THE CREATION OF YAO MING
From the beginning, the life of China's biggest sports star was shaped by two powerful, often competing forces: his mother and the communist government.
The faint whispers of a genetic conspiracy coursed through the corridors of Shanghai No. 6 Hospital on the evening of Sept. 12, 1980. It was shortly after 7 p.m., and a patient in the maternity ward had just endured an excruciating labor to give birth to a baby boy. An abnormally large baby boy. The doctors and nurses on duty should have anticipated something out of the ordinary. The boy's parents, after all, were retired basketball stars whose marriage the year before had made them the tallest couple in China. The mother, Fang Fengdi, an austere beauty with a pinched smile, measured 1.88 m—more than half a foot taller than the average man in Shanghai. The father, Yao Zhiyuan, was a 2.08-m giant whose body pitched forward in the kind of deferential stoop that comes from a lifetime of ducking under door frames and leaning down to listen to people of more normal dimensions. So imposing was their size that ever since childhood, the two had been known simply as Da Yao and Da Fang—Big Yao and Big Fang.
Still, the medical staff surely had never seen a newborn quite like this: the enormous legs, the broad, squarish cranium, the hands and feet so fully formed that they seemed to belong to a three-year-old. At more than 5 kg, he was nearly double the size of the average Chinese newborn. The name his parents gave him, from a Chinese character that unifies the sun and the moon, was Ming, meaning bright.
News of Yao Ming's birth was quickly relayed across town to the top leaders of the Shanghai Sports Commission. They were not surprised. These men and women had been trying to cultivate a new generation of athletes who would embody the rising power of China. The boy in the maternity ward represented, in many ways, the culmination of their plan.
The experiment had no code name, but in Shanghai basketball circles it might as well have been called Operation Yao Ming. The wheels had been set in motion more than a quarter-century earlier, when Chairman Mao Zedong exhorted his followers to funnel the nation's most genetically gifted youngsters into the emerging communist sports machine. Two generations of Yao Ming's forebears had been singled out by authorities for their hulking physiques, and his mother and father had both been drafted into the sports system. "We had been looking forward to the arrival of Yao Ming for three generations," says Wang Chongguang, a retired Shanghai coach who played with Yao's father in the 1970s and would coach Yao himself in the '90s. "That's why I thought his name should be Yao Panpan." Long-Awaited Yao.
Giddy with the sense of possibility, some officials wanted to start helping the family immediately with food and finances. Others even began pushing for an exception to the country's strictly enforced one-child policy. If China truly wanted to compete internationally, they asked, why shouldn't the nation's tallest couple be allowed to breed an entire team of champions?
One communist leader didn't share in the delight. This man, one of the most powerful sports officials in Shanghai, had bitter memories of the torment inflicted on him by a group of youthful revolutionaries that included Yao Ming's mother. It had taken him nearly a decade to battle his way back to the top. He was in no mood to start bending the rules to help Da Fang.
For him, revenge sounded far sweeter.
The marble archway at no. 651 Nanjing Road loomed ahead of her—enormous and forbidding, even to a girl of her height. It was 1965, and Fang Fengdi, age 15, had arrived at the élite sports-training center that would become her home for the next five years—a place that would witness her transformation from frivolous girl to basketball star to something even more pivotal to Chinese history. But the entrance to No. 651 may have seemed all the more forbidding for one simple reason: Da Fang didn't want to be there. "I was just a young girl who loved to sing and dance," she recalls. "I always thought I'd be an entertainer, but I didn't like basketball at all."
Da Fang's height, however, had attracted the attention of Shanghai sports officials, who had paid an unexpected visit to her family's small apartment. They explained to her parents that Da Fang had the potential to bring glory to the city and perhaps to the nation through her efforts on the basketball court. The officials' unspoken message was also clear: because the sports system would become her "iron rice bowl," taking care of her food, shelter and employment for the rest of her life, she wouldn't have to follow her mother into the cramped assembly lines of the local garment factory.
Life in the sports factories, however, wasn't so different from life on the assembly lines. Both occupations provided workers with (or condemned them to) lifetime employment within the same danwei, or work unit. The best athletes usually lived five or six to a room, but they received a steadier diet of milk and meat than the rest of the population, a significant perk in a land where food was severely rationed. But athletic training was physically punishing and subject to the danwei's dictatorial rule. The danwei's minipotentates made, or at least enforced, nearly all of the key decisions in people's lives: where to live, where to work, what to eat, whom to marry and—most insidiously—what to think.
Da Fang's generation, born in the flush of the revolution, was the first to be indoctrinated from childhood in the rigid certainties of Mao Zedong Thought. By the mid-1960s the ideological training at No. 651 Nanjing Road had become almost as intense and monotonous as the athletic training. Every week there were obligatory sessions called, without irony, Democratic Life Meetings. Party leaders extolled the Great Helmsman and exhorted the faithful to show ever more revolutionary spirit. Then the athletes engaged in a self-flagellating round of confession and repentance.
In Da Fang's day the high priest presiding over many of the Democratic Life Meetings at No. 651 was a handsome but imperious party cadre named Zhu Yong. Zhu was technically the official in charge of women's basketball, even though he didn't know the rule book nearly as well as he knew Mao's Little Red Book. His real authority came from his position as deputy Communist Party secretary, which gave him the power to shape the young athletes' minds. Several times a week Zhu summoned the basketball players to the institute's first-floor lecture hall for "political thought" meetings, at which he chastised them for sacrificing too little for the revolution, succumbing to the evils of individualism and even engaging in romantic relationships, which were not allowed.
Young and impressionable, Da Fang was putty in the hands of such propagandists. Molding her basketball game proved more difficult. The teenager may have been the tallest female player in Shanghai, but "she was terrible at first," says one of her early coaches. "She ran very slowly, she couldn't catch the ball, and she got so tired she could run up and down the court only a couple of times before she had to stop."
The athletes trained eight to 10 hours a day, year-round, on outdoor courts that were bitterly cold in winter and blisteringly hot in summer. Coaches routinely beat players and forced them to play while sick or injured, pressing them to display revolutionary spirit. Some cried tears of pain throughout practice. Others vomited at the sight of a basketball court. But they kept going. Lin Meizheng, a forward on the Shanghai women's team, suffered from a painful kidney infection but never missed a practice. "We always felt that showing spirit was the top priority," she says. "You may not be able to improve your technique, but you can always improve your spirit."
Da Fang developed that spirit, too, and it began to show on court. After more than a year of training, the 16-year-old was still an awkward player, but she fought more aggressively for rebounds, and she sometimes hurled her now 1.88-m body to the ground in pursuit of loose balls. Her former coaches and teammates say her stiffening resolve had to do with a growing conviction in the purity of her "red" roots as the descendant of a long line of poor workers. For now, playing basketball was her only way to carry out the revolution. But that, like everything else, would soon change.
The girl with the red armband pushed the prisoner through the frenzied crowd into a familiar space at No. 651 Nanjing Road, a basketball court that now, in early 1967, was being used as a "people's tribunal" for the dispensation of mob justice. "Enemy of the people!" screamed the young athletes, shoving and punching the prisoner as he stumbled past. "Spy! Traitor! Counterrevolutionary!"
The prisoner's head was crudely shaved. His hands were tied behind his back. And his dark eyes seemed so filled with fear that several of the young athletes in attendance had a hard time believing he was Zhu Yong. Could this hunched figure really be the powerful party secretary who, just months before, had ruled over the sports institute with an iron fist? Zhu, who had been locked up in solitary confinement for several months, knew there was no escape from the ritualistic humiliation of these "struggle sessions." All the middle-aged party leader could hope for was to survive. "Enemy of the people, confess your crimes!" The voices came from all around him, and one of the loudest belonged to the girl in the armband, a voice he had heard many times—thin and high, but now chillingly hard. It was the voice of Fang Fengdi.
Da Fang was barely 17, but she seemed transformed. Her lively banter was gone, supplanted by fervent recitations from Mao's Little Red Book. Her hair had been cut very short in a display of revolutionary ardor. Her usual sports garb had been replaced by a baggy dark Mao suit and black cloth shoes. The only splash of color on her was the red armband, which bore three characters that struck fear in millions of Chinese: Hongweibing. Red Guard.
Da Fang had enlisted as one of Mao's "little revolutionary generals," the shock troops who would carry out the most extreme acts of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The decade-long cataclysm, which Mao had launched in 1966, produced cruelty and oppression on a horrific scale. Thousands of intellectuals, former capitalists and people with ties to the West were beaten to death. Millions more were imprisoned and tortured, while tens of millions were forcibly displaced to the countryside for "re-education" through hard labor.
Like many Chinese, Da Fang is loath to talk about her role during that tumultuous period. "The Cultural Revolution really didn't affect me very much," she says while sitting in her son's house in Houston, Texas, looking out at the fountains bubbling in the man-made lake outside. "We had to stop our basketball training and focus on other things for a while. But I came from a workers' family, so it didn't have much impact on us." In a narrow sense, she's right. Her family belonged to one of the "five red categories" (workers, soldiers, poor peasants, martyrs and communist cadres), so Da Fang was spared the persecution visited upon the "five black categories" (landlords, rightists, capitalist roaders, counterrevolutionaries and rich peasants). But according to her friends and former teammates, the Cultural Revolution would shape her life and personality—and the future of her only son.
During the early days of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards rampaged through Shanghai, shutting down schools and universities, demolishing temples and monuments, ransacking the homes of capitalists and intellectuals. The young zealots eliminated anything with a trace of decadent foreign influence, from women's cosmetics to French bakeries to classical music.
Competitive sports, another insidious legacy of Western domination, were similarly consigned to the trash heap. Training stopped; competitions were canceled. The Red Guards plowed under athletic fields, shut down the national sports commission and imprisoned its chairman, Mao's old confidant Marshal He Long. The best coaches and athletes were attacked for their supposed obsession with medals, a counterrevolutionary crime that even had a name: jinmao zhuyi, or trophyism. Table-tennis star Rong Guotuan, whose 1959 world championship victory had set off celebrations across China, found one way to escape continual beatings and humiliation: he hanged himself in his jail cell.
Nearly all of Da Fang's older teammates were trundled off to factories, most of them never to play basketball again. In some ways, being banished to the labor camps was better than staying behind at No. 651 Nanjing Road. The Red Guards imprisoned Zhu and some three dozen other top coaches and administrators in makeshift jails on the second floor. At night the captors harangued their former bosses to keep them from sleeping. During the day, Red Guards forced them to read Mao's Little Red Book, write self-criticisms and face the terrifying specter of "struggle sessions."
Da Fang was one of the Red Guards the old leaders feared most. As an acolyte of the so-called Strong Wind Rebels, who took over the institute, the 17-year-old became a leader of the basketball section. Her group of Red Guards had one primary task: to investigate, punish and re-educate the "bad elements" among their former coaches and leaders. "Da Fang seemed especially eager to improve herself as a revolutionary," says one of her former teammates. "Some of us wanted to join the Red Guards to avoid trouble, because anybody who wasn't with them was considered an enemy. But Da Fang was a true believer. And true believers, you know, were capable of anything."
According to former players and coaches who lived in the compound during these years, Da Fang became one of the most zealous disciplinarians. "She treated people badly," says one former coach, who remembers watching her cut off another woman's braided hair in one of the gentler forms of punishment. "The Cultural Revolution gave her a sense of pride, arrogance," says another coach. Thirty years later, he still searches for an explanation. "She was just a child. What did she know, right?"
Hunched before his captors at center court, Zhu Yong listened as Da Fang and the other Red Guards recited his crimes: working at a department-store candy counter before the revolution, maintaining contacts with the enemy Nationalist Party, deviating from the true path of Maoist thought. The deposed commissar had been active in Shanghai's communist underground long before Da Fang was born, but now the revolution was eating its own, and among local sports leaders Zhu suffered the most. The Red Guards deprived him of food. They beat him with fists and clubs, and they pulled his arms up behind his back in the excruciating "airplane" position. There's no evidence that Da Fang participated in Zhu's physical abuse, but several witnesses say she often led the public denunciations against him. During one session, in an apparent attempt to turn the onetime leaders against each other, she commanded Zhu to engage in hand-to-hand combat with his former second in command. The two men refused, and Da Fang erupted in anger.
For months Zhu had denied the charges against him, but now he was starting to break. Da Fang and his other captors once again shouted out their accusations, and the mob of athletes repeated each denunciation in full-throated unison. Somebody pulled Zhu's arms into the airplane, and the former party leader finally cracked. "Yes, yes," he said. "I confess." Zhu was shipped to a re-education camp in the countryside outside Shanghai. He would spend the next five years doing hard labor. One of the other deposed leaders remembers seeing Zhu once during that time, standing knee-deep in an icy stream, pulling rotten grass out of the water. The former commissar's hands were bleeding from frostbite, and his eyes had gone dead.
Chairman Mao didn't need his "little revolutionary generals" for long. By late 1968, having used the turmoil to consolidate power, he called in the army to establish order. The Red Guards were demobilized. Within weeks, millions of them were shipped off to the countryside to temper their revolutionary zeal with years of hard labor. Some would never make it home again.