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According to former players and coaches who lived in the compound during these years, Da Fang became one of the most zealous disciplinarians. "She treated people badly," says one former coach, who remembers watching her cut off another woman's braided hair in one of the gentler forms of punishment. "The Cultural Revolution gave her a sense of pride, arrogance," says another coach. Thirty years later, he still searches for an explanation. "She was just a child. What did she know, right?"
Hunched before his captors at center court, Zhu Yong listened as Da Fang and the other Red Guards recited his crimes: working at a department-store candy counter before the revolution, maintaining contacts with the enemy Nationalist Party, deviating from the true path of Maoist thought. The deposed commissar had been active in Shanghai's communist underground long before Da Fang was born, but now the revolution was eating its own, and among local sports leaders Zhu suffered the most. The Red Guards deprived him of food. They beat him with fists and clubs, and they pulled his arms up behind his back in the excruciating "airplane" position. There's no evidence that Da Fang participated in Zhu's physical abuse, but several witnesses say she often led the public denunciations against him. During one session, in an apparent attempt to turn the onetime leaders against each other, she commanded Zhu to engage in hand-to-hand combat with his former second in command. The two men refused, and Da Fang erupted in anger.
For months Zhu had denied the charges against him, but now he was starting to break. Da Fang and his other captors once again shouted out their accusations, and the mob of athletes repeated each denunciation in full-throated unison. Somebody pulled Zhu's arms into the airplane, and the former party leader finally cracked. "Yes, yes," he said. "I confess." Zhu was shipped to a re-education camp in the countryside outside Shanghai. He would spend the next five years doing hard labor. One of the other deposed leaders remembers seeing Zhu once during that time, standing knee-deep in an icy stream, pulling rotten grass out of the water. The former commissar's hands were bleeding from frostbite, and his eyes had gone dead.
Chairman Mao didn't need his "little revolutionary generals" for long. By late 1968, having used the turmoil to consolidate power, he called in the army to establish order. The Red Guards were demobilized. Within weeks, millions of them were shipped off to the countryside to temper their revolutionary zeal with years of hard labor. Some would never make it home again.
Da Fang, however, would have a different fate. The revival of basketball — a sport she had been taught to vilify as a bourgeois Western import — saved her. Trophyism was still a crime, but the nation's communist leaders now saw sports as a way to restore the lost sense of communal feeling inside China and to rebuild diplomatic relations outside. Training sessions resumed in Shanghai in 1969. Many of the nation's best athletes, however, were still toiling away at factories and collective farms. The dearth of veterans benefited the 19-year-old Da Fang and hastened the rise of Yao Zhiyuan, the 2.08 m center who joined the Shanghai men's team after escaping the brunt of the Cultural Revolution as a worker at the Shanghai No. 8 Machinery Factory. Da Fang would soon become the standout Chinese center of her generation, developing a steady shot to go with her tenacity under the basket — skills that would later help her power the women's national team to an unforgettable upset win over South Korea in the 1976 Asian Championships.
Da Fang was a loyal Maoist, too, and Beijing sensed that she would be a perfect role model for the nation. She was selected year after year as the national team captain and was often assigned to greet foreign delegations at the airport, meet presidents and mingle with members of the politburo. She moved easily between the basketball court and the highest echelons of political power. But around her teammates she rarely cut loose. "Da Fang was very closed," says Luo Xuelian, the national team's effervescent point guard. "After practice she would just sit in her room knitting sweaters." The aloofness only added to her aura of authority.
Nagging health problems, however, hindered Da Fang's career. The grueling practices exacerbated the pain in her lower back, and she constantly teetered on the edge of exhaustion. She traveled with the national team to Iran, France and Cuba, but health problems forced her to miss several other trips, including a 1975 tour of the U.S. Three years later, at age 28, Da Fang was ready to hang up her sneakers.
When Chinese athletes reach the end of their playing days, they are never truly released from their obligation to the state. Until recently the sports system automatically absorbed most retired athletes as coaches or administrators, who passed on their knowledge to the next generation. If they happened to be extraordinarily tall or talented, they were expected to pass along something even more fundamental: their genes. Indeed, when Shanghai sports officials finally let Da Fang retire, they suggested that she produce a champion. But whom could Da Fang marry? She had never kissed a boy, much less dated one. Her entire adolescence and adult life had been focused on just two things: sports and revolution. Even if Da Fang had had the time or inclination, dating was strictly prohibited in the sports system — and marriage was forbidden until athletes either retired or turned 28. If a player got pregnant, she would have to get an abortion or be kicked off the team and reassigned to a less desirable work unit.
The responsibility for arranging marriages among the most gifted retired athletes often fell to the coaches. "We had to do a lot of work as matchmakers," says Wang Yongfang, the former sports-institute leader who coached Da Fang early in her career and, after a long stint of hard labor in the countryside, was rehabilitated as the leader of the Shanghai women's team. "These girls spent far more time with the coaches and team leaders than with their own parents. Who else was there to make sure everything was O.K.?"
Before Da Fang even started to look for a husband, Shanghai officials had identified a suitable partner for her: Yao Zhiyuan. Yao, an active player who was two years her junior, was an agreeable man whose ready smile and love of a good quip contrasted sharply with Da Fang's grim demeanor. For several years the two players had eaten in the same cafeteria, lived in the same dormitory and practiced on adjoining courts, but, Da Fang says, "we didn't know each other very well." Shanghai coaches teased the two towering centers that they were made for each other. But it was up to a team leader named Liu Shiyu to make the match. He spoke with the players separately and convinced them that they could "make do" with each other — adding that they had the Communist Party's stamp of approval to do so. Given such high-level interest, how could Da Fang and Da Yao refuse?
The sports community didn't have to wait long for the first offspring of what the press was calling "the first couple of Asia." In the small apartment where Da Fang and Da Yao lived, everyone gathered to see the miracle child — long-awaited Yao.