The good folks over at Sports Illustrated China were gracious enough to send me an English translation of the article that appears in their publication after Yao was awarded the 2007 Sportsman of the Year award in China. Here it is!

Yao Ming, sportsman of the year
Written by Mary Nicole Nazzaro

Fast-forward 25 years.

Yao Ming is 52 years old and his basketball heroics are far behind him. He and wife Ye Li have their own family, maybe even a basketball player. They bask in nice memories of Olympic Games and Toyota Center lights and crowds. Their lives are peaceful and uncluttered. The glitz and glamour of the NBA are a distant memory.

Watch the highlight movie of Yao Ming’s sports career for a moment in your mind, and then ask yourself – what will be the best moment of this film? What will be the moment when I will look back and think,yes, that’s the Yao Ming I remember, the man who single-handedly introduced millions of American basketball fans to the most populous country in the world, the man who was named SI China’s Sportsman of the Year, way, way back in 2007?

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Through public voting, Yao was selected as the S.I. China Sportsman of the Year. He beat out several prominent Chinese athletes, including Milwaukee Buck Yi Jianlian and last year’s winner Liu Xiang. Raymond has posted some of the photos from the article in the forum. And for a limited period of time, you can see some of the same photos they are displaying on the S.I. China home page at http://www.sichina.com.

Yao Ming shoots over Detroit’s Rasheed Wallace Wednesday night. Yao scored 21 points, grabbed 13 boards, had 3 assists, and blocked 4 shots. He also hit some big shots in the fourth quarter that were instrumental to a close 80-77 win. Click here for more photos from the game.

It was ridiculous how the Rockets escaped with this win. They overcame one of the worst free throw shooting games ever (6-of-22), the Pistons were extremely cold in the first half shooting only 27% from the field, the Rockets blew a 14-point first half lead, a 10-point lead in the 4th quarter, and the Pistons had two chances at the end of the game to win it on two consecutive three-pointers that missed. But the Rockets will take a win anyway they can get it. That’s how desperate they are for W’s.

The game started out with Rick Idle-man not rewarding the players who had given effort in Philadelphia on Monday with a starting assignment. Luther Head, Mike James, Kirk Snyder, Luis Scola and Bonzi Wells were all on the bench to start the game. James and Snyder didn’t play one minute of the game, and neither did Steve Francis.

It was clear from the outset that Idle-man was going to stick with his old ways, hunker down with a few key players, and be more conservative than ever to scratch out a win any way he could. He even had McGrady consistently playing point guard in the fourth quarter. It was like a throwback to the JVG era.

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