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The marble archway at no. 651 Nanjing Road loomed ahead of her — enormous and forbidding, even to a girl of her height. It was 1965, and Fang Fengdi, age 15, had arrived at the élite sports-training center that would become her home for the next five years — a place that would witness her transformation from frivolous girl to basketball star to something even more pivotal to Chinese history. But the entrance to No. 651 may have seemed all the more forbidding for one simple reason: Da Fang didn't want to be there. "I was just a young girl who loved to sing and dance," she recalls. "I always thought I'd be an entertainer, but I didn't like basketball at all."
Da Fang's height, however, had attracted the attention of Shanghai sports officials, who had paid an unexpected visit to her family's small apartment. They explained to her parents that Da Fang had the potential to bring glory to the city and perhaps to the nation through her efforts on the basketball court. The officials' unspoken message was also clear: because the sports system would become her "iron rice bowl," taking care of her food, shelter and employment for the rest of her life, she wouldn't have to follow her mother into the cramped assembly lines of the local garment factory.
Life in the sports factories, however, wasn't so different from life on the assembly lines. Both occupations provided workers with (or condemned them to) lifetime employment within the same danwei, or work unit. The best athletes usually lived five or six to a room, but they received a steadier diet of milk and meat than the rest of the population, a significant perk in a land where food was severely rationed. But athletic training was physically punishing and subject to the danwei's dictatorial rule. The danwei's minipotentates made, or at least enforced, nearly all of the key decisions in people's lives: where to live, where to work, what to eat, whom to marry and — most insidiously — what to think.
Da Fang's generation, born in the flush of the revolution, was the first to be indoctrinated from childhood in the rigid certainties of Mao Zedong Thought. By the mid-1960s the ideological training at No. 651 Nanjing Road had become almost as intense and monotonous as the athletic training. Every week there were obligatory sessions called, without irony, Democratic Life Meetings. Party leaders extolled the Great Helmsman and exhorted the faithful to show ever more revolutionary spirit. Then the athletes engaged in a self-flagellating round of confession and repentance.
In Da Fang's day the high priest presiding over many of the Democratic Life Meetings at No. 651 was a handsome but imperious party cadre named Zhu Yong. Zhu was technically the official in charge of women's basketball, even though he didn't know the rule book nearly as well as he knew Mao's Little Red Book. His real authority came from his position as deputy Communist Party secretary, which gave him the power to shape the young athletes' minds. Several times a week Zhu summoned the basketball players to the institute's first-floor lecture hall for "political thought" meetings, at which he chastised them for sacrificing too little for the revolution, succumbing to the evils of individualism and even engaging in romantic relationships, which were not allowed.
Young and impressionable, Da Fang was putty in the hands of such propagandists. Molding her basketball game proved more difficult. The teenager may have been the tallest female player in Shanghai, but "she was terrible at first," says one of her early coaches. "She ran very slowly, she couldn't catch the ball, and she got so tired she could run up and down the court only a couple of times before she had to stop."
The athletes trained eight to 10 hours a day, year-round, on outdoor courts that were bitterly cold in winter and blisteringly hot in summer. Coaches routinely beat players and forced them to play while sick or injured, pressing them to display revolutionary spirit. Some cried tears of pain throughout practice. Others vomited at the sight of a basketball court. But they kept going. Lin Meizheng, a forward on the Shanghai women's team, suffered from a painful kidney infection but never missed a practice. "We always felt that showing spirit was the top priority," she says. "You may not be able to improve your technique, but you can always improve your spirit."
Da Fang developed that spirit, too, and it began to show on court. After more than a year of training, the 16-year-old was still an awkward player, but she fought more aggressively for rebounds, and she sometimes hurled her now 1.88-m body to the ground in pursuit of loose balls. Her former coaches and teammates say her stiffening resolve had to do with a growing conviction in the purity of her "red" roots as the descendant of a long line of poor workers. For now, playing basketball was her only way to carry out the revolution. But that, like everything else, would soon change.