America gets best of Yao's big adventure By JONATHAN FEIGEN Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle Yao Ming will return to Shanghai in a week or so, free from the nearly unrelenting and often suffocating scrutiny of the past six months. He will have had a few days without the constant examination of his every move and spoken word. He will have rested in a week spent without opposing players trying to test or punish him. He will have enjoyed a week without the media that never tired of their search for truths about him hidden in the pithy comebacks he used to keep it from getting too close. But sometime in the days that will follow his homecoming, someone -- a friend, a teammate, a stranger waiting in line for cappuccino -- will ask about his adventure. Yao did not know what he would say. But in the examination of the Rockets' season, it has almost been lost that this first season with the Yao Ming circus was all so incredible. Others have received endless media attention. It long ago became a part of Michael Jordan's life. Shaquille O'Neal drew mobs of media as a rookie. But with Yao, it was different. There was from the start a fascination about him, as if we removed the usual sports blinders to understand the novelty of a Chinese citizen joining a Western professional sports league. And he let enough of himself show to inspire the endless examinations. There were inane questions. "What does he eat?" translator Colin Pine was often asked as if he were Joan Embry bringing animals to the Tonight Show. "Why are you so tall," Yao was asked. Yao caught glimpses of each city's image of itself. In an Indianapolis or Detroit, he would be asked what he knew of each town. In New York or Washington, he was asked if he had seen the sights, certain that he knew of that town's wonders. He was often treated as a prop as anchormen and disc jockeys would expect him to pose in gags about his height as if he were nothing more than a cardboard cutout. As the fascination with him became obvious, he seemed more aware of the responsibility to represent his country and culture. He said he would just be himself and that would have to do, and he was right. But in many ways, all the examination showed him to be what he truly wanted to be, a driven, ambitious athlete. "He's just like us -- only 7-foot-6 and Chinese," Steve Francis said. And we all laughed. But Francis was right. Once anyone bothered to look beyond the most obvious -- that he is tall and from China -- Yao was primarily a gifted athlete with the same goals. He brought extra charm and wit, and it helped him get by. But he was here for the same thing as his teammates. So when he is asked what it was really like in America, he likely will be too modest to admit that he became such an object of fascination. "I guess," he said last week, "people did not know much about people from China." That seemed fair. It turns out while we were all so curiously watching him, he was watching us. He might not be able to explain why we found him so fascinating. But at his first season's end, it seems we got the better of the deal.
