Yao gets love from England media

I guess this deserves a individual thread. Yao got love from England. It is also interesting to know the difficulties in his transitional period.

LINK: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/us_sport/basketball/article1361490.ece

How a small step for Yao can become a giant leap for China
The 7ft 6in basketball icon who decamped to the US is to become the face of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing
Ian Whittell

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” The words of Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, adorn the locker-room of the Los Angeles Lakers at the beginning of every basketball season, but if they relate to any NBA superstar, surely it is Lao’s countryman, Yao Ming.

The first step of Yao’s painful, extraordinary and highly profitable journey took him on to the jet that flew him to Houston from Shanghai in 2002 and set him on the path to becoming, conceivably, the world’s biggest sports star. The 7ft 6in Houston Rockets player needs look up to no one in the modern game and, while the non-Chinese, non-basketball fan may have little idea who Yao is, the staging of the Olympic Games in his homeland next summer ensures that that is about to change.

David Beckham may be moving to the United States with the intention of becoming the world’s best-known sportsman, but, given Yao’s standing as the biggest celebrity in a country of 1.3 billion people, the Chinese has beaten the English footballer to that status. Not that the journey has been smooth for the shy 26-year-old.

The son of a 6ft 7in father who worked for a harbour engineering company and a 6ft 3in mother — a former basketball international — Yao had never been outside China until Nike flew him to Paris in 1997 to attend a talent camp.

There followed many years of protracted negotiation with Shanghai Sharks, Yao’s club, the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) and the Chinese Government before the Rockets could make him the first pick in the 2002 draft and the CBA would agree to Yao’s release. This season, Yao’s salary with the Rockets is $12 million (about £6.1 million) and it is thought that as much as half goes back to his homeland as part of the deal. Most of it goes to the CBA, but his home city takes a cut, as does China’s State General Administration for Sport.

However, once on American soil, Yao’s tribulations were just beginning. “The first few months I was really homesick,” he told The Times at his home in Houston, Texas, where he is recovering from a fractured tibia that will keep him out until mid-March. “I was counting it day by day, just to survive.

“After a couple of weeks I felt like I had already left home months ago — it was really slow. I would look at the dates all the time to see how it passed. I wasn’t driving at the time. I didn’t know my way around Houston. Everything was unfamiliar and I was trying to adjust to the NBA and perform.

“The most difficult part was because I was the No 1 draft choice. There was a lot of pressure, so much attention. If I had to do it all over again, I don’t know that I could do it any better.”

Yao’s formative months in the NBA were not assisted by having to operate under an intense spotlight, with dozens of journalists travelling from China to cover his every move. Nor was he spared the ignorance of the media in his new home, who bombarded him with inane questions.

“When people ask me those types of questions — what do you eat, what do you do every day? — they are only interested in me because of my size,” Yao said in perfect English. “All they see is this big, big man and they are not looking at the man. They would ask me, ‘Is there a special kind of food that you eat that makes you so tall?’

“They don’t understand. I know that I’m bigger mostly because of my parents’ size. It’s just in my genes, not because I have some kind of special secrets. If I had a secret or special foods, I would make another 100 people who were 7ft tall and have a real good team.

“Finally, after one or two years in the NBA, I became clear about my job. They ask the questions and you answer them. So from then on, I tried to be more professional and I started to make some jokes, to make it fun for myself. If the questions were going to bore me, at least I could have some fun and entertain myself.”

The cultural problems extended to the basketball court, where Yao’s talent was instantly obvious but his personality less attuned to top-level professional sport. Rockets staff spent months frustrated, for example, by his reluctance to dunk the ball on opponents because it had been ingrained in him by his upbringing that to humble a rival in such a way was impolite.

In time it would be precisely his ability to bridge the cultures, at a time when China was opening up to the ways of the West, that contributed to the Yao phenomenon, but there are still moments when he is painfully aware how far that one step on to a Houston-bound plane five years ago has taken him from his unremarkable upbringing in Shanghai.

“Let me give you an example,” Yao said, warming to the topic. “I have a friend who is living in a small town just outside London. We were born in the same hospital and we grew up in the same neighbourhood in Shanghai. He and his family moved to England when he was nine years old.

“Last summer I saw him for the first time in 17 years. It was hard for us to even talk. He had been living overseas for such a long time and even though he was born in China and both of his parents were born in China, he had all of those years to adapt to a different culture, a Western culture.

“We were so different. After living there for his whole life, it was almost impossible for us to talk to each other in Chinese. So eventually I told him, ‘OK, let’s just talk to each other in English.’ But then, of course, English here \ is different than in London, so we still had problems. The cultures make such a big, big difference.”

As the NBA sought to make inroads in an expanding Chinese marketplace, it became apparent that Yao’s character and elite play had delivered the perfect icon. Fran Blinebury, the respected Houston Chronicle columnist, said: “He is the face of the 2008 Olympics, the symbol of the new China. The Government have him doing ads to discourage people from eating shark fin soup because of the negative conservation issues relating to killing sharks.

“There is no sportsman as big as that in the US today. Michael Jordan at his peak, yes, but then Michael was 6ft 6in and could, just about, put on a disguise and blend in. Yao is 7ft 6in — he is not blending in anywhere.”

All this is not easy for a private man who is happiest at home playing computer games, surfing the web and listening to music. But things are about to become even more frantic. Yao will be the point upon which China wants the world to focus in 2008.

“The Olympics are a big, big deal in China,” he said. “We have been waiting for them for over 20 years. I still remember when I was kid first thinking about them.

“I’ll tell you this story. In 1993, we tried to get the Olympics. Obviously, we lost, but that night when the announcement was going to be made, I stayed up late as a 13-year-old boy to hear the news, but finally I fell asleep before the news.

“The next morning, my mom tells me we lost the Olympics and I’m really, really sad. Then, in 2001, we go to Moscow to try to get the 2008 Olympics and that night the TV was sitting right over my shoulder while I was in my bedroom playing video games and I was just listening for the news. I wasn’t watching because I was afraid to. Finally I heard [Juan Antonio] Samaranch [the IOC president] say ‘Beijing’ and I almost cried.

“When the time comes, we’ll have many people come to China for the first time. They’ll come to play in the Games, to watch the Games, maybe to stay and visit. They will see a new China. You know, China in the last 20 years has changed so much. There are so many stories to tell.”

There may also be one more story to tell, come 2012. “I don’t know if I will still be playing on the national team then — I hope so,” Yao said. “If I play in London, that would be my fourth Olympics. If I played four, I would tie the record for any Chinese basketball player. It is held now by a woman [Zheng Haixia]. That would be a very special honour for me and I would like to have it.”

Tall story

Born Sept 12, 1980, Shanghai

Height 7ft 6in

Weight 310lb

Parents Father Yao Zhiyuan, 6ft 7in, is a former basketball player with Shanghai Sharks and worked for a harbour engineering company. Mother Fang Fengdi, 6ft 3in, is a former basketball international

Yao’s salary 2002-03: $3.85 million; 2006-07: $12.0 million; 2010-11: $17.04 million

China’s top celebrities in 2006 according to Forbes.com

1, Yao Ming; 2, Zhou Xun (actress who starred in hit movie Perhaps Love); 3, Zhang Ziyi (actress in martial arts film House of Flying Daggers and Memoirs of a Geisha); 4, Zhao Wei (TV and film actress); 5, Liu Xiang (gold medal-winner in 110 metres hurdles at the Athens Olympics in 2004)

Tallest players in NBA history

Manute Bol (Sudan) 7ft 7in (1985-95); Gheorge Muresan (Romania) 7ft 7in (1993-2000); Yao Ming (China) 7ft 6in (2002-present day); Shawn Bradley (United States/Germany) 7ft 6in (1993-2005)

Reluctant icon refuses to court publicity and is happy to leave field to Tiger Woods

Behind Yao Ming’s bid for global domination sits a four-man think-tank, “Team Yao”, assembled by Erik Zhang, a Chinese-American businessman and an adviser to the player’s family.

The team includes John Huizinga, a renowned economist, along with Bill Sanders and Bill Duffy, from the respected BDA Sports agents group and, according to Sanders, the only limit to Yao’s exposure lies in his modesty and a wish for privacy.

“I always say a player’s marketability is down to four factors — a player’s talent, his success, his integrity and his character,” Sanders said. “The more you have, the more marketable you will be. Yao has all those and he has another component — China. He plays basketball, one of the most popular sports in the world, in the most populated country, which is also the last frontier of capitalism.

“American companies are clamouring to be in business with him. Whenever the conversation comes around to ‘how do we activate in China?’ Yao’s name comes up. That is Tiger Woods-like and there is a very short list of people like that.

“But Yao is a reluctant icon. He doesn’t have the ego that a lot of celebrity athletes have. He feels a responsibility to China and to Chinese basketball. But privacy is important to him.

“He gives us a certain number of days to ‘sell’ and I would guess that figure is half as many days as Tiger Woods or Peyton Manning [quarterback with the Indianapolis Colts, winners of Super Bowl XLI] does. Could he be making more money? Sure. Should he be out there [in the public domain] with Tiger Woods? Sure. But he doesn’t want to be.”

Tiger Woods
$87m per year
Present deals
Nike, American Express, Buick (General Motors), Electronic Arts, Accenture, Tag Heuer

David Beckham
$30m per year
Present deals
Adidas, Gillette (subject to renegotiation), Pepsi, Coty, Snickers, Motorola, Disney, Major League Soccer

Yao Ming
$15m per year
Present deals
Visa, Apple computers, Gatorade, McDonald’s, Garmin computers, Nike, Unicom (Chinese mobile phone), Pepsi

Peyton Manning
$11.5m per year
Present deals
MasterCard, Sprint Nextel mobile phones, Reebok, Sony, DirecTV, Gatorade

 

Sorry for the misleading title. I should have used a different one.

 

I just noticed freeman post this article in the Yao rehab thread. I believe this deserves a new thread since it is a very good reading.