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.
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.
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-10 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.
Nathan Fenno
A Killing Still Unresolved
from The Los Angeles Times
* * *
Sherra Wright guided the silver Cadillac SUV through the darkness on a mild night, seven years after search-and-rescue dogs found her ex-husband’s body in a Memphis field.
The remains of Lorenzen Wright weighed 57 pounds. The coroner needed dental records to identify the man the Clippers had picked in the first round of the 1996 NBA Draft. Five gunshot wounds were visible in the withered corpse. Two in the head. Two in the torso. One in the right forearm.
The killing remained unsolved, but by last December a long-dormant police investigation had taken on new life. And a task force of federal marshals and Riverside County sheriff’s deputies was tracking the Cadillac on Interstate 15 near Norco.
As Sherra drove south with her twin 17-year-old boys, Lamar and Shamar, she relived the Murrieta Mesa High basketball team’s five-point win earlier that night. The twins had combined to score 32 points. Sherra told her oldest son, Lorenzen Jr., all about the game on the phone.
Then red and blue lights flashed behind them. The SUV pulled over and a voice amplified by a loudspeaker ordered Sherra to exit the car with her hands up. She started shaking.
More cruisers zoomed up. Guns were drawn, Lamar said. The twins begged their mother to keep her hands up.
They’d met about 25 years earlier, the teenage basketball prodigy from small-town Mississippi still growing into his 6-foot-11 body, and the headstrong daughter of his club coach.
Lorenzen was 16, Sherra five years older. She paid for his hot wings and iced tea on dates, as well as for better clothes, new shoes, even a custom-made suit.
“It was love and hate at the very first sight,” she wrote in Mr. Tell Me Anything, a 2015 book featuring two characters she later said were based on her and Lorenzen. “He hated that she was all he had been warned she would be. She hated that her interest was officially sparked by a minor.”
This article is based on interviews with three of the couple’s six children—the first time they’ve spoken publicly—and others close to the family, in addition to court documents, books, public records, and media accounts.
“Ours is a Love Story, not this horror film that has been erected by the Media,” Sherra wrote in a brief letter to the Los Angeles Times.
Nicknamed “The Howl” because he screamed after dunking the ball or blocking a shot, Lorenzen earned $55 million over 13 seasons with the Clippers, Atlanta Hawks, Memphis Grizzlies, Cleveland Cavaliers, and Sacramento Kings. Friends thought the couple put on a good show off the basketball court: the stay-at-home mother and doting father enjoying mansions, luxury automobiles, designer clothes, and a family that always appeared to be smiling.
After the Clippers drafted Lorenzen from the University of Memphis with the seventh overall pick in June 1996, Ian Rice became close friends with the young family adjusting to Los Angeles.
Then a teenage ballboy for the Clippers, Rice helped Lorenzen and Sherra move into a custom home in Playa del Rey and cared for their Rottweilers. Lorenzen lent the kid his Chevrolet Tahoe with televisions and a video-game system in the back for prom, then bought him a tuxedo and Nikes to match the cherry red SUV. When Rice graduated from high school, Lorenzen and Sherra attended the ceremony and rented him a limousine with a “CLASS OF 1999” banner.
“He was in love with her,” Rice said. “She had a grip on him.”
But privately there was trouble, which occasionally spilled into public view. In August 2005, police responded to a domestic disturbance call at the Wrights’ Memphis home. Sherra, according to news reports at the time, had a cut on her hand and abrasions on her jaw. There were no arrests or charges.
Another time, Lorenzen and childhood friend Mike Gipson retreated to the family’s RV with a couple of strippers. Sherra discovered them, Gipson said, and Lorenzen jumped out a window. Sherra forced her way into the RV, chased the strippers out, ripped off Gipson’s shirt, and tore up the vehicle’s interior.
In Mr. Tell Me Anything, a handful of violent incidents between the two main characters are folded in with allegations of infidelity and explicit descriptions of sexual encounters. Sherra told the Memphis Commercial Appeal in July 2015 that “99.99 percent” of the book contained true stories from her relationship with Lorenzen. She described it on social media as “my story.” Lorenzen Jr. said his mother “wrote about things that really happened in her life.”
The book described the wife catching her husband with another woman. The wife kicked down the bathroom door, dragged the interloper out by her hair, and repeatedly punched her. Then the wife turned to her husband and “slapped the hell out of his ass.”
Lorenzen and Sherra separated in early 2009, around the same time his NBA career ended. Banks foreclosed on two of their homes, including a 17-room mansion. They had $3 million in joint debt.
A permanent parenting plan filed in Shelby County, Tennessee, Circuit Court before the divorce was finalized in February 2010 required Lorenzen to pay $26,650 a month in alimony and child support based on his previous income as a professional basketball player. It cited the couple’s “extremely lavish lifestyle” and the need to continue to provide the children with benefits such as a nanny and private bas
ketball training.
Lorenzen also had to maintain a $1 million life insurance policy, with Sherra as trustee.
A few months after their divorce, the relationship seemed to have thawed. Loren, the couple’s oldest daughter, said her father wanted to remarry Sherra.
“He would tell us every day he was working to win her back,” the 21-year-old said.
Investigators later found a series of sexually explicit text messages Sherra sent Lorenzen on July 17, 2010—designed, they said in court records, to lure him to Memphis.
Lorenzen flew from his home in suburban Atlanta the next day without even packing a change of clothes.
Phil Dotson, a close friend, later told reporters that he dropped off Lorenzen and Lorenzen Jr. at Sherra’s rented home on Whisperwoods Drive in the Memphis suburb of Collierville around 10 p.m. Nothing seemed amiss.
Lorenzen planned to drive back to Atlanta with a friend, Jeremy Orange, and the children on July 19, with a stop at Six Flags White Water, Orange said, but when he arrived at Sherra’s home that morning she said Lorenzen wasn’t there. Orange repeatedly called his friend. There was no answer.
When Gipson called Sherra, she suggested Lorenzen had run off with a lady friend. She texted Orange that Lorenzen was “probably in one of his little holes” and ended the message “LOL.”
Lorenzen’s mother, Deborah Marion, filed a missing-persons report July 22. When officers contacted Sherra, she told them her ex-husband had left the home around 2 a.m. on July 19 with an unknown person in an unknown vehicle.
The Best American Sports Writing 2019 Page 23
