Joel Embiid, a native of Cameroon, is a talented Internet jokester. He’s also a professional basketball player that told teammates in college that he killed a lion before he hit middle school.
During an interview on The Vertical’s podcast with Adrian Wojnarowski, the Philadelphia 76ers center told a tale of his days as a member of the Kansas Jayhawks.
From CSN Philly:
“Americans don’t really have any idea what’s going on in the world, especially us Africans. When they think about Africans, they think about us running around with lions and tigers and all those other animals. When I got to Kansas I kind of used that to my advantage, talking about how I killed a lion and that’s how I became a man. At six years old I had to go into the jungle and kill a lion and had to carry it on my back and carry it back to the village to show I’m a man. And they bought into it. I don’t know. It might be true or it might be false. I don’t know. But that’s the perception.”
Biting commentary in the form of a pretty clever social experiment by Embiid.
When Wojnarowski asked Embiid about Donald Trump as President, he responded with precision:
“Growing up in Cameroon, I always thought the U.S. was just amazing. It was just a dream. I thought it was heaven. And then coming here a couple years ago, the U.S. is still nice, but it’s not like what I thought it was going to be. With the election going on and Donald Trump getting elected, I mean I don’t usually get into politics but with the way he’s been acting -- talking about racism and women -- it’s hard to understand why people elected him. It just shows you the way people think. Racism isn’t over and people are still behind him.”
Embiid is already shaping up to be an interesting voice in the NBA. I’m looking forward to his commentary moving forward from a league perspective.
