Yao Ming’s Retirement: Missing What Was Already Gone

I’m too young to have known what vinyl records really weighed. My parents kept them on a shelf in our family room’s entertainment system, and I could pull them out and play them on a record player that was also a cassette player, CD player, and radio–it had a remote control, too–but I never went to a store and thumbed through rows of albums still in shrink wrap, with unscuffed corners, unless there was an antique store next door, or I was posturing to be cooler than I ever was or will be.

Records were before my time, but I still lived with them. I knew how they crackled and the sound they made when they skipped, like the world was ending, and I knew you better not scratch them and had to flip them over to hear the whole thing. I knew they made the consumption of music an active process for the listener, which is why people like my parents couldn’t part with them, even though they were taking up much more room than their actual worth. And when Eddie Vedder got all sentimental and angry and started yelling, “Spin the black circle!” I knew what he meant, I just wouldn’t have screamed it. If I had written that song, I probably just would have been like, “yeah, spin it back. . . spin it back. . . yeah.”

And 7’6″ Yao Ming’s retirement has me feeling the same way.

It’s not that he wasn’t a great player, and it’s not like I won’t miss him. I loved the impossible feat of such a large giant of a man being able to flick the ball so softly into the bottom of the net, which was like a sledgehammer feeling as soft as a butterfly’s wings, or an avalanche of rocky cotton balls–it defied all natural premonitions and conjectures. It defied doubt. It defied faith. And, ultimately, became too impossibly imaginative to sustain: Yao’s colossally soft touch was undone by a ravine the size of a hairline fracture. It’s sad. It’s tragic. Perhaps even ironic. And definitely as mystifying as a mighty wax record succumbing to the flimsy, weightless shine of a compact disc.

And, now, with this news, the retirement of Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan’s aging, and LeBron’s refusal to turn his back to the basket, the post feels like a phonograph with nothing to play on it. It’s a sad day, but we were already bargain hunting in indie record stores, pretending that buying Dwight Howard on vinyl was the same as that first Beatles or Stones record that our parents rode home with in their bicycle basket.

This link will take you to some of Yao’s teammates reacting to the news, and I apologize if this sounds too much like a eulogy–Yao Ming is still alive!