BEIJING – The first trace of thunder came at 9:48 p.m., Beijing time, when the disembodied voice, in English, said, “And now, introducing a” but there was no introducing anyone, not when 11,083 voices started colliding with one another.
Yao Ming isn’t easy to miss anywhere that he walks anywhere in the world, and right now he was walking onto the floor at the Olympic Basketball Gymnasium and there was certainly no mistaking him.
The host nation of these Olympics had already won a couple of gold medals, it had already gotten off to a swift start all across these Games, it had already electrified the world with an Opening Ceremony that people were still talking about two days later. But this was the first impossible-to-miss moment of the Games.
And here came Yao, leading the Chinese basketball team onto the court, into a lay-up line, into a cauldron of sound that, as a boy, he could never have dreamed he’d one day hear on his own soil. The people who came here brought no illusions with them; these were the mighty Americans their hometown lads would be challenging.
“All I want,” an Olympics volunteer named Wang Ping said a few hours before the game, “is an opportunity to yell very, very loud for a very, very long time.”
That is what he would get. That is what they would all get. The U.S. would play its role, running and dunking and trapping and looking very much like a team with an 80-or-so year head start on the hosts, winning the game 101-70. But so would the Chinese, both the players and the people.
The players spent much of the first quarter and a half of the game thrilling the people in the arena, and the estimated 1 billion people worldwide who were expected to watch it. Yao made like Willis Reed, draining his first shot, a 3-pointer. The Americans missed a batch of open shots, collected a bunch of layups, and marveled at their opponents’ energy.
“It’s not easy playing with every eye in your country watching your every move,” Jason Kidd said. “I give them all the credit in the world for that.”
Then Sun Yue, who earlier in the weekend had agreed to terms with the Lakers, hit a 3-point shot with 6:06 left in the second quarter, and the game was square at 29-29, and the people inside the gymnasium were mad with glee, stomping their feet and clapping Thunderstix and enjoying themselves beyond belief.
That was as good as the basketball would get for them, the U.S. cranking it up from there, collecting 11 dunks and eight lay-ups in the first half alone. But it was a night, for these players and for these people, that transcended all of that.
“It is a treasure,” Yao would say, “for my memory.”
Yao was the focus of it all, of course, and it was plain to see that he is still not himself, still working his way back into shape after missing the last few months of the NBA season with a stress fracture. He made only two of the nine shots he took after that opening 3, though he did lead the team with 13 points.
When he was removed from the game with just over four minutes to go, the U.S. more than 30 points ahead, he shook his fist at the crowd, which hadn’t let up its vocal barrage all night, chanting and singing, even after the Americans had taken control.
“This is a personal Olympics for me,” Yao explained. “Everyone is proud. It felt great, all the flags and the people cheering. It was a great game, a great atmosphere, a great night to be a part of all of this.”
No one who was there would argue with him, of course. Mostly because they were all too hoarse to try.