McCarthy and proteges at Beijing’s Temple of Heaven. Photograph: Aaron Kuo-Deemer

Tom McCarthy was living in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, arranging manufacturing deals for sports shoemaker Etonic, when he decided to grow the game of basketball in Asia. “You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to see the size of the opportunities,” he says.

In 1995 he began running basketball clinics throughout Asia for children, teen-agers, and coaches—attended by more than 23,000 in all. “I’ve personally taught the game to kids in 27 countries,” says the lanky, 6’5″ McCarthy, “including Yao Ming [of the Houston Rockets] when he was just 13.”

At the same time, McCarthy, who played a year of basketball in college as a walk-on and subsequently coached at the high school and small-college level, was developing and expanding the Asian Basketball Confederation (now FIBA-Asia) with leagues in 44 countries. He organized tours of China by retired NBA stars—the first team, coached by Oscar Robertson, included Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Moses Malone, and Adrian Dantley. And he served as an NBA scout in Asia, first for the Orlando Magic and currently for the Boston Celtics.

In 2004, McCarthy decided to turn his attention to baseball. He co-founded the professional Chinese Baseball League and became the first American named to a Chinese government sports committee. McCarthy sold his share to a Japanese conglomerate in 2006. He still laments that his plan for a stadium with a replica of the Great Wall sitting atop a left field fashioned after Fenway Park’s green monster never got off the drawing board.

McCarthy is now CEO of Beijing International Group, a company of some 200 full- and part-time employees in 13 cities, which markets the China Tennis Grand Prix Mercedes Benz Cup and its associated junior program, “Swing for the Stars.” “In the two and a half years we’ve been running clinics and sponsoring the Tennis Grand Prix,” he says, “the number of Chinese playing tennis has grown from one million to six million.”

Raised in Roxbury’s Heath Street housing project, McCarthy recently purchased a small house outside Beijing (“the city got too crazy with all the construction for the Olympic Games”), but he is considering returning to the States and starting a school—part sports academy, part prep school—for Chinese students.

“Three sports is enough,” he says.

Terry Byrne is a writer in the Boston area.

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