Apocalypse Yao
IT’S easy to get hung up on Yao Ming’s height when, at 7’-6”, he stands out even among the human skyscrapers of the NBA. Ming is so big he was kept awake by growing pains in his teens as his body stretched during the night, and at eight years of age he had reached the average Chinese adult height of 5’-5”.
Even at birth he was the size of an average Chinese four-year-old. However, that birth was no accident. A new book by Brook Larmer, former Newsweek magazine bureau chief in Shanghai, alleges Yao Ming’s arrival had been anticipated for years by Chinese Communist Party officials desperate to boost the nation’s pride through sport. The officials had kept an eye on the family — and others — for decades, equipping doctors with special growth-predicting manuals that measured youngsters’ bones and pubic hair in order to identify the size of future athletes.
It’s hardly surprising, since the obsession with size came from the very top of Chinese society. For instance, the height of China’s ruler, Deng Xiaoping, was a genuine State secret until his death in 1997, with best estimates topping out at 4’ 11”. Self-conscious about his stature, when Deng was photographed with western leaders the picture was often taken at a 45-degree angle to give the impression of equivalent height. That obsession filtered down the government ranks, with height requirements strictly enforced for prospective diplomats. Given the attractions of life abroad as a diplomat, many Chinese underwent leg-lengthening operations to become eligible — operations in which the leg bones are broken and then stretched in a brace to encourage new tissue to grow.
With that top-level height obsession mixed with the traditional Communist focus on sport as a representation of state ideology, it’s no surprise sports chiefs were under pressure to find big men.
Yao’s grandfather was one of Shanghai’s tallest men but was found too late for basketball, which has a long history in China. Yao’s father Yao Zhiyuan, 6’-7”, took up the sport and got to know Fang Fengdi, 6’-2”, captain of the Chinese women’s basketball team and a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution.
The two were encouraged to marry, with the word “encourage” under severe pressure. Arranged marriages weren’t uncommon, but under the Communist regime there was another twist — marriages had to be approved by a work-unit leader. In the late seventies Yao Zhiyuan and Fang Fengdi were encouraged by their team leader to “make do” with each other, and they married in 1979. In September 1980 Yao Ming was born and there was never any doubt about what sport he’d play. At eight years of age he began serious basketball training, but there was one drawback: he didn’t like the sport.
He certainly didn’t impress immediately at Xuhui District Sports School. Though obviously very tall, Yao’s skinny torso was at variance with his thick legs and large backside, which earned him the early nickname of “the fat penguin”, and he lacked both speed and stamina, completing only one lap in the time it took others to do four circuits of the basketball court. (It could have been worse: table tennis players his age were trained by taking 700 hundred shots in one ten-minute period with one hand, then repeating with the other hand. All day).
The humiliations continued. When the boys were 12 they were all taken to the Talent Selection Office in the school to be examined by doctors in order to determine their progress. This procedure involved the boys standing naked in front of doctors, having their groins investigated for pubic hairs, and then being told to squat. As they did so their testicles were cupped by a doctor who would roll each ball between thumb and forefinger; all of the above was done with a view to establishing their future height and build.
Yao, with his impeccable pedigree, was sent through to the next level of sports education, and at 13 he went to the Sports Technology Institute in Shanghai to train full-time as a basketball player. He was already 6-6, but with years of growth ahead of him, the authorities wanted him even bigger. He was spared weight training as that was thought to retard growth and he was told not to do stretching exercises for the same reason; he was also told to take long afternoon naps, as the doctors felt he’d grow far quicker in his sleep.
Yet despite all the care and attention the young Yao suffered. His bones were dangerously low in calcium, and his heart and lungs seriously underdeveloped. To remedy these problems he was given gallons of milk, double dosages of bee pollen and fed with red meat and vitamin-enriched wheat. He was also given strange home-made concoctions. This is where the Irish reader will sit up straight in the chair, given Sonia O’Sullivan’s experiences in the early nineties against Chinese runners fed on “caterpillar juice”.
The coach responsible for those performances, a former prison guard called Ma Junren, gave the credit for his girls’ success in international athletics to his unorthodox training methods: he claimed to have banned distractions like boyfriends, to have channelled his mother’s ‘deer spirit’ and forced his girls to run a marathon a day — at 7,000 feet — while feeding them all the while on turtle’s blood and dead caterpillar fungus. The latter — dongchongxiacao in Chinese — is a tonic which tastes of liquorice and is credited with being fifty times more potent than ginseng.
Larmer is careful to stress that while proof of steroid or growth hormone abuse involving Yao Ming is not available, the practice of giving athletes unidentified substances after training is clearly open to misinterpretation. Members of China’s national table-tennis team were given an unidentified blue liquid to drink after training, for instance, while basketball players received chocolate-flavoured powders to “enhance their energy”. The better the player, the higher the dosage — top basketball players are supposedly given red pills which, while damaging the liver and kidneys, have a highly stimulating effect, according to one player: “The pills make you want to have sex all the time, even after a hard practice.”
This was the environment Yao found himself in, but the young giant flourished. His skills improved, his strength developed and he kept on growing. His career arc also lurched upwards when, late in the autumn of 1996, Terry Rhoads walked off the Nanjing Road in Shanghai and into a local gym to see an event welcoming the local club, the Sharks, to the first division of the Chinese Basketball Association. When Rhoads saw the 16-year-old Yao Ming, already 7’2”, come out and start sinking three-pointers in the shootaround, alarm bells started going off in his head. Or maybe it was the clanging of a cash register.
Rhoads was no casual observer, as the swoosh tattooed on his left calf would testify. Charged by Nike with opening up the Asian market, he had stumbled across the hottest property in Chinese basketball — in Chinese sport — and couldn’t get an introduction fast enough, though there was one small problem. As Rhoads and the other Nike representatives crowded around Yao, one of them looked at the giant’s feet and piped up: “Hey, this is a Nike party, why are you wearing Adidas?”
Yao said those were the only shoes which were big enough for him — they’d been donated by a player on the women’s national team — and added he could never find any to fit. Rhoads pounced, e-mailed the Nike headquarters in Bradenton immediately and within days a brand-new pair of Nike Airs — size 18 — were hand-delivered to Yao at home. Nike pressed home their advantage by delegating Frank Sha, a Shanghai native whose father had coached Yao’s mother. Sha helped the footwear giants court Yao by bringing him to the new restaurants popping up in Shanghai such as the Hard Rock Cafe, an apt symbol of Yao’s future in the west.
There were hiccups along the way — Yao’s eligibility for the NBA draft was held up for a couple of years — but there were also positives. The American link enabled Yao to visit the US in 1998 for a summer of Nike-sponsored basketball and touring, and the teenager’s genuine, long-held dislike of the game crumbled as the possibility of life as an NBA player sank in. Yao also developed his game, moving away from the regimented Chinese approach and adding such decadent American skills as the dunk, which was frowned upon at home.
YAO signed for the Houston Rockets of the NBA in 2002 — suggestions for a nickname ranged from “Ming Kong” to “Apocalypse Yao” — for four years at $17.8m, a fat contract boosted by a Nike endorsement deal. The consensus is he’s learned well and is a valuable asset to the Rockets, having overcome early shyness to face down the likes of Shaquille O’Neal in a much-publicised head-to-head and to trash-talk with other huge players (threatening to stick the mouthpiece of Chicago’s Tyson Chandler down his throat). Yao even found time to appear as a guest in The Simpsons.
The Chinese giant learned his lessons well in other contexts also. Nike, thanks to Rhoads’ foresight, had bagged the big man early on, sponsoring him from 1998, but their funding was generous only by Chinese standards. In late 2003, when his contract was up for renewal, Nike were supplying him with a standard issue pair of basketball boots and a relatively paltry $50,000 per annum. Reebok saw their opportunity and offered Yao a contract worth $60 million, with the potential to rise to $100 million. When he signed with their rivals, Nike executives were shocked; it was the first time they’d ever lost a head-to-head battle with another company over an athlete.
In a delicious irony, the child of a Red Guard — born at the behest of communism — had learned a little more about capitalism than his teachers.
Operation Yao Ming by Brook Larmer is published by Penguin USA.
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