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Yi Jianlian is the first to admit he's not ready for prime time. "I'm too young and skinny," he says, his baggy denim shorts and triple-XL Nike shirt only reinforcing his point. Yi has played only one season, most of it riding the bench, in the CBA. But his final regular-season game last spring offered a tantalizing glimpse of the future. With the game heading into overtime, Yi came off the bench to score 13 points in five minutes to seal the victory--and secure Guangdong's place atop the standings. Two weeks later, when Guangdong played the army team for the CBA championship, the stands were crawling with sports agents and shoe-company representatives, all fixated on the big kid on the bench. "It's partly the Yao Ming effect," said a shoe-company executive. "But Yi Jianlian is so promising we would have pursued him anyway." Yi played sparingly in the game, but he offered a fitting capstone to the season, stealing an inbounds pass in the final seconds for a breakaway jam. At the team's postgame meal, agents and reps crowded around the teenager, toasting him with Tsingtao beer until his face turned beet red.
So when might Yi Jianlian don an NBA uniform? That depends on the biggest mystery of all: his age. The national junior-team roster says Yi was born on Oct. 27, 1987, which would make him just 15--and not eligible to enter the NBA draft independently as an international player until 2009. Several well-placed Chinese basketball experts say he is 17 or 18. Dates are manipulated, they claim, to give Yi more years of eligibility for junior competitions, which China counts on to increase its international prestige. (Age shaving is endemic in international junior competitions. It even affected the Clippers' Wang Zhizhi, who had NBA teams scrambling to verify his true age to make sure he was old enough for the draft.) Yi and his parents both say on the record that he was born in 1987. But when pressed on the issue, Yi turns away and fills the room with an uncomfortable silence, and his father smiles blankly without responding. Whatever the truth, it doesn't seem to bother Nike. The company recently beat out the competition and signed Yi to a six-figure, multiyear deal worth far more than his actual salary--and indeed more than Yao Ming's original Nike contract. Forget about that other guy for a minute. The klieg lights of stardom are already starting to shine on the kid from Shenzhen.
Brook Larmer is writing a book about the rise of Chinese athletes on the world sports stage