GENERATION
HOLD ON, we’ll get to the essence of Zion Williamson, basketball’s Next Big Thing, in a little bit. Just wait.
Patience is not a trait we associate with youth—or with our pop culture at large. But if there’s one thing we have not been able to fully download on demand, it’s Williamson. In the three years that he’s been on the national stage—including his lone season at Duke and his rookie season in the NBA with the New Orleans Pelicans—his most anticipated moments have been abbreviated, interrupted, or delayed.
Williamson’s introduction to the storied Duke–North Carolina rivalry, in February 2019, lasted all of 30 seconds before he planted his left foot with so much force that his shoe blew apart and he sprained his right knee. Five months later, he sat out the second half of his first and only game in the NBA’s Summer League in Las Vegas after suffering a knee bruise in a collision with an opponent in the second quarter. And he missed the first 44 games of his rookie year while recovering from knee surgery, pushing his NBA start date back to January 22 of this year.
The moments we get only make us hungrier for more of the high-flying Williamson. He’s been a figure of fascination and potential since 2017, when he burst onto the national scene as a high school junior with a 360 dunk that made ESPN’s Top 10 Plays. A video on ’sTwitter page drew hundreds of thousands of views, and suddenly Williamson was a social-media superstar. By the end of 2018, his clips had racked up more than 69 million views on YouTube—most from well before he arrived at Duke that fall. (Compare those YouTube views and social-media moments with the way that most of America first encountered the last teenager to whip up this much hype in the NBA: a cover dubbing LeBron James “The Chosen One” when he was a high school junior in 2002.)
