The Man Who Would Be Ming

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Like many Americans before him, McClintock arrived in China with fears of deprivation and isolation. He brought a 1.8-kilogram tub of peanut butter from the Safeway in Flagstaff, Arizona. "We figured that would hold him," his wife says, "until I could get there with the Hamburger Helper." Alisha shows off the well-stocked larder in the condo: Welch's Strawberry Spread, Bush's Original Baked Beans, Franco-American Gravy and Post Cranberry Almond Crunch cereal, all of it personally delivered by Alisha—who is completing her nursing studies at Northern Arizona—when she arrived on Christmas break.

"I expected pure Third World," her husband says with a shrug, but Alisha needn't have troubled. In Shanghai there are a dozen Western-style supermarkets—and a Starbucks on nearly every corner, plus Tony Roma's and T.G.I. Friday's and Hard Rock Cafe. On this day, however, Dan walks to a sidewalk noodle stand on Diligent Study Road. This is his training meal: a 40¢ bowl of steaming pasta in broth, topped with slivers of beef. Chinese street food is more likely to repeat than the Los Angeles Lakers, but it suits the big man, as does the comfort of ritual, six hours before the game.

"I knew the basketball in China was good and that good Americans had played here," he says as he slurps his meal. "I was more worried about the culture—I had no idea what to expect. What I feared most was religious: How would they react to my Bible? I just brought it, and if they took it away, they took it." They didn't take it. The religious revival in China, whether in government-sanctioned churches and temples or in clandestine "house Christian" gatherings, is one of the most extraordinary features of the post-Mao era.

What about the pressures of being the heir to the departed Young Giant? "As far as I'm concerned, they were just looking for a good player to come in and help," Dan-ni-er replies. "Not as a replacement—those are shoes I can't fill. Yao's larger than life."

Unlike Yao, the No. 1 pick in last June's NBA draft, McClintock wasn't a first-rounder. The Nuggets chose him in the second round in 2000, 53rd overall. They dumped him on Oct. 30 of that year, and he played for the Kansas City Knights before Denver signed him again the following April. "My first start—against the Lakers at the Staples Center, when I was guarding Shaq—it kind of hit me that I had made it to the top of the pyramid," says McClintock, who in 22 minutes had NBA career highs of eight points and eight rebounds. "I thought I did O.K., but that night Shaq made 13 out of 13 free throws." It was McClintock's last NBA start, too.

After a lackluster season in Italy, he played in a summer league in Arizona before getting a call from his agent with the offer to play for Shanghai. He has average big-man skills and is not very aggressive under the boards. "I'm going to try my hardest to get back to the NBA, but this is still a great living," says McClintock, who would not say how much the Sharks were paying him but confirmed that it was six figures. "As long as I can play and I'm getting better, I'll go anywhere."

Across town, while Dan-ni-er sleeps the pregame afternoon away, the indoor and outdoor courts of the Lu Wan District Children's Athletic School echo with the clamor of wannabe Yao Mings. Teenage boys leap and shout and launch fadeaway threes, and a dozen girls who can't be older than seven dribble two balls at a time—perhaps the Olympians of 2020 and beyond. OUR DREAM IS TO BECOME A SHANGHAI SHARK, reads a banner strung on the fence, but it is out of date; the success of the Young Giant has trumped domestic glory. Now, says a coach named Wu, "the NBA is the ultimate goal."

Wu surveys the basketball court and confesses, "I don't see another Yao Ming here. We x-ray their hands when they're quite little, and from the length of the bones we can predict how tall they will grow to be. They all have the dream, but the fact is, we don't have anyone here who is going to grow above 2 meters." That's nearly 0.3 meter shorter than the orbiting Rocket rookie.

"This lad's mother is very worried," Wu says, pointing to a boy named Xu. "Both his parents played for city teams, and the mother, especially, wants him to be another Yao. But the X ray shows that he will be only 2.05 meters at the most, so there is no hope for him."

At 7:25 p.m. the Shanghai Sharks dancers have finished flailing to La Bamba and have sprinted back to their fur-trimmed overcoats. (This arena isn't heated, either.) A giant replica of Yao Ming's No. 15 jersey has been hoisted to the rafters; the starting lineups have been introduced to a working-class crowd of fewer than 2,000 at the Lu Wan Sports Arena. In an egregious performance the home team proceeds to lose to the Guangdong Southern Tigers 130-101. It is the defending champions' third defeat in a row, dropping them to an embarrassing 4-5, and Dan-ni-er is partly to blame. By the middle of the first quarter he had three fouls and had missed all three of his shots, including an unopposed dunk on which he failed to jump high enough and bounced the ball off the front of the rim.

At this Alisha hid her eyes in her mittens, and the Sharks reserves sank deep into their parkas on the bench. Someone in the green plastic chairs of the grandstand bellowed, "Get some black men!"

The Southern Tigers, who are in first place, have two African-American imports—Nick Sheppard, from Pepperdine via the Harlem Globetrotters, and Jason Dixon, out of Liberty University by way of Turkey, Israel, Argentina, Sweden and Cyprus. But as Healthy Ma says, it's a team game. The visitors' homegrown guards are as quick as cats, darting untouched among the grasping Shanghainese.

In China the pro game has advanced to the point where a player with a few games of NBA experience might prosper—but won't dominate. CBA rules restrict each team's foreign players to a total of five quarters of playing time per game. Usually, one foreigner plays the entire game and the other joins him for the final 12 minutes, but the Tigers are so far ahead by the end of three periods that they sit both of their Americans.

Byrne, on the other hand, gets much more than his usual playing time, peeling off his insulating outerwear when McClintock commits his fourth foul early in the second quarter with the Sharks behind by 21. Byrne has modest skills that are not enough to rescue the drowning hammerheads. Later, over a late supper at Pizza Hut, he says, "I'll probably be gone tomorrow."