For nearly a decade, China has been enthralled by the cult of Yao spun by Communist Party propagandists and corporate sponsors: the winner, the gentle giant, the favorite son. His image was ubiquitous here, and the public basked in his glow even as other Chinese players in the N.B.A. sputtered.
Yet his retirement is forcing many Chinese to acknowledge that their country has relied on Yao alone for victory and national pride, ignoring shortcomings in the state sports system that leave China facing a future bereft of N.B.A. and Olympic basketball glory.
I’ve probably mentioned here before that I spent a month in China in the summer of 2007 for grad school. Yao’s image was plastered everywhere, especially in his native Shanghai. One of the first Chinese guys I met asked me to “detail the extent of Yao’s genius and its influence on America.” I spotted basketball hoops inside the Forbidden City and at the base of the Great Wall at Badaling.
I should note now that I am a terrible basketball player by U.S. suburban kid standards. I’m a decent passer with a strong lower body and a good sense of physics so I’m vaguely useful grabbing rebounds, but I can’t hit a shot from outside 10 feet and I tend to dribble the ball off my feet. I never played any organized basketball at any level, and in pickup games I’m usually among the worst or the very worst player on the court.
But I played a few times with some dudes in Shanghai and felt like Allen Iverson. It was a small sample of both opponents and games, but it seemed like there was a certain baseline level of play and basketball coordination that came with growing up in the U.S. and playing regularly against better competition that made me a better player. Some of these kids clearly played pretty often. They all had better jumpshots than I did and several of them were better athletes, but even my rudimentary crossover dribbles beguiled them.
Again, it could just be that I happened upon one particularly terrible group of college-aged Chinese basketball players. But it stands to reason that if these guys grew up — according to Levin’s article — with no instruction at all, they’d hit a ceiling of sorts.
I’ll leave the sweeping discussions of Chinese economics to people who have studied them at greater lengths than I have, but in 2007, China was pretty clearly enduring frenzied change. I saw a shirtless man standing on a pile of rubble in the shadow of the Jin Mao Tower, holding a naked baby, talking on a cell phone, selling crabs out of a bucket. I don’t want to overstep my bounds as a sports and sandwich blogger, but I tend to figure once the pace of change settles a bit, that nation will come to things like youth basketball, and we’ll eventually see a huge influx of Chinese athletes in professional sports.
Tedquarters 