If all goes according to plan, the star-laden American men’s basketball team will romp to a gold medal at the Paris Olympic Games next month. Which means that for one of the team’s linchpins, the Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid, the most complicated challenge may have been choosing to play for the bos5000 United States in the first place.
Embiid, who is 30, is a native of Cameroon who also holds French and American citizenship. France aggressively courted Embiid, and his decision to instead join the U.S. team led to withering criticism from the French basketball community. (Cameroon’s team did not qualify for this year’s Games.)
But things never go easily for Embiid. He is one of the sport’s best players but also something of a Sisyphean figure. For all his success — including an M.V.P. award in 2023 and multiple scoring titles — he has never achieved the N.B.A.’s biggest prize: a championship. The Sixers have repeatedly fallen short in the playoffs, at times in heartbreaking fashion. Then there’s the churn: During his tenure, the team has seen coaches, star players and general managers come and go. And Embiid himself can’t seem to avoid injury. (Shortly after Embiid and I spoke, the 76ers did sign another star player, Paul George. So there’s reason to hope, Philly fans!)
Can you talk about what it means for you to be playing for the United States? It means a lot. I’ve spent half of my life here. I’ve got a great family, great wife, my son, so it just made a lot of sense. I’ve been given the opportunity to be here and accomplish a lot.
I have dual citizenship — Canadian and U.S. — and soon I’ll have lived in America for longer than I was in Canada. But it’s clear to me that, for whatever reason, I will never self-identify as American. Do you have similar feelings? Do you think of yourself as American? Nah, I think of myself as from Cameroon. That’s always going to be home. I was born there, and from what I’ve seen growing up — the struggle — I’ll always identify with it. That’s one of the reasons I ended up succeeding: because of the way I was raised, the environment I was raised in. Nothing was ever comfortable. I always felt like I got to work for everything. I started playing basketball at 16. [Embiid actually started playing at 15 but first played in America at 16.] It’s hard to make it when you start that old, especially because guys have been playing their whole life in America.
A lot of people thought you were going to play for the French team. You ultimately decided to play for the American team. Can you tell me how you wound up making that decision? It was tough. Obviously, I got my home country, Cameroon, which I love, and the U.S., where I’ve been for 14 years now, and then France, where I have a lot of family. I kind of felt rushed in that decision. I wanted to take as much time as possible, and it didn’t help that France had put an ultimatum on when the decision had to be made.
What was the timeline? I didn’t know. You know, I saw it on Twitter, and I was like, Whoa, where did this come from? Because from the conversation that I had with the U.S., it was: Take as much as time as you need. We’d love to have you, but it’s OK if you make another decision. Then when you’ve got someone else putting the pressure on you, making it seem like, Oh, you got to make the decision, we need it, we need it — I’m like, well, I got one person over here telling me take as much time as you need. But one thing that was always known was that Cameroon is the first choice, and if they qualify I’m playing for my home country. I had the dewaspin777 opportunity to talk to the French president about what was going on, and I told him one thing that was kind of bothering me a lot was the relationship between France and Cameroon and Africa’s countries in general.
Historically, you mean? Yeah, and even right now. There’s a lot of things going on over there. There’s a lot of pushback as far as basically kicking out the French because it’s been so many years of oppression. So that was my mind-set. I still got my family living in Cameroon, and I don’t want to put them through any of that stuff. I want them to be safe, and the relationship between France and Cameroon or Africa in general is just not good.
You spoke to President Macron about this? Yeah.
No disrespect, but I would hope he has more important things to do than trying to convince basketball players to come play for the French team! But what did you say to him, and what did he say back? It was a nice conversation. I got a call, and at first — I usually don’t answer random numbers. I got a text, and I figured what was happening. We had a great talk.
Are there ways in which having a son has changed how you think about your job? He changed everything. We had him in 2020, and before that, I was not a serious human being. I was always joking around; I was always saying whatever. I was always acting crazy. That was the golden days of my Twitter era.
You were famously a very good Twitter troll. Yeah, basically. Then once I found out I was having a kid, I was like, I got to set a better example. I can’t just be on Twitter trolling. That can’t be my life. My focus on basketball changed. Not that I wasn’t taking it seriously before, but I took it to another level.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview”
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