But Yao got boxed out. Two weeks ago Chinese authorities ordered him to stay home and rest up for Olympic workouts that begin this week. “He is a member of the national team, so he has to obey its decisions,” said Xu Minfeng, spokesman for the Chinese Basketball Association. Yao, who loses his “junior” status this year, was stoic. “This was my last chance to play in the [Hoop Summit],” he said, relaxing in Ningbo after scoring 29 points in the Chinese pro league’s season finale. Asked about the NBA draft, Yao shrugged: “I don’t want to talk about impossibilities. I have to face reality.”
Hoop dreams, Chinese reality. So far, they’ve been at odds. The Dallas Mavericks drafted another talented Chinese player, 7-foot-1 Wang Zhizhi, last year, but his team–run by the People’s Liberation Army–refused to let him go. The saga of young stars like Yao and Wang 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 Beijing’s struggle to expand capitalist freedoms without losing control. It also reveals the cultural collisions that can result when slick global businesses try to move aggressively into the Middle Kingdom. Behind it all: Chinese 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 not just two stars with NBA potential. There are 1.2 billion other 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 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. 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, but he won’t be at the Olympics; the national team shunned him for trying to go to the NBA without official permission. Then there is Wang, who delights crowds with 360-degree dunks. When the Mavericks drafted Wang in the second round last year, the military brass who run the team were indignant. Drafting Chinese kids was their job. Maverick’s then-owner Ross Perot Jr. flew to Beijing to sign Wang, but the PLA team manager refused to meet with him, much less let him purloin the star player.
Yao’s prospects seemed brighter. The son of two basketball players–his mother is 6 feet 4, his father 6 feet 10–Yao signed at 15 with the Shanghai Sharks, a club that is jointly owned by government and private interests. It’s not exactly the B-ball high life. Yao makes $20,000 a year, washes his own uniform and lives year-round in a team dormitory outside Shanghai. But he’s clearly got game. Terry Rhoads, the sports-marketing director for Nike China, remembers the first time he saw Yao–during a casual shoot-around in Shanghai. “I thought: ‘He’s huge, but does he have any skills?’ " he says. Yao stayed out by the three-point line and drained one shot after another. Rhoads turned to his colleagues and said: “We have just seen the future of Chinese basketball.”
Yao’s 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. The deal promised to plow more than a third of his future earnings back into the Shanghai Sharks, according to an Evergreen representative. NBA rules don’t allow more than 4 percent to be withheld from a player’s contract, so the agreement might not have held up. Even more troubling was Yao’s parents’ claim that they felt pressed into signing the deal late one night and then regretted it. Yao was barely consulted. The family, humiliated, vowed not to cooperate with Evergreen again.
The frayed relations were later repaired, and Yao planned for the Hoop Summit with his new American agent. But even as the pieces fell into place, Beijing began to fear losing a player that could help its international prestige. When national coach Jiang Xingquan moved up the Olympic training schedule by a week–which meant it would overlap with the Hoop Summit–officials canceled Yao’s trip. They said their star was too exhausted to play in the States. “I’m not tired,” Yao said later. “Besides, it’s just one game.” No matter. This week, instead of going through private workouts for NBA teams, Yao is in an empty gym in Beijing, lacing up his shoes for five months of intense Olympic training. Like Wang, Yao is proud to play on the Chinese national team, and he knows the Olympics will give him a chance to impress the world. The NBA will just have to wait.
