You’ve seen the dunks. If you haven’t, let’s pause here. Go watch the dunks. (This one too.) Around this time next year, he’ll be doing them in the NBA Dunk Contest, and if for some reason he declines the invitation, Adam Silver will rent a Greyhound bus and drag him there by his fingernails. With any luck—for us, not necessarily for him—he’ll be jumping over two Kias that night in a Knicks or Hawks or Cavs or (God help him) a Suns jersey. It doesn’t really matter. Everyone who cares about sports will be watching.
Zion Williamson is the most thrilling college basketball player since Michael Jordan. This is a bit of a cheat, because LeBron and Kobe didn’t go to college, but still. And it’s not just the dunks. It’s also the blocks, and the threes, and the dimes, and the handle. At the moment, Williamson is six feet eight and weighs around 285 pounds. But he’s still only 18—he turns 19 in July, right after the NBA Draft—introducing the frightening possibility that he’s still growing.
The way Zion looks when he’s beasting 23-year-old fifth-year seniors on national TV, it can be easy to forget that he’s just a kid. But up close, it’s not. He vibrates like he’s on a sugar high, and he’s funny and guileless, delighted by the newness of this wild ride he’s on. Zion Williamson doesn’t need to be told to enjoy this while it lasts. It’s written all over his face. From an upper-deck seat at Cameron Indoor Stadium—Duke’s other Zion—he spoke with GQ about his lottery-pick roommate, his very near future in the NBA, and whether us normal-sized humans ever seem puny to him. (Yes, we do.)
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GQ: What was it like to play at Madison Square Garden as a teenager?
Zion Williamson: It was incredible. The Garden—that’s where big names are made. The arena’s beautiful. Like how it’s kinda like darkish everywhere except that rectangle? The rectangle is just lit up. I love it.
Whose locker were you sitting in? Do you remember?
I was sitting in [rookie forward] Kevin Knox’s locker. I saw [former Knicks superstar Kristaps] Porzingis’s locker right when I walked in, but you know, outta respect for him—he’s a very great player, and hopefully I can get to that level. He’s an MVP-caliber player. I’m not just gonna sit at your locker. I’m gonna try to work my way up to that level. But I found Kevin Knox’s locker, and because he’s a rookie and that’s probably what I’m gonna be next year.
This group of freshmen seem to have a terrific bond, but you and R.J. seem especially tight.
Oh, yeah.
It’s not phony, right? It’s not just for the cameras?
No, not at all. I don’t know how to describe it. Everybody on the team—even though I’m closest with R.J., I can go hang out with Justin Robinson, Brennan Besser, Mike Buckmire… We all hang out with each other. There is no odd man out.
I’m sure you’ve had teams where that’s not the case.
Oh, yeah—being real, every team’s not like that. But this team, we instantly all had the connection.
Why do you think that happened?
Coming in, we understood that yeah, we’re good, but freshmen don’t really win the national championship. You always need veteran support. We just learn from them. We take in everything we can.
The friendship you have with R.J.—it’s unusual under the circumstances, don’t you think? It could’ve easily not gone that way.
I know. I know.
Is the draft a subject you guys discuss, or is it one of those things that’s just always there in the background?
I mean, we both understand the situation, but the only thing we can do is go out, play our best, try to win as a team, because at the end of the day, an NBA team is gonna pick who they want. You see some of these guys who’ll go for 40 points and stuff—but that doesn’t really affect your draft pick. The NBA teams know what they want. So me and R.J. don’t focus on that. We just focus on trying to win a conference championship and hopefully go for a national championship.
It’s funny you bring that up—I don’t know that there’s any real correlation between playing time in college and NBA draft position. There are plenty of lottery picks who were the sixth man on their teams in college. It happens all the time. Jaren Jackson Jr. only played 20 minutes a game last year at Michigan State, and he went fourth.
Yeah, nobody’s insecure about playing time. We’re all secure. We all have the same thing in mind. Coach K—he told us how it’d be when we come. If I’m playing with four other five-star recruits, with great players coming off the bench, I’m not always gonna play 30-plus minutes, and that’s something I knew before I came here. So if I play 20 minutes, I’m not fazed by it at all, because that just comes along with being on a great team.
So far this season there have been moments, especially against Texas Tech, when it seemed as if the officials were just flummoxed by you—like they’d just never seen a college player your size who moves as fast as you.
Yeah, I think so. I think some officials just haven’t reffed somebody like me, because I’m not just big, I’m very mobile, and I think I’m nimble. I can get from spot to spot real quick. But, you know, the fact that I’m so much stronger, when I attack the basket, when I get fouled, a regular foul would not faze me much because I would just power through it. But some referees don’t see it like that—they just see it as I tried to force my way in there, and I get the charge call. At first it would kinda bother me, like, “Come on, this is basketball!” But then I’m looking at it from their perspective, and so sometimes it does look like I am forcing my way. In reality, I’m not—it’s just I’m able to get through the contact. But I’m at the point now where the calls just roll off me. It’s just, “All right, on to the next play.”
When did you realize you were unusually big?
I’m gonna say…my…my junior year.
Really? That late?
I didn’t pick up all this weight until junior year. Freshman year, I was small. I was 6-3, 175—like, I was small. And over the course of about two years, I picked up a hundred pounds. I mean, I wouldn’t look at myself and go, Wow, I’m 250! I wouldn’t know I was 250 until I stepped on the scale, and then I’m like, Oh. I’m 250? I don’t feel 250. I don’t feel slow. Like, with all that weight just came more athleticism and finding myself able to do new things. People always say you have to grow into your body, but for me, it wasn’t even growing into my body—the more weight came, it didn’t faze me. It made me faster, stronger. It helped me become a more versatile player.
Your teammates talk a lot about being amazed by the things you can do, but sometimes it seems to me like you’re watching R.J. and you’re equally amazed by him.
Oh, definitely. My high school didn’t have high-level players like him who would go NBA. My high school didn’t really focus on sports like that. So when I came to Duke—I talk about it all the time in the locker room that I was so used to being the tallest in my high school, when I first came to practice this summer, I felt like an average person, because you had people like [Duke seven-footers] Javin [DeLaurier], Marques [Bolden], and Antonio [Vrankovic]. Even Cam. They’re all taller than me, and I was like, "Wow, I’m not the tallest anymore." I was so used to being around them that when school started and other kids came back, I was looking at them like, “Wow, these are some small humans!” Like, Coach K, he’s probably like six foot maybe, he’s even tall compared—like, on TV, I thought Coach K was kinda short, but when I see him in person, I’m like, “Oh, Coach K has some height on him.”
What has it been like getting to know him? Is he different than the guy you see on TV?
He possesses something that I’m trying to get. He loves to win and he will do anything—like, he is the one person that I know that human nature does not affect him. Let’s be realistic: If I know I’m about to play a team that has supposedly no chance of beating us versus a team that’s top five of the nation—I can sit here and tell myself, "Look at all the games the same," and I do tell myself every game’s the same, but when you get out there you still might play the different at first. With him, it doesn’t matter. We can be in an exhibition game and it doesn’t even count against your record. He has the same attitude. I’ve never seen someone go against human nature like that. It doesn’t affect him.
You’ve talked about how you don’t like just being known for your dunks. I remember one of your most viral dunks of the year, against Clemson, came after you stole the ball at midcourt—the defensive play was the key to the whole thing, but the dunk was all they showed in the replays.
Yeah, I guess that’s human nature, right? I could probably score 40 points, get 10 rebounds, 10 assists, but I can have one dunk that was incredible, and those other 38 points don’t matter no more. It’s like, “Oh, my God. He needs to be in a dunk contest! Did you see what he just did? That was incredible!” And at first it did kind of bother me—I’m not gonna lie. For a while, I wouldn’t wanna dunk in the lay-up lines. People would start dunking, and I would just go lay it in.
Why did it bother you? You mean you felt like people were diminishing you, or making you like a Harlem Globetrotter or something like that?
Yeah. That’s not me. Then I sat down with Coach K, and he talked to me about it. My parents also. Like, I wouldn’t be at Duke if all I could do was dunk. Duke recruits the best basketball players. They don’t recruit dunkers or highlight makers. They recruit good basketball players. So I thought about that. I felt more comfortable about myself, and the people who know basketball, they know that I bring to the table more than just dunking. So people wanna classify me as a dunker, they can. If my opponent wants to think of me as a dunker, it’s just gonna shock them more when I show them another part of my game.
How does it feel to be compared to LeBron James? I try to avoid that with him, but you’re the first player I’ve seen where it doesn’t seem that crazy.
I mean, I appreciate the fact that people think that, but Michael Jordan’s Michael Jordan, LeBron’s LeBron, and they didn’t become who they were because they were compared to other people. I appreciate that people think that, give me the comparisons to LeBron, but I’m not LeBron. I’m myself. Before I got big, I was playing point guard, so I’m kinda like a pass-first person. Some people tell me I should be more selfish, but that’s not me.
This could be just my view from the outside, but it seems like for a player at your level, there’s less tension nowadays when it comes to discussing the NBA. It used to be this third rail—we all knew it was there, you knew it, we knew it, but it was like this thing that you weren’t supposed to think about and that we weren’t supposed to ask about. And it feels like that’s changed a little bit. We’re all more realistic now, and that’s the vibe I get from Coach K as well. Is that the case?
Oh, yeah. He’s definitely realistic about it. He’ll tell us, “Some of you guys won’t be here next year, but…” But like I said: He’s the only person I see that can go against human nature. He doesn’t think about the past, he doesn’t think about the future. He lives everything in the moment, every practice.
Are you good at staying in this moment? Or is it hard to keep your mind from wandering ahead six months?
I’m in between. But when we play in this gym—it’s just incredible here. Everything about it. I have so many parts that I love about it. We’ll be shooting before a game, and then they’ll start playing a video that shows highlights of all the old Duke players, and then Coach K, he’ll walk out and I’m like, “Wow, I’m playing for him. Me! From just some small private school in Spartanburg, South Carolina, with a graduating class of 45 people. He found me somehow.” Or they’ll play this song, “Everytime We Touch,” by I think her name is Cascade? [Note: it’s Cascada] They play it before every game. When we’re warming up and the clock hits one minute and 30 seconds, I think it’ll start. And first when I heard it, I’m like, “This is kinda like a corny song to me.” But then they’ll start playing it and the fans will start clapping, [starts clapping] and you can just see the pure joy it brought, and it rubbed off on me a little. Now whenever I hear that song, there’s a big smile that comes across my face.
