NBA.com: Sleeping Giant (yao article)

http://www.nba.com/features/hoop_yao_april2004.html

The Chinese New Year was on January 22 this year. For millions of Chinese, like Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, it is a day that is normally set aside for celebration and joy with family. Instead, he fought Houston traffic with his translator Colin Pine, met his team, answered questions from the media, flew to Indianapolis, signed some autographs and talked to some more reporters. It was almost 9 PM before his time was his own again, even though a cancelled practice made this one of his slowest days since joining the NBA.
These are the kinds of adjustments Yao expected when he left his lifelong home of Shanghai for the NBA in October ’02. Even rookies groomed by American coaches with NBA-style training techniques normally wither for a season or two as they learn how to cope with new pressures. Life in the League is built around an absurd amount of travel, precious little sleep and free time that comes only in odd chunks of hours, never days, and usually in strange cities. There is not enough time for muscles to recover between games and there is plenty of scrutiny from the media and everyone else if you make a mistake.



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This article appears in the April 2004 issue of Hoop Magazine.
And then there is the fun part of your job: about 100 times a year you square off against keyed-up professionals hell-bent on abusing, embarrassing and humiliating you. Welcome to the League, rookie. Of course, on top of all that, Yao faces challenges just speaking English; eating, sleeping, talking, getting around and making friends in American culture; and managing the massive expectations of fans around the world.

“What Yao’s attempting is unfathomable,” says former NBA All-Star center and commentator Bill Walton. “The NBA season is a brutal grind. It drains you in every way—physically, mentally, emotionally, psychically, spiritually. And he is also attempting to bridge two cultures that could not be more different.”

His patience, hard work, open-mindedness and sense of humor are constants. Even as reporters and opponents try their best to ratchet up the pressure on him, he maintains Yoda-esque poise when answering questions—even including little fables and analogies to make his subtle points. He never says a mean word about anyone and he has a knack for taking the high road to dispel controversy.

On the court, he has made himself a shoo-in for a decade of NBA All-Star games.

“He’s already the second-best center in the world,” says Walton, who ranks only Shaquille O’Neal ahead of the 23-year-old Yao, “and he’s just getting started.”

With averages in the neighborhood of 17 points and nine rebounds at midseason, Yao’s game has obviously evolved from last season. In addition to his impressive 53.1 field-goal percentage, he has shown uncommon court awareness and deft passing skills—finding cutting teammates for open layups and jumpers—as well as making his presence known on the defensive end, blocking 1.8 shots per game and intimidating countless others.

The only question now is whether or not he will be the kind of NBA All-Star who wins championships and makes the Hall of Fame or not. Big men like Yao, who is listed at an incredible 7-5, are notoriously late bloomers.

It is a mistake, though, to measure Yao’s success based on his personal achievements and statistics—as those things do not necessarily relate to his stated goals. Late in the evening of Chinese New Year’s Day, glad to be sitting down at last in his Indianapolis hotel room, Yao says that his only specific goal for the Year of the Monkey is to help the Rockets make the playoffs, something they haven’t done since ’99, and to play well for China in the Athens Olympic Games.

He is doing his fair share for Houston—at the time of this interview he is in the middle of a stretch of games that will see him shoot 65 percent from the floor and 86 percent from the line while averaging 23 points and 11 rebounds per game. Against the Knicks a few days later, he will score 29, while missing only three shots. A few days after that in Orlando he will stick a career-high 37 on the Magic.

Speaking through an interpreter, Yao admits he has plenty of room to improve despite his streak of solid games.

“It’s like last year I was chasing behind the car,” he says. “This year I am riding in the car.” In the future, one can assume, he intends to get behind the wheel.

Yao has a new coach this year; Jeff Van Gundy replaced Rudy Tomjanovich, and he says an attitude shift is the only thing standing between Yao and a Hall of Fame-type career. Van Gundy calls “confidence, decisiveness and no hesitation” the keys to his development.

Yao concurs, and has been working hard to be more assertive, despite the rumors that his Chinese upbringing might somehow prevent him from doing so.

“I’m not worried about whether it’s some cultural problem or not,” says Yao. “I’m just worried about how to fix it.”

Van Gundy recognizes the effort. It seems, though, that some aspects of the advice Yao has been getting lately have created something of a conundrum of personality and perhaps of culture, too. The exact traits that have allowed Yao to succeed as a newcomer in a demanding environment—his patience, friendliness, humility and open-mindedness—are being called hindrances to his development as a player.

As the argument goes, all those things that make him so nice and so mature are keeping him from having the kind of competitive fire that fuels a lot of top American athletes. Off the court, it is very hard to see why anyone would try to learn to have anger, but in the NBA, there is an argument that it’s a trait that is required for survival.



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Yao and the Rockets have had success against Shaquille O'Neal's Lakers, winning two of three meetings this season.
Bill Baptist/NBAE/Getty Images
Yao is the product of a Chinese system that was designed for him to succeed. He was sought out at a young age and groomed by the finest professionals his country had to offer. There was plenty of hardship—cramped apartments, grueling all-day practices from a brutally early age and a total lack of free-spirited fun (his next game of pickup playground basketball will be his first). As a player in China, Yao was discouraged from dunking the ball, as it is perceived as showing up your opponent. Despite clearly being the best player on his teams in China, Yao was taught never to let his individual gifts and game shine above the team.

Does that put Yao at a disadvantage? At least one unnamed Eastern Conference official believes it does, openly bemoaning Yao’s lack of a mean streak in The New York Times, and suggesting that without some nastiness, Yao might never have what it takes to wrestle a championship from O’Neal and his Lakers.

One person who knows Yao’s friendly side best is Knicks guard Moochie Norris. He played with Yao until a midseason trade to New York and still plans on spending his offseasons at home right next door to the house in Houston where Yao lives with his mother and translator Colin Pine.

“He is kind of a finesse big guy,” allows Norris, “but it took Shaq a few years to work out how to use his body in this League, too. Yao can learn that, too. Even now, when you pound him and get him angry, he can get down there in the paint and get that Shaq mentality. That’s what they’re trying to get him to do.”

That kind of talk gives Walton chills.

“Everybody wants Yao to be Shaq. They want him to use his body as a battering ram to get to the hoop,” says Walton. “But he has a completely different game, based on skill, timing and position, and he should be encouraged in that.”

A man known for his tie-dyes and Birkenstocks, Walton has long walked a philosophical tightrope between Jerry Garcia and his college coach John Wooden—the common themes being selflessness, love and dedication to a cause bigger than one’s self. So it’s no surprise that Walton brushes aside the argument that Yao lacks anger.

“It doesn’t matter where the motivation comes from,” he says. “It can come from the urge to have financial success, from some sort of grudge, the pretty girl sitting in the stands. The source is irrelevant.”

As a player, Walton was a tremendously skilled and dominant center with an uncommon willingness to share the ball. It’s clear that he hopes Yao will be taught to follow in his footsteps. He cringes at talk of this once-in-a-lifetime player being reduced to a bully.

Yao isn’t breaking new ground on the gentle giant theory. Despite the dominance of his era, the late Wilt Chamberlain never exactly possessed a take-no-prisoners approach on the court. Wilt had an advanced understanding of the game, and would pull back on the ferocity of his play when appropriate. Fearful that he might injure an opponent’s hand as he reared back to dunk a basket, he would sometimes opt for a finger roll or simple layup. To prove to his detractors that he was more than an overpowering physical specimen, Wilt set out to lead the League in assists—and did it, leading the NBA in total assists (702) in ’67-68.

Former Knick great Patrick Ewing—who signed on as one of Van Gundy’s assistants more or less to tutor Yao—played physically, but also relied on a skillful stroke from beyond 15 feet. The games of Hakeem Olajuwon and David Robinson were based more on their cat-like agility and quickness then on sheer brawn. At the same time, the aforementioned pivots were by no means pushovers. All were physical forces in the middle and intimidated any opponent that dared to venture into the paint during their watch.

Though he might not prescribe anger for Yao, Walton concedes Yao might want to think about at least finding a way to be more intimidating and annoying. Ewing says he wants his protégé to learn the art of physical play so as to scare away aggressive, double-teaming defenders.

Walton can’t bring himself to disagree. “All the great champions,” he says, “have a certain something about them that makes them very unpleasant to play against. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was the greatest scorer in the history of the League. His skyhook was unstoppable, and every time he shot it with his right arm, his left arm elbowed you in the throat. Magic Johnson was throwing elbows every time he got in the lane and Larry Bird would bop you every chance he got, too.”

In a ’92 interview with Playboy, Michael Jordan confessed that his Bulls only beat the famous Detroit Pistons “Bad Boys” once they started dishing as many elbows as they had been receiving. For Yao, it’s not about throwing elbows and landing cheap shots as it is about developing that killer instinct that separates the great from the good.

Van Gundy could be just the coach to teach it; his teams have long been known for a certain physicality. When he coached the Knicks, his team lost a game in Philadelphia that saw guard Allen Iverson blatantly knocked hard to the floor time and again.

When reporters asked Van Gundy about his team’s rough play, he shrugged. “You can’t be physical in the NBA,” he said, incredulous that anyone would suggest any such thing had been part of a game that clearly, to his eyes, had been child’s play. “Iverson flops around a little bit,” he added, “but we’re not a physical team.”

For a player of Yao’s size, being physical is useful in warding off the shorter guards who are most likely to abandon their man on the perimeter to double-team him in the post. Double-teams force the player with the ball to make a quick decision and a smart pass in the face of tough physical defense, and learning to deal with the double-team is one of the greatest barriers to stardom in the NBA. Given that reality, the smartest move for Yao might be to make his presence felt to people like his friend, neighbor and occasional double-teamer Moochie Norris.

That’s the kind of thing he’s working on these days. Yao spends a lot of time with Ewing, who is charged with helping Yao master the art of surviving in that precious real estate under the NBA basket—or at least avoiding punishment like the elbow he got from Knicks guard Stephon Marbury that clearly shocked him in a game in January.

Whether Yao will see the wisdom of Ewing’s message remains to be seen. “Patrick and I have a good relationship and he has an abundant amount of experience,” prefaces Yao. “The way he acts when we practice, it’s almost like he’s younger than I am. He spends all the time yelling, jumping around and making a scene. It makes me tired just to look at him.”

It also begs the question: As much as Yao is learning from the League, might there be a little something the League could learn from Yao?