Wednesday, August 31, 2005
"The Center of the World"
Did you know that Chinese viewers of Houston Rockets games, at 30 million a game, outnumber their American counterparts by a ratio of 30/1? That's just one stunning fact from an interesting article on the cultural and international significance of Yao Ming, in Foreign Policy. Getting Yao to play in the world's best league wasn't easy however:
"David Stern always wanted to find a Chinese Michael Jordan to break open the China market," says Xu Jicheng, a veteran basketball commentator. But finding a local hero who could make the leap to the NBA wasn't a simple prospect. China's best players were still being developed behind the walls of the nation's socialist sports system as properties of the state. By the late 1990s, rumors spread in the West about two talented Chinese youngsters who stood more than 7 feet tall. Both Yao Ming and his older rival, 7 foot, 1 inch army soldier Wang Zhizhi, had developed solid skills in the Chinese system, and by the time the NBA scouts and Nike executives discovered them, they had already begun to model their games on the NBA stars they saw on television.It's anecdotal, but I sense a gap between the thinking of Chinese people, who relish the opportunity watch Yao Ming play on basketballs' biggest stage, and "officials" who seem to view him as property of the state. The article is a long one, but certainly it's worth bookmarking or printing for when you have the time to read it.
The first efforts to bring these players to the NBA were tragicomedies of cross-cultural misunderstanding. In early 1999, an American lawyer joined forces with the manager of Yao's Shanghai team to sign the 19-year-old giant to a representation agreement, only to have Yao's family angrily renege, claiming that they were forced into a deal that was tantamount to extortion. When the Dallas Mavericks surreptitiously drafted Wang less than two months later, the soldier's army superiors were so baffled and incensed by the American intrusion that they refused to meet with the team's owner at the time, H. Ross Perot Jr. China has always been wary of foreign powers coming in to lay claim to its resources, fearing that any encounter could leave it weakened and humiliated. Today, even as a newly powerful nation opens up to the outside world, the same suspicions remain about American basketball. "Chinese officials look at the NBA as an imperialistic power," says Yao's Chinese-American agent Erik Zhang. "They see these Americans coming in to take away their best players and offering very little in return."
