Victor Wembanyama Doesn't Make Sense (1985)

On watching an evolutionary leap in real time...and hoping it lasts.

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I.

The other night, for the very first time this season, I watched Victor Wembanyama play basketball. I don’t watch a lot of NBA games this early in the year, because the season is far, far too long and the regular season has become largely an exercise in nihilism, and the grift of an in-season tournament named after a Dubai-based airline hasn’t really changed much of anything except to ratchet up the artistic pretensions of hardwood-floor designers. Half the league is injured or sitting out on any given night; load management has evolved from a complex electrical concept into an excuse to rest Joel Embiid’s knee before it explodes. The NBA has its problems, but it increasingly feels like Wembanyama, a 21-year-old 7-foot-4-inch-tall Frenchman with the limbs of an ostrich and the athleticism of a cheetah, might be the solution to those problems.

It’s hard to explain Wembanyama’s impact until you actually watch him play. Even now that I’ve watched him play, I’m not sure how to explain it. Every so often, an athlete comes along who defies the geometry of a sport itself, and this is what Wembanyama does. He slinks in from off screen to block shots and then swishes 3-pointers with the skill of a shooting guard; he can play every spot on the floor with the same acumen. He is everything, everywhere, all at once.

Watching Wembanyama is like bearing witness to an evolutionary leap in real time. Even after the Golden State Warriors somehow defeated Wembanyama’s Spurs by relying largely on the wily three-card monte defense of Draymond Green—who is roughly seven inches shorter than Wembanyama, though in real life it feels like seven feet—the Warriors’ Steph Curry admitted during a post-game interview seemed kind of stunned about what he had just witnessed.

“He challenges you,” Curry said, “in a way that doesn’t make any sense.”

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II.

Forty years ago, on November 22, 1985, Ralph Sampson scored 26 points, gathered 11 rebounds, blocked six shots and handed out seven assists in the Houston Rockets’ win over the Indiana Pacers. Sampson had been an All-Star in his first two seasons in the NBA, and he would become an All-Star in his next two, as well, playing next to Hakeem Olajuwon as a duo known as the Twin Towers. It felt like Sampson, a freakish 7-foot-4 inch specimen who often played with the DNA of a guard, was on the verge of living up to his seemingly limitless potential; it felt like he had the ability to become one of the most unique talents in NBA history.

It did not work out that way, of course. By his fifth season, Sampson struggled with injuries and with his own limitations as a basketball player; the league began to figure him out, and he did not have the skills or the healthy knees to transcend those limitations. “Suddenly,” wrote Chuck Klosterman, “everyone seemed to agree that he had never been that good to begin with.” Sampson’s success was so fragile that it became ephemeral; his potential was so immense that it became impossible to live up to, for reasons that spanned both the mental and the physical.

Five days before Sampson dazzled against the Pacers, Auburn running back Bo Jackson ran for 121 yards and two touchdowns in a victory over Georgia. He was a transcendent football player who would soon win the Heisman Trophy, who would soon play both Major League Baseball and professional football, and who would parlay that into a myth that still resonates four decades later. But as with Sampson, Bo’s freakish brilliance wasn’t built to last; a hip injury derailed his career just when it was reaching its peak. There is a fragility to that kind of transcendence; there is a perpetual underlying fear, when you’re watching something so entirely unprecedented, that it can’t possibly be built to last.

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III.

Last year, Wembanyama was limited to 46 games after a blood clot in his shoulder raised concerns that his body was too impossibly structured to hold itself together. In July, he announced he was cleared to return, and so far this season, he is the most impactful player in the NBA by a very, very large margin.

The thing about modern pro basketball is that it can be very loud and obnoxious to follow online. It is now mostly consumed in highlights and bytes on social media, and processed through the language of the hyper-aware. If you’re not cool enough to keep up, then it feels like you’re not cool enough to watch at all. But Wembanyama transcends all of that noise; you don’t have to know basketball at all to know that you’re witnessing an awe-inspiring force. This is something the NBA hasn’t had in a while, maybe not since LeBron James went straight to the league out of high school. There have been great players, incredible players, in the ensuing years, but the only other one I can think of who transcended basketball itself—who offered something that felt entirely novel even to casual fans—is Steph Curry, who is sort of the opposite of Wembanyama, a superhuman in a seemingly ordinary body.

Watching LeBron blossom into a superstar felt like an inevitable triumph of pure physicality; watching Curry transform into the best shooter in NBA history felt like a victory for the everyman. But Curry is right about Wembanyama: There should not be a human being who is capable of doing this many things in such mystifying succession. Now that there is, it feels like such a precarious experiment. There are so many things working against it, in terms of the natural breakdown of the human body; there are so many ways it feels like it can’t possibly last. But at a moment when there is so much dour news, when there is so much fragility in the day to day, there is something heartening about rooting for Wembanyama to beat the odds and to keep getting better and better, for him to outrun the inevitability of time itself. At a moment when the world has stopped making sense, Wembanyama’s nonsensical presence is a reminder to savor the things we do have, for however long we have them.

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