Houston Rockets general manger let out a long, exasperated sigh over the telephone Tuesday, as though to say: Are you kidding? Asking Yao Ming to ease back on his Chinese basketball commitments – never mind sit out the Beijing Olympics in August – is a request that’ll go unasked to his franchise star.
Yao’s body takes a terrible toll at 7-foot-6, something needs to change and still the Rockets are at the mercy of a Chinese basketball federation that never truly let the NBA have the most popular and beloved of its 1.3 billion people. He’s forever on loan, forever on the way to getting his career run into the ground.
“Asking him to not play for China is like, well, asking him not to play basketball,” Morey said. “We understood that when we drafted him and it’s still the case. We know that he belongs to the fans of the NBA and those of China. It isn’t a consideration to discourage him.”
Yao has gone down again. This time, it’s a stress fracture in his left foot. The threshold of chronic injury to his legs and feet creeps closer. There’s a disturbing, depressing pattern. He has broken his foot twice in the past two years. He’s broken a leg. He’s had an infected toe. Four surgeries in two years and the truth is increasingly inescapable: With the way he moves, with 7 feet, 6 inches of unprecedented polish and power, Yao has asked his lower body to support a style, a frame, that no basketball player his size has ever maintained.
What complicates everything is the demands, the pressure, the loyalty that Yao has to his national team. NBA commissioner David Stern had to undergo years of glacial negotiations to crack the Chinese market, to get Yao and Milwaukee’s Yi Jianlian into the league. Yao is such an earnest and loyal son, honorable and decent to the core.
“The national team is a part of who he is,” his old coach, Jeff Van Gundy, said.
Yao has trouble saying no to anyone, Van Gundy said – never mind the government that manipulated his development from birth to the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft. Van Gundy calls Yao the hardest-working and best teammate in the NBA. He loved coaching him, loves counting him as a friend. And truth be told, he’s desperately worried about Yao’s future.
As it turned out, Van Gundy walked into a Houston health club Tuesday afternoon and still hadn’t heard the news about Yao’s injury. He was on the telephone with a Miami radio station when someone finally informed him. Just then, guess who walked through the doors?
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