As the most coveted of all the new players joining the league that year, Yao was following in the footsteps of American sporting giants like “Magic” Johnson and Shaquille O’Neal. In 2002, Yao’s extraordinary frame helped to make him the first overall draft pick of the 2002 NBA Season – a previously unimaginable achievement for a Chinese athlete. This extends to his own body, its gifts and various betrayals. “I believe in acceptance if you can’t change something, then do better, try to embrace it.”
#Yao ming parents professional
That is the only way they were hard on me.”ĭuring the course of our conversation, it quickly becomes clear that Yao’s philosophy of life – the philosophy that led him to professional basketball, to the US, and even to his role in superpower relations – is to accept what he cannot change. I appreciate that they allowed me to have very flexible teenage years – they didn’t give me pressure about school or basketball, they only insisted that I be patient and persist. Of his parents he says: “The older I am, the more I take their way as my guide.
Yao does not resent that – nor pretty much any of the firm direction he received when he was young. They encouraged him to enter a state sports school from the age of nine. At 11.2lb and 23in long, Larmer says he was nearly twice the size of the average Chinese newborn of the era.Īnd although Deng Xiaoping had just decreed the end of communism as China had previously known it, the state still thought it had a duty to help little Yao fulfil his manifest destiny to play basketball. Then again, the Shanghai sports authorities knew from the beginning that Yao junior was going to be a big boy. Yao the politician, at a meeting of the Shanghai People’s Congress, 2011 © AFP Yao says the Shanghai Sharks – a team he once played for and now owns – still use that method. Yao says that, with him, the doctors got it spot on: “When I was 12 or 13, they measured my hands,” he says, alluding to a technique that predicts a child’s final height from their “bone age”. We’d joke with them and say, ‘Just imagine how tall your children would be.’”Ĭhinese scientists even developed some intriguing methods for figuring out just how tall their loftiest comrades would grow. Larmer quotes the former basketball coach of Yao’s mother saying: “We were always telling Da Yao and Da Fang (“Big Yao” and “Big Fang”, Yao Ming’s parents), ‘You are both so tall.
At a time when communism had a hand in every decision, from what the masses ate (or failed to eat) to whom they married, Yao’s parents were nudged towards becoming the tallest married couple in Shanghai, according to Brook Larmer’s 2005 book, Operation Yao Ming. His mother was 6ft 2in, his father 6ft 10in – so the party “encouraged” them to pursue a career in basketball. It started before Yao, now 33, was even conceived. His body has made a lot of his decisions for him, from cars to careers to his role in history. It soon becomes clear that being Yao Ming is not always easy.
“I don’t have the luxury to pick my own car,” he says wistfully. Asked what car he drives, he says he owns a Range Rover – because most cars are not big enough for him. He has nothing personal against smallness. Yao gazes at the tower, bristling with cranes. The tail of a typhoon is whipping Shanghai and the wind has cleared the usual noxious haze, so we have a clear view of the 127-floor Shanghai Tower, soon to be the tallest building in a country obsessed with skyscraper one-upmanship. When he looks across to the mega-tall skyline of Shanghai’s financial district, Lujiazui, Yao doesn’t feel so big. Only the high-rise city can diminish his stature. His head, with its distinctive flat-top, seems preternatural. At 7ft 6in, he is like Tiananmen Square: built to dwarf the merely mortal. China’s greatest basketball player – its ultimate sporting ambassador, possibly its most famous living citizen – is not just tall. When Yao Ming lumbers into our interview room at the elegant M on The Bund restaurant in Shanghai, he stoops to enter through a doorway made for lesser men.
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