Hakeem Says
Now for the story of the video from Embiid’s perspective, as recorded by the Sporting News’ DeCourcy:
"When I was 15, that’s when I had the thought that I wanted to play basketball,” Embiid said, sitting on an end zone bleacher at Allen Fieldhouse. “My dad wasn’t really — he was against it. But I had my uncle talk to him, and he finally convinced him to let me play basketball. And then I started playing. “When I started playing basketball, my coach back in Cameroon the first day he gave me a video of Hakeem Olajuwon. He told me to watch it every day. After practice, after every practice, I’d watch every move he did — and I’d just keep doing that. I just fell in love with his game, his footwork, how he moves. I was so proud — I wanted to be like him, because he’s African, moved from Nigeria to the U.S. I just felt if I had the chance to come here, I would try to do the same thing.” At the beginning it was kind of difficult for me, because it was so physical,” Embiid said. “Back home, it wasn’t the same. At Montverde, we had really good players like Dakari Johnson, we had so many guys. I think we had more than five pros on the team. I think that’s how I got better, playing against them every day. But it was hard at the beginning. “When I got here, I wasn’t known, so I didn’t have any offers. I was just like, ‘If anybody recruits me, I’m just going to go there and try to get my degree.’ And then in summer I played AAU, and I think I did pretty good. So I started having offers. I had a chance to have my mentor Luc, he was helping me a lot. I started watching NCAA games, and I liked Kansas. And even Luc liked it, because he played against them when he was at UCLA. He was like, ‘Man, that school is for bigs,’ that I’m going to develop over there, they get bigs to the NBA.”"
But Hakeem never said quit, so Joel Embiid never did.
Next: Wunderkind