Back in China, the nation’s other basketball phenom, Yao Ming, can only dream of taking flight. Yao thought he was going to be the first Chinese player in the NBA. The 7-foot-5 Shanghai sensation is more highly touted than Wang: the 20-year-old could be the No. 1 overall pick in the June NBA draft. But as the May 13 deadline to enter the draft draws near, Yao is still waiting for a horde of business people and apparatchiks to decide his fate. Last week, as Wang scored 13 points in the Dallas season finale, Yao was wading through a stream of bicycles on a dusty Beijing street. An old cab pulled up to take him back to his cramped dorm room. Yao stooped low and scrunched into the tiny back seat, folding his legs incongruously, like an accordion. “He’s too tall,” exclaimed one bystander. And his aspirations have grown too big for China.
Yao and Wang are more than just freaks of nature in basketball shorts. The twin towers are national treasures, symbols of China’s growing stature in the world. They’re also emblematic of the NBA’s outsize dreams for conquering China. The NBA, struggling at home, sees salvation in the land of 1.3 billion potential hoop fans. China, determined to win the 2008 Olympics and join the World Trade Organization, is eager to make its mark on the world–on its own terms. The two-year struggle to get these young players into the NBA has been a cultural collision–this one far removed from U.S.-China bickering over spy planes and trade liberalization. If it works out, it could be–in basketball parlance–the ultimate give-and-go. “This is just like Ping-Pong diplomacy,” says Xia Song, a sports-marketing executive who represents Wang. “Only with a much bigger ball.”
Two years ago it looked more like a ball and chain. Wang’s Army bosses were miffed when the Mavericks had the nerve to draft their star back in 1999. Nelson remembers flying to Beijing with the then owner Ross Perot Jr.–son of the eccentric billionaire–to hammer out a deal with the stone-faced communists of the PLA. “You could hear them thinking: ‘What is this NBA team doing, trying to lay claim to our property?’ " Nelson recalls. “We tried to explain that this was an honor for Wang and for China.” There was no deal. Wang grew despondent and lost his edge on court. This year Yao became the anointed one. He eclipsed Wang in scoring and rebounding, and even stole away his coveted MVP award in the Chinese Basketball Association league. It looked as if his Shanghai team–a dynamic semicapitalist club in China’s most open city–would get its star to the NBA first.
Then came the March madness. Wang broke out of his slump to lead the Army team to its sixth consecutive CBA title–scoring 40 in the final game. A day later the PLA scored some points of its own by announcing that Wang was free to go West. What inspired the change of heart? No doubt the Mavericks worked to build trust with Chinese officials (even inviting national-team coach Wang Fei to spend the 1999-2000 season in Dallas). There was also the small matter of Chinese pride. The national team stumbled to a 10th-place finish at the 2000 Olympics, after placing eighth in 1996. Even the most intransigent cadre could see that the team would improve only if it sent its stars overseas to learn from the world’s best players.
But the main reason for the turnaround had nothing to do with basketball. Beijing desperately wants to host the 2008 Games, and offering Wang to the NBA gave it one more chance to promote its bid. (The honored guest at Wang’s farewell press conference was the head of the Beijing 2008 bid committee.) But the Olympic connection goes even further: Dallas is preparing its own bid for the 2012 Olympics, and the Chinese are enticed by the prospect of a quid pro quo. “We’d like America to support us for the 2008 Olympics, and we will help Dallas get the Olympics in 2012,” said Li Deqiu, the PLA’s basketball chief, at Wang’s farewell press conference in Beijing.
Wang isn’t completely free yet. Once his NBA season ends, he has tournament obligations in China that will keep him from honing his skills–and beefing up his body–with the Mavericks. He will miss summer camp, the preseason and the first month of the 2001-2002 regular season. Moreover, the Chinese Army hasn’t agreed to let Wang play in the NBA next season, and it reserves the right to bring him back at any time for national-security purposes. Xia explains: “It’s important to make a good first step.”
Yao wants to make a much bigger step. Like Wang, he is the son of two former basketball players–his father is 6 feet 10, his mother is 6 feet 4–and he’s been groomed for greatness since he was a child. Yao was sent to a special sports academy at the age of 13, when officials measured his knuckles (a common practice in China) and predicted, with uncanny accuracy, that he would grow to be 7 feet 5. Two years later Yao signed on with the Shanghai Sharks, a professional club that is jointly owned by the local government and a state-owned television station. Terry Rhoads, sports-marketing director for Nike China, remembers seeing Yao draining three-pointers when he was 15. Rhoads’s reaction: “We have just seen the future of Chinese basketball.”
Yao’s Shanghai patrons are irked that Beijing-bred Wang got to America before their native son. If the old-guard military in Beijing can get a player into the NBA, why can’t the dynamic, outward-looking city that represents the new China? Especially when Shanghai boasts one of the best young players in the world? At 20, Yao has already developed the frame and the game to be considered a potential franchise player. With the dearth of powerful big men in the NBA, he could grab a spot in this year’s draft that would virtually guarantee him a salary of more than $3 million a year for his first three years. (He earns about $70,000 a year in salary and endorsements in China.)
Yao’s earning potential off the court could be even higher. If he becomes a true NBA star–and, granted, he has a long way to go–the marketing possibilities would be staggering. Handsome, personable and increasingly conversant in English, Yao could become the poster boy for companies wanting to market their products to China and the rest of Asia. Even in America, where Asia is suddenly hip (think “Crouching Tiger”), Yao will be much more than a hidden dragon. Bill Duffy, the U.S. rep for Wang who is also advising Yao, says the big man will “be a window for America into China. And there will be 200 million people in China following him in America.”
The NBA understands the power of an icon. Ever since Michael Jordan retired three years ago, the league’s ratings and attendance figures have dropped steadily in the United States. To sustain growth, the NBA has expanded aggressively overseas and lured foreign talent to the league. (There are now 45 international players in the NBA, more than 10 percent of the total.) The final frontier is China, where some 200 million Chinese play basketball and NBA games are beamed to more than 300 million households each week. Soccer is the most popular sport in China, but basketball is becoming the hip domain of urban youth. “The thirst for basketball in China is incredible,” says Rhoads, whose company, Nike, sponsors high-school leagues and several CBA teams.
The NBA has only just begun its full-court press on China. But there are already roadblocks. China’s enormous TV market is still run by a monopoly that pays minuscule rights fees. The distribution of merchandise is spotty and unreliable. And counterfeiting remains a national pastime. (Even before Wang’s first game, fans were already buying fake Mavericks jerseys with Wang’s nickname–“Da Zhi.”) The NBA hopes these problems will disappear when China enters the World Trade Organization. But it is also banking on a big boost from Wang and Yao. “The only way to ignite the Asia market,” says Daniel Chiang, an entrepreneur from Taiwan involved in Asian professional basketball, “is to have local heroes that people can look up to.”
Right now, Yao cares little about being a hero. He just wants to play ball. But the decision to go to the NBA, it seems, is everybody’s but his. Yao seems determined to enter the draft (“It’s almost a sure thing,” he says), but he has to contend with a web of competing interests. Most government officials, including the mayor of Shanghai, support Yao’s NBA dreams. But some members of the Shanghai sports commission want Yao to stay behind to help the city win a national championship. The CBA, for its part, worries that the league will be crippled by the loss of its two biggest stars in the same year. A few days after Wang’s departure, CBA director Xin Lancheng told reporters: “Yao will not be going [to the NBA] this year.”
The trickiest maneuvering, however, is coming from the new capitalists who run Yao’s team, the Shanghai Sharks. Li Yaomin, the Sharks’ deputy general manager, has dreams of turning his club into the Los Angeles Lakers of China. That may not be possible without Yao, Shanghai’s version of the Lakers’ Shaquille O’Neal. Unless, of course, the club gets a load of benefits for giving him up. In March, Li invited NBA agents to make proposals for Yao’s release from his Sharks contract. It was a strange inversion of the American tradition in which players, not clubs, select agents. No matter: Li received pitches from several top names, including Wang’s agent, Bill Duffy, and Jordan’s former agent, David Falk.
What can the Sharks get for Yao? There is a limit on how much an NBA team can pay a foreign club for a player’s release: $350,000. Li is requesting that, and much more. His list of demands for the NBA team that drafts Yao includes training programs, exhibition games, TV and merchandising rights in China, players to replace Yao, even the right to bring their star back to play midseason. “Some of his ideas are off the wall,” says Tom McCarthy, head of ABC Promotions, a Hong Kong-based marketing company. “But if I were on the Chinese side, I’d be squeezing as much as I could because I have something the NBA wants.”
The real squeeze, however, is going on secretly right now, and it may affect Yao for the rest of his career. According to several sources close to the deal, the Sharks are currently negotiating with Yao’s parents to determine the amount that their son will have to give back to the club. Two years ago the parents signed–and then, a day later, tore up–an agreement that would have paid the club one third of Yao’s salary for the duration of his career. Today they are discussing a side deal in which the club would take up to $1 million a year from Yao’s salary, not including a cut of his endorsement contracts. “The club has Yao Ming over the barrel,” says one source close to the situation. “They’re saying, ‘You go under our conditions or you don’t go at all.’ With that choice, what will Yao do?”
The NBA may have to get used to capitalism with Chinese characteristics. “In China, sadly, there is no such thing as individual rights,” says one Chinese sports-marketing executive. “The [CBA] clubs feel they own players in perpetuity.” The NBA says it has no jurisdiction over side deals made between a foreign player and his club. But the National Basketball Players Association was set up precisely to ensure that a player is performing for himself, not for bosses back home. “They will scrutinize this deal very closely,” says one U.S. executive who deals with the NBA. “It could turn into a public-relations nightmare for the Chinese just as easily as it could show how much China is changing.”
Meanwhile, Yao is just waiting for the future. As he wandered through a Beijing mall last week, he had no place to hide. Children, teenage girls, adults–most of them no taller than his belt buckle–besieged him for autographs. Yao ducked (literally, ducked) into a coffee shop before heading to a CD store, where he picked up the latest album by the boy band Westlife. That evening, Yao retreated to the one place he can hide: surfing the Internet. Few of Yao’s chat-room pals know who he is. Nor do they know that his user name, Sabonis, is a tribute to another foreign center, Lithuania’s Arvydas Sabonis, who has already made it in the NBA. But with time, luck and crafty maneuvering, perhaps everybody in the world will know Yao Ming.
