Yao’s mom and Yao’s government are in control

One of the best basketball blogs you’re not reading is Globetrotter, which bills itself as 1.7% rhymes, and may or may not have an official connection to our favorite Rockets/Backstreet fans.

Globetrotter is also 30% Asian, and directed us over to TIMEasia, which we also didn’t know existed. They have an excerpt from a new book about Yao titled Operation Yao Ming, and it’s good stuff that has been alluded to for some time.

News of Yao Ming’s birth was quickly relayed across town to the top leaders of the Shanghai Sports Commission. They were not surprised. These men and women had been trying to cultivate a new generation of athletes who would embody the rising power of China. The boy in the maternity ward represented, in many ways, the culmination of their plan.

The experiment had no code name, but in Shanghai basketball circles it might as well have been called Operation Yao Ming. The wheels had been set in motion more than a quarter-century earlier, when Chairman Mao Zedong exhorted his followers to funnel the nation’s most genetically gifted youngsters into the emerging communist sports machine. Two generations of Yao Ming’s forebears had been singled out by authorities for their hulking physiques, and his mother and father had both been drafted into the sports system. “We had been looking forward to the arrival of Yao Ming for three generations,” says Wang Chongguang, a retired Shanghai coach who played with Yao’s father in the 1970s and would coach Yao himself in the ’90s. “That’s why I thought his name should be Yao Panpan.” Long-Awaited Yao.

After this we got scared and started crying. Left out of our excerpt of their excerpt is that Yao’s mother was known as “Big Fang”. We’re pretty sure we’re going to be killed for even talking about this, so if you don’t mind joining us in the afterlife (read: hell), go ahead and check it out for yourself.