Waymoresports.com: Yao article

This is an article from a Toronto paper. www.waymoresports.com

Chris Young
SPORTS REPORTER

Take one 22-year-old basketball player with a frame you can't teach: 296 pounds spread over 7-foot-6 tall.

Add a silky mid-range jump shot, nice passing skills, shot-blocking ability, wheels that get him up and down the floor in something quicker than sundial time, even some post moves. Make him the No. 1 overall summer conscript to an already high-powered team that has everything but size. Give him an attitude that's as out of NBA fashion as Afros and hi-tops.

And oh, one more thing. Make him from China. World's biggest country, untapped market of 1.3 billion, including 12 million alone from his hometown of Shanghai.

And straight out of NBA central casting comes — Yao Ming, Next Big Thing. To Houston, Texas, which seems appropriate because they sure know a thing or two about big — big hats, big hair, big oil, big Enron swindle.

Yao Ming is big all right. Maybe big enough to drag a league out of the doldrums and halfway around the world. Maybe big enough to take a corner of North American pop culture into the final frontier, and bring some Far Eastern values to the hip-hop generation.

You don't think so? For years, we've been told a couple of things: that a billion Chinese don't give a damn about our games and, more recently, that North American marketers do give a damn about the Chinese — and Europe, and South America, and Australia, or just about everywhere else in the universe with the ability and inclination to plunk down $20 on a T-shirt.

Now comes potentially the greatest leap forward yet, a meeting of sports and business that could amount to a seismic paradigm shift. In Houston and around this entire league, the future is Yao. "He's a national treasure over there," says Houston Rockets spokesperson Nelson Luis. "But man, he has a lot on his shoulders."

That weight showed in his first NBA game on Wednesday night when he failed to score and picked up three fouls in only 11 minutes in a loss to Indiana. After playing last night in Denver, Yao makes his home debut tonight against the Toronto Raptors.

Basketball is the world's No. 2 team sport — only soccer is bigger, and that game has nowhere near the hold here that hoops does. NBA commissioner David Stern has been laying the groundwork of this penetration for 15 years or so, striking deals that at first virtually gave away league broadcasts to the far corners of the globe on tape delay. Those deals have grown into an increasingly lucrative revenue source, and along with them the number of players from outside the U.S. has increased — 66 are on the league's opening-night rosters, up from 52 a year ago.

At last year's all-star weekend, Stern suggested that within a decade, the NBA could be expanding overseas. It was blue-sky thinking, with nothing concrete in the way of planning behind it.

But Stern is nobody's fool. The league he has overseen for nearly two decades has hit a wall on this continent. With Yao coming finally to America, that day of international expansion could be a little closer.

"I don't think he can do it by himself — no single foreign player can get that done," says David Carter of the Los Angeles-based Sports Business Group. "But he is a very big piece of that puzzle. He gives the NBA the biggest platform."

Big? There's that word again. Just how big can be measured in a number of ways: An invite from visiting Chinese President Jiang Zemin and a photo opportunity that took him beyond the sports pages; the billboards around Houston pushing Yao with the tagline, "This Could be the Start of Something Big;" his 48-inch waist; the Yao bobble-head doll that's two inches taller than any of the other Rockets'.

Then there are big differences that are hardly the kind of thing you expect from a blueblooded NBA lottery pick. He hasn't sneered at the team that drafted him. Half of his $18 million (U.S.) contract will go to the Chinese basketball federation, part of the deal the Rockets brokered to get Yao here — and not a peep, no "show-me-the-money" whine.

Geez, the guy hasn't even bought himself one of those gas-guzzling, environmentally destructive SUVs that are an NBA brat's birthright. Matter of fact, he doesn't even have a driver's licence. But he does have a custom-made bicycle on order, his preferred mode of transport as a Chinese league pro in Shanghai.

For now, he is being chauffeured around. His parents, both of them former Chinese national team players, are in Houston to ease him through the culture shock that actually began a couple of years ago, on Yao's first trip to the U.S. to play the game.

"It was strange at first to see such passion and emotion in the game," he told ESPN Magazine. "When I went to America, I didn't like to dunk much. It's not the Chinese way."

Even before Yao had signed a contract, China's biggest beer maker Yanjing reached a six-year contract to become Houston's international partner — the first such partnership the league has ever seen. Yao's presence may end up being key, too, in securing a big-money naming rights deal for Houston's new 18,500-seat arena, which is scheduled to open at the beginning of next season.

None of this is new in sports. When Li Tie signed with Everton, the English Premier League soccer club was able to leverage its way into a two-year deal with Chinese cellphone company Kejian, even putting the name in Chinese script on its uniform tops. Sun Jihai, at Manchester City, is China's other high-profile star playing first-team soccer overseas. Their presence led to an agreement this summer for live Premiership broadcasts in China, the biggest such deal ever reached.

But those two, and a handful of women's soccer players from China, represent nowhere near the star potential of Yao in the eyes of marketers. Neither do Wang Zhi Zhi or Mengke Bateer, two other Chinese players in the NBA.

"Wang Zhi Zhi kind of set the table," says Terry Lyons of the NBA, "but if that's the case, then Yao Ming is sitting down for a big meal. His impact on basketball in China and in Asia will be like no player ever."

"There's really two elements to this, the import and the export," says Carter. "There are U.S. companies that would be interested in retaining Yao to help develop their markets in Asia, which is harder than it seems, but which is also very important with the 2008 (Olympic) Games coming up in Beijing. And he can also help import Asian and Chinese companies to America."

So it's no wonder the NBA is opening an office in Beijing, or has added a Chinese-language Web site enabling fans to vote for their all-star starters (what are the odds now that Yao will jump centre for the west, even ahead of perennial vote-leader Shaq-zilla?). The NBA last month brought on eight new regional Chinese television carriers, and as many as 30 Rockets games will be broadcast back to Yao's home country, most of them live.

As far away as here in Toronto, home to nearly half a million Chinese, ripple effects are showing. CCBC, the Raptors' local Chinese radio broadcaster, has added a Mandarin reporter for post-game interviews on the nights Yao, Wang and Bateer are here. The Raptors have had a five-year relationship with the Chinese Canadian Youth Athletic Association, which this year has bought between 500 and 700 tickets to five of their games — up from two last year, said vice-president Chris Overholt. One of those additional games is, naturally, Yao and the Rockets' lone visit to the Air Canada Centre on March 5.

"Yao's definitely given people here in the Chinese community a little more reason to follow the games," says Peter Au, chief executive officer at CCBC. "For us it's very much like Doug Flutie going to the NFL. Everybody wants to watch his progress."

Sure, Yao is not the first non-American cornerstone player — Nigerian Hakeem Olajuwon was that, and coincidentally he too had his glory days in Houston. But Yao is the first outsider to arrive with no U.S. background.

That very unfamiliarity, though, may make him a tough sell to North America's mass audience. Like the country he hails from, Yao is still very much an enigma to them.

"I think the fact that he rarely shows much expression in a lot of his photos gives him some of that Ivan Drago-like feel (Rocky IV) — a star who dominated another country brings his trade to ours," says David Hardisty, who runs Clutchcity.net, a Web site for Rockets fans. "I think a lot of American-based casual fans though, already dismiss him as a bust — the next Shawn Bradley. So it will take the play of Yao Ming, in my opinion, to really shape his image."

That Yao has ended up in Houston is not nearly as outlandish as it might seem at first glance. It's the fourth-largest city in the U.S., with the eighth-largest Asian community.

It was reported that on his first day of practice, one of his new Rockets teammates asked him the standard "Wassup?" Yao replied with a hearty laugh, that NBA greeting sounding something like a Chinese obscenity.

Hey, a big language barrier remains. Then again, next to Yao Ming, how big could it be?