Yao turned down more money from Nike

btw, I just did a quick search online, and the contract figure seems to be a bit less than I remembered. here are the search results:

Nike signed LBJ to a 90 million contract
Nike signed Kobe to a 8-9 million per contract from 04 to 07, making it somewhere between $30 million-$40 millnion in total (I'm not sure whether this figure includes all the conditional bonuses or not).

so LBJ + 2/3 of Kobe comes to a bit less than $120 million.
Reebok had a offer of about 40%, which comes to about $50 million.

by turning down Nike's 2nd offer, Yao turned down at least $70 million in sponsorships, not to mention the added requirement of 3 all star appearances in the next 7 years.

-- so yes, I'm sticking to my original point, which is you'd better believe that there was something REALLY wrong to piss off Yao like that.

 

I am sorry, but have a hard time believing nike would offer more for yao then lebron. When I was in Asia, I saw more lebron commercials and billboards than yao stuff.

 

Care to explain the 70,000 earlier? Why not just donate 2 millions to begin with instead of getting all the criticisms then donate the right amount.

Maybe he does care about his money and turning down that huge contract from Nike was a huge mistake....

 

that offer was widely reported when yao turned down nike, including multiple sources that cited yao himself. Unless there's some other contradictory evidences, I don't see how the validity of this report should be doubted.

further more, yao is with reebok and lebron is with nike at the end of the day. the fact that Lebron has more commercials NOW does not prove they would not value Yao as much if he signed with Nike.

and remember that offer was a desperation offer, proposed under special circumstances. At the time, Nike had to over-bid in order to persuade a pissed off Yao, and staffs in Nike Asia was trying everything in their power to cover their own asses. -- you can bet that people were fired because of the first blunder after Yao signed with Reebok.

 

wow... I mean... wow...

I know I shouldn't try to respond to this, but I'll try to ignore my better part of sense and actually lay out some obvious facts...

Yao's reaction to the earth quake was extremely quick. IIRC, he announced his donation less than 12 hours after the quake hit -- he's definitely among the first ones to make humanitarian relief commitments. At THAT time, nobody expected the quake to be as disastrous because it hit a relatively unpopulated part of China.

AFAIK, 4 hours after the earth quake, everyone was saying this is a bad disaster. the death toll could exceed well over 1,000 if we are unlucky.

about 12 hours after the quake, when the casualty in Beichuan was reported in, people started to get concerned and was saying "omg, we might have more than 10,000 casualties after all are said and done".

What's the official death toll now? 60,000+ plus several thousand more still missing? -- I haven't kept up with the number, but nobody, NOONE, expected the quake to be this disastrous.

pledging $70,000 relief fund at the very first hours shows how much Yao is concerned with his fellow people, not a reason to bash him because nobody expected it to be so serious.

As the damage started to be counted and people starts to realize how horrible it was, Yao followed up and readjusted his donations.

There's simply no way anyone should have anything bad to say about Yao, when it comes to humanitarian efforts. Whoever is not satisfied about what he has done is either blind or pathetic. really.

 

Too bad yao didnt take Nike's offer. He could of given more than 2 million to his homeland.

 

I tried doing a google search (english ) and none of those Ive seen mentions of Yao going to reebok coz he felt cheated or that Yao (without citing reasons ) chose to go with reebok even if Nike had a bigger offer. It all seemed that Nike could not or chose to not match Reebok's offfer coz of the large money they already put out for lebron , Melo and Kobe.

 

back in 2002 when yao was preparing for the Draft , Nike offered to tear up the last year of his contract with nike ( 4 yr 200,000 ) and give him a new
4 year 1,600,000 ) deal which team yao rejected. Nike never did much to promote their association with Yao in his Rookie year, no yao shoes or apparel and even ads wer sparse

That 4 yr 1.6million offer was a joke at roughly 400,000 only a year. Heck Nike gave the bulls 3rd pick Jay Williams a deal worth about 750,000 a year ( jay was also represented by BDA sports ) Maybe this is where Yao started to get pissed at Nike for offering him such a low ball contract. But how can you blame Nike for not trying because they know that Yao even when his contract expires in 2003, Yao cant just sign with a different brand coz Yao's 99 contract with Nike stipulates that Nike had a right to match clause meaning that even if other brands offer a bigger deal , all Nike had to do was match it and Yao must resign with them. Not knowing Yao would sign for a lower deal just to get away from them ( this is just my theory here ) so the right to match clause could not apply .

 

sucks yao didn't go with nike.

nike commercials are killer; i want to see some awesome nike commercials about yao!

 

So true, it bothers me this hasn't been discussed more.

 

I like Nike's clothes and shoes. Maybe after all those foot injuries Yao should change exchange reebok for nike. maybe

 

that news is years old...

 

er... i don't know if u got his point...he did say "JOBS for Chinese CHILDREN" that's y he said "dont ban him"