NANTERRE, France — On a rainy fall afternoon in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, François Salaün sat outside a cafe in a suit taking drags from a vape pen. He once taught at a high school around the corner, where, three years ago, he taught a student named Victor Wembanyama, who had to duck to get into classrooms and knew an unusual array of facts about the world.
Salaün recalled asking the students in his French class to write a short story about the realization of a dream. Some shared their hopes of becoming famous basketball players, but not Wembanyama, though he was well on his way to that dream.
In fact, Wembanyama didn’t really follow the prompt at all. Instead, he and a friend wrote a tale titled “Alice et Jules,” about a married couple whose lives were upended when Jules drove while drunk, crashed, fell into a coma and woke up having lost contact with Alice. In the end, they reunited.
Wembanyama liked to do things his way, and Salaün didn’t mind so much. He remembered Wembanyama as smart, polite and gifted in French literature. He said he also had a calming influence on the class.
His former teacher’s recollection surprised Wembanyama and resurfaced a memory: One day in class, Wembanyama had folded his lanky body in half, with his forehead resting on his desk, so he could stealthily play on his phone. Then Salaün asked the class a question.
“I answered the question, like, out loud, while being on my phone, because I knew the answer,” Wembanyama said. “And I remember he was like, ‘Thank you, Victor, but what are you doing?’”
Wembanyama started laughing as he finished telling the story. He had been a typical teenager on that day, at least for a moment. But at 7-foot-3, he has never really been typical, and perhaps he never will be. In eight months, he will almost certainly be the top pick in the N.B.A. draft as the most hyped teenager since LeBron James, who called him an “alien.” His play and potential have drawn comparisons to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hakeem Olajuwon, Kevin Durant and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
When Wembanyama plays basketball, he does sometimes look otherworldly.
His height — and his wingspan of about eight feet — often make it seem as though he’s in two places at once. He’s as smooth as a smaller player, but he barely has to leave the ground to block shots or grab rebounds.
This month, dozens of scouts and N.B.A. team executives gathered in Las Vegas to watch his French professional team, Metropolitans 92, play two games against G League Ignite, the N.B.A.’s developmental team for top prospects. Wembanyama’s team lost the first game, but he scored 37 points, including seven 3-pointers, and blocked five shots. Two days later, Metropolitans 92 won the rematch; Wembanyama had 36 points, 11 rebounds, 4 assists and 4 blocks.
“I’ve always felt like I was on a different level,” Wembanyama said. “I was living a different life than everyone else in school, for example, even in elementary school. I was just thinking differently than everyone. I’ve always tried to be original in everything I do, and it’s really something that stays in my soul: Be original. Be one of a kind. It’s like, I can’t explain it. I think I was born with it.”
The people who knew Wembanyama growing up sometimes affectionately joked that he was on his own planet.
He was playing for a youth basketball team in his hometown, Le Chesnay, west of Paris, when Michaël Allard, a coach from a club in Nanterre, saw him in what the coach called “a beautiful coincidence.” Allard thought the 10-year-old Wembanyama was an assistant coach because of his height, though he soon took notice of more than that.
“He’s competitive, he’s joyful and he wants to play all the time,” Allard said in French.
The Nanterre club has both youth and professional teams. When Wembanyama was 13, he won his first French championship. He’d always loved basketball, but that championship made him fall in love with winning.
“I cried that day,” Wembanyama said. “That was my first big title, so I was so happy.”
In middle school, Wembanyama began teaching himself English, knowing that to play in the N.B.A. he would need proficiency beyond the little he’d learned in school. He watched videos from American accounts on Instagram, along with English-language television shows.
As he entered his teenage years, scouts and the news media began flocking to see him.
“It was when he was 14 that I said to myself, ‘This one, he has to go to the N.B.A.,’” said Frédéric Donnadieu, speaking in French. Donnadieu was Wembanyama’s first coach at Nanterre and is now the president of the club.
Wembanyama’s parents, Felix Wembanyama and Elodie de Fautereau, tried to keep his life as normal as possible.
They made sure he kept up with his schoolwork. If he got bad grades, the coaches made him sit at the wooden scorer’s table in the gym and do his homework instead of practicing with his friends.
“That annoyed him more than anything else,” said Amine El Hajraoui, a coach at Nanterre.
Though Wembanyama’s parents asked for him not to have any special treatment, that was sometimes unavoidable.
He moved to Nanterre at 14 to live in the dormitory where the club housed its players. It was a simple building with bright brick accents about a 15-minute walk from school, where Wembanyama slept on a bed that had been specially made in northern France to fit him.
The Nanterre club’s training facility was next door to Wembanyama’s high school, where it installed a fridge for easy access to the five meals a day that a caterer prepared, according to recommendations from nutritionists, to help the growing Wembanyama fill out his frame. His coach had an office on the school’s campus. The principal helped manage his schedule. A group of 25 people were responsible for his physical and mental development.
At home, basketball was not the first subject discussed, though Wembanyama’s mother had played and coached the game. His parents shielded him from some of the ever-increasing news media requests for interviews. They worried about thrusting him onto a set path too soon, afraid of the effect that might have on his growth as a person.
“If one day he said to himself that he wanted to stop playing basketball because he was tired of it, that he said to himself, ‘I want to go out, to have fun,’ what would he have done?” said Donnadieu, his former coach. “Today it’s interesting, because his story is beautiful. But when he was 15, sometimes it was too much.”
Michaël Bur, who coached Wembanyama in Nanterre, used to do a simple exercise with his players. He’d ask them to choose a meaningful word that started with the same letter as their first name. As usual, Wembanyama took the assignment in a different direction.
“He said, ‘You know, Coach, my name is Victor,’” Bur recalled in French. “I said, ‘Well, yes.’ He said, ‘What letter does it start with?’ And I said, ‘the letter V,’ and he said: ‘V in Roman numerals means 5. My name is Victor because I can play all five positions.’ And I thought that was extraordinary for a 16-year-old.”
Wembanyama understood and embraced his uniqueness. But he also recognized that being part of a team meant needing to relate to his teammates.
“Everybody is talking about him being a unicorn, being so different on the basketball court, but in real life he’s just a normal kid, having fun with friends,” said Maxime Raynaud, who transferred to Nanterre in Wembanyama’s final year there.
In October 2020, Raynaud and Wembanyama were training one afternoon when two older French pros arrived — Vincent Poirier and Rudy Gobert. Gobert played for the N.B.A.’s Utah Jazz at the time and had won the league’s Defensive Player of the Year Award twice. The teenagers started trash-talking.
“As soon as we turned from messing around talking about playing to actually playing two on two, there’s something that switches in his head and he just turns into a kill mode,” Raynaud said of Wembanyama.
Video of the games went viral. Gobert, 30, who is 7-foot-1, chuckled recently at how excited people were to see Wembanyama shooting over him. Wembanyama, at 16, was already taller than Gobert.
“In this era of social media, everything gets magnified,” Gobert said. “And you know, those young kids, it’s a lot of added pressure on them. I think what strikes me the most about him is his maturity.”
After Wembanyama graduated from high school in 2021, he left Nanterre’s professional team, Nanterre 92, for ASVEL, a club based in a suburb of Lyon, France, and owned by the former N.B.A. star Tony Parker, who is French. Then, in July, Wembanyama chose to go home: Metropolitans 92 is based in Levallois-Perret, close to where his parents live.
Fans in the city have sold out the 2,800-seat arena for the first three games of the team’s season.
“We come to see Victor Wembanyama, of course, before he goes to the U.S.,” said Jeremy Guiselin, 27, speaking in French before a game in late September. “It’s the last moment for us to see him before he becomes a superstar, before he becomes No. 1 in the draft, and before he becomes a bit unattainable.”
A group of team employees meets once a month to discuss how to best help Wembanyama add strength to his still-lanky frame. They know opponents will use physical play as a weapon against him.
“I told him that I’m not going to specifically try to get him the first position of the draft,” said Vincent Collet, the coach of Metropolitans 92 and the French national team. “We want to get prepared for the next goal, which is to dominate in the N.B.A.”
There is a part of Wembanyama that will be sad to see this phase of his life end. He has spent his whole life in France, most of it around Paris.
“I’m going to miss France, for sure,” he said. “But I’ve worked all my life for this, so I’m really just thankful and grateful.”
In two exhibition games in Las Vegas, Wembanyama went toe-to-toe with the Ignite’s Scoot Henderson, who is expected to be drafted second overall behind Wembanyama next year. Henderson held his own before leaving with an injury early in the second game, but there was no question who everyone had been there to see.
Amid all the commotion, Wembanyama still finds ways to unplug.
The night between the games in Las Vegas, he sat on a tufted leather couch in the team hotel — his knees sticking up several inches past a coffee table — and spoke excitedly about his favorite fantasy and sci-fi stories. He said he was “the biggest” fan of “Star Wars” and shared books he’d been reading lately.
“I’ve just finished the second book of, what’s the name? I read it in French,” Wembanyama said. He looked through his phone to remember the translation.
“‘The Royal Assassin,’” he said. “You know about it?
“I read my first book in English a few months ago,” he added. “It was ‘Eragon.’ You know about it?”
Every night before bed, Wembanyama sets an alarm on his phone then puts it away. He goes through his bedtime routine, then gets under the covers and reads.
“I could read nonfiction, but the way I read is mostly to not think about anything I just did during the day,” Wembanyama said. “Not thinking about anything I’m going to do in the morning. Just disconnect from the world. And so fantasy is really what helps me the most in doing that. I just get absorbed by a book and just fly in another dimension.”
He recently began reading the “Game of Thrones” novels, called “Le Trone de Fer” in French, a phrase that translates to “The Iron Throne.”
“So far it might be the best thing I’ve ever read,” he said.
He has already seen the television series, and his favorite character is Tyrion Lannister, played by Peter Dinklage.
“He’s just so complex,” Wembanyama said. “And the way he just settles into the story.”
As he spoke about how much he loved the TV series, he was reminded about its ending, which was widely panned.
“Ahhh, it’s OK,” Wembanyama said, smiling and shrugging his shoulders. “This is not about the way it ends. It’s about the journey.”
Léontine Gallois contributed reporting from Nanterre, France.
Source: Basketball - nytimes.com
