. Ha Seung-Jin, the eighteen-year-old, came out inspired: after false-starting the jump ball, he immediately collected four points, two rebounds, one block, and a huge two-handed dunk. He also committed four fouls in less than four minutes. For the rest of the game, Ha sat on the bench, dejected.
The Chinese starting point guard fouled out in the third quarter, and then the backcourt began to collapse. The Korean guards tightened the press, forcing turnovers and hitting threes: Bang, Yang, Moon. Bang three, Bang three, layup—and with five minutes left China’s lead had dwindled to one point.
On every possession, Yao came to half-court, using his height and hands to break the press. At one point, he dove for a loose ball—all seven feet six inches. With the lead back at five and less than two minutes left, Yao grabbed an offensive rebound and dunked it. Thirty points, fifteen rebounds, six assists, five blocks. After the buzzer, when the two teams met at half-court, Yao Ming shook Ha Seung-Jin’s hand, touched his shoulder, and said, “See you in the NBA.”
The next morning, Yao caught the first flight out of Harbin. He sat in the front row of first class, wearing headphones. First the Indian team filed past, in dark wool blazers, and then the Filipinos, in tricolor sweatsuits. The Iranians were the last team to board, Darrehsari’s head scraping the ceiling. Each player nodded and smiled as he walked past Yao. During the flight, many Chinese passengers came forward to have their tickets autographed. In three days, Yao would leave for America. Later that month, he would accept an apology from Coca-Cola and settle the lawsuit out of court.
I sat in the row behind Yao, beside a chubby man in his forties named Zhang Guojun, who had flown to Harbin to watch the game. He’d bought his ticket from a scalper for nearly two hundred dollars. Zhang was proud of his money—he showed me his cellphone, which used China Unicom services and had a built-in digital camera. Zhang told me that he constructed roads in Inner Mongolia. He sketched a map on the headrest: “This is Russia. This is Outer Mongolia. This is Inner Mongolia. And this”—he pointed to nowhere—“is where I’m from.”
We talked about basketball. “Yao is important in our hearts,” Zhang said solemnly. “He went to America, and he returned.” Halfway through the flight, the man held up his cellphone, aimed carefully, and photographed the back of Yao Ming’s head.
2003
NO OBSTACLES
ALEC WILKINSON
Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path—a vocabulary, that is, to be employed in finding one’s way among obstacles. Parkour goes over walls, not around them; it takes the stair rail, not the stairs. Spread mainly by videos on the Internet, it has been embraced in Europe and the United States by thrill seekers and martial-arts adepts, who regard it as part extreme sport—its founder would like to see it included in the Olympics—and part grueling meditative pursuit. Movies like its daredevil qualities. A bracing parkour chase begins Casino Royale, the recent James Bond movie. It includes jumps from the boom of one tower crane to that of another, but parkour’s customary obstacles are walls, stairwells, fences, railings, and gaps between roofs—it is an urban rather than a pastoral pursuit. The movements are performed at a dead run. The more efficient and fluid the path they define, and the more difficult and harrowing the terrain they cross, the more elegant the performance is considered by the discipline’s practitioners.
Parkour was created in Lisses, a medium prosperous suburb of Paris, in the early 1990s, by a reserved and restless teenage boy named David Belle. His father, Raymond, who died in 1999, was an acrobat and a hero fireman. In 1969, he appeared in newspaper photographs hanging from a cable attached to a helicopter above Notre Dame. The night before, someone had hung a Vietcong flag on the cathedral’s tower. Raymond was lowered like a spider on a thread, and he grabbed the flag. David Belle is now thirty-three. He has an older brother, Jeff, who is also a fireman; they have the same father but different mothers. (A third brother died a few years ago, of an overdose.) David was raised by his mother’s father. On the few occasions when he tried to live with Raymond, their temperaments clashed. David’s grandfather told him stories about Raymond that revolved around his exploits—“Spider-Man stories and Tarzan stories,” David says—and left him wishing to emulate him. He wanted to be Spider-Man when he grew up.
The parkour scene in Casino Royale is performed by a childhood friend of Belle’s named Sébastien Foucan, who has developed a parallel pursuit to parkour, called freerunning. Belle appears in two kinds of films, movies that show him performing parkour for its own sake, and movies and commercials in which he appears as an actor performing parkour. All of the films have the kind of vaudeville improbability of a video game. He leaps gaps between rooftops that it doesn’t seem possible to cross. Or he jumps from a rooftop to one that is so much lower that he gets smaller and smalle
r, descending like a spike about to be driven into the ground. If parkour has a shrine, it is the climbing wall in Lisses, called the Dame du Lac, where Belle played as a teenager. The wall is about seventy-five feet high, and the films I like best show him fearlessly racing up and down it as if it had stairs. All are so steeped in risk that there are none I can watch without anxiety.
A young man who practices parkour is called a traceur; a woman is a traceuse. A traceur, Jeff Belle says, is someone “who traces David’s footsteps, the way David traced our father’s.” Enthusiasts also say that a traceur is someone who goes fast. The video of Belle that traceurs seem to find most compelling, judging from how often they mention it, is one in which he crashes into a cement wall. I have found it on YouTube, using “David Belle fall” as the search term. Belle is attempting to leap over a double-wide ramp that leads to an underground parking garage. The ramp is enclosed by cinder-block walls, about three feet high. Belle arrives at a run from the left. He lowers his hands but they appear to miss the first wall entirely; he seems to be looking at where he means to land. Incredibly, while aloft, he turns, so that his shoulder, not his head, strikes the opposite wall. Ten feet beneath him, at the bottom of the ramp, a cameraman is lying on his back in order to shoot from below. Belle manages not to land on him. His first gesture is to see if the cameraman is all right. Then he begins walking briskly up the ramp. Toward the top, he turns and can be seen to be grinning.
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