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Nobody, though, seems a safer bet than Yi Jianlian. The son of two former athletes--his 6-ft. 5-in. father and 5-ft. 8-in. mother were both forcibly recruited by the state to play an obscure sport known as team handball--Yi was discovered in 1999 on a playground in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen. Barely out of grade school, he was already 6 ft. 4 in. tall, a behemoth in a region known for its diminutive people. Yi's parents, however, were reluctant to let the Soviet-style sports school lay claim to their only son. "We had endured hardships ourselves," says Yi's mother, Mai Meiling, who like her husband works as a postal clerk. "We couldn't get good jobs when we retired because we didn't have a good education. We wanted more for our son." Dai Yixin, the school's veteran coach, finally convinced the parents their son wouldn't get lost because he had all the raw ingredients of a star: speed, flexibility, coordination, leaping ability, size. By measuring the gaps between the bones of his hand and tracking the growth of his genitals--a Chinese-honed indicator of height--Dai predicted that the youngster would reach 6 ft. 8 in. or 6 ft. 9 in.
Still, Yi's career almost ended before it began. Halfway through his first 400-m training run at the full-time sports school, Yi stopped abruptly, gasping for breath, tears rolling down his cheeks. "I wanted to quit," Yi says. "I had never lived away from home before, and I had no idea if I could make it as an athlete." But his body kept growing, and so did his determination to make the best of a difficult situation. Yi still preferred watching cartoons to NBA games, but by the time he joined Guangdong's professional Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) team last year, he was an astonishing 6 ft. 11 in.--and he could leap and touch a spot more than 11 ft. 6 in. off the ground. (The basketball rim is 10 feet high.) As Yi mastered new skills--the midrange jumper, the baby hook, the reverse slam--he attracted the attention of Adidas. Eager to loosen Nike's hold on Chinese basketball, the shoe company flew Yi to New Jersey for its ABCD Camp in the summer of 2002. He was the only Chinese player there. "It was an eye-opening experience for him," says Guangdong junior coach Zhang Zhenming. "He came back with a very clear vision of where he wanted to go: the NBA."