Paul Rouse: Can Wembanyama navigate a very different type of fame?
SOARING STAR: San Antonio Spurs star Victor Wembanyama, the number one pick in the NBA Draft, dunks the ball over the New York Knicks’ Isaiah Hartenstein at Madison Square Garden this week. Picture:Elsa/Getty Images
If you don’t already know who Victor Wembanyama is, you will soon see him everywhere.
Here are the bare facts: Wembanyama is a 19-year old French basketballer. He stands at 7 feet 4 inches, and plays with a grace and athleticism that is astonishing.
Last week, in just his fifth NBA game for the San Antonio Spurs, he scored 38 points and claimed 10 rebounds in a 132-121 victory over the Phoenix Suns.
He looked very inch a generational player whose brilliance could dazzle the sporting world for the next two decades.
What the experts say, as well, is that his personal talent is not indulged at the expense of his team. Instead, as his coach, Gregg Popovich put it: “He’s a multi-faceted player – he’ll pass to the open guy. He’s got confidence in himself. He made some plays that were unbelievable. That combination is pretty good.”
The Phoenix Suns had the future Hall of Fame player, Kevin Durant, in their team. Durant is the player that Wembanyama is most usually compared with and he said afterwards: “I don’t see anyone else like him in this game. We’re both skinny and I know he watched me growing up, but he’s his own player.”
The NBA is a magnificent propaganda machine. It can make even the relatively mundane appear magnificent and it has promoted as icons some players who could never live up to the tag.
This hype is essential to “the show”.
But all the evidence suggests that Wembanyama is uniquely placed to live up to the colossal expectations that have been set.
What will be fascinating to watch about him is how his fame manifests itself.
We know that through all of modern organised sport, there have been superstars whose fame has transcended the game that they play.
That is to say they become cultural icons of their time, not just sporting heroes.
It happened, for example, with W.G. Grace in cricket, Babe Ruth in baseball, Muhammad Ali in boxing and Pele in soccer.
Basketball is the most popular global sport in the world after soccer. It is true that cricket has a huge fanbase, not least because of the passion for the game in India, but there are great swathes of the world where the game holds no interest.
By contrast, basketball – which is the ultimate game for urban streets and lanes and yards – has a genuine global reach. This is something that is carried along on the tides of American popular culture, its music, films and television programmes.
And the growth of basketball – in which the NBA in American is by far the most important and richest league – means that its greatest stars can generate a fame that is truly enormous.
It happened with Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant – and still happens with LeBron James. All the early indications are that Victor Wembanyama will rise to that level of superstardom.
There will most likely be a difference, however.
The nature of all celebrity has fundamentally changed in this new millennium. That is not to say that there was uniformity of experience shared by previous generations. There clearly wasn’t.
Indeed, sporting fame has always been transformed time and again in tune with how wider society was itself being fundamentally changed by technology. To this end, a certain level of fame could be achieved through newspapers and radio. Subsequently, being able to see on TV the actions and deeds of sports stars brought an entirely new dimension to this fame. Indeed, it has revolutionised the meaning of fame.
By the end of the 1950s about 90% of American families had their own television. Much of the rest of the world followed in this process. Part of this was down to the technological advances which allowed the live broadcast of sport through satellite across the world from the 1960s.
Because viewers could watch live sporting events from around the world it created a new momentum. All manner of new possibilities poured out of the tube that sat now in the corner of almost every front room.
The most potent example of this was the global fame earned by Muhammad Ali in the 1970s.
The age of television is not dead – but the advent of the internet and the ubiquity of social media has decisively shifted the meaning of fame.
The fact that sports stars can use social media to communicate directly to people has redefined the power of their celebrity. It has facilitated the creation of a model in which the sports star can endorse, promote and market consumer goods and services beyond the need for a channel that they do not themselves control. They may choose to engage with TV, but they don’t need to.
For example, Cristiano Ronaldo has 611 million followers on Instagram. These followers are prime targets for the consumption of products from a range that Ronaldo, himself, controls.
This can be seen most obviously in the CR7 brand. There is the clothing range that mixes an underwear collection with a range of styled shirts. There is the CR7 ‘Play it Cool’ cologne. And there is the “eyewear” range. These are sunglasses, or as the official website cristianoronaldo.com puts it: “A contemporary collection able to masterfully match any type of look: classic colors for everyday style alternate with more eye-catching tones or a style that does not go unnoticed.”
There is also, as the website says, “a new footwear line that further enriches the whole collection and interprets the style of the most demanding and eccentric man.” And there is his bottled water, which he says “is much more than water. It is an inspiration to drink health and a lifestyle”. The fact that last sentence has no actual meaning seems not to matter.
In terms of basketball players, the greatest star in the world is LeBron James. He has 158 million followers on Instagram.
By contrast, as things stand, Victor Wembanyama “only” has 3.1 million followers on Instagram, although this number is accelerating by the day.
It is the nature of the modern world that Instagram will most likely soon enough follow Twitter down a road to increasing irrelevance. In other words, it will be displaced by something new. And as newer technologies and channels of social media emerge, the nature of commercialisation and media representation – and by extension of celebrity – will change.
What will not change is the fact that sports stars are uniquely placed to make incredible sums of money on the back of their talent. Those who play team sports will continue to be paid extravagant salaries by their employers. But the great shift is their capacity to earn independently. This has reframed where the power lies in modern sport.
The challenge for Victor Wembanyama will be to make the most of his talent in a world where he has the potential to make a lot of other people (as well as himself) an awful lot of money. It will take uncommon discipline to navigate the sharks who will swim up to him – the hope is that he can both thrive and survive in the goldfish bowl of modern life.
