Word: yao
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...couldn't feel more at home. An All-Star for the second straight year and the league's sixth leading scorer, Nowitzki, 24, like Houston Rockets center Yao Ming and Sacramento Kings forward Peja Stojakovic, belongs to a swelling corps of international players who are winning hearts, minds and dollars, both in the U.S. and abroad. While helping make basketball arguably the world's fastest-growing sport, he and the other sharpshooting globetrotters have managed to captivate hard-to-please hoops fans in the U.S. "Nowitzki's just a freak. He's too big for the small forwards to guard...
Memphis Grizzlies sensation Pau Gasol, a gangly 7-ft. native of Spain who can handle and shoot the ball like a 6-ft. guard, last year became the first European player to win Rookie of the Year. This year Yao is a favorite to become the first Asian to get the honor. Meanwhile, Russian-born 6-ft. 9-in. forward Andrei Kirilenko is helping his elders John Stockton and Karl Malone keep the Utah Jazz in the play-off hunt. "There are going to be a lot of us," says Gasol. "We're proving we can play here...
...players, including Yao, were taken in the first round of last year's draft, and 10 or more could go that high this year. Serbian seven-footer Darko Milicic, 17, is widely expected to be the second pick after LeBron James, the high school sensation from Akron, Ohio. It's no coincidence that the three best teams so far this season (and those with the best shot at dethroning the L.A. Lakers as NBA champs) are the Kings, Mavericks and Spurs, all aided by an abundance of foreign talent. (With Stojakovic and center Vlade Divac on the Kings, some fans...
...October another marketing partner, Reebok, launched Philadelphia star Allen Iverson's sneaker, the $130 Answer 6, across much of Western Europe. It sold out in six weeks. International markets now account for 30% of Reebok's sales, up from 10% two years ago. Thanks in large part to the Yao-inspired basketball craze in China, Spalding's international sales grew 44% in 2002. And Sprite has joined with players like Nowitzki, Stojakovic and Parker to help peddle the soft drink in their native lands...
...more importantly, governmental attempts to control Yao are signs of future problems that extend beyond the basketball court. I am glad Yao is representing China, but what China is that? The potentially progressive, market-oriented democracy we would like to see? Or is part of Yao’s income going back to a Communist, human rights-oppressing, militaristic China that continues to build nuclear weapons and will likely clear Beijing streets of any “undesirables” in time for the 2008 Olympics...