Yao Ming

• 1. Introduction

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  Yao Ming weighed 11 pounds at birth in Shanghai on the 12th of September 1980 , more than twice the average weight of a Chinese newborn. His mother stood 6 feet 3 inches tall. His father stood 6 feet 7 inches. Both had played professional basketball before China's Cultural Revolution upended their careers. By the time Yao was nine years old, he was playing basketball for fun. By the time he was ten, sports doctors had examined him and predicted he would grow to 7 feet 3 inches. They were wrong. He grew four inches taller than that.

  What followed was a career built on prodigious talent, painful interruption, and a particular kind of visibility that no Chinese athlete had carried before. How does a young man from Shanghai become the first international player ever selected first overall in the NBA draft without playing U.S. college basketball? What did it mean to an entire country when he scored the first basket of China's home Olympics? And what happens to a giant when his body keeps breaking down, game after game, year after year?

• 2. Shanghai's Rising Giant

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  At age 13, Yao tried out for the Shanghai Sharks' junior team in the Chinese Basketball Association and practiced ten hours a day just to earn a spot on the roster. Four years of junior competition later, he joined the senior squad. In his first season with the adult team, he averaged 10 points and 8 rebounds a game. Then came the broken foot , the second fracture of his career , which Yao said robbed him of four to six inches of vertical leap. That injury would prove a grim forecast for everything ahead.

  For two consecutive years, the Sharks reached the CBA finals and lost both times to the Bayi Rockets. Then Wang Zhizhi left the Bayi Rockets to become the first NBA player from China, and the door opened. In Yao's final CBA season, his numbers reached a level that strained credulity. During the playoff run, he averaged 38.9 points and 20.2 rebounds a game. He made all 21 of his shots in one finals game while shooting 76.6% from the field for the series. The Sharks won their first CBA championship. Yao was 21 years old.

  His parents, whose basketball careers had been derailed by the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, came to those Shanghai Sharks games on bicycles.

• 3. The Negotiation

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  Long before Yao stepped onto an NBA court, a team of advisers assembled to navigate a bureaucratic maze unlike anything the draft had seen. The group that came to be known as "Team Yao" included negotiator Erik Zhang, NBA agent Bill Duffy, Chinese agent Lu Hao, University of Chicago economics professor John Huizinga, and Bill Sanders, the vice president for marketing at BDA Sports Management.

  The complications were real. In 2002, the Chinese government issued new regulations requiring Yao and other Chinese players to turn over half of any NBA earnings, including endorsements and salaries, to the government and the national basketball association. A deputy general manager at the Shanghai Sharks named Li Yaomin had already pressured Yao to enter the draft in 1999 and had influenced him to sign a contract granting Evergreen Sports Inc. 33% of his earnings. That contract was later found to be invalid.

  The sharpest obstacle came from the CBA itself. After Wang Zhizhi refused to return to China to play for the national team and was subsequently banned, the CBA stipulated that Yao would have to guarantee his return for national team duty. They would not permit him to play in the United States unless the Houston Rockets took him with the first overall pick. Team Yao secured those assurances, and on the morning of the draft, the CBA gave its permission. When Houston selected Yao first, he became the first international player ever drafted at the top of the board without U.S. college experience.

• 4. A Rookie's Reckoning

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  Charles Barkley said on television that he would "kiss Kenny Smith's ass" if Yao scored more than 19 points in one of his rookie-season games. On the 17th of November 2002, Yao scored 20 points against the Los Angeles Lakers on a perfect 9-of-9 from the field and 2-of-2 from the free-throw line. Barkley made good on the bet by kissing the buttock of a donkey that Smith had purchased for the occasion, Smith's literal interpretation of the word.

  Yao's first game against Shaquille O'Neal on the 17th of January 2003, carried its own tension. O'Neal had made a mock-Chinese remark about Yao in the press, which drew accusations of racism. Yao said he believed O'Neal was joking, but he noted that many Asians would not see the humor. In the game itself, Yao scored the Rockets' first six points, blocked O'Neal twice in the opening minutes, altered two more of his attempts at the rim, and sealed the win with a dunk in overtime. Yao finished with 10 points, 10 rebounds, and 6 blocks; O'Neal finished with 31 points, 13 rebounds, and 0 blocks. Years later, O'Neal said that Yao "could've been up there in the top five centers to ever play the game" if not for the injuries.

  The NBA added Chinese to its All-Star ballot that same season alongside English and Spanish, and Yao received nearly a quarter million more votes than O'Neal to start the 2003 All-Star Game. He became the first rookie to start in the All-Star Game since Grant Hill in 1995. His final rookie averages were 13.5 points and 8.2 rebounds, and he finished second in NBA Rookie of the Year voting to Amar'e Stoudemire.

• 5. Peak and Fracture

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  In the summer of 2004, Houston acquired Tracy McGrady from the Orlando Magic in a seven-player trade, and Yao set the All-Star vote record previously held by Michael Jordan, drawing 2,558,278 total votes for the 2005 game. The Rockets won 51 games. In the first two playoff games against the Dallas Mavericks, Yao converted 13 of 14 shots in Game 2, the best shooting performance in the franchise's playoff history. The Rockets then lost four of their last five games and fell in Game 7 by 40 points, the largest losing margin in any Game 7 in NBA history.

  During the 2005 offseason, Yao was rewarded with a five-year, $75 million extension. Then the body began its long campaign against him. He developed osteomyelitis in the big toe of his left foot; surgery was performed on the 18th of December 2005. He broke a bone in his left foot on the 10th of April 2006, in a game against the Utah Jazz. He broke his right knee on the 23rd of December 2006, while attempting to block a shot. That season he had been averaging 26.8 points, 9.7 rebounds, and 2.3 blocks before the injury and was being mentioned as an MVP candidate.

  After the 2007 season , during which he averaged 25.1 points and 10.3 rebounds in seven playoff games against the Utah Jazz, then said afterwards "I didn't do my job" , a stress fracture in his left foot ended his 2007-08 regular season at 55 games. The Rockets stretched a winning streak to 22 games after he went down, at the time the second-longest in NBA history. On the 3rd of March 2008, surgeons placed screws in his foot to strengthen the bone. Four months later he was playing at the Beijing Olympics.

• 6. China's Stage

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  On the 6th of August 2008, Yao carried the Olympic flame into Tiananmen Square as part of the torch relay. That evening, he also led China's delegation during the opening ceremony. In China's first basketball game of the Beijing Olympics, against the eventual gold medal-winning United States, Yao scored the first basket of the game , a three-pointer. The Americans won 101-70, but Yao's words afterward stayed: "It was the first score in our Olympic campaign here at home and I'll always remember it. It represents that we can keep our heads up in the face of really tough odds."

  The national team chapter of Yao's career stretched from the 2000 Sydney Olympics through Beijing 2008 and carried some of its own defining moments. At the 2004 Athens Olympics, he scored 39 points in a win against New Zealand, then helped secure China's quarterfinal berth with 27 points and 13 rebounds in a 67-66 win over the reigning FIBA World Champions, Serbia and Montenegro, hitting two decisive free throws with 28 seconds left. Three times he led China to FIBA Asia Cup gold medals , 2001, 2003, and 2005 , winning tournament MVP all three times.

  At the 2006 FIBA World Championship, despite returning from six months of injury rest, he posted 36 points and 10 rebounds in a win over Slovenia to advance China to the Round of 16. His tournament scoring average of 25.3 points per game led the entire field. He retired from international play after the 2008 Beijing Games.

• 7. The Weight of Visibility

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  On the 9th of November 2007, when Yao played fellow Chinese NBA player Yi Jianlian of the Milwaukee Bucks for the first time, the game was broadcast on 19 networks in China. More than 200 million people in China watched it alone, placing it among the most-watched NBA games in history. That number captures something about what Yao's presence meant far beyond any box score.

  As of 2009, Yao had led Forbes' Chinese celebrities list in both income and popularity for six consecutive years, earning $51 million in 2008 alone. His endorsement portfolio at various points included Nike, Reebok, Pepsi, Visa, Apple, Garmin, and McDonald's. In 2003, he successfully sued Coca-Cola for using his image on bottles without permission during a national team promotion, and later signed with them for the 2008 Olympics. When the Miami Heat distributed 8,000 fortune cookies to fans before his first game in Miami on the 16th of December 2002 , an East Asian cultural stereotype , Yao was not angry, explaining that he had never seen a fortune cookie in China and had assumed it was an American invention.

  In China, the phenomenon was called the "Yao Ming Phenomenon". In the United States, it was called the "Ming Dynasty". NBA commissioner David Stern, on the occasion of Yao's retirement, described him as a "bridge between Chinese and American fans" with "a wonderful mixture of talent, dedication, humanitarian aspirations and a sense of humor." On the 9th of July 2017, Yao and his wife Ye Li served as godparents of the cruise ship Majestic Princess, christening the vessel on behalf of Princess Cruises.

• 8. After Basketball

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  On the 20th of July 2011, Yao held a press conference in Shanghai to announce his retirement. He cited the third fracture to his left foot, sustained near the end of 2010, along with a series of injuries that had forced him to miss 250 games across his final six NBA seasons. The announcement generated more than 1.2 million comments on the Chinese social-networking site Sina Weibo.

  Yao had already enrolled at the Antai College of Economics and Management at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2011, taking a tailored degree program with mostly one-on-one lectures to avoid becoming a distraction on campus. He completed his economics degree in July 2018, after seven years of study. Off the court and out of the classroom, he had co-written an autobiography with ESPN analyst Ric Bucher titled Yao: A Life in Two Worlds, provided the voice for a character in the Chinese animated film The Magic Aster (released on the 19th of June 2009), and opened Yao Family Wines in Napa Valley, California in 2016, producing Cabernet Sauvignon blends that wine critic Robert M. Parker Jr. ranked at 96 points.

  In April 2016, Yao was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame alongside Shaquille O'Neal and Allen Iverson, becoming the first Chinese national elected to that institution. On the 3rd of February 2017, the Houston Rockets retired his Number 11 jersey. That same month, he was unanimously elected chairman of the Chinese Basketball Association, a role he held until his resignation in 2024. His conservation work with WildAid, which began before his retirement, coincided with a 70% drop in shark fin soup consumption in China between 2011 and 2018.