During his stay at the Shaolin Temple in China’s Henan province last summer, Victor Wembanyama followed Master Yan’an and a group of monks up a mountain in total darkness. There were no lights. No phones. No sound except footsteps on rock.
The point of the exercise, his master explained, was to free the mind from fear. ‘The only way to go is step by step. Listen to your breath and listen to your heart. Feel each step with your foot and use your awareness,’ Master Yan’an previously explained.
Wembanyama, at 7 feet 4 inches, had to lean forward and duck under trees along the path. He hit his head more than once, but he kept going; climbing a total of 1,500 stone steps to the top.
At the summit, at Bodhidharma Cave – where, according to legend, the founder of Zen Buddhism meditated for nine years – Wembanyama sat cross-legged on flat ground and meditated alone.
He was 21 years old and was, by most measures, already the best basketball player on the planet. And he had gone there not for a PR stunt, not for a documentary, but because he genuinely believed there were things his body and mind still could not do – and that a 34th-generation Shaolin Warrior Monk might help him find them.
That moment on the mountain tells you almost everything you need to know about Victor Wembanyama. The NBA’s latest legend-in-the-making.
French phenom Victor Wembanyama has led the San Antonio Spurs to the NBA Finals for the first time in over a decade. He’s managed to do so in just his third season in the league.
The 22-year-old is not like most basketball stars, however, and took himself to a reclusive Shaolin Temple in China’s Henan province last summer to work on his body and mind
The Frenchman disappeared from public view before later sharing photos from his travels
The days began at 4:30 in the morning – evenings ended at 9pm, lights out, phone untouched
Let’s start with the basics, because the basics are already impossible.
Wembanyama stands 7 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 235 pounds. His wingspan has been measured at over 8 feet. He shoots like a guard, passes like a point forward and defends like nothing the sport has ever classified.
In his third NBA season – the one that has carried the San Antonio Spurs to their first Finals since 2014 – he averaged 25 points, 11.5 rebounds and 3.1 assists per game, while blocking shots at a rate that defies his positioning on the floor.
Danilo Gallinari, who spent sixteen years in the NBA and has seen most of what the game can produce, put it simply when we spoke ahead of the Finals: ‘I have never seen anything like it. I don’t think that anybody in the world has ever seen or experienced anything like Wemby.’
Asked whether there is a ceiling on what he can become, Gallinari didn’t hesitate.
‘If he can stay healthy, he’s going to be dominating the game. We will talk about him being one of the best who ever played. I honestly think there is one Wemby every 50 or 100 years.’
LeBron James once called him ‘an alien’, Stephen Curry said he gave off ‘cheat-code-type vibes’ and Giannis Antetokounmpo said he thought Wembanyama would end up being ‘one of the best to play this game.’
Wembanyama was named the Western Conference Finals MVP after beating OKC last week
Legends in the game have already suggested Wembanyama will redefine what is possible
The San Antonio Spurs Star, pictured alongside Drake, has become a global phenomenom
These were not the usual compliments players extend to rising stars. They sounded like dispatches from men who had seen something that hadn’t been there before.
And yet, focus only on the physical dimensions and you will miss the point entirely. What separates Wembanyama from every other large human being ever handed a basketball is not his body. It is what lives inside it.
Wembanyama was born on January 4, 2004, in Le Chesnay, France, and grew up in the suburb of Nanterre, on the western edge of Paris.
He began playing basketball seriously at the club Nanterre 92, and the club made an unusual commitment. They would let Wembanyama shape his own development, rather than forcing him into the mould of a traditional center.
That decision – to let a 7-foot teenager practice handles, shoot off screens and run half-court sets rather than just park him in the paint – produced the player who arrived in the NBA in 2023 as the most anticipated draft prospect in a generation.
He was picked first overall by the Spurs and arrived wearing a Louis Vuitton forest green kimono suit or ‘alien-like’, as he called the colour. Ironic given that, three years on, Wembanyama is known as ‘The Alien’.
Somewhere along the way, basketball stars became a known quantity off the court – social media accounts, endorsed products, curated personas assembled by teams of handlers. However, Wembanyama has always felt like a refusal of that template.
Wembanyama has led a young Spurs team to the NBA Finals where they will face the Knicks
Wembanyama has been hailed for his mentality off the court, as much as his ability on it
The Frenchman reads before every game and has often been pictured arriving book-in-hand
He reads before every game and has been spotted arriving at arenas carrying books under his arm with the same frequency other players carry headphones.
His affection for reading even saw The San Antonio Public Library launch a ‘Read Like Wemby’ campaign, offering reading lists based on his known literary tastes.
He visits art galleries in every city he travels to, and has to bend down to study some of the exhibits. He compares basketball itself to art: ‘Each line, each dot on a clipboard is a pass or a basket. Every game is an artwork in itself.’
And, while some would question the authenticity of such tales, his own teammates have been there to back-up the lore surrounding French superstar.
Speaking after their Game 4 victory last week, Spurs star De’Aaron Fox said: ‘Everything that you hear about Vic is true. He don’t want to see blue light after like 9:00. He reads books. He’s not on his phone. Like real. Like this is real.’
He is, by most accounts, genuinely strange and genuinely at ease with being so.
Gallinari, reflecting on what Wembanyama’s habits and choices tell him about the player, said: ‘It tells me that he’s very focused. He’s doing stuff that not only makes him happy, but also makes him better.
‘He understands that he is a role model for kids and when you are a role model, you have to present yourself as a model on and off the court. He is so mature for his age.’
Last summer, when his second NBA season was cut short by a blood clot in his shoulder, his agent did not send him to a specialist recovery programme. He sent him to the Shaolin Temple.
Wembanyama arrived in China, smiled on camera and then disappeared from public view
Master Yan’an, a 34th-generation Shaolin Warrior Monk, designed a programme built around one objective: helping Wembanyama control his centre of gravity
Last summer, when his second NBA season was cut short by a blood clot in his shoulder, his agent did not send him to a specialist recovery programme in the United States. He sent him to the Shaolin Temple.
The retreat was arranged quietly. Wembanyama arrived in China, visited the Great Wall, smiled on camera and then largely disappeared from public view.
Photos began circulating on Chinese social media of a shaved-head figure in a grey monk’s robe sitting before a row of Buddha statues. The NBA’s Weibo account confirmed the news with a single line: ‘Concentrate on training.’
Master Yan’an, a 34th-generation Shaolin Warrior Monk, designed a programme built around one objective: helping Wembanyama control his centre of gravity.
The goal was to help him generate force from various positions and resist external forces – preparing for the double-teams and physical play he’d face from NBA rivals.
The days began at 4:30 in the morning. There were hours of meditation, kung fu forms, and what the master called moving meditation – walking and climbing, silently, learning to feel each step. The evenings ended at 9pm, lights out, phone untouched.
One day, the San Antonio Spurs star was tasked with dribbling a basketball up a dangerous mountain path up to Sanhuangzhai, a monastery deep in the Song Mountains. The trail traversed ancient forests, suspension bridges and cliffside plank paths as it rose roughly 2,500 feet in elevation to the summit.
The goal was to help him generate force from various positions and resist external forces – preparing for the double-teams and physical play he’d face from NBA rivals
There were hours of meditation, kung fu forms, and what the master called moving meditation
A year on from that reclusive retreat, his San Antonio Spurs are going to the NBA Finals to face the New York Knicks, beginning on Wednesday
Master Yan’an explained that the average person who attempted the trail would need around eight hours to complete it.
Yet Wembanyama, while dribbling a basketball, did it in just four.
A year on from that reclusive retreat, his San Antonio Spurs are going to the NBA Finals to face the New York Knicks, beginning on Wednesday. It is only his third season in the league.
He has not yet reached his peak – a fact that every coach, analyst and former player who watches him tends to acknowledge with both admiration and mild dread.
The Knicks are a formidable opponent, built around Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns, a team that swept through the Eastern Conference with ease.
But they have no answer for Wembanyama. Nobody does, not yet.
