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Yao has even dealt deftly with his first media mini-controversy. Last summer Shaquille O'Neal asked a reporter to "tell Yao Ming, 'Ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-soh.'" In an Asian Week column early last month, the remarks were repeated, and Yao was asked for a response. Tongue in cheek, he said that Chinese was a hard language to learn. (To defuse any controversy, Yao had also sent Shaq a Christmas card, not a typical Chinese gesture.) Before the two played in Houston later in January, Shaq apologized, using the Mandarin dui bu qi. Yao invited Shaq to his home for dinner, and though O'Neal declined because of a family commitment, he congratulated Yao on his All-Star selection. Yao joked that he was relieved O'Neal couldn't come for dinner: "I was afraid my refrigerator wasn't big enough."
Where there is fame, charm and potential, money usually follows. The Rockets have seen single-game ticket sales rise 55% (group sales are up 100%) since Yao arrived. But the real windfall will come in October, when the team auctions off the naming rights to its new arena. The value of naming rights is usually determined by the number of media hits a team generates, and with Yao on board, a Rockets' study shows, the team's profile has doubled. So, presumably, will the value of the naming deal. The NBA, meanwhile, is beaming Yao's games into China to a potential 287 million homes.
Yao won't see a penny from naming or broadcast rights, but if he stays healthy and continues to improve his game, he should one day be rich enough to buy his own arena. In 2001 Yao made Erik Zhang, 28, a University of Chicago M.B.A. student (and a distant cousin by marriage), his official representative. Born in Shanghai, Zhang later moved to Wisconsin with his family. He envisions Yao at the lucrative nexus of American marketing dollars and Chinese consumers. "In five years," predicts Zhang, "he'll be way bigger than Tiger Woods. He'll be global."
To help turn Yao into an elite pitchman, Zhang recruited John Huizinga, deputy dean of faculty at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, sports agent Bill Duffy and a marketing director, Bill Sanders. In September Team Yao, as the group is known, commissioned a Chicago business-school class to prepare a marketing study on Yao. Students traveled to five Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, to conduct extensive polling and focus groups. In December the class presented Team Yao with a 500-page report about the core values of the 400 million urban Chinese consumers on whom they think Yao's marketers should focus. These Chinese, when asked which values were most important to them, "used words like hardworking, self-confidence, respect, talent, heroism and lightheartedness," says Sanders. Head to head, Yao outpolled all other Chinese celebrities on those qualities. "Yao was at the top--China's most popular celebrity, by far."
Market research is notoriously pliable, but even before Team Yao started mining the report, companies were at the door. "We chose him because we just thought he was hipper than other people around," says Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who cast Yao opposite Verne (Mini-Me) Troyer in an ad for the firm's new notebook computers. Visa built its Super Bowl ad around Yao's brief English-speaking debut ("Can I write a check?" he asks).