Since its inception, the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame has always been a place for giants of the game.
Yao Ming makes it bigger.
Not just for his massive 7-foot-6 frame, but for his outsized stature in helping to take the game global.
Not merely for the slam dunks he hammered down on the court, but for the planks of understanding he put together between East and West during nine often eye-opening years in the NBA.
Not only for the baskets that he scored, but for the relationships that he built.
Almost from the moment he arrived in Houston as the No. 1 pick in the 2002 draft, Yao was an outsized cultural and corporate icon whose reach extended across a vast ocean. He blended the introspective, whatever-is-best-for-the-community attitude of China into the brash, look-at-me American society and did it seamlessly.
What is easy to forget is that amid the hype of being the top overall selection in the draft, Yao was a 22-year-old who arrived in America as a rookie living abroad for the first time with so much to learn on and off the court.
In a recent post written for The Players Tribune, Yao remembered those early days in Houston, the culture shock he experienced and the welcome embrace he received from teammate Steve Francis:
“In the Chinese tradition, when you meet someone for the first time you stay back a little bit. You say hello, shake hands, but it is very formal. Over time, like a pot of water that slowly heats up, you get to know someone and get more comfortable. Steve wasn’t that way. Steve was boiling water right away. On the court or off the court, Steve was 200 degrees all the time. I instantly liked him.
“I didn’t know this at the time, but before I arrived, the Rockets had hired a Crhinese professor from a local university to teach the team about Chinese customs. Everyone was so friendly and trying very hard to show me that they knew some things about Chinese culture. They showed me that they even knew little things, like how Chinese people hold a business card with two hands when we exchange it. I laugh when I think about it. At the time, all I wanted was for everyone to treat me the same as any other NBA player. But it was those small things that made me feel their warmth toward me.”
Growing in new home
Yao grew from the timid, tentative stranger in a strange land who did not score in his first NBA game and spoke to the U.S. media through an interpreter into a confident, dominant post player who became a one-of-the-guys jokester and an All-American trash-talker on the day he blasted the L.A. Clippers for 32 points and after one turnaround jumper defiantly shouted, “You try to (bleeping) stop me!”
Early in his rookie season, Hall of Famer Charles Barkley told his TNT partner Kenny Smith, “I’ll kiss your ass if Yao Ming scores 20 points in a game.” And a few weeks later, there was Chuck puckering up to the back end of a donkey during a halftime show after Yao delivered against the Lakers.
The big man credited Francis and coach Rudy Tomjanovich for helping him assimilate.
“Rudy gave me very important advice: ‘Don’t waste any energy on the things you cannot control.’
“In the first half of my rookie year, I had a lot of ups and downs. I didn’t play my best. I figured out that people will compliment you and people will criticize you no matter what you do on the court. Rudy helped me a lot in that way.
“The difference between the Chinese Basketball Association, 20 years ago, and the NBA was not skill only. It was a different understanding of basketball. I had to change my understanding of the game. In the CBA, my height scared people. When they saw how tall I was, they gave me space to work. In the NBA, every possession was a fight. I learned that big men have to play faster. Back then, in the CBA, the game would usually slow down to the big man’s pace. In the NBA, it was a sprint from the very, very beginning. If you could not run at same speed as the guards, you could not compete.
Yao never bristled at the criticism, but laughed at and appreciated all of the jokes.
Following a game late in that rookie season, Yao was conducting his customary postgame interview session through his interpreter, an earnest fellow named Colin Pine. Each time this reporter asked a question, Pine would repeat it in Mandarin to Yao and then translate Yao’s answers back for me.
Finally, when asked about one play near the end of the game, Yao answered directly in near-flawless English. The dutiful Pine instinctively repeated the answer.
When I told Pine, “Thanks, but I don’t need help translating English,” Yao exploded into laughter and nearly fell out of his chair.
A world ambassador
In his travels throughout the league, Yao made everyone he came into contact with feel comfortable, which isn’t always easy when your perspective on life is 7 1/2 feet off the ground. He did it with a virtually unparalleled work ethic that earned the respect of teammates and coaches. He also did it with a down-to-earth attitude that was warm and embracing.
During a trip to his hometown of Shanghai for a preseason game, Yao was almost giddy as he took a minivan full of friends on a personal tour of his roots in the vast city. The small group, which included then-coach Jeff Van Gundy, strolled through the courtyard of the apartment building where Yao grew up and visited his primary school, where he learned to read and write and took his very first shot attempt at the basket outside in the playground.
“Another airball,” cracked wiseguy Van Gundy when Yao tried to re-create the youthful attempt.
“Hey, coach,” Yao replied wryly, “have you ever carried your country’s flag in the Olympics?”
His verbal shots could be as deft as his jumper, but were always accompanied by an open smile.
Personally, Yao was less the forbidding Great Wall of China and more China’s Welcome Mat.
Yao was the symbol of an emerging China in the 21st century, as big a pitch man as he was a center, doing humorous TV commercials with actor Vern Troyer ? Mini-Me from the Austin Powers movies ? and, of course, with Barkley. He was seen as the bridge across the Pacific, bringing together two vastly different cultures on the common grounds of sports and capitalism.
“For Chinese, he is a symbol of modernization and professionalization in the sporting industry,” Steven W. Lewis, an Asia expert at Rice University, told the New York Times. “But he also has this incredible political symbolism … the ability of Chinese to go out and compete in the world.”
The league used Yao as a key to unlock the vast Chinese market — No. 2 worldwide behind only the U.S. — for the NBA. China used Yao as an ambassador for its emerging influence in the global market. The depth of China’s affinity for the NBA would be greatly tested by the absence of the favorite son, just as China’s progress in the world basketball arena would be stunted without Yao. The Chinese national team has regressed without him. His arrival in the NBA did not signal an opening of the floodgates bringing in more top-level players. Los Angeles Lakers forward Yi Jianlian (No. 6 pick in the 2007 draft) is, at best, an NBA journeyman. There is no other transcendent successor to Yao on the horizon, though 7-foot-2 Zhou Qi was chosen in the 2016 draft.
Yao led China to its three best Olympic performances ever, eighth place finishes in 1996, 2000 and 2004. He was voted MVP of the FIBA Asian Championship in 2001, 2003 and 2005. He was MVP of the Chinese Basketball Association as he drove the Shanghai Sharks to the championship in 2002, ahead of making the jump to the NBA.
On the court and in the locker room, Yao was always known as a tireless worker and an excellent teammate.
Falling short on court
The Rockets had planned to use Yao as the linchpin for a new basketball dynasty in Houston, a link to their back-to-back championships in 1994 and 1995 and the linear descendant to the Hall of Fame foursome of Elvin Hayes, Moses Malone, Ralph Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon as dominant Houston big men.
But the dynasty and the championships never came when he was paired in 2004 with the equally star-crossed Tracy McGrady. They never won a championship, in fact, never won a playoff series together. Yao won his only playoff series in 2009 when McGrady was shelved, defeating the Portland Trail Blazers in the first round, and two games later, in the West semifinals against the Lakers, suffered the broken bone in his foot that led to the end of his playing career at age 30. Yet he was an eight-time NBA All-Star and five times was voted to one of the All-NBA teams.
“I wished so much that I could have played for a championship for the Rockets and for the city of Houston, which had become another home to me,” Yao said at the time of his retirement. “I got the joy of the playoffs that one time when we beat the Trail Blazers and I always wanted so much more.”
Without Yao returning, the Rockets were forced to start over virtually from scratch. Without Yao, the Rockets, the NBA and the American sports scene became a less interesting place.
Of all his predecessors who have been enshrined in the Hall of Fame, few have contributed the effect in sheer numbers as Yao, who brought the fervent attention of the most populous nation on the planet to the NBA, allowing former commissioner David Stern’s vision of a global footprint to take a step closer to reality. When Yao and fellow countryman Yi squared off for the first time in their NBA careers on Nov. 9, 2007, more than 200 million people watched the game on TV in China, an audience larger than the Super Bowl.
Full circle at 2008 Olympics
When the 2008 Olympics went to Beijing, Yao was China’s unofficial ambassador to the world, the touchstone to an ancient society who had rubbed elbows with Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant and Hollywood celebrities. His was the face that his government and his fellow citizens wanted to put forward as the symbol of the nascent century.
Even at the showcase of the Olympic Games, where he was the flag bearer leading Team China at the Opening Ceremonies, Yao was pulled in different directions. Having just come off another surgery that had cut short his NBA season, Rockets fans had hoped he would sit out. But the emotional and patriotic tug from his homeland was too great and he played with a badly injured foot. Yet he handled the situation with grace and dignity.
“There’s always pressure on me,” Yao said. “That’s my life. I accept it. It is a different burden for me. I can tell you I have two careers. Most players don’t have that experience. You play for the professional league, the NBA, the best league in the world. If you win titles in this league, that would be wonderful.
“The Olympics was a national honor, a dream I have when I am young. It was obligation and an expectation that I have. The whole country was focused on the games in Beijing. Basketball is a big game in China.”
Even bigger because he made it so.
It is both cruel and ironic that the only place that China’s best-ever basketball player could not measure up to the greatest expectations was on the court. His is an NBA career that will be remembered more for promise than for proof, potential that never came to full bloom.
Yao could not deliver on the next Rockets championship dynasty due to injuries, a man whose head scraped the clouds brought down at ground level by his feet. Having missed just two games due to injury in his first three seasons, a series of fractures to his feet and ankles kept Yao out of 250 games over the next six years until announcing his premature retirement in December 2010.
However, it is inaccurate and unwise to say Yao never stood tallest. During the stretch from 2006-08, he was most deserving of the starting center spot for the Western Conference in the NBA All-Star Game. During the season before Dwight Howard’s ascendance and with Shaq past his peak, Yao was the best center in basketball, averaging 23 points, 10.4 rebounds, 1.9 blocked shots and shot 51.4 percent from the field. At the same time, Yao was the greatest ambassador that his country and the game could ever have.
It took other international stars many years to make the ultimate mark on the NBA. Olajuwon was in his 10th season when he led the Rockets to their first championship in franchise history.
It took Dirk Nowitzki 13 years of perseverance to finally get to raise that championship trophy in Dallas. Due to the successive foot injuries, Yao never got that chance, a career cut off in its prime, at 30. But a legacy that stretched around the globe.
As the home to basketball’s giants, Yao Ming makes the Hall of Fame bigger.
