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Yao got game: in America, the in-your-face dunk is the most beloved of basketball conventions. But for one seven-foot-four teenage giant, learning to slam the ball through the hoop meant defying everything his Chinese coaches had taught him--and getting his first taste of freedom on the court.

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THE STACCATO BLASTS OF the coach's whistle echoed through the gymnasium in suburban San Diego, and the basketball court went deathly still. Coach Rle (pronounced "Ar-lee") Nichols had finally run out of patience, and the teenagers on court--all members of his Nike-sponsored High Five America youth team--knew that one of them, maybe all of them, would be paying for it. The diminutive coach arched a bushy eyebrow at the towering Chinese kid under the basket.

"I've already told you a hundred times," Nichols said, shaking his head. "You've got to go for a dunk every time you touch the ball!"

Yao Ming had arrived in the United States a week earlier--a seven-foot-four package delivered personally by Nike's top marketing executive in China--and the seventeen-year-old would be spending the summer of 1998 playing on Nichols's traveling squad. The High Five America team was an odd assortment of wealthy white suburban kids, inner-city toughs, and some of the best athletes in California. And now, a Chinese giant. Yao was nearly a foot taller than anybody else on the team, and he showed some promise: soft hands, a delicate fadeaway jumper, fearsome shot blocking. But he also had an infuriating habit: He refused to dunk.

The slam dunk, of course, is the most glorified shot in the American game, a rim-rattling exclamation point that can delight crowds and demoralize an opponent. It also happens to be the highest-percentage shot in basket ball, especially for somebody over seven feet tall. And yet each time Yao got position inside, he laid the ball in gently off the glass or spun away from the basket for a soft fadeaway, just as he had been taught to do in China.

For a week, Nichols had been insisting that Yao dunk the ball every chance he got. And for a week, Yao had been resisting. Was something lost in translation? Nichols didn't speak any Mandarin, but he wasn't completely unaware of Chinese culture. He had toured China in the early eighties as the coach for Athletes in Action, a Christian-sponsored traveling squad that had played several games against the national team while surreptitiously bringing in hundreds of Bibles for China's underground churches. Nichols's Chinese hosts had informed him in advance that Athletes in Action wouldn't be allowed to win any televised games against the national team; the referees would make sure of that, if they had to, because it was a matter of face.

But Yao was displaying the other, gentler side of face. His reluctance to dunk came from a deeply inculcated fear of showing off and hurting other players' feelings. "He thought dunking was too flashy," Nichols said. The Christian coach didn't think he'd ever have to say this about a player,...

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