The more I watch basketball, the harder it is for me to write about the value dichotomy of monetary earnings versus on-court production. There’s this idea that we can ostensibly calculate the intrinsic worth of a man based upon a data set that includes myriad variables which are impossible to quantify. These incursions into the depths of what metrics have to offer in the culture of evaluating the game help us understand the things we can’t see on the court, but numbers also work to remove the humanity from the game that relies on the human element more than any other. Basketball is the most emotive mainstream sport, and that’s what keeps us watching.
I watch basketball for different reasons than I did as a teenager, when Yao Ming was drafted in 2002. I watched individual games from a macro point of view. There was a lot of ball watching and a lack of interest in how things operated on the low block. Yao was living proof that having all of the size in the world wasn’t enough to create intrigue among adolescent hoops fans. Suffice to say, I didn’t appreciate Yao for what he did on the floor or for who he was off it.
As I’ve grown older, Hall of Fame ceremonies have moved away from just appreciating the greats to a forcing of maturity. The present only lasts but a moment, and the number of moments we have for today’s players is much more fleeting than we realize. Appreciating the now becomes easier when we know what the future holds. Career’s end and we’re forced to move on without players who had become a huge part of our fandom. Just this summer, we lost both Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan to retirement, but many others have been lost to factors outside their control. Yao addressed this upfront in his induction speech.
“First of all I would like to thank the Hall of Fame Committee for such a great honor,” Yao began. “Your recognition made tonight a most memorable memory for me because my career ended too soon. For me, I treasure each and every moment. I’m grateful for my time on court and for your recognition tonight.”
Sometimes, a part of maturity is the act of forgetting yourself to appreciate those around you. A younger version of myself only watched basketball to see things that inspired awe — not realizing that magnificence can come from the humanity of the individual as much as it can come from their physicality. Yao’s physicality was inherently tangible; He existed to make large men look as average as I do in the real world. But there was a physicality to his game that we couldn’t grasp with the eye test, either.
Yao made a career out of placing one of his broad shoulders directly in the center of the sternum of a Joel Przybilla (or Eric Dampier or Kwame Brown) and using his legs to will his way through them to get to the rim. He made a career of using a deceptively quick first step to slide his shoulders around the forearm of a Pau Gasol (or Brad Miller or Ben Wallace) and swiftly move to the baseline to get to the rim. His shoulders did all the work, and his feet made all the work possible. He was a gifted basketball player who was too large for us to appreciate all of the little details that added up to a Hall-of-Fame talent.
Yao was powerful, a pickup truck playing against motorcycles, and when he put all his weight into achieving singular goals, there was no one who could regularly stop him in isolated situations. He was a deft passer when double teams converged on his forays into the paint, and when he moved away from the block, his range easily extended to 18 feet. Yao had soft hands and a soft touch and a soft heart — all of which helped define who he is.
During one NBA game between Yao’s Rockets and Yi Jianlian’s Milwaukee Bucks in 2007, “well over” 200 million Chinese people tuned in. For comparison’s sake, the United States census listed about 308 million Americans in 2010, so more than two-thirds of the U.S. population was watching a regular season game in China because of the popularity of Yao and a hyped rookie. His pull among his countrymen is just a large his stature.
Alone, Yao is the Mount Rushmore of Chinese basketball, but among Americans, there’s debate in some circles about whether he even belongs in the Hall of Fame. He gave everything you’d want an elite center to provide, his body just didn’t give him the health needed for a longer career. Yao spent his time in the NBA taking up space, but the fleeting nature of his time in the Association wasn’t long enough for some to grasp his greatness, at least not long enough for him to be recognized as the true great he was.
Yao’s identity was centered around a set of beliefs that allowed him to remain present while also being at a cultural distance. He was able to survive alone without being an eremite. There’s something, not so much heroic, but intrepid, about one living and thriving outside the pale from the collective other.
I haven’t only realized my own maturity through an appreciation of Yao, but also the maturity of American basketball fans. Yao unknowingly served as one of the peacemakers in the war against xenophobia — a war that’s largely been won in the last half decade of the NBA (except the country has been slow to follow: Just look at the popularity of you know who). Of the 60 players selected in the 2016 NBA draft, nearly half (28) were international prospects, including Zhou Qi and Wang Zhelin of China. Because of Yao and others, the tropes and stereotypes about international players from a decade ago are no longer a big point of discussion. The international game is nearly as respected as our more lauded domestic version, and Yao is very much a part of that transformation — whether we’re willing to give him credit or not.
You just can’t place a numerical value on a guy who cherished seemingly everyone he encountered. For the prime of his career, that value wasn’t reciprocated — at least not from me. But at least Yao’s induction into the Hall of Fame served as a pair of spectacles to help me read into all of those years I missed while watching Steve Francis instead. Because of Yao, I have a heightened appreciation for those stars whose humanity is set aside for those with more athletic ability. We’ll never remember Yao just for hoops. Because with him, both literally and figuratively, the size of the man and heart were one and the same.
