BEIJING — Limping down the hallway on sandals that reveal a red, painfully swollen foot, China’s Yao Ming does not want to stop. He looks weary from hosting visitors from around the globe at the Summer Games and cannot hide his disappointment after failing to lift his team to an Olympic medal in basketball.
Before the 7-foot-6 center can disappear through a doorway, however, a question that cuts to the heart of how much everything from athletics to economics to international relations has changed in his home country halts Yao in his tracks.
“Do you know Ma Jian?” Yao is asked.
The towering superstar arches a dark eyebrow, wondering how a visitor from the United States would know the forgotten face of hoops in China.
Replies Yao, “He is an old basketball player.”
In truth, Ma Jian is not so old. In fact, his 39th birthday is celebrated the same day a 94-68 loss to Lithuania eliminates China from the tournament.
And, if you want a short explanation of how an upwardly mobile nation of 1.3 billion people got to be such big players on the world stage so quickly in the 21st century, Ma is much more than just another athlete past his prime.
“I was not trying to be a rebel,” Ma says. “But somebody has to be the first to make change.”
After being a member of the national team that competed at the 1992 Summer Games, Ma became the first Chinese basketball star to seek fame and fortune overseas, leaving to play at the University of Utah and what ultimately proved to be an unsuccessful tryout in the NBA.
Rather than being hailed as hoops diplomat, Ma was blacklisted by sports authorities in China, who viewed his departure as an act of defiance and never welcomed him back to the national team.
“What I tried was so unheard of, they did not know how to deal with me,” Ma says.
With ripped muscles and a buzz cut that hides any hint of gray hair, Ma looks as if he could still snare rebounds. But Ma is content to watch from the Olympic arena where many fans now wear the jersey of Yao, whose annual salary of $50 million as a Houston Rockets star and popular corporate spokesman also earns him praise from the communist government’s current leadership as a model worker in the new China.
“Yao shows me respect. He should. He realizes what I did won the big money for him,” says Ma, laughter shaking his shoulders.
But how influential really was Ma on the lone athlete in the world who might inspire as many loyal followers as golfer Tiger Woods?
Yao offers a salute to Ma that demonstrates the kinship most valued in locker rooms everywhere, by playfully ripping on his predecessor with a fond recollection of a Chinese league contest seven years ago, when the young prospect got the chance to face a fading veteran on the court.
“I remember the game Ma went against me,” Yao says. “That was the first game my girlfriend came to see me play. I scored 40 points and had 30 rebounds on him.”
Not unlike the United States of 50 years ago, modern China is in such a hurry to move forward, there’s little time to ask where society is headed.
In Beijing, children of the 1970s and 1980s can easily feel lost in the rapid transition from the standard workingman’s garb and stringent socialism of Chairman Mao to the rampant materialism in a capital city where Audis honk in clogged streets and fashion trends are set by “Desperate Housewives” on television.
Being born in 1969 put Ma on the leading edge of what Chinese poet and singer Yang Haisong calls the “Rotten Generation,” in which anyone not obsessed with making money is left like garbage at the curb.
Yao proudly carried the flag of a proud host country as a chest- puffed audience of 90,000 cheered during the opening ceremony of the Summer Games.
Ma watched Yao do the honors on a large-screen TV, from a spot at a table inside a brand-new outlet of the Hooters chain in Beijing.
At the end of an evening anxiously anticipated throughout China for years, the sports bar’s manager pleaded with Ma to pose alongside scantily clad Hooters girls for a photograph to hang in the entrance. “Too bad I had already paid for the check. I should’ve asked for a discount. Getting free meals for being a sports celebrity would be very Americanized of me, don’t you think?” Ma says.
Fifteen years after Ma cracked the door, Yao has opened shop and cannot count the money fast enough.
Unfolding his 6-7 frame from a chair, Ma is asked, “Were you born too soon?”
Striding up the arena steps, he looks back for only one, long breath of reflection.
“I have no regrets,” Ma says. “I built a bridge. It does not matter who did. But maybe this did more than something for China. Maybe it did something for basketball. My regret would be if I had not tried.”
The social and economic reform reshaping China started with a million tiny steps. Is it overstatement to suggest one of the unsung pioneers was Ma?
He currently works quietly outside the spotlight, as manager of the venue where the Olympic basketball competition is being staged.
Before the tourney’s opening game, the hugely famous and massively wealthy international superstar of China’s team wrapped a giant arm around an old basketball player who dared to dream big.
Yao will always remember what Ma did.
It’s China that must be taught never to forget.
Mark Kiszla: 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com
