It's my martial arts world

[Greg]

I don't know how much you follow the NBA, but Wembayama is one of the leagues rising superstars. You can read more at ESPN. https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/4881...wembanyama

MASTER YAN'AN HAS trained at the Shaolin Temple in the Henan province of China since he was 6 years old. He has climbed the roughly 1,500 stone steps up Wuru Peak to the Bodhidharma Cave thousands of times. None of the steps is the same size or height. Some are narrow; some are tall. During the day, tourists who visit the temple usually take one to two hours to reach the peak. It is not advised to climb at night. There are no lights along the trail, and one wrong step could send a hiker tumbling down the steep staircase.
But Master Yan'an had an unusual student last summer. San Antonio Spurs All-NBA center Victor Wembanyama was looking for a challenge that would test him in ways he'd never been tested before. He wanted to build his inner strength alongside his already prodigious physical strength.
His goals, he said, transcended mere athletic glory.
"I told him: You play basketball, and I do kung fu. If you want to be great, you have to do things that other people can't do," Master Yan'an told ESPN. "There are two parts to climbing the mountain. The daytime is for your body. Your endurance, your strength. The nighttime is for your mind. Your awareness."
Wembanyama understood.
After darkness fell on the sixth night of his retreat at the Shaolin Temple last summer, he joined Master Yan'an and a group of monks for a hike to the Bodhidharma Cave.
"There were no lights anywhere," Master Yan'an said. "You can't see anything. The only way to go is step by step. Listen to your breath and listen to your heart. Feel each step with your foot. Use your awareness."
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Two staffers from San Antonio who had accompanied Wembanyama expressed their reservations. Master Yan'an worried, too. He'd been entrusted to train a global icon, a generational talent, and they were about to embark on a treacherous mountain path in total darkness.
"He's really young, and he has a really great future in basketball," Master Yan'an said. "He's also very tall, so he hit his head on some of the trees along the path and had to lean forward to go under them." But the entire point of this training, he said, was to free your mind from fear and trust your awareness to guide you.
The group walked and climbed for about an hour, a moving meditation in darkness and silence.
Throughout his time at the monastery, meditation had been the most difficult aspect for Wembanyama to embrace. It's hard for someone 7-foot-4 to sit cross-legged at all, let alone silently for up to 90 minutes, without moving.
But he kept at it. Each night he slept in three single-size beds that had been pushed together to accommodate his frame. Each morning he rose at 4:30 to train. The monks would have him run through the forests near the monastery or along an uneven 200-meter hillside track, doing frog jumps, sprints and one-legged hops uphill and downhill to build his balance and stamina.
They taught him the Shaolin 13 Fist Form -- one of the two basic forms of kung fu meant to teach efficient weight shifts, stability and striking principles.
Master Yan'an said he designed Wembanyama's customized martial arts training to emphasize controlling his center of gravity, which would generate force from different positions and resist external forces, to mimic the double-teams and physical play he'd face from NBA opponents.
Several times a day Wembanyama meditated with 100 other monks, each session's length determined by the length of the wick of incense that burned in the center of the room. Thirty minutes was doable. But sometimes the incense burned for 90 minutes, and it was agonizing for the then-21-year-old Wembanyama to sit that long.
"I knew he could do it," Master Yan'an said. "Because when he trains, he always tries again and again until he is the best."
Master Yan'an recognized then what the basketball world is recognizing now: that Victor Wembanyama has perhaps the most unprecedented set of skills and untapped potential anyone has ever seen, and that he requires a similarly unprecedented training regimen to realize it.
This is the story of how 34 generations of Shaolin warrior history trained a once-in-a-generation NBA superstar -- helping to build the player who not only dominated the league's best team in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals with frightening ease, but who also looks poised to do so for the rest of his nascent career.