1
Opening Night
ZION WILLIAMSON wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t bouncing around the basketball court in joy. That was the most obvious sign that something wasn’t right, that his long-awaited, injury-delayed NBA debut wasn’t going as planned.
Zion doesn’t just play the game of basketball, he plays it with the excitability of a puppy. Flying through the air. Hammering down dunks. Quick jumps and changes of direction. Long bounce passes through a pack of defenders. Zion brings happiness to people watching him play, all while being the picture of happiness himself.
He is a showman, an actor who is the star of the play, the recording artist feeding off the fans at his own concert.
“When you’re able to get the ball and you’re wide open and you see the crowd standing on their feet, to describe that feeling, you have to be in that situation,” Zion said of his thought process before delivering a breathtaking dunk. “The ball is in your hands with thousands of people watching you, and they’re just waiting to see what you’re going to do.”
Only this time, in his first game for the New Orleans Pelicans, a debut that had been delayed nearly three months due to minor surgery on his right knee, Zion looked tense. He looked nervous. He looked stiff. And those are three words that are never used to describe Zion Williamson on a basketball court.
In the rare moments back in college when Zion wasn’t dominating the game, his coach, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, would pull him aside and offer the simplest advice.
“Smile,” Coach K would say. “Have fun.”
Zion would usually exhale and go back to being Zion—a six-foot-seven, 285-pound force of nature, grabbing rebounds, making steals, and, of course, soaring to the rim to deliver some kind of mighty dunk—maybe a windmill, maybe a 360. He’d go back to having a good time playing the game he loved.
That was how he’d started playing basketball, after all. First with his friends, then in rec leagues in Florence, South Carolina, where he was coached by his mother, a former college high jumper, and his stepdad, a former Division I basketball player. If it wasn’t fun, why do it?
He liked to work hard and practice his fundamentals, but mostly he liked to play. No matter what was going on in his life, he could always step on a court and forget about his problems. That didn’t change when he became a social media star and top recruit in high school, or when he was a household name—just “Zion”—during a year at Duke University. And it shouldn’t now as he entered the NBA as the most hyped rookie since LeBron James in 2003.
“I know everybody uses this corny little caption on social media, but it’s true for me,” Zion said. “The moment I stop having fun playing basketball is the moment I’ll be done.”
Zion wasn’t about to stop playing, not when his NBA career was, literally, just beginning. But he needed a spark to get back to being … well, Zion.
Over eighteen thousand fans had come to watch Zion and the Pelicans play the San Antonio Spurs. Some hometown fans had paid nearly $1,000 for a single ticket to get their first glimpse of the man they dreamed would bring them championships one day. All over New Orleans there had been a buzz of anticipation for what was to come, with fans jamming into bars and restaurants or their friends’ living rooms to watch. A huge national television audience tuned in to see what the kid could do against NBA competition. ESPN had been hyping the game for days.
The plan was to bring Zion along slowly. Team doctors wanted him playing about four minutes at the start of each quarter. Then they wanted him to rest while they examined his knee. It wasn’t an ideal way to start a career, but it was the only way Zion could play at all, so he agreed to the plan. The doctors and coaches were thinking about his long-term future.
“I think you have to be smart about it,” said New Orleans coach Alvin Gentry.
With those limitations in place, the game wasn’t going as well as Zion had hoped. He’d played about twelve minutes through the first three quarters, but scored just five points. He’d taken only three shots. He’d committed four turnovers. He wasn’t in the flow of the action, where he would naturally find the ball and overwhelm opponents.
The Pelican fans, who’d come seeking a vision of greatness, were getting restless. So were the people watching on TV. On social media, where critics love to overreact, some were wondering if Zion’s knee injury meant he would never be as good as he had been in college and high school. Others thought he might have been overrated. This was the NBA, not college ball.
Or maybe this was proof that a player with Zion’s huge, muscular build couldn’t last in the NBA without injuries impacting his game.
Zion wasn’t scrolling through Twitter and Instagram during the game, but the look on his face suggested that he knew he was disappointing a lot of people.
“You don’t have to make the Hall of Fame tonight,” teammate J.J. Redick told him. “Just go out and be you. The rest will sort of take care of itself.”
Zion walked onto the court in the fourth quarter and it looked like more of the same. He was hesitant. He looked uncomfortable. He wasn’t aggressive. He missed a six-foot shot. He committed another turnover.
Then with 8:52 remaining in the game, Zion got the ball and found himself unguarded out behind the three-point line. He wasn’t known as a three-point shooter, although he’d worked tirelessly to improve his form, especially when he was out of action because of his knee. Putting up shots was the one thing doctors had allowed Zion to do during the rehab process because it wouldn’t impact the injury.
He also knew he’d be coming out of the game soon, likely at the eight-minute mark. Might as well let one fly, right?
He did. It went in.
The fans erupted in cheers, but as Zion got back to play defense, there was still no smile. Next time down the court on offense, Zion went down low near the basket and broke free from a Spur defender. Teammate Lonzo Ball saw what was happening and lobbed a pass near the hoop. Zion rose up, caught it over two San Antonio defenders, and laid it in.
Now the crowd was going wild! This was the Zion they had expected.
Still, no smile.
Next time down, he nailed another wide-open three. Then he secured a defensive rebound. Back on offense, he received a pass down on the post near the basket, made a startlingly quick move, and laid the ball up. It missed, but with the otherworldly speed of his reaction, Zion seized the rebound and scored.
No smile, but he was bouncing back down the court now. He was beginning to look like himself again. This here—now, this was basketball.
The game clock was ticking fast, though, and Zion was supposed to come out of the game, per doctor’s orders. He was on a roll, however, and as long as there wasn’t a stoppage in play, there was nothing Coach Gentry could do.
Next possession—a Zion three-pointer. Possession after that—another Zion three-pointer. He was on fire, so what could his teammates do but continue to feed him the rock?
Finally, he got it again and was fouled. He hit one of two free throws and then, seconds later, was taken out of the game because team doctors were shouting at Coach Gentry.
“He wasn’t happy about it,” Coach Gentry said. “I don’t think anyone would be happy about it. I ain’t the brightest coach in the world, but I wasn’t going to take him out in those situations unless I was told to.”
San Antonio would go on to win the game. Coach Gentry had to ignore the crowd chanting “We want Zion!” in the final minutes. Still, Zion’s first game was a success.
In a three-minute, eight-second stretch, Zion had scored 17 points. He finished with 22 total and put the NBA on notice: Yes, he was the real deal.
“It was everything I dreamed of except for the losing,” Zion said. “Just the energy the crowd brought, the energy the city brought, it was electric. I’m just grateful.”
And as he left the court to a standing ovation, he slapped hands with teammates and even briefly broke into a smile.
The game, for Zion Williamson, was fun again, and when Zion is having fun out on the court, there might not be anyone anywhere who is capable of stopping him.
2
Secret Weapons
ZION LATEEF WILLIAMSON was born July 6, 2000, in Salisbury, North Carolina. He was named after Mount Zion—the legendary hill in Israel, right outside the Old City of Jerusalem. “It’s a biblical name,” Zion would explain.
He had to spend time explaining to people how to pronounce his name. It’s “ZEYE-on” not “ZEE-on.” For too long, people were confused. Little did they know he would make the name famous across the sports world.
This was long before he became an NBA star; before he was making crowds ooh and ahh at shots he blocked while playing for Duke University; before he was a six-foot-seven sixteen-year-old who was dunking in high school games. Growing up, he was just another happy kid living in South Carolina, where his mother had moved them.
Zion is in the pros now, but he didn’t dream that big when he was little. His ultimate goal was to be a college basketball star. Maybe that was because not a lot of people expected him to grow so tall and get so strong. Maybe not even Zion himself.
But Zion had a secret weapon: his mom.
Her name is Sharonda Sampson and she was a track athlete in the 1970s at Livingstone College. It’s a small school in North Carolina that was actually once called the Zion Wesley Institute. The Livingstone campus is where the first Black intercollegiate football game was played in America, back in 1892. Sharonda attended school there nearly one hundred years later. She was a tremendous talent, routinely clearing six feet in the high jump—leaping ability she obviously had passed on to her son.
It was Sharonda who put five-year-old Zion on a basketball team with nine-year-old kids, always encouraging him to pass the ball to them. That was smart for two reasons: It helped Zion get along with the older boys, and it helped him learn the skills of a point guard. Back then, no one knew Zion would grow up to be so tall. At his size, Sharonda thought that if he was going to fulfill his dream of being a college basketball player, he’d better learn how to pass. And so he did.
Text copyright © 2021 by Dan Wetzel. Illustrations copyright © 2021 by David SanAngelo
