Wembanyama refuses burden of hiding emotions.

San Antonio Spurs center Victor Wembanyama (X via NBA)

By JARED WEISS / THE ATHLETIC

To be an NBA player is to be a professional in compartmentalization. When you come up short, you don’t fail just in front of the people you see, but also the abstract world at large. Success and failure hinge on split-second decisions as you try to focus on trusting the training rather than fearing judgment.

The weight of internal expectations and upholding the responsibility to the team is already enough pressure to push an NBA player to his breaking point.

There are no questions about how Victor Wembanyama feels. His actions have backed up his words all season. He is cold and calculated most of the time but vicious and primal on occasion.

All of this culminated in an emotional moment on the bench with his teammates as the San Antonio Spurs eliminated the Portland Trail Blazers last week, delivering him and many of his teammates their first playoff series victory.

After the game, he was asked in French by L’Equipe’s Maxime Aubin about how he turns his whole range of emotions on the court into a strength, and why he thinks that is so rare for elite athletes in general.

“That’s a tough question. I think it’s first and foremost a fear of judgment,” Wembanyama said in French, according to Aubin. “Like, this feeling that you have to act a certain way, social codes, I guess. Personally, I refuse to carry the burden of having to hide my emotions.”

What makes Wembanyama special is that he is chasing his own definition of greatness even while the existential implications of his pursuit may be on his mind. He is pushing himself to his own limits, even though those limits may be greater than those of any other person. When he shows his emotions, it reminds the world that he is, in fact, as human as everyone else.

“Being the best player out there, it’s good for him to show that,” his teammate Julian Champagnie said. “It’s good for him to express that. It’s good for the sport of basketball to show that guys actually care and want to win, and want all these great things.”

Champagnie loves seeing Wembanyama unafraid of vulnerability, saying that the game is emotional and nobody truly understands it unless they are on the court.

Back in March, when the final buzzer sounded on a 25-point Spurs comeback against the Los Angeles Clippers, Wembanyama threw his head onto the shoulders of his teammates De’Aaron Fox and Keldon Johnson, overwhelmed with emotion. As he remained there, more Spurs came to celebrate him with joy.

“I was about to pass out from the first quarter from exhaustion,” Wembanyama told ESPN in his walk-off interview moments later. “That’s close to being the hardest game of my life.”

In December, after the Spurs’ NBA Cup final loss to the New York Knicks, Wembanyama went to the postgame news conference podium in tears. He said he had lost someone that morning (later revealed to be his maternal grandmother) and took one question before excusing himself for the evening.

Most players would take the night off from media duties when they were grieving a loved one. He could have done so, and the media in attendance would have respected it. But he understood the value of the news conference to the sport and to his own career. He recognized that, as the star of the team and a face of the league, he was responsible for showing up and taking accountability after such a high-profile loss.

As Victor Wembanyama’s “profile has skyrocketed and his career arc has suddenly shifted from budding talent to star, the external expectations have only caught up to his own,” writes Jared Weiss for The Athletic. (Reddit via r/NBATalk)

He tried, willing to step to the podium while crying, hoping he could fulfill this mandate to carry the game forward, one that has been bestowed upon him as much as he has reached out for it. As his profile has skyrocketed and his career arc has suddenly shifted from budding talent to star, the external expectations have only caught up to his own.

Wembanyama has brought a refreshing honesty to the job over this past year. He answers questions transparently while keeping his emotions level most of the time. Yet the reason he has won so many hearts and minds, particularly this season, is that he gives pieces of himself as an offering to the world. There is this feeling that when you see him, you see the real him. It is a thrill not just to witness someone great through the filter of a screen, but to know that their true self is permeating.

His teammate Luke Kornet noted how the experience of being exposed to the media, television and the internet is strange. People are watching you without being present, yet you can only experience your own presence in that moment. That realization pushed Kornet to get away from social media and focus on carrying himself in a way to fit within the construct of the people to whom he is actually accountable in his world.

“Between my family and then my team, it’s like, that’s enough people to try to have your actions reflect,” Kornet said. “Because otherwise, if you’re caring about so many voices, then the ability to satisfy them is just going to be incomplete at the end of the day and kind of impossible.”

Kornet believes that most media members are trying to honestly represent the players to the public, but he admits that he feels a sense that he is a character in the story of basketball. The key is to understand that his place in that story is told through what he does and not necessarily his intentions.

Kornet appreciates when some athletes like Wembanyama choose to embrace their exposure in the public domain and put their full selves out there, but the goal can’t be to be understood by everyone.

“Even your spouse or children or family, no one actually knows your exact interior perspective and experience in everything,” Kornet said. “This is where faith and religion ultimately come in. So obviously, it’s great to have people who do know you closer and feel like they can intimately understand you. But also, to a certain sense, you have to have peace with knowing who you allow close to you and who you’re going to share that with, and you’re cool being misunderstood.”

That distinction helped Kornet develop what he called an awareness of himself in the third person, recognizing that the character the outside world sees will have its own story, and he has to live in his own. This has forced him to make a real decision within himself of how to maintain his own truth.

It is something he can see Wembanyama working out in real time.

“I think that’s where your ultimate peace is,” he said. “To be able to live in that place.”