Joel Embiid Is Seven Feet Tall and Rising
So there he was, in the middle of the jungle, face-to-face with a lion.
Joel Embiid was still in Cameroon then, just 6 years old. It didn't matter. He'd been sent away from his village, part of a tribal initiation. And now, it was kill or be killed. The young Embiid took his spear and shoved it through the lion's mouth. Then he returned to his village triumphant, the lion draped over his shoulders. And on that day, as the story goes, he became a man.
Unfortunately, it's complete bullshit.
Read enough stories about the Philadelphia 76ers' star big man—or speak to enough people who know him well—and eventually this legend will come up. It's a well-worn thread in the fabric of the myth surrounding Joel Embiid (pronounced jo-ell em-beed). That he has continued to tell it suggests both a playful charm and deft cunning at the heart of the seven-foot man. But keeping such a tale alive also seems unnecessary given the wild and improbable life that Joel Embiid is actually living right now. "I always say, 'My life is a movie,' " Embiid tells me. "Everything happened so fast."
Here's a guy who didn't play basketball until he was 15 and has, at 24, joined the first tier of NBA stars, with a positionless skill set that looks an awful lot like the future of basketball—this despite spending more time injured on the bench than in uniform in his five seasons. Then there's the fact that he barely spoke English less than a decade ago and is now the NBA's deadliest trash-talker, its most riotous follow, and maybe the Internet's last good troll. He's already contending for the league's most beloved player, and might soon become its Most Valuable, too. His is a true story crazy enough to warp the dimensions of possibility.
At age 15, as a skinny Cameroonian pushing seven feet, Embiid shows up to his first ever basketball practice. It took him months to persuade his father—fearful that the game was too dangerous—to let him play. He promptly dunks on someone. He remembers the feeling as "regular, because I'm seven feet." Basketball intrigues him. He recalls watching the 2009 NBA Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and Orlando Magic. He'd seen people in his neighborhood putting up bricks, but here was Kobe Bryant, hitting everything. He wanted to shoot like that, to be more than just huge. But being huge gets him noticed nonetheless. Fellow Cameroonian and current Los Angeles Clipper Luc Mbah a Moute invites Embiid to a camp, then helps guide the young talent to his former high school in Florida. Word spreads. Have you seen this kid? His talent is raw, but his seven-foot frame is the type you can hang hope on. He lands a scholarship to Kansas, gets hurt, and leaves for the NBA anyway. The future can't wait. He becomes the third overall pick in the 2014 NBA Draft, tasked with saving a terrible Philadelphia 76ers franchise in a post-Iverson malaise. But then he stays hurt. For two years, he sits and people wonder whether his body is broken for good. He bides his time while rehabbing by becoming a social-media star—making himself into a Hall of Fame Internet personality before he even steps on the court. When, finally, he does play, he's somehow even better than advertised. The promise was real, the hype warranted. He gets the $148 million franchise contract and becomes an All-Star.
Which brings us here, to the beginning of the 2018 NBA season. Joel Embiid looks like he might finally emerge out from underneath the shadow of the enormous expectations that have hovered over him since we first learned someone like him could exist. So maybe he can't tell this story yet, because he has no idea how this movie ends. Neither do we. Which means: We've just dropped into the world of Joel Embiid right when the wild, true story of Joel Embiid—crazy as it may already be—is just starting to get really interesting.
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The smell of chicken in Joel Embiid's apartment is overwhelming—less someone-cooked-chicken-earlier and more someone-is-running-a-small-Wingstop. Unsurprisingly, there on the top of his marbled counter rest two plates of chicken wings. There are also three plates of cajun pasta and a plate each of Brazilian cookies—"they're trash," Embiid says upon trying one—croissants, apples, and clementines hovering nearby, not to mention the beef skewers, crepes, and the rest of the leftovers I barely make out in a brief glimpse into the fridge.
"My girlfriend is coming," he tells me, which hardly feels like an explanation for this quantity of food. When I ask if he can tell me who he's dating, he says no but offers that she's "pretty big at what she does." The restless Internet mob has since suggested she's Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Anne de Paula. (Embiid admits that dating while in the NBA is not without its challenges. "You gotta do your background check," he says. "You don't want to be that guy marrying a girl that someone else in the NBA has been with.... I'm sure some guys end up getting married to women that have been around. And maybe on the court they also get told"—here he lowers his voice to a whisper—"Hey, I fucked your wife.")
About 15 minutes later, Embiid's bodyguard, Bubs, shows up, carrying a party-size aluminum foil tray of…chicken. This seems like an exercise in excess—not just that Joel Embiid has a bodyguard but that the man arrives with jerk wings. At this point, there should be enough chicken wings—though, admittedly, I didn't count—for Embiid to feed at least one person on each of the 41 floors below him.
While we talk, the 7'2" Embiid sits on the corner of his countertop—an oak tree that has paused to catch its breath. He wears a black-and-white Maison Kitsuné tee displaying the NBA logo and black Jordan sweat shorts that have the 2018 NBA All-Star logo on the right thigh, clearly a piece of swag from whatever closet comes with being honored as one of the league's best. On his wrists he has black rubber wristbands that say, ON A MISSION AND BLESSED—from a larger stash in a box nearby that also includes UNGUARDABLE, UNSTOPPABLE, and TRUST THE PROCESS. His hair—a mess of tangled twists—likely extends his height closer to 7'4". On his face the stubble is thick at the chin, patchy up near his sideburns, a sign of youth on an otherwise overdeveloped man. English is one of three languages he speaks, and when he talks the words come low and slow, blending together as if maybe they got tired traveling all the way up his torso.
He tells me that the food comes from his chef, who stops by four or five times a week to drop off meals. It's the superstar athlete's attempt at a more carefully crafted diet, a corrective to the eating habits that became the object of scrutiny and Internet laughter a few years ago, when it was reported that Embiid consumed pitchers of Shirley Temples. Embiid used to drink one (a single Shirley Temple, not a pitcher’s worth) almost every day but has since cut back to merely "once in a while," he tells me while grabbing a bottled water from the fridge, as if to prove his point. (Bill Self, Embiid's coach at Kansas, tells me that Embiid was the "least mature eater" he's ever seen: "This dude would come to the house and go right to the plate of brownies and take the plate home, and that would be all that he would eat.") Of course, the diet is only one piece in a much larger puzzle, one that has proved to be the hinge on which Embiid's career swings from dormant to dominant: his body.
When it's working, he plays like an athlete the NBA has never seen before. It's not what he has—height, agility, strength—but what he lacks: the gangly clumsiness that ships standard with the awkwardly tall. People his size (other NBA stars Kevin Durant, Kristaps Porzingis, and Anthony Davis, for instance) often look as if they've achieved their height by being pulled from both ends on some sort of torturous medieval Pilates reformer. Embiid, on the other hand, looks like God hovered the computer mouse at the top-right corner of his JPEG and dragged diagonally. Odd, then, that it's been the well-proportioned Embiid—rather than the skinny guys who look like they're going to snap like twigs—who has spent so much of his career injured.
“[In] Cameroon, we don’t know shit about space. I don’t even know if there’s a Cameroonian astronaut. That’s what I wanted to become. I wanted to become president, and I wanted to become an astronaut. Because I was really good at math.”
A bad back prematurely ended his one-year college stopover at Kansas. He was still expected to be taken with the first pick in the 2014 NBA Draft anyway, so great was the talent his body promised. Then a stress fracture in his foot in the days leading up to the draft scared teams into thinking that he was yet another big man destined to spend his career on the bench. Something built to break—no matter its promise or wingspan—will probably break.
The Philadelphia 76ers drafted him anyway with the third overall pick. Sam Hinkie, the general manager at the time, was one year into a daring plan to rebuild Philly's floundering franchise, forgoing wins in order to land high draft picks and using those picks to acquire potential franchise-altering talent like Embiid. If it worked, after two or three years, he'd have a brand new superteam stacked with young, promising pieces. This farsighted plan was later dubbed The Process, and Embiid was its cornerstone.
The Sixers' hope, after drafting their prized—though hobbled—pick, was that Embiid would miss only a year, max. But the summer of 2015 brought more bad news: He'd need another surgery and would miss his second straight season. Hinkie's Process was either not working or taking too long—it didn't matter. He resigned under pressure and Embiid became the scapegoat. On top of the injury frustrations in his first two years, Embiid also had to cope with the tragic loss of his younger brother, killed by an out-of-control truck back home in Africa.
"All I wanted to do was go back home and, like, never come back—just disappear and stay home," says Embiid.
Instead, Embiid stayed and, with time on his hands, found a different way to neutralize those who placed the burden of the Sixers' woes squarely on his broken back. He mastered social media at a time when social media was becoming the most important outlet for the modern NBA—a place where fans and players alike could find all the league news, trash talk, and leaked J. R. Smith DMs they could ever want. (The NBA even has its Twitter handle on the official game ball.)
Embiid had gotten an early glimpse at the power of NBA Twitter when he became a meme the day he was selected by the Sixers. On account of his foot injury, Embiid wasn't in attendance for the draft, and so after he was picked, the ESPN broadcast cut to a satellite feed of him watching from Los Angeles. The tape delay was such that Embiid sat completely mum, expression unchanged, for nearly 15 seconds. Of course, the Sixers had been such a woeful organization that viewers were left to wonder whether Embiid's seeming lack of enthusiasm wasn't a hilarious dig at the misbegotten 76ers. Twitter lit up with jokes, all of them along the lines of: TFW—"that feel when" for the uninitiated offline folks reading—you get drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers.
In NBA Twitter, Embiid saw a natural outlet for his brand of charm, a charisma that made him popular even in his brief year at Kansas—especially with the wives of Bill Self's coaching staff. "He knew exactly which one liked to have the hug with both arms, and which one liked the left-arm hug, or which one liked the right-arm hug," Self fondly remembers. "He had that audience down perfect, where he could have people basically buying into everything he's selling. He was very, very bright that way." In the same way that Embiid could read a room, he could size up the NBA's social-media landscape—which was full of boring athletes offering boilerplate platitudes. So he behaved the way you might if, through the power of some dark magic, you woke up in the body of a 7'2" man with thirsty Twitter fingers and exactly zero fucks. He asked Kim Kardashian to slide into his DMs (before moving on to Rihanna); he retweeted his own draft meme; he nicknamed himself The Process. (Asked what happens to the Process nickname if he goes to another team, Embiid says, "I want to be in Philly for the rest of my life," which seems like something only somebody who has been in Philly for less than five years might say.)
Joel Embiid's social-media cocktails—a mix of playful antics, irony, and self-deprecation—helped defang the flood of criticism that he was still parked on the Sixers bench. Like the time he uploaded a video of him swatting the ever-loving shit out of what must be a 6-year-old in front of a crowd full of people. He offset his bullying with the caption "Don't worry lil man we still got the same amount of NBA games played ha #TrustTheProcess #WeAllFromAfrica." After two years of Embiid sitting with an injury, we didn't know what to expect from Embiid on the court—but we knew exactly what to expect from the sideline. Just as the Internet was taking a turn for the worse, he was growing into its last good troll, a lovable avatar slinging viral gold.
This year, [Embiid] says he’ll be upset if he doesn’t win DPOY and MVP. Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon both won it in the same year. “It would be good to follow up those guys,” he says.
When he finally got a chance to play, well, that wasn't so bad either. Embiid made his long-delayed NBA debut at the beginning of 2016, his third season with the Sixers—some 969 days after he'd last played organized basketball. He thought he was going to get booed. Instead, the crowd chanted, "Trust the Process!" (If you want evidence of just how beloved Embiid is, ask yourself: Who else has a self-given nickname that is so widely embraced?) In 22 minutes, he scored 20 points and had seven rebounds. He played 30 more games before another season-ending injury (a torn meniscus). Those 31 games, though! This was just two years after the Golden State Warriors had revolutionized basketball, pushing the game even more in the direction of high-paced, high-scoring, making the big man obsolete. And yet, already Embiid looked like the next next frontier, where there were no big and small men. Everyone would be a lab-created aberration like Embiid, a seven-footer who could dominate in the paint on offense, act as rim protector on defense, and do everything else, too: pass with sharp vision, run the court on the fast break, Euro step around the big buffoons matched up against him, slash for dunks, and shoot threes, free throws, and pull-up jumpers with a silky stroke.
The 76ers signed him to a five-year, $148 million contract. That bears repeating. He'd played in exactly 31 games of the 246 for which he'd been on their roster, and yet they decided that those 31 games were transcendent enough to warrant face-of-the-franchise type of money. And it appears they were right to give it to him. Last year, Embiid averaged a double-double, became an All-Star, and finished second in Defensive Player of the Year voting. This year, he says, he'll be upset if he doesn't win DPOY and MVP. Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon both won it in the same year. "It would be good to follow up those guys," he says.
Perhaps more importantly, last season Embiid stayed healthy (though there was a fractured orbital bone, for which he had to wear a spooky protective mask, and he took to calling himself "The Phantom of the Process"). That's a problem for other players—not just because he's unstoppable but because it takes away their go-to trash talk, too.
"A lot of guys, when they have nothing to talk [trash] about, and when they know that they're clearly not better than you, they have a tendency to talk about the past, bringing up my injury streak," he says. "I'm really not an injury-prone player. I just had that one injury that took, like, two years."
Last year he played 63 games in the regular season and eight in the playoffs. Yes, the playoffs, two words 76ers fans, until this spring, had only recently heard after the three words "did not make." But with LeBron James going west to L.A. and Joel Embiid healthy, the Philadelphia 76ers are a real threat to win the Eastern Conference. (Of Tristan Thompson's recent comments that his Cleveland Cavaliers, even without James, are still the team to beat in the East, Embiid says, "He's just out of his mind.... He must be stupid.") He spent this offseason working on every part of his game. What did he improve? “Everything. I never thought I had any flaws, really. It’s just about make sure everything I did was perfect.” He’s never been healthier going into a season. Through the first three games, he's leading the team in minutes (34.3 per game) while averaging 28 points, nearly 11 rebounds, and two blocks per game. It looks like he was right: The Process really is to be trusted.
“I’m so much better than I was last year,” he says. “I just look at myself, like the only thing that can stop me is like…”—and here he pauses to think of something that can stop him—“nothing. That’s why I’m excited.”
There are 48 stories in the luxury high-rise Joel Embiid calls home. Joel Embiid does not live on the 48th floor. "I don't have that type of money," he says. "All my money goes back to Africa." (Conveniently, he just signed a new shoe deal with Under Armour, the specific details of which were not released, but it reportedly gives him gobs of money and includes charitable initiatives back in Cameroon and in Philly.)
So he settled for the 41st floor, with a view befitting Philly's new king: looking over City Hall, its glowing clock like a neighbor’s extremely intrusive night light. He heads to his bedroom, set off down a hallway. He moves as if trying to conserve energy, with a slow gait that, especially after he emerges with Ugg slippers in the place of low-top Vans, evokes the rhythmic shuffle of a pouty teenager (or an off-duty athlete). I peek around.
He's only living here temporarily—he just bought a place, but it's not ready yet—and the apartment feels that way, barely lived in. There's a room filled with boxes. The bar cart is all cart, no bar, positioned beneath some framed Benjamin Franklin stamps because: Philadelphia! The rest of the "art" includes a painting of a rooster, a photo of a bird taking flight, and what looks like a stock MacBook desktop photo that might be called "Autumn," blown up and framed. In a dark corner of his apartment sits a stack of NBA Live 19's with Joel Embiid on the cover, on top of a stack of Slam magazines with Joel Embiid on the cover, on top of a copy of The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance with Tom Brady on the cover. He has not read this book—"I don't read books"—but does say he's "still got about 15, 20 years in the league," so maybe he hopes he can absorb some of Brady's longevity.
Some of this stuff is from the previous owner. Some is Embiid’s. It’s not clear who owns what. Except for one piece of furniture smack in the middle of his apartment: a custom-made gaming chair, complete with the 76ers logo and the words THE PROCESS printed on it. Embiid is a voracious gamer, sometimes embarking on 12-hour gaming marathons. On our way up to this place, he told the concierge to look out for a PlayStation that was being delivered. (He already has one here, but he wanted to play FIFA 19, which was not yet out, and the pre-release download codes they sent him were not working, so he just had a new console sent instead.)
“I love when people talk trash.... I love when people tell me that I was gonna be a bust,” he says. “I enjoy when people tell me, you suck, you can’t dribble, you can’t shoot, because it’s like: gotta go to the gym.”
He says the gaming chair was sent to him, which adds up, because Embiid apparently does not like to spend money. Drew Hanlen, a skills coach for a number of NBA stars including Embiid, says that in his first few years living in Philly, Joel didn't have a couch, so he'd just pull a few chairs together and play video games sitting on those.
"I'm like, 'You're a millionaire, buy a couch,' " Hanlen remembers telling Embiid. "And he's like, 'I don't need to spend money on a couch.' And then he finally got one given to him. So now he has a couch."
As Embiid tells it, there wasn't much time to play video games growing up in a middle-class neighborhood in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. He was busy playing sports, or sneaking off to play sports, or running back home from sneaking off to play sports before his mom could catch him. ("When my mom found out, it was bad for me," he says.) His father—a military colonel—didn't want him to play basketball, partly because he worried it might be too physical and partly because, in his dad's head, Embiid's future had already been determined: He would go to France to play professional volleyball, a sport in which he'd shown early promise.
Of course, Embiid didn't grow up dreaming of being a volleyball player. He wanted to be…an astronaut, which he realizes now was a job not likely to be showcased at his middle school career fair. "[In] Cameroon, we don't know shit about space," he says. "I don't even know if there's a Cameroonian astronaut. That's what I wanted to become. I wanted to become president, and I wanted to become an astronaut. Because I was really good at math."
But then he grew into Joel Embiid and, after his dad finally relented, tabled his extraterrestrial dreams for basketball, an industry in which, unlike with space exploration, his nation did have a pioneer: Luc Mbah a Moute, currently a forward on the Los Angeles Clippers. Embiid was invited to Mbah a Moute's local camp in Cameroon, where his preternatural talents—and too-big-for-a-spacesuit size—caught the NBA player's eye. Mbah a Moute helped shepherd Embiid to his former high school, Montverde Academy in Florida, where he played a season before transferring to another Florida school, called The Rock School.
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When Justin Harden, the coach at The Rock School, heard stories about Embiid at Montverde, he heard about a guy who was so new he was “like Bambi on ice.” By the time he got to The Rock School a year later, his raw athleticism stood out. Harden remembers dodgeball and volleyball as particularly dangerous outlets for the young Embiid. "He'd get out there and start hitting, and everybody's scattering like roaches when the light comes on. They weren't about to get a broken face because of this guy," he remembers.
Harden recalls once walking into a basketball practice—appropriately enough, just after finishing a phone call with a college coach interested in Embiid—and seeing his big man bank a three-pointer off the backboard, a particularly clumsy way to hit a normally sexy shot. Dude, hit the rim, Harden thought. But then Embiid made seven more, all off the backboard, and Harden realized he was doing it on purpose. It displayed an athletic touch a man of his size really has no business having. "It's really remarkable," Harden says. "I've said it many times: I sincerely think that he probably could have done anything he wanted to put his mind to."
Embiid’s mind. It’s something all of those who worked closely with him highlight, an uncommon ability to pick up new skills immediately—evident even in high school—that, when paired with his physical gifts, creates an unstoppable combination.
Take, for instance, how Joel Embiid learned to shoot threes: by watching white people on YouTube. "Listen, I know it's a stereotype, but have you ever seen a normal 30-year-old white guy shoot a three-pointer? That elbow is tucked, man," he wrote in a piece for The Players' Tribune. He also famously watched, repeatedly, a tape of Hakeem Olajuwon in the hopes of perfecting the Hall of Famer's patented Dream Shake, a balletic move that is virtually unstoppable when performed by someone with the size and touch of Olajuwon. Embiid has it, too, apparently—just ask any of the defenders who've tried to lock him up inside, only to be Dream Shaken out of their shoes. Hanlen says most of the players he works with can learn a new move quickly, but they might take weeks to master it. "For [Embiid], he might have me demonstrate it ten times. He might ask a few questions. He'll have me demonstrate a couple more times, and then he'll just do it full speed," he details. "And then you'll see him use it the next day, in live play, one-on-one. And you're just shaking your head like, 'How did he already have that?' "
All of this is especially remarkable when you keep in mind that Embiid's only played in 94 NBA games and, because of his past injuries, his minutes in those games were limited. He's just getting started.
"Guys like myself might have played 100, 200 games a year since I was in kindergarten," says Hanlen. "He's probably played 150 games of real organized basketball in his life."
One of those games was a road win last season against the Lakers in which Embiid scored 46 points, grabbed 15 rebounds, and added seven assists and seven blocks just for fun. He out-muscled everyone inside, sure, but he also hit threes and face-up jumpers, showcased a point guard–esque vision with his passing, and even displayed a delicate Euro step that's entirely too graceful for someone whose feet are the size of water skis.
Embiid says that was the game when he realized that all those people saying he could be the best player ever might be on to something. "That's when you watch the tapes [and] you start to realize that you can do this nightly," he says. "Like, no one can stop you."
In a postgame interview that night, Embiid was asked how healthy he felt; the sideline reporter wanted a percentage. "Sixty-nine percent," he said, before claiming, later, that he was from Africa and didn't know "why people were making fun of that number."
Ask Joel Embiid how tall he is and he'll lie to you. "I like to say six-eleven," he tells me before adding, more definitively, "I'm six-eleven."
He and I sit at adjacent red leather high stools. My feet rest on the bottom rung. His size 17's, still nestled into those cozy Uggs, are flat on the floor, his legs at a perfect right angle. As if I've just reminded him of a vital task on his to-do list, he picks up his phone—a small lifeboat in the ocean of his palm—and texts the 76ers' senior director of PR, Patrick Rees: "Make sure they list me at 6'11" this year lol." (Rees will later tell me that, in the 76ers' official listing, Embiid's height—always at 7'0" or 7'2", maybe because of his changing hairdo—is not going to change, "because he's not 6'11"”.)
"People have a tendency to categorize me as a big man," Embiid says. "I do everything that a guard would do on a basketball court, so I want to change the game in a way that it's just positionless."
When it comes to NBA players, this is nothing new. Big guys don't like to be characterized as, well, big guys for fear that it makes them look like slow oafs. Though Embiid joins a long list of NBA legends who refuse to admit their membership in the 84-inch club—Kevin Durant, Kevin Garnett, and Bill Walton among them—he might just have the toughest time pleading his case, as massive as he is.
“I always analyze everybody…. Some people talk to me and I act like I don’t understand or I act like I’m not listening, but I hear everything. I observe. I see everything.”
At least part of this desire to seem shorter is tied to a reluctance to be labeled a center. There is only one spot on each All-NBA and All-Defensive team for a center. There are three for a forward/center (an official classification he had changed this offseason). But it's also that Embiid cares about optics. He knows that being seen as a slow-footed bruiser who lives in the low-post makes certain haters think he can't do what smaller guys can. And he feeds off of that.
"I love when people talk trash. I love when people tell me that I couldn't do this. I love when people tell me that I was gonna be a bust," he says. “I enjoy when people tell me, you suck, you can't dribble, you can't shoot, because it's like: gotta go to the gym.”
This is the guy Joel Embiid projects to the world: confident, unflappable, bulletproof. It's a version of the same guy who has shot an arrow through the heart of the Internet—the one who wears his own jersey to the club, or jogs through the streets of Philadelphia at night, or shows up at public parks and dunks on extremely average-looking white dudes (all antics that have been caught on camera and spread throughout Twitter, always followed by a stream of laugh-crying emojis). It is not necessarily the same guy you get when you're sitting across from Embiid. He can be shy, reticent, reluctant to share. He says he's still scared to approach a stranger and ask for directions. In conversation, he sometimes fidgets nervously—his hands balling in his shirt, or pulling on his shorts, feet shuffling back and forth on the floor, fingers on one hand massaging the webbing in between his thumb and index finger on the other, dark brown eyes darting down the hallway.
"I don't have trust issues, but it's kind of hard for me to, like, trust somebody," he says. "I always analyze everybody…. Some people talk to me and I act like I don't understand or I act like I'm not listening, but I hear everything. I observe. I see everything."
For all of us, there can often be a gulf between the person we put into the world and the person we actually are. Joel Embiid is no different. He knows how narratives take shape, which stories get retold. And while the world has taken notice of the avatar that Embiid wants us all to see, he's been watching carefully. On the other side of the carefree guy who cracks wise about killing a lion, being at 69 percent health, or YouTubing "white people shooting three-pointers" is the guy who was perceptive enough to know that we would laugh at those things, who took the time to crack the code to Internet fluency, who wanted so badly to be great that he spent hours on YouTube watching white people shoot threes and then hours more in the gym practicing them. Always on the other side of the viral Joel Embiid is the one who's a lot more aware—and who gives at least a few more fucks—than we give him credit for. Embiid's friend Michael D. Ratner remembers seeing this side of Joel at a party a couple years back, when he was still hurt.
It was in L.A., a gathering of 30 people or so. Ratner walked away from the group and stumbled upon Embiid, sitting by himself in a dark room. Ratner sat next to him and asked what he was doing. Embiid didn't say anything, just kept scrolling through his phone. Then he pointed it at Ratner. Embiid had searched himself on Twitter and was reading tweet after tweet calling him a bum. Ratner says the one he remembers most was a tweet calling Embiid Greg Oden, the 2007 #1 overall pick who barely had a career in the NBA because of knee injuries.
Ratner recently told Embiid while the two were out for dinner that he always thinks about that moment in the dark when he sees Embiid out on the court, killing it. "You could have just given up there," he told him, "and instead you just used that as fuel." Then he noticed that Embiid had put his face in his shirt. He was crying, in the middle of the restaurant. Ratner thought Embiid was fucking with him, because, well, he's Embiid. But he wasn't.
Embiid remembers that night—and the way he was doubted then. "People making fun of me. Telling me that I was a bust. That I was done. That I was never going to play in the NBA," he says. As he sits here with me, high above a city now eager to Trust the Process, it's the only moment when he's visibly animated. "I don't take anything for granted. I'm just grateful. I thank God every day. Now look at me. Now we're here talking about having so much potential and being a top-ten NBA player, having a whole city behind you. I never wished this."
It's true. This was never Joel Embiid's dream. He wanted to be an astronaut, remember? Instead, he stumbled into a career as one of the planet's most transcendent athletes. But he still harbors fantasies of going to space.
He knows there could be complications. He learned last year, on a visit to NASA, that he definitely can't fit in the spaceship. Plus: There's the math. Embiid says he's not so sure he's as good with numbers anymore. But he's undeterred. He figures maybe he can get into some program that'll help put him on the path to NASA. The ever-confident Embiid says it'd be "easy" to pick up rocket science once he's done with this job, dunking on people. Despite the obvious hurdles, he estimates that he could be the first seven-footer in space in a year and a half, if he really put in the time.
"I'm just too busy right now," he says.
Clay Skipper is a GQ staff writer.
Photographer & director: Lane Stewart
Styling: Kelly McCabe
Hair: Kenny Duncan at Main Attraction Unisex Salon
Grooming: Barry White at Barrywhitemensgrooming.com
Produced by: Dario Callegher Production
Director of photography: Santiago Gonzalez
Producer: Tessa Travis (Milk)
Set designer: Lenore Romas
Post-production: Velem, Lily Rhodehamel
