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Two years later Yao, just 13 but already 2 m, moved out of his parents' apartment to live at the Shanghai Sports Technology Institute. The city sports authorities, marveling at both Yao's size and his continuing awkwardness on the court, felt he would succeed only with more professional training. Over the next eight years Shanghai's top coaches and scientists would work to turn the galumphing giant into a star — and his parents would barely see him. Letting go wasn't easy for Da Fang. During those years she did her best to look after Yao's welfare, cooking big meals on his days off and, after home games, waiting outside the locker room to hand him food and clothing. At one point, frustrated by her inability to find basketball shoes big enough for him in China, she made a desperate plea to a family friend who lived in the U.S. The girl's boyfriend found a pair of size-18 Nike Airs for $92 and shuttled them back to Shanghai.
Like so many of her compatriots, even former Red Guards, Da Fang would gradually turn to the capitalist West not just for shoes but for a vision of life beyond the confines of the Chinese system. Her main source of ideas, initially, was Nike, which was angling for an advantage in China's burgeoning consumer market. From the moment in 1996 when a group of Nike executives first glimpsed Yao swaying like a giraffe into a Shanghai gym, they hoped that the then 2.18 m teenager would become the kind of hero who would help them sell the swoosh to the Chinese masses. Nike reps cozied up to his mother, offering, in addition to cool shoes and clothing, endless advice about how to turn Yao into a world-class player. To reach his potential, they said, Yao would have to find a way out of the deadening world of Chinese basketball and expose himself to foreign competition.
At Nike's urging, Da Fang pushed Shanghai's sports leaders to let Yao attend a 1997 Nike junior basketball camp in Paris. After seeing the effects of that first foreign trip — "He started to have more faith in himself," she said later — she embraced Nike's plan to escort Yao on a two-month basketball tour of the U.S. in the summer of '98. It was the first time Chinese authorities had given a player so much freedom. By the time a newly confident Yao returned at the end of the summer, he and his mother had begun to believe he might one day be good enough to play in the NBA. And the crowd that showed up at the family's apartment in September for Yao's 18th birthday party offered strong supporting evidence: it included an NBA coach, an NBA scout and Nike's full retinue of marketing reps in China.
Two vastly different worlds — China and the U.S. — were colliding over Yao, and nobody could predict the consequences. China itself was in the throes of a frenzied transformation. Rigid nationalists still ran the sports system, but many in the chain of command were acting more like businessmen on the make. One evening in April 1999, Li Yaomin, the deputy general manager of Yao's Shanghai team, summoned Da Fang and her family to the sumptuous Grand Hyatt hotel for an urgent meeting with a U.S. lawyer named Michael Coyne. "Your son has been taken care of for life," Li reportedly assured them. Late into the night, the club manager and his American friend tried to persuade the family to sign a contract that would give a third of Yao's future earnings to Coyne's company, Evergreen Sports Management. As the clock ticked past 2 a.m., Li reportedly warned the family that this would be Yao's only chance to go to the NBA. Reluctantly, Da Fang gave in.
Just before dawn, a tearful Da Fang called her contacts at Nike to bemoan the choice she had felt forced to make. The company reps, shocked that another American had swooped in on the giant they had been grooming, moved quickly to quash the deal, enlisting an NBA agent who denounced it as a form of extortion. The NBA, he pointed out, allowed a maximum agent commission of 4%, not 33%. Da Fang reneged on the deal a few days later, but the Evergreen contract would hang over her son's negotiations for three years — and her bitter feelings about the episode would border on paranoia. Less than a month later Nike persuaded the family to sign a four-year endorsement contract initially worth about $20,000 a year. It was a princely sum for a poor family, but Da Fang would tell a friend later that she felt the Nike deal, too, "was shoved down our throats."
By 2002 the maelstrom around Yao was dizzying. Now nearing his full height of 2.26 m, the 21-year-old utterly dominated the Chinese league, piling up more than 40 points and 20 rebounds per game in the finals to lead Shanghai to its first national title in half a century. The performance convinced his Shanghai bosses that it was time to let Yao enter that summer's NBA draft. But new obstacles emerged, and Da Fang — now the center of an amorphous group of advisers, Team Yao, that pointedly did not include Nike — struggled to find a way around them. Shanghai officials insisted that the onerous Evergreen contract was still valid. Beijing also announced that Yao would have to hand over 50% of his future earnings to the central government.
The biggest blow, however, came in June, when Wang Zhizhi, an army soldier who had been allowed to play in the NBA the year before, refused to come home to train with the national team. Wang's defiance terrified the authorities. What would happen if Yao decided to defect? With the help of Team Yao, Da Fang had been able to force the hand of Shanghai authorities, playing on their fears of being portrayed as greedy obstructionists. But now, faced with Beijing's refusal to release her son, Da Fang erupted. "If we don't reach an agreement," she threatened, "Yao Ming will never play basketball again." It wasn't until hours before the draft, after Yao himself offered a pledge of loyalty to the Chinese national team, that the authorities finally relented, sending the Houston Rockets the reassuring fax they needed to choose Yao as the No. 1 pick in the 2002 draft.
When Da Fang and her husband flew to Beijing to watch the draft with their son, the family seemed remarkably subdued. "They had felt tortured by this whole process," said one friend, "so they didn't have much emotion left." After NBA commissioner David Stern announced Yao's name as the top pick, Da Fang clapped lightly and gave only the faintest of smiles. NBA personnel had to prompt the family to show some excitement for the cameras, and the trio proceeded to make one of the most ungainly group high fives in TV history.