A long article appeared in the Times Online in UK on Yao. You can read it by clicking here, but for the most part if you have been following Yao’s career, you won’t really learn much new. However, below I have narrowed down some of the things that were new and interesting to me:

* Yao said, “The first few months I was really homesick,” he told The Times at his home in Houston, Texas, where he is recovering from a fractured tibia that will keep him out until mid-March. “I was counting it day by day, just to survive.

“After a couple of weeks I felt like I had already left home months ago — it was really slow. I would look at the dates all the time to see how it passed. I wasn’t driving at the time. I didn’t know my way around Houston. Everything was unfamiliar and I was trying to adjust to the NBA and perform.

* Yao said, “…after one or two years in the NBA, I became clear about my job. They ask the questions and you answer them. So from then on, I tried to be more professional and I started to make some jokes, to make it fun for myself. If the questions were going to bore me, at least I could have some fun and entertain myself.”

* Yao said, “…I’ll tell you this story. In 1993, we tried to get the Olympics. Obviously, we lost, but that night when the announcement was going to be made, I stayed up late as a 13-year-old boy to hear the news, but finally I fell asleep before the news.

“The next morning, my mom tells me we lost the Olympics and I’m really, really sad. Then, in 2001, we go to Moscow to try to get the 2008 Olympics and that night the TV was sitting right over my shoulder while I was in my bedroom playing video games and I was just listening for the news. I wasn’t watching because I was afraid to. Finally I heard [Juan Antonio] Samaranch [the IOC president] say ‘Beijing’ and I almost cried.

* Yao also said that he would like to hold the record for the most number of Olympic games for a Chinese basketball player, which would be four, taking him to play in the 2012 London Olympics.

* Bill Sanders, VP of Marketing for Yao’s agency BDA Sports, said the following: “…Yao is a reluctant icon. He doesn’t have the ego that a lot of celebrity athletes have. He feels a responsibility to China and to Chinese basketball. But privacy is important to him.

“He gives us a certain number of days to ‘sell’ and I would guess that figure is half as many days as Tiger Woods or Peyton Manning [quarterback with the Indianapolis Colts, winners of Super Bowl XLI] does. Could he be making more money? Sure. Should he be out there [in the public domain] with Tiger Woods? Sure. But he doesn’t want to be.”

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 3:38 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.