Tuesday, May 20, 2008 Malilong: Sacrifice By Frank Malilong The Other Side
WE all know or have, at least, heard about Yao Ming: at 7 feet 6 inches, the tallest player in the National Basketball Association; drafted by the Houston Rockets as the first overall pick in 2002; married his girlfriend, Ye Li, a former member of the Chinese women’s basketball team last year; and chosen Model Worker of China in 2005 by the State Council, which is the equivalent of the Philippine Cabinet.
He placed second to the Phoenix Suns’ Amare Stoudemire in the selection for NBA Rookie of the Year and was the Rockets’ franchise player until his 2008 season was cut short by a stress fracture in his left foot in February. That will not stop him from collecting his contracted $13,762.775 million salary this year, however.
Yao Ming was in the news yesterday but for the wrong reason. An Agence France Presse report from Beijing said that the cager sparked a hailstorm of protest when he donated 500,000 yuan or roughly P3 million to the relief fund for his country’s recent earthquake victims.
Many of his countrymen obviously felt that the money was too little, coming from someone who, according to AFP, has been at the top of Forbes Magazine’s list of Chinese celebrities for the past five years. Critics, said the wire agency report, believe that the donation was “loose change” for someone whose total earnings last year reportedly reached $55 million.
What made Yao’s perceived lack of generosity glaring was the report that the 90-year-old widow of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping gave her entire life savings to the earthquake victims. Her donation of 100,000 yuan was pittance compared to Yao’s gift (which he would later increase to 2 million yuan) but it earned her praise while him, brickbats.
In both their books, the evangelists Mark and Luke wrote about the day Jesus, who was watching people dropping money into the temple treasury box, saw a widow dropping two small coins. He then told his disciples that the widow put in more than the rich people who gave large offerings “for all of them gave from their plenty, but she gave from her poverty and put in everything she had, her very living.”
The widow could have made a good case for not being able to contribute anything at all, said the commentary on Mark’s gospel in 366 Days with the Lord. “But the best giving has sacrifice connected with it – even a certain courageous recklessness. As Winston Churchill observed, we make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
