The Limitless Potential of Zion Williamson
Photo by AB + DM.
HOLD ON, we'll get to the essence of Zion Williamson, basketball's Next Big thing, in a little bit. Just wait.
Patience is not a trait we associate with youth—or with our pop culture at large. But if there’s one thing we have not been able to fully download on demand, it’s Williamson. In the three years that he’s been on the national stage—including his lone season at Duke and his rookie season in the NBA with the New Orleans Pelicans—his most anticipated moments have been abbreviated, interrupted, or delayed.
Williamson’s introduction to the storied Duke–North Carolina rivalry, in February 2019, lasted all of 30 seconds before he planted his left foot with so much force that his shoe blew apart and he sprained his right knee. Five months later, he sat out the second half of his first and only game in the NBA’s Summer League in Las Vegas after suffering a knee bruise in a collision with an opponent in the second quarter. And he missed the first 44 games of his rookie year while recovering from knee surgery, pushing his NBA start date back to January 22 of this year.
The moments we get only make us hungrier for more of the high-flying Williamson. He’s been a figure of fascination and potential since 2017, when he burst onto the national scene as a high school junior with a 360 dunk that made ESPN’s Top 10 Plays. A video on SportsCenter’s Twitter page drew hundreds of thousands of views, and suddenly Williamson was a social-media superstar. By the end of 2018, his clips had racked up more than 69 million views on YouTube—most from well before he arrived at Duke that fall. (Compare those YouTube views and social-media moments with the way that most of America first encountered the last teenager to whip up this much hype in the NBA: a Sports Illustrated cover dubbing LeBron James “The Chosen One” when he was a high school junior in 2002.)
In the summer of 2019, Jordan Brand signed Williamson to a reportedly five-year, $75 million contract, the most lucrative shoe deal ever for a rookie. He has deals with Gatorade and Mountain Dew for when he’s thirsty and a Mercedes-Benz AMG S 63 to get around. He’s on the cover of the NBA 2K21 video game, a series he just so happened to grow up playing. That’s in addition to the $44 million he’ll make from the Pelicans for his first four years in the league, the amount allotted to the 2020 No. 1 draft pick.
There’s a similarity in how the sponsors initially handled LeBron and Williamson: slowly. It’s not slow in terms of how often you see them; it’s slow in terms of how often you hear from them. The rollout is more Here He Is than Who He Is. Williamson doesn’t have many lines in his earliest commercials. Most of them are in his Gatorade ad, in which he says, “It’s time to play basketball. Let’s do this.” That’s eight more words than LeBron said in his first three Nike ads.
Just because we’ve heard Williamson speak doesn’t mean he’s outspoken. He’s part of an activated and empowered generation, the first group to come of age with a Black president in office—Williamson was eight when Barack Obama won the 2008 election. Others have turned their smartphones into megaphones, yet as of now he hasn’t declared a cause.
The truth is that for all the sponsorship deals and IG followers, he has no real personal brand, no message, and no championships yet. Just outsize potential. In a way, that makes him perhaps the most symbolic member of his generational cohort: He’s a work in progress with no clear direction but forward. Like every other 20-year-old in America, he’s got a lot to prove.
For now we’re still evaluating his talent based on that bane of the analytics era: a small sample size. We seek confirmation that he can live up to the hype as he gives us more reason to hyperventilate. In the fourth quarter of his first NBA regular-season game, he produced a scintillating three-and-a-half-minute stretch with 17 straight points for the Pelicans. But just when NBA fans were getting used to Williamson as a regular presence in their lives, the league—and then the entire sports world—shut down to stop the spread of the coronavirus. It was time to wait again.
It will happen. Trust. Believe. Breathe in, breathe out. Be more like Zion Williamson himself. And remember that every thing we’ve discussed so far happened before he turned 20.
"I REMAIN patient because my mom taught me growing up to be grateful for everything,” Williamson says during a phone interview from inside the quarantine bubble at Walt Disney World when the NBA season resumed this summer. His voice sounds laconic but becomes slightly higher-pitched as he gets excited. “While I was hurt, that played a big part,” he says of staying calm and thinking about the long run. “Even though I was hurt and not playing, the bigger picture was: I am going to play again.”
His mother and the bigger picture: Keep those two things in mind. They’re two central themes in Williamson’s story. So is his body—all six feet, six inches, and 284 pounds of it. No one can quite explain how someone that size can be so agile and jump so high.
But first, let’s look at how he publicly projects himself. His Instagram account, which has more than 5 million followers, is mostly a collection of promotional and professional pictures. His captions are often quotes from hip-hop lyrics, like Drake’s “I’m living life right now, man / And this what I’ma do ’til it’s over, ’til it’s over. But it’s far from over.”
At the moment, he’s being cautious about what he wants to reveal. When we talk, his mother, agent, and publicist are on the line. A question about his decision to pay a month’s salary for all of the employees at the Pelicans’ arena, the Smoothie King Center, after the season was postponed during the pandemic is cut off by his agent. Williamson did address the donation in an Instagram post in which he cited the selfless examples set by his mother and the desire to “express my support and appreciation for these wonderful people who have been so great to me and my teammates.” His generosity sure went over well in New Orleans, where, among other things, the local aquarium named a baby African penguin Zion in his honor.
His body has been marveled at—and also analyzed, worried about, and surgically repaired. Fans fretted when he looked out of shape at the start of the NBA calendar, then they gawked at their first glimpse of him after the NBA’s four-month coronavirus shutdown, when the Pelicans posted an Instagram photo of Williamson in the weight room, wearing a shirt with the sleeves cut off that showed sculpted shoulders and bulging biceps.
Williamson shrugs off that attention. “I just thank God for giving me the body that I have,” he says. “People tell me I’m not supposed to do the things that I do at my size. I just take it as a blessing.” He was five-foot-nine in eighth grade and added eight inches over the next two years. “Eleventh grade is when I grew into my body. My athleticism and speed took off.”
Three years later, the expectations have mounted. He’s seen as the future of the NBA, the salvation of television ratings that dipped 4 percent the year before his arrival. (The first sign he could make a difference: His debut Las Vegas appearance on ESPN—all nine minutes of it—drew a Summer League record of 1.6 million TV viewers.) And yet he can’t even legally buy a bottle of beer.
For the past year, David Griffin, the Pelicans’ executive vice-president of basketball operations, has had to serve as the parent standing in the door, telling all of the neighborhood kids that Zion can’t come out to play. Most of the updates bringing the bad news—from the Summer League collision to the announcement that he would miss the start of the NBA season following surgery for a torn meniscus in his right knee—were accompanied by Griffin’s remarks.
As the initial six- to eight-week prognosis for Williamson’s recovery went by the wayside, it was Griffin who kept popping up on TV and radio to say, Not yet. Then earlier this year, after Williamson missed about two weeks of the NBA restart for an urgent family matter, the Pelicans slow-rolled his return, in spite of the fact that it may have hurt the team’s chances of making the playoffs.
Griffin rose through the Phoenix Suns’ front office from 1993 to 2010, with an athletic-training staff that was widely considered to be the best in the NBA. Last year he brought key members of the Suns’ athletic-training staff and player-performance group to New Orleans. Their new task is to do for Williamson what they once did for Steve Nash and Grant Hill in Phoenix: Extend his career despite any health issues that may arise.
“It’s not up to me to worry about what other people want,” Griffin says. “It’s my job to worry about the long-term viable and sustainable opportunity for our team to win.”
In between Griffin’s stints in Phoenix and New Orleans, he was the general manager of the LeBron-led Cleveland Cavaliers for a run that included the 2016 championship. But Williamson’s coaches and management seem hesitant to make any direct comparisons between the two players—the kid has enough pressure on him as it is. Still, plenty of analysts have pointed out that he is a practically unthinkable combination of different stages of LeBron’s development; he moves at the speed of early-career LeBron while carrying the muscle that LeBron added later. It’s as if Williamson got the perfect genetic blend from his mother, Sharonda Sampson, who ran track in college, and his father, Lateef Williamson, who was a defensive lineman.
“He is a stop-start, explosive-cutting guard athletically, in the form of a nose tackle,” Griffin says. “No one’s ever had his combination. At least no one who’s ever made it to the NBA. No one has had his combination of fast-twitch [muscles] and mass.” That means unique goals are necessary for his workout regimen: “Flexibility and putting himself in a position where he can control all that torque.”
Yet for all the high-level (and high-stakes) biomechanics in play, Williamson says his post-quarantine physique came from the most basic workouts. “Believe it or not, pushups and sit ups,” he says. “And a lot of running.”
His daily exercise regimen also consisted of two sessions on the basketball court, plus flexibility, strength, and conditioning work away from the court with a trainer. His mother handled the diet, adjusting her southern cooking style to feed a professional athlete. “All the sauce, the bacon, that stuff—he can’t have that,” Sampson says. What he does have a lot of is salmon.
When Williamson first got to the NBA’s campus in Orlando to resume the season, he told reporters, “It just felt like I was five years old again. Just went back to square one, tried to get my body where it needs to be, get my fundamentals back to square one and start from there.”
He seems the most animated when thinking back to those early years, when his mother was a physical-education teacher who led summer basketball camps in Sumter, South Carolina. “I’d be playing basketball in this little church gym from nine to five every day,” Williamson says. “Being around other kids, hav ing fun. In that little church gym, my passion grew for the game.” Maybe that explains why he’s so patient: He’s in no rush to step into the future, because he has no particular desire to leave the past.
WHILE BASKETBALL was fun for Williamson, his mother took it seriously. She grew up on the Lakers, Celtics, and Pistons in the 1980s and the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. She made him watch entire games of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan, not just the highlights—“to see people who thought the game of basketball,” Sampson says. She had him work on his ball handling just in case he didn’t grow past six-foot-three.
That was also the time period when his stepfather, Lee Anderson, came into his life, and the two developed a close relationship. Williamson had a tight family, friends to play with, and a love of the game—what more could a kid want? His biological father wasn’t around, but Williamson doesn’t dwell on it. (In a 2017 Instagram post, he said, “Happy Father’s Day to my step dad, who has been there for me since I was 4, teaching me the game I love and showing me how to be a man. To my real dad, idk if he will see this, but happy Father’s Day, always will have love for ya.”)
There’s always a positive feeling when he reflects, always happiness when he’s reminded of his younger days. Consider his reaction to his All-Star Weekend reunion with Ja Morant, a teammate from the South Carolina Hornets AAU team in 2014. Nearly six years later, the first and second picks in the 2019 NBA draft (Morant went to the Memphis Grizzlies) were playing together again in the Rising Stars Challenge, which features the top players in their first and second years in the NBA.
It made Williamson nostalgic, even during breaks in the game. “I was thinking about our Hornets days,” he said afterward. “And I keep thinking, never in a million years would I have thought we’d have been in this game or been in the situation we’re in.”
Morant, on the other hand, stayed hyperfocused on the moment and clearly stated his goals for the immediate future. “We’re trying to make it our league,” he said.
You won’t hear such bold proclamations from Williamson. Yes, that does feel out of sync with the rest of Gen Z, which often seems compelled to share every thought and activity. As America’s racial landscape shifted after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers in May, he didn’t weigh in, even though athletes have never been more encouraged to speak their minds on social issues, suddenly both sanctioned and seconded by the leagues themselves. When the NBA relaunched in July, the players were allowed to replace the last names on the backs of their jerseys with social statements preapproved by agreement between the league and the players association. The phrases included “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe.” Williamson’s selection might have been the most benign option on the list: “Peace.”
But if there’s anyone who might make allowances for his age, it could be Barack Obama, who he says would be his dream workout partner. They met during All-Star Weekend at an NBA Cares community-service event, and Obama surprised Williamson with a detailed analysis of his play at Duke and in New Orleans. Later, the former president sat with Chris Paul, Kevin Love, and Giannis Antetokounmpo for a panel on community leadership. Obama listened as Antetokounmpo explained that, at age 25, “I really don’t have the answers,” and then he prodded the still-young star of the Milwaukee Bucks.
“At 25, you should be focused on your job . . . and you shouldn’t have all the answers,” Obama said. But you can still be public about giving back and “set an example for people.” Antetokounmpo got the message: It’s time.
That time could very well be five years away for Williamson. In the meantime, he must not only find his voice but do so in the era of cancel culture, when one wayward tweet can undo a short lifetime of goodwill. His brand is being managed carefully. There’s an aversion to controversy that’s rooted in Williamson as well.
“He doesn’t like to separate himself with attention,” says Mike Krzyzewski, his coach at Duke. “He’s always very considerate about not having the light shine on him all the time, although the light wanted to shine on him all the time.”
Any person you talk to about Williamson credits his mom and stepdad for the way they raised him. He’s respectful. He listens. He isn’t self-centered. His motto—“Nothing is given. Everything is earned”—even comes from LeBron.
“His teammates accepting him is important to him,” says former Pelicans coach Alvin Gentry, who was dismissed from the team in August. “I have to remind him: ‘You have to step forward. These guys are going to accept it.’ ” At the same time, Gentry needs to remind himself that Williamson is still young. “His best friends are ball boys and things like that,” the coach says.
THE FIRST time Krzyzewski gathered his 2018–19 team for a film study, he noticed that Williamson and fellow freshman Cam Reddish kept smiling. The coach finally asked them what they found so amusing. Previously Williamson had only watched videos of himself dunking. But Krzyzewski was showing them how what you do when you don’t have the ball is just as important. “He became a student of the game while he was here,” Krzyzewski says.
Cue the highlight reel from Duke versus Virginia, February 2019: In the span of two seconds, Williamson went from trying to trap the dribbler on the left side of the court to blocking a three-point shot in the far-right corner. He was still in the lane, some 21 feet from Virginia’s De’Andre Hunter as Hunter caught the pass and began his shot, yet the distance didn’t matter as Williamson rushed out, leaped, and swatted the shot into the stands.
Krzyzewski breaks basketball generations down to three- to five-year eras. He’s been coaching at Duke for 40 years, enough time to see about ten generations of players take the court at Cameron Indoor Stadium. What he sees in Williamson’s cohort is a group that needs to be shown things on video. You can’t just tell them what to do; they have to watch, think, and absorb it. This generation of players seems quieter than the ones he had before. “If guys would talk and stay wide, they’d be alert,” he says. “They’d not look; they’d see. When a player can see and not look, they become better.”
Williamson has already been watching as each small action he takes both on and off the court is rebroadcast on infinite loop. What is he seeing? How will that make him better in time?
Like the rest of us, his old coach wishes he could have had more from him in his only year at Duke. “If he didn’t tear that shoe and hurt himself . . . ” Krzyzewski says, pausing as if to mentally add another national-championship banner to his collection in the stadium. “It would have been really interesting.”
As much as Williamson provides, it never seems to be enough for anyone else. We wanted a college career capped off with him cutting down the nets. We wanted an inaugural NBA season in which he played every national television date and won Rookie of the Year. We want to hear more from him. We want all of those things immediately, on our schedule, not on his or the Pelicans’.
We could take a cue from Mike Krzyzewski. It’s the nature of a coach to always demand more from players. Something about Williamson makes Krzyzewski take a time-out for appreciation. He uses words like funny, smart, competitive, and enthusiastic to describe Williamson. Then he cuts himself off. He’s done analyzing and extrapolating. For a change, it’s time to accept Zion Williamson exactly as he is. “I’ll tell you what,” Krzyzewski says. “There’s not a damn thing wrong with him.”
This story appears in the October 2020 issue of Men's Health.
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