Wang’s problems formed a troubling backdrop to Yao Ming’s move to the NBA. Before leaving China, Yao promised to fulfill his national-team commitments during the off-season, and he reportedly agreed to pay the Chinese Basketball Association 5 to 8 percent of his NBA salary for his entire career. He also paid the Shanghai Sharks, his CBA team, a buyout that was estimated to be between $8 million and $15 million, depending on his endorsements and the length of his career. Yao’s four-year contract with the Rockets was worth $17.8 million dollars, and after one season his endorsement income was already higher than his salary.
But even Yao’s sponsorship potential was threatened by the irregularities of China’s sports industry. In May, Coca-Cola issued a special can decorated with the images of three national-team players, including Yao, who already had a contract with Pepsi. The basketball association had sold Yao’s image to Coca-Cola without the athlete’s permission, taking advantage of an obscure sports-commission regulation that grants the state the right to all “intangible assets” of a national-team player. The regulation appeared to be in direct conflict with Chinese civil law. Yao filed suit against Coca-Cola in Shanghai, demanding a public apology and one yuan—about twelve cents. The Chinese press interpreted the lawsuit as a direct challenge to the nation’s traditional control of athletes.
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 in 2003, sixteen teams arrived for the Asian Championship; the winner would qualify for the Olympics. The squads defied any simple concept of nationality and border. 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 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 sweat suits lounged in the lobby; a restaurant on the second floor had been converted into a halal cafeteria. The South Korean team included Ha Seung-Jin, an eighteen-year-old who was seven-three, weighed 316 pounds, and had basketball bloodlines—his father was once a center for the Korean national team. People expected Ha to be a first-round NBA draft pick the following year, which would make him the first Korean to play in the league. “I want to be a Korean Yao Ming,” he told me, through an interpreter (who added that the young player’s nickname was Ha-quille O’Neal). Ha was eager to play Yao; everybody expected China and South Korea to meet in the finals. 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 sold fruit and vegetables in a market. Darrehsari’s wingspan was over eight feet wide. Once, when he was leaving the court after a game, I asked him to touch the rim. 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, and 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, but there was concern that all the pressure and the excessive practice schedule could shorten Yao’s career. He issued a message on his website, expressing frustration with the national team: “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 was represented by an entity known as Team Yao, which consisted 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 was a student; and Bill A. Duffy, who headed 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, which had yet to be announced. A source close to the negotiations told me that the deal, which was heavy with incentives, could be worth well over $100 million—potentially, the largest shoe contract ever given to an athlete.
A security guard let me into the compound. I walked through rows of willows, past well-kept lawns decorated with concrete deer. It was raining hard. Despite being as much as $100 million richer than he was the day before, Yao still did not have a bed that fit. This time, the hotel had arranged for a wooden cabinet at the foot of the bed, to prop up his legs. The shades were drawn; discarded clothes lay everywhere. Liu Wei, the point guard, sprawled in a tangle of sheets on the other bed.
The night before, after China had defeated the Taiwanese team by sixty-one 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. Duffy told Yao to ice it immediately after that night’s game. Yao answered that there was no ice at the arena.
Duffy looked up, incredulous. “They don’t have ice?”
The games were being held in a converted skating rink, in a multi-sports complex, less than two hundred miles from the Siberian border.
“No ice,” Yao repeated, 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 in Chinese 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 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 pre-game 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 crowd is full of thunder sticks—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, who looks scared. 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 board, and dunks with both hands. Tie game. Next possession: China lead. 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 seven-three 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 an instrumental version of 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, shoulders slumped.
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 sprawled across the hardwood. 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 sweat suits. 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, it seemed that all the 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. He had flown to Harbin to watch the game, and his scalped ticket had cost nearly two hundred dollars. Zhang was proud of his money—he showed me his cell phone, 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 cell phone, aimed carefully, and photographed the back of Yao Ming’s head.
The Home Team
The night before the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, Wei Ziqi joined two of his neighbors on the local barricade. It consisted of a rope stretched taut across the road, and the villagers carried wooden paddles that read “Stop!” in both Chinese and English. Two of the neighbors wore blue-and-white polo shirts with the “Beijing 2008” logo across the breast. Sancha, their village, is a ninety-minute drive from the capital, and marks a point where the Great Wall winds through the mountains of northern China. At the barricade there was also a piece of paper with a message in English: “Please help us to protect the Great Wall. This section of the Great Wall is not open to the public.”
According to the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, or BOCOG, there were more than 1.7 million citizen volunteers in the region. The most visible ones were stationed at Olympic events and at places like the airport and downtown intersections, which were usually staffed by high
school and college students who spoke some English. These urban volunteers had been outfitted by Adidas, an official Olympic sponsor; the company provided gray trousers, new running shoes, and bright-blue shirts made of a high-tech material called ClimaLite. But the ClimaLite and the corporate sponsorship disappeared in the countryside. That was one way to gauge distance—north of the capital, the urban development thinned out, and along the way the volunteers’ gear became more ragged. The ClimaLite was replaced by cheap cotton; the running shoes were no longer standard issue; the Adidas logo was nowhere to be seen. Many farmers wore only a red armband, because they were saving the new shirt for something more important than the Olympics.
And yet these rural volunteers were diligent. Sancha’s population was less than two hundred, but the village had enlisted thirty residents to staff the barrier around the clock. Earlier that afternoon, when Wei Ziqi drove me through the countryside to the village, we were stopped at two other checkpoints. We also passed a crumbling Ming dynasty tower manned by a lonely sentinel wearing a green armband that read “Great Wall Groundskeeper.” In Bohai township, six miles from the village, I registered with the police. For the Olympic period, the authorities had banned foreigners from spending the night in this part of the countryside, but they made an exception because I had rented a house in Sancha since 2001. “Just don’t hike up to the Great Wall,” the cop warned me. He said that the big tourist sites were open, but everything else was off limits. On his desk was a stack of police manuals titled The Terrorist Prevention Handbook. While we chatted, I opened one to a random chapter: “What to Do if There’s a Terrorist Attack in a Karaoke Parlor.”
Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.) Page 25
