One in a billion: Can Satnam Singh Bhamara do a Yao Ming in India?

Over the years, we have come across many a story on how Yao Ming was a 'project'. "Knowingly bred" for basketball and forced to play the sport "against his will", China's most famous sportsperson inadvertently popularised the sport in his country. Former Newsweek journalist Brook Larmer even came up with a book, Operation Yao Ming, explaining how the giant, who represented the Houston Rockets for eight seasons, spent his childhood years in state-run training camps.

Satnam Singh was not put through such hardships. He is not a product of some gene-pool engineering. Nor were his parents "encouraged" to get married to produce a "tall" baby. Singh's success is a result of hard work and the NBA's long-term dream of realising its India potential. It's taken about 10 years.

Today, as many as 300 million Chinese play and watch basketball. The numbers from India are encouraging, but there is obviously a long way to go.

Satnam's historic entry into the NBA comes less than three months after Sim Bhullar, a naturalised Canadian of Indian descent, appeared in an NBA game for the Sacramento Kings. Satnam, who was just 14 when he left India for the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, has come a long way. In five years, he has done what no Indian couldn't in all these years.

One of his first coaches at the junior level, Divya Singh remembers a "jovial young boy" who always wanted to make it big.

Divya, a former captain of the Indian women's team, recalls how Satnam would talk about his height all the time. "He would tell us how tall his father, mother and grandmother were. We were obviously surprised to see a seven-footer in our midst," Divya, now coach of the senior women's team, says.

Divya first met Satnam in 2011. "It was the youth championships in Vietnam. I remember he played brilliantly against three seven-footers from the Chinese team.. Against South Korea, the eventual champions, Satnam put up another brilliant show as India lost by just four points," Divya says.

Divya, whose sisters Priyanka, Prashanti, Aakansha and Pratima have all represented the country, hopes Satnam can do to India what Ming did to China. "It's all about doing well. If he trains hard and plays well, then it will inspire people to watch the sport a lot more," Divya says.

The legendary Abbas Moontasir, who played in the 1960s and 1970s, is also hopeful. "If a player like Yao Ming could make the most populous country in the world follow the sport so avidly, I don't see why Satnam's inclusion won't have the same effect on the second-most populous country.

"However, all this brouhaha will be soon forgotten if he doesn't perform well. A lot rests on this tall man's shoulders," says the 73-year-old Arjuna Award winner.

"You don't produce players by making the sport popular. For that, you have to train hard. I've seen so many skillful players go waste because they aren't ready to train that much. To compete with the big guys, you need to be able to match their physicality. I'm not saying you need to be tall. I'm saying even if you are comparatively short, you need to make up for that with you stamina," says the Nagpada resident.

Actor Abhishek Bachchan, a diehard basketball fan, doesn't want the media to draw comparisons between Satnam and Ming. "That would defeat the whole purpose. We would be writing his obituary by putting him under that kind of pressure. Give him time," says Bachchan.