The year of Yao
So I’ve been doing a lot of travelling over the past week and something that’s caught my notice is that there is one face that’s virtually ubiquitous throughout China - that of Yao Ming’s. From various product endorsements to olympics averts, posters to Yao’s likeness can be found everwhere. In a way, he has become the unofficial mascot for China.
Humans always have an overwhelming need for figureheads, and my view is that as far as atheletes go, the Chinese couldn’t have hoped for a better representative on the world stage. As the first (significant) Chinese basketball player to enter the NBA, Yao Ming had to carry the hopes of 1.6 billion people in the face of adversity.
When he entered the league in 2001, there was an unprecedented level of nastiness directed at him. Americans, for the most part, saw him as an outsider, and an interesting experiment that somehow needed to fail. He didn’t. In a league well-known for narcissistic players, Yao never gave himself a nickname. He never gave himself excuses for bad games. Season after season he came through with the kind of class that few other players in the NBA could pull off.
In China, Yao gave youngsters who’d never touched a basketball before a reason to play the game, much like how Michael Jordan inspired an entire generation in the 90s. Yao Ming lived and assimilated into America, but he never lost touch of his culture and always remained true to his roots.
That’s Yao Ming, a gentle giant of a man. His identity, his life, his burden.