The Next Yao Ming?

By Brook Larmer

The Chinese giant was so dazzled by the lights of Las Vegas that he didn't notice the furtive glances of the tourists gathering around him. Trying to unwind after a few days of intense training in August, the basketball sensation had just taken a ride on the roller coaster atop the Stratosphere tower--he was lucky there wasn't a maximum height limit to get on--and now he was gazing out over the gaudiest stretch of urban landscape in America. He marveled at the brightly illuminated replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Manhattan skyline, the dazzling fountains of Rome. "Las Vegas is the most beautiful city in the world," he said, "especially at night." A red-faced American tourist broke the reverie. "Hey, Yao Ming!" the man shouted. "Yao Ming, you da man!" It was the last thing the Chinese athlete wanted to hear. He gave a tight smile and then, as politely as he could, he recited one of the few English phrases he has committed to memory: "I am not Yao Ming."

Maybe not. But Yi Jianlian had better get used to the lofty expectations. A lot of people on both sides of the Pacific are hoping that the talented 6-ft. 11-in. teenager will be the next Yao Ming. Ever since Yao electrified the National Basketball Association last season as a rookie fresh out of Shanghai, a slew of agents, scouts and shoe-company reps have been looking for a Chinese player who can follow the large--and lucrative--footsteps of one of the league's biggest draws. Yi wears size-18 shoes, just like Yao. But it is the glimmer of his vast potential--the explosive slam dunks, the boyish good looks, even the mystery surrounding his age (anywhere from 15 to 18, depending on whom you believe)--that has catapulted Yi beyond where Yao stood at this point in his career. The attention is a bit overwhelming for a shy kid who started playing ball only four years ago. "I do feel a lot of pressure," says Yi (pronounced Ee). "But what I need most is to learn and to practice--not to get distracted by being famous."

There are, of course, plenty of hidden treasures in the Middle Kingdom. Aside from Yao, two other Chinese hoopsters already play in the NBA: Mengke Bateer, a muscle-bound 6-ft. 11-in. reserve center with the Toronto Raptors, and Wang Zhizhi, a lithe, 7-ft. 1-in. sharpshooter with the Los Angeles Clippers. Another player, a rail-thin center named Xue Yuyang, 20, was chosen in the second round in June's NBA draft, but Beijing--rankled by his decision to enter the draft without official permission--has refused to let him test his mettle in America. So instead NBA scouts and agents are focusing on the crop of younger players, ranging from Tang Zhengdong, 19, a bruising 7-footer with an uncharacteristic taste for rough play, to prodigy Chen Jianghua, 14, a 6-ft. 1-in. ball handler whose gravity-defying 360-o dunks look like something out of a Jet Li movie.

Nobody, though, seems a safer bet than Yi Jianlian. The son of two former athletes--his 6-ft. 5-in. father and 5-ft. 8-in. mother were both forcibly recruited by the state to play an obscure sport known as team handball--Yi was discovered in 1999 on a playground in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen. Barely out of grade school, he was already 6 ft. 4 in. tall, a behemoth in a region known for its diminutive people. Yi's parents, however, were reluctant to let the Soviet-style sports school lay claim to their only son. "We had endured hardships ourselves," says Yi's mother, Mai Meiling, who like her husband works as a postal clerk. "We couldn't get good jobs when we retired because we didn't have a good education. We wanted more for our son." Dai Yixin, the school's veteran coach, finally convinced the parents their son wouldn't get lost because he had all the raw ingredients of a star: speed, flexibility, coordination, leaping ability, size. By measuring the gaps between the bones of his hand and tracking the growth of his genitals--a Chinese-honed indicator of height--Dai predicted that the youngster would reach 6 ft. 8 in. or 6 ft. 9 in.

Still, Yi's career almost ended before it began. Halfway through his first 400-m training run at the full-time sports school, Yi stopped abruptly, gasping for breath, tears rolling down his cheeks. "I wanted to quit," Yi says. "I had never lived away from home before, and I had no idea if I could make it as an athlete." But his body kept growing, and so did his determination to make the best of a difficult situation. Yi still preferred watching cartoons to NBA games, but by the time he joined Guangdong's professional Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) team last year, he was an astonishing 6 ft. 11 in.--and he could leap and touch a spot more than 11 ft. 6 in. off the ground. (The basketball rim is 10 feet high.) As Yi mastered new skills--the midrange jumper, the baby hook, the reverse slam--he attracted the attention of Adidas. Eager to loosen Nike's hold on Chinese basketball, the shoe company flew Yi to New Jersey for its ABCD Camp in the summer of 2002. He was the only Chinese player there. "It was an eye-opening experience for him," says Guangdong junior coach Zhang Zhenming. "He came back with a very clear vision of where he wanted to go: the NBA."

Yi Jianlian is the first to admit he's not ready for prime time. "I'm too young and skinny," he says, his baggy denim shorts and triple-XL Nike shirt only reinforcing his point. Yi has played only one season, most of it riding the bench, in the CBA. But his final regular-season game last spring offered a tantalizing glimpse of the future. With the game heading into overtime, Yi came off the bench to score 13 points in five minutes to seal the victory--and secure Guangdong's place atop the standings. Two weeks later, when Guangdong played the army team for the CBA championship, the stands were crawling with sports agents and shoe-company representatives, all fixated on the big kid on the bench. "It's partly the Yao Ming effect," said a shoe-company executive. "But Yi Jianlian is so promising we would have pursued him anyway." Yi played sparingly in the game, but he offered a fitting capstone to the season, stealing an inbounds pass in the final seconds for a breakaway jam. At the team's postgame meal, agents and reps crowded around the teenager, toasting him with Tsingtao beer until his face turned beet red.

So when might Yi Jianlian don an NBA uniform? That depends on the biggest mystery of all: his age. The national junior-team roster says Yi was born on Oct. 27, 1987, which would make him just 15--and not eligible to enter the NBA draft independently as an international player until 2009. Several well-placed Chinese basketball experts say he is 17 or 18. Dates are manipulated, they claim, to give Yi more years of eligibility for junior competitions, which China counts on to increase its international prestige. (Age shaving is endemic in international junior competitions. It even affected the Clippers' Wang Zhizhi, who had NBA teams scrambling to verify his true age to make sure he was old enough for the draft.) Yi and his parents both say on the record that he was born in 1987. But when pressed on the issue, Yi turns away and fills the room with an uncomfortable silence, and his father smiles blankly without responding. Whatever the truth, it doesn't seem to bother Nike. The company recently beat out the competition and signed Yi to a six-figure, multiyear deal worth far more than his actual salary--and indeed more than Yao Ming's original Nike contract. Forget about that other guy for a minute. The klieg lights of stardom are already starting to shine on the kid from Shenzhen.

Brook Larmer is writing a book about the rise of Chinese athletes on the world sports stage