In middle age, some sports fans become reactionaries. Due to dwindling neuroplasticity, or some general souring toward the world, they can no longer appreciate how a game evolves. It’s similar to when a music fan stops checking for new artists and plays only albums that they loved in high school. As an aging NBA fan, I’m trying to stay vigilant. I never want to catch myself ranting endlessly at the bar about the inferiority of younger stars. When I watch them on the court, I look for fresh expressions of basketball beauty. And yet, despite my best efforts, I’m having a hard time getting into Victor Wembanyama.
Wembanyama, the league’s most promising young player, is only 21 years old and he’s French, but I don’t hold either of these things against him. Nor do I resent him for playing for San Antonio, a rival of my beloved Lakers. In fact, his fiery desire to improve reminds me of a young Kobe Bryant. I enjoyed his off-season jaunt to China, especially the 10 days that he spent at a Shaolin temple, learning kung fu. And at a time when NBA stars tend to be overly friendly with one another, Wembanyama has an entertaining tendency to needle his rivals. As a player, though, he leaves me unmoved.
Part of it is that he’s not especially relatable. In the parlance of sports fandom, Wembanyama is a freak. He ranks among the most unusual-looking players to ever grace a basketball court. Even in a league populated by giants, he is preposterously lanky at 7 foot 4 inches and 235 pounds. Other players have been given nicknames that suggest the strangeness of their physiques: Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks’ muscled 6-foot-11-inch player from Southern Europe, is known as the “Greek Freak.” Wembanyama, for his part, has been likened to a praying mantis. Before he was drafted, LeBron James called him an alien, and the nickname stuck.
Every professional athlete is an extreme outlier in terms of their body type, skill, ability, or all three. NBA teams seek out men of monumental stature; some 300 players in the league have been at least 7 feet tall. But even in this context, Wembanyama stands alone. Most 7-footers have been used as shot blockers; when they scored, it was almost always due to their extreme size. Wembanyama has mastered the skill sets of much smaller players. He can dribble through his legs; once I even saw him dribble through the legs of his defender. He can fluidly pull up and shoot from well behind the three-point line. It’s not a stretch to say that Wembanyama moves better with a basketball than anyone ever has at his height. “In all other instances, a 7-footer dribbling the ball up the court means that something has gone wrong,” the author and Spurs fan Shea Serrano told me. But when Wembanyama dribbles, Serrano finds it “good and right and holy.”
Wembanyama may possess preternatural grace for someone of his size, but he is still a coltish presence on the court. He seems to have stolen a taller man’s legs. Much of what he does comes easily on account of his enormous size, like a teenager having his way with a younger sibling’s Fisher-Price hoop. In a half-court offense, Wembanyama is never more than two (giant) strides from the basket, and when he arrives, he needs just a bunny hop to bring his forehead even with the rim. He can catch a lobbed ball with his back to the basket and execute a reverse dunk before he lands. For anyone else, these alley-oops would be spectacular, highlight-reel plays. For Wembanyama, they look like chin-ups.
As every sports marketer knows, identification is at the core of fandom. It is easier for us to bask in the glow of a great player if we can imagine ourselves executing their moves. Brands that endorse athletes count on people to buy into this fantasy of attainable greatness; they come right out and say so.
But it’s difficult for anyone to imagine doing the things that Wembanyama does, because he plays the game at such a high altitude. No normal person could ever match the skills of smaller NBA players either, but that fantasy is more accessible. Steph Curry, the league’s all-time record holder for three-pointers, has a degree of eye-hand coordination that is at least as freakish as Wembanyama’s height. But because Curry is just 6 foot 2, and I am nearly that, I can at least delude myself into thinking that with enough practice, I, too, could hit some of the shots that he does. It’s no accident that Curry, Michael Jordan, and other players whose physiques more closely resemble the everyman’s tend to have more fans, and more signature shoe lines. We look at Jordan and pretend that we can be like Mike.
Do people want to be like Wembanyama? Maybe so. He might be the front wave of a new era. The NBA may soon be stacked with even ganglier players who have all-world ball-handling skills and deep shooting range. Maybe my eyes will eventually adjust to them. Football fans needed time to accommodate themselves to Patrick Mahomes’s sidearm throws, as did the baseball fans who at first recoiled from Hideo Nomo’s tornado windup.
Either way, Wembanyama won’t be bothered. In his first season, he was named Rookie of the Year, and in his second, he would have been named best defender had he not been injured. This year, he looks even better, and Nike has already given him a signature shoe. A special logo is emblazoned on the heel and insole: an alien.
*Sources: Jim Poorten / NBAE / Getty; Chris Coduto / Getty; Stephen Gosling / NBAE / Getty; Adam Hagy / NBAE / Getty
