Quotes of the Day
It is a January morning in old Shanghai, and the sky is the color and density of oatmeal, feebly lit by an orange disc as vague as a watermark. In urban China in the 21st century, this is known as a sunny day. At an outdoor marketplace, a teeming tenement of narrow stalls and alleys, clamoring vendors peddle knockoff Rolex watches and Nike sneakers, pirated videos, severed ducks' heads and trussed pink pigs. Into this tumult strides a 2.13-meter alien from the imperial courts of the U.S. But he is no tourist.
Daniel Raymond McClintock is a 25-year-old pro basketball player out of Golden West High in Visalia, California, and the University of Northern Arizona, a former Denver Nugget who lasted only six games in the NBA. He has been hired this season by the Shanghai Sharks of the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) to do nothing less than replace the irreplaceable Yao Ming at center. That makes McClintock the man in the middle of the biggest sports story in the most populated place on earth.
While "Young Giant Yao," as the Chinese lovingly call their paramount sports hero, contributes a stunning rookie season to the Houston Rockets, McClintock is expected to reciprocate. Last season, with Yao at center, the Sharks won 23 of 24 league games, earning their first CBA championship. Anything less than commensurate dominance will be considered a failure and a loss of face for McClintock. At the market everybody seems to know his name, perhaps because every Sharks home game is aired on television. So are most of Yao's games in Houston, beamed live at 9 a.m. Shanghai time from the Lone Star to the Red Star state.
A half-hour later Dan and Alisha and their new DVDs are compressed into a Volkswagen Santana taxi, bound for the condo that the Sharks have leased for them in a complex of rococo pink high-rises that look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa dipped in grenadine syrup. "You!" Dan commands, using Mandarin for "turn right." Then, after passing through the gates, he says, "Ting!" which means "halt." The driver lets them out in front of a fountain topped by a plaster nymph with breasts the size of cantaloupes.
McClintock is a sweet-tempered evangelist of the Christian faith, and like every Westerner who has journeyed to Cathay since Marco Polo, he finds himself bedazzled by China's masses and her mystery. He is asked if he is a bit overwhelmed by his new life in Shanghai. "I came here to play the game," says the Man Who Would Be Ming. "No matter where you are, basketball comes down to one thing. Put the ball in the hole."
At 9:30 the next morning McClintock and a fellow Shark, 2.08-meter Kevin Byrne out of the University of Idaho, are watching tape of that night's opponent, the Guangdong Southern Tigers. The two players are in Room 301 of a dormitory at the Hui Feng Training Center of the Shanghai Technical Sports Institute, where all the Sharks save three—the two pampered imports and one Chinese player with U.S. college and pro experience—are made to dwell, dine and train.
The institute is a remnant of the Soviet sports system as adapted by the People's Republic of China. A year ago Yao Ming was living in Room 305. At this very moment, in the little restaurants and motorbike repair shops just outside the gates of the institute, his proud and excited countrymen squat in front of televisions and watch him battle the overmatched Minnesota Timberwolves half a world away. Yao's NBA debut on Oct. 30 was reported to have been seen in 287 million households in China.
After a half-hour of video McClintock and Byrne join the rest of the Sharks in an unheated gymnasium across campus for the pregame shootaround, which is endured by the shivering players in parkas and toques. Outside it is 7°C; inside it feels about half as warm. During the halfhearted workout the coaches' infrequent instructions are translated for McClintock and Byrne by an exceptional teammate: Ma Jian, the 2-meter power forward who, a decade ago, became the first mainland Chinese to play basketball at a major U.S. college, Utah. Like McClintock, Ma—whose given name, Jian, means Healthy—had a brief taste of the NBA: a handful of preseason games for the Los Angeles Clippers in 1995. He was the last cut, and he cried like an orphaned child.
Healthy Ma has a one-year contract with the Shanghai Sharks, a shaved skull, a black Fubu do-rag, a red Phat Farm sweatshirt, a U.S. green card, and an American wife and two little sons in Henderson, Nevada. At 33, balanced on a weak right knee, he yearns for one last NBA dance.
"Do you think you'll still be playing when the Olympic finals are in Beijing in 2008," he is asked, "and Yao Ming scores 66 points against the U.S. Dream Team?"
"He could score 66, and China would still lose," Healthy Ma snaps back. "It's a team game." Like many Americans before him, McClintock arrived in China with fears of deprivation and isolation. He brought a 1.8-kilogram tub of peanut butter from the Safeway in Flagstaff, Arizona. "We figured that would hold him," his wife says, "until I could get there with the Hamburger Helper." Alisha shows off the well-stocked larder in the condo: Welch's Strawberry Spread, Bush's Original Baked Beans, Franco-American Gravy and Post Cranberry Almond Crunch cereal, all of it personally delivered by Alisha—who is completing her nursing studies at Northern Arizona—when she arrived on Christmas break.
"I expected pure Third World," her husband says with a shrug, but Alisha needn't have troubled. In Shanghai there are a dozen Western-style supermarkets—and a Starbucks on nearly every corner, plus Tony Roma's and T.G.I. Friday's and Hard Rock Cafe. On this day, however, Dan walks to a sidewalk noodle stand on Diligent Study Road. This is his training meal: a 40¢ bowl of steaming pasta in broth, topped with slivers of beef. Chinese street food is more likely to repeat than the Los Angeles Lakers, but it suits the big man, as does the comfort of ritual, six hours before the game.
"I knew the basketball in China was good and that good Americans had played here," he says as he slurps his meal. "I was more worried about the culture—I had no idea what to expect. What I feared most was religious: How would they react to my Bible? I just brought it, and if they took it away, they took it." They didn't take it. The religious revival in China, whether in government-sanctioned churches and temples or in clandestine "house Christian" gatherings, is one of the most extraordinary features of the post-Mao era.
What about the pressures of being the heir to the departed Young Giant? "As far as I'm concerned, they were just looking for a good player to come in and help," Dan-ni-er replies. "Not as a replacement—those are shoes I can't fill. Yao's larger than life."
Unlike Yao, the No. 1 pick in last June's NBA draft, McClintock wasn't a first-rounder. The Nuggets chose him in the second round in 2000, 53rd overall. They dumped him on Oct. 30 of that year, and he played for the Kansas City Knights before Denver signed him again the following April. "My first start—against the Lakers at the Staples Center, when I was guarding Shaq—it kind of hit me that I had made it to the top of the pyramid," says McClintock, who in 22 minutes had NBA career highs of eight points and eight rebounds. "I thought I did O.K., but that night Shaq made 13 out of 13 free throws." It was McClintock's last NBA start, too.
After a lackluster season in Italy, he played in a summer league in Arizona before getting a call from his agent with the offer to play for Shanghai. He has average big-man skills and is not very aggressive under the boards. "I'm going to try my hardest to get back to the NBA, but this is still a great living," says McClintock, who would not say how much the Sharks were paying him but confirmed that it was six figures. "As long as I can play and I'm getting better, I'll go anywhere."
Across town, while Dan-ni-er sleeps the pregame afternoon away, the indoor and outdoor courts of the Lu Wan District Children's Athletic School echo with the clamor of wannabe Yao Mings. Teenage boys leap and shout and launch fadeaway threes, and a dozen girls who can't be older than seven dribble two balls at a time—perhaps the Olympians of 2020 and beyond. OUR DREAM IS TO BECOME A SHANGHAI SHARK, reads a banner strung on the fence, but it is out of date; the success of the Young Giant has trumped domestic glory. Now, says a coach named Wu, "the NBA is the ultimate goal."
Wu surveys the basketball court and confesses, "I don't see another Yao Ming here. We x-ray their hands when they're quite little, and from the length of the bones we can predict how tall they will grow to be. They all have the dream, but the fact is, we don't have anyone here who is going to grow above 2 meters." That's nearly 0.3 meter shorter than the orbiting Rocket rookie.
"This lad's mother is very worried," Wu says, pointing to a boy named Xu. "Both his parents played for city teams, and the mother, especially, wants him to be another Yao. But the X ray shows that he will be only 2.05 meters at the most, so there is no hope for him."
At 7:25 p.m. the Shanghai Sharks dancers have finished flailing to La Bamba and have sprinted back to their fur-trimmed overcoats. (This arena isn't heated, either.) A giant replica of Yao Ming's No. 15 jersey has been hoisted to the rafters; the starting lineups have been introduced to a working-class crowd of fewer than 2,000 at the Lu Wan Sports Arena. In an egregious performance the home team proceeds to lose to the Guangdong Southern Tigers 130-101. It is the defending champions' third defeat in a row, dropping them to an embarrassing 4-5, and Dan-ni-er is partly to blame. By the middle of the first quarter he had three fouls and had missed all three of his shots, including an unopposed dunk on which he failed to jump high enough and bounced the ball off the front of the rim.
At this Alisha hid her eyes in her mittens, and the Sharks reserves sank deep into their parkas on the bench. Someone in the green plastic chairs of the grandstand bellowed, "Get some black men!"
The Southern Tigers, who are in first place, have two African-American imports—Nick Sheppard, from Pepperdine via the Harlem Globetrotters, and Jason Dixon, out of Liberty University by way of Turkey, Israel, Argentina, Sweden and Cyprus. But as Healthy Ma says, it's a team game. The visitors' homegrown guards are as quick as cats, darting untouched among the grasping Shanghainese.
In China the pro game has advanced to the point where a player with a few games of NBA experience might prosper—but won't dominate. CBA rules restrict each team's foreign players to a total of five quarters of playing time per game. Usually, one foreigner plays the entire game and the other joins him for the final 12 minutes, but the Tigers are so far ahead by the end of three periods that they sit both of their Americans.
Byrne, on the other hand, gets much more than his usual playing time, peeling off his insulating outerwear when McClintock commits his fourth foul early in the second quarter with the Sharks behind by 21. Byrne has modest skills that are not enough to rescue the drowning hammerheads. Later, over a late supper at Pizza Hut, he says, "I'll probably be gone tomorrow." The day after the Guangdong debacle it becomes evident that for McClintock and Byrne, the Year of the Goat has begun about three weeks early. "The players that we invited from the U.S.A. are not doing well," says Sharks coach Liu Qiuping after practice. "Usually we bring in one tall American and one short one. When Yao Ming went to the NBA, we got two tall guys to take his place, but it didn't work out as we had wished. They do not play as if they are in a war. They should be full of spirit and energy. Instead, they are not very smooth."
Even an 18-year-old forward named Wang Li Gang feels obliged to throw his two fen in. "Not everybody can be like Michael Jordan," he says, "but I thought they'd be better than this."
The prestigious newspaper Wen Hui Bao is not quite as harsh in an article headlined, WORKER HARDER, HOMEBOYS:
"In the past, the Shanghai team gained the upper hand in the center position because of Yao Ming. And his extraordinary capability in defense also made up for the errors his teammates made. The team's weaknesses have all surfaced since Yao Ming left the team.
"It is learned that the Oriental Club is planning to recruit a new center from outside in order to substitute for Dan-ni-er, as a result of his poor performance. However, it is neither fair nor accurate to put all the blame on Dan-ni-er alone. It is also not helpful for the team's future success."
"It's not their fault," says Ma, who, with his ailing knee, played only a few minutes of the rout but drew the loudest ovation from the faithful. ("Ma Jian jia you!" they cried when he took the court. Add fuel, Healthy Ma!) "It's tough for them," he continues. "They come on short-term contracts. They are people who love this game, and they make our league look better. But their language is different, their culture is different, their playing system is different—you can't expect a Chinese coach and American players to work together so quickly.
"Our young Chinese players talk about Yao all the time—‘Oh, I wish he was here'—and I tell them that it's a waste of time talking about him. Look up at the ceiling, boys: There's his jersey. He's retired, and he's not coming back. Let's take care of our jobs. Forget him. Work hard today."
This is not to say that the young Sharks wish they were Yao. "They all want to be Kobe," Ma says. "None of the big guys' shoes sell well here." Ma contends that he is not jealous of Yao. But doesn't Ma wish he were the one in the NBA—even for one game? "Just one game would resolve everything in my life," he says, sighing. "I would know that I could play with the best. It would make my dream come true." And he begins to silently sob.
The Sharks have two days to prepare for the Hong Kong Flying Dragons. For the American players the writing seems to be on the wall: according to the Shanghai Daily, a Nigerian center named Uche Ejelu Okafor—declared ineligible by the NCAA a year ago when he tried to play at Missouri—has been called in for a secret tryout with the Sharks.
The evening of the game, the Sharks break out of their desolation with such intensity that they seem to have trained on maotai liquor instead of boiled noodles. There is no sign of Okafor. If his name was floated merely to warn the Americans—"killing the chicken to scare the monkey," in the words of a Chinese proverb—the ploy has worked, at least for one night.
Shanghai scores the first 10 points and leads Hong Kong 44-29 after one quarter. By this time gentle Dan McClintock has slammed home three dunks and has dared to yelp in protest to a referee. His wife is glowing with pride. When Dan-ni-er sits down in the second quarter with 25 points (and Byrne—who will be cut in a couple of weeks and replaced by an American guard—comes in to score 20 points), he almost seems to smile. But this would be vanity.
The Sharks win 122-108, and for an instant Yao Ming is just a memory.
- Allen Abel/Shanghai
- Dan McClintock, Yao Ming's replacement on the Shanghai Sharks, has the toughest job in China