Kieran Shannon: It’s Wemby’s world now. Even if he doesn’t seem to be from it
Over the past fortnight Victor Wembanyama has shown he is no longer merely the future of the NBA. He is the face of it right now. Pic: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
They’re very giddy in New York right now, partying this past week like it’s 1999: for the first time since that celebrated year their often-derided but always-beloved Knicks have made it back to the NBA finals.
And were they to go and actually win the whole thing outright, the outpouring would be something even more volcanic than if the Cork hurlers were to finally bring Liam MacCarthy back to Leeside and more akin to Mayo finally bringing back Sam.
Basketball may be the most played game in America yet it is not America’s game: football lays claim to that. But basketball is New York’s game. The sport is rooted in the very geography and culture of the city with its 1800 public outdoor courts, like Rucker Park and The Cage that spawned streetballers and showstoppers like Julius ‘Dr J’ Erving and Lew Alcindor AKA Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and of course Madison Square Garden itself.
Where all the greats have sang and fought but its biggest crowd-puller and longest residency act is the Knicks. Yet the last time they hoisted a world NBA championship banner from the Garden’s rafters was 1973, months before Ali and Frazier fought for a second time there. If Jalen Brunson, the team’s spiritual leader at just 6’ 2”, was to inspire the Knicks to another four wins over the next fortnight he would become as cherished and revered an athlete as the city as ever had.
The problem for him and the city that doesn't sleep - until at least the Knicks win that championship - is that standing in their way is a 7’5” force or freak of nature from France called Victor Wembanyama, christened by LeBron James and now known by all as the Alien.
Over the past fortnight he has shown he is no longer merely the future of the NBA. He is the face of it, right here right now while still only 22, and is on the verge of becoming the most compelling, charismatic and outstanding team sport athlete on the planet as we fade out of the era of not just LeBron and Curry and Durant but of Ronaldo and Messi.
Last Saturday night his San Antonio Spurs, a franchise with championship pedigree but hadn’t made the playoffs since 2019, overcame the defending NBA champions, Oklahoma City Thunder, in Game 7 of the western conference finals. It was an epic game in an epic series with the tone set by Wembanyama in game one, pulling down 24 rebounds and scoring 41 points which included a Curry-like three-pointer to bring the game to overtime.
Curry, like Brunson, is just 6’ 2”. Wembanyama, we’ll repeat, is 7’ 5’’. Men his size aren’t meant to shoot three-pointers. In the 80-year history of the NBA only 13 players have been listed to be Wembanyama’s height or taller. Only one of them made more than 10 three-pointers in their entire career. Wembanyama has made 152 this season alone between the regular season and playoffs, his accuracy an above-league-average of 35%.
What’s probably even more remarkable than Wembanyama’s all-round game is his mindset and personality. Kobe was similarly driven and Kareem similarly cerebral but in the early part of their careers at least that created a distance and in Bryant’s case, even division with teammates. Wembanyama is openly loved by and openly loving with his teammates. After the win over the Thunder he tearfully hugged every single person in the Spurs organisation that was in Oklahoma.
“Everything that you hear about Vic is true,” teammate De’Aaron Fox told NBC after the Spurs’ Game 6 win over the Thunder. “He don’t wanna see blue light after nine [pm]. He reads books. He’s not on his phone. It’s hard to describe the way that he is as a human being because he’s such a phenomenal basketball player but he’s a better person than he is a basketball player.”
He grew up – and boy, did he grow up – in Le Chesnay, a suburb in the shadow of Versailles, a 40-minute drive from Paris. His parents were both athletes – 6’ 6” Felix a long jumper, 6’ 3” Elodie a pro basketball player herself, and both coaches – Felix teaching many children, not just his own, proper running techniques, and Elodie a raft of underage basketball teams – yet were hardly Earl Woods or even Richard Williams. They impressed upon him there was more to life than his sport; if he got bad grades in school, they’d insist his coaches make him sit at the scorer’s table in the gym and do his homework before joining in practice. And all along they’ve encouraged young Victor to be the captain of his own spaceship.
“I was probably born with that will to do things differently and do things my way,” Wembanyama would tell ESPN's Brian Windhorst just before he was drafted at 19. “I’m really glad I kept that willpower, to not [let] coaches put me in a box.”
As early as the age of 12 he’d determined he was not only going to be a professional basketball player but proficient at English as it was “the language of basketball”. Soon after that he began meditating daily.
He’s brought that curiosity with him to the NBA. On a previous trip to New York for a pair of games, he enquired what parks he could pick up a game of chess; he’d land on Washington Square Park. He carves out time to read every day, most commonly sci-fi, “just to disconnect from the world”, before switching his light off for the night.
We can tend to forget it now but last season, his second in the league, was cut short for him when he was diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis in his right shoulder, a condition that was both career and life threatening. “That traumatic experience,” he’d tell ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne, “spending so much time in hospitals, around doctors and hearing more bad news that I wish I hadn’t heard” would trigger him to undergo an off-season like no other.
He didn’t just go to Hakeem Olajuwon’s home to learn some new back-to-basket moves or to Jamal Crawford’s home to brush up on his ball-handling. He went to China and spent 10 days at a spiritual retreat at a Shaolin temple.
Every morning at 4.30 he’d rise with the monks, and immerse himself in Chan meditation. He studied kung fu, again to improve his strength and flexibility and balance. He’d shave his head, run daily through the forests or along a hillside track. One night he had to complete a hike to a local cave in complete darkness and silence. Another time he had to dribble a basketball to a monastery up a dangerous mountain, having to navigate cliffside planks and suspension bridges. The trek would take the average person eight hours. Wembanyama, while dribbling a ball, did it in four and a half.
“The goal for me in my life is to accomplish myself and be a complete human being,” he’d tell The Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor upon winning the 2024 NBA Rookie of the Year award. “I’m free to do what I want and what I need to do and there’s nothing that is going to stop me from doing so.”
Not even Brunson and the Knicks, we dare say. Sorry, New York, but it’s Wemby’s world now. Even if he doesn’t seem to be from it.
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