Victor Wembanyama and why we crave sports villains

Wemby, as the 224-centimeter Frenchman with Congolese roots is affectionately known, can do things on a basketball court that most humans have experienced only on a Nerf hoop attached to a closet door.

He dunks from seemingly impossible distances or without even leaving the ground. Most players his size lumber. He’s uncannily graceful and quick. Wemby dribbles, spins, and sinks 3-pointers better than players who reach his armpits. He’s also the first NBA player ever to receive every first-place vote for Defensive Player of the Year. 

The 22-year-old phenom led his San Antonio Spurs to the NBA Finals last June. But something surprising happened to the new star during that playoff run: Wembanyama was suddenly hated.

He was ejected from a second-round playoff game for elbowing a Minnesota Timberwolves opponent in the throat. The slow-motion replays made it look like a blow from a John Wick film. In the Finals, he shoved New York Knicks star Jalen Brunson to the floor, then laughed as Brunson protested.

Wembanyama is built like a streetlamp, willowy and strong, with a 243-cm wingspan. Brunson may be an All-Star, but he stands barely above 183 cm, far more ordinary and earthbound. When the Knicks won the series, with Brunson the Finals MVP, many people cheered David slaying Goliath.

During the series, the cover of the New York Post featured Wembanyama in a “Wanted” poster. He caught more heat for skipping the post-series handshakes and telling reporters in the news conference after the final game, “See you all never.”

“Is Wemby the quickest hero-to-villain arc in sports history?” a reader asked the Ringer’s Bill Simmons, one of the NBA’s most influential tastemakers.

“I think you can make the case [that] the Finals alone changed how people looked at him entirely,” Simmons answered.

Wembanyama remains the frontrunner for MVP this year in just his fourth season in the league. He’s also found himself cast in the classic role of the bad guy.

“Now there’s a lot of places in the NBA where people don’t love you anymore,” a reporter said to Wembanyama this fall. “They vilify you.”

Wembanyama replied that he was fine with fans of other teams viewing him as the enemy.

“We are fighting for the top spot on the mountain, and we are going to have to move people in our way,” he said.

This supposed heel turn, when a likable star athlete gets reclassified as a villain, got me thinking about how sports villains are made. Some athletes deliberately cultivate the role. Others earn it through their behavior. And some find themselves cast as the bad guy whether they want the part or not.

The idea of the heel turn comes from the scripted dramas of professional wrestling. But athletes from other sports have recognized that to be a superstar who fills stadiums and captures the fascination of fans as well as marketers, talent often isn’t enough. It also helps to become a character in a morality play.

Muhammad Ali was the greatest at this — as he was the first to remind people while performing — as the world’s most boastful boxer.

The heavyweight champion revealed in a 1969 interview that he learned about the value of adopting an arrogant persona from a conversation he had with a wrestler known as Gorgeous George, who was famous for his over-the-top, staged narcissism.

“He told me people would come to see me get beat,” Ali said. “Others would come to see me win. I’d get ’em coming and going.”

Ali took on a more polarizing and riskier persona as well — that of the athlete activist. In 1967, with public opinion about the Vietnam War dividing the nation, he refused to be drafted into the military. He was stripped of his title and banned from fighting for over three years.

He was celebrated and reviled by people on opposite ends of the political divide, in much the way Colin Kaepernick was when he took a knee during performances of the national anthem before NFL games in 2016 to protest police killings of Black civilians.

The Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham became a flash point of controversy this past WNBA season both for her hard fouls and her opinions in the Trump-era culture wars on topics like transgender athletes. Her nickname: MAGA Barbie.

There’s another bad guy archetype, that of the rule-breaking bully, that players — or even entire teams — have leaned into to gain an advantage over their opponents.

The intimidating Detroit Pistons of the late 1980s, with Bill Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman, called themselves the Bad Boys and played basketball like they were in a bar fight. Argentina won the World Cup four years ago with a classically beautiful style of play. This summer, with an older and less talented roster, they deployed a slugging, physical, fouling strategy — which led them all the way back to the finals.

Joakim Noah understands both sides of the villain role. The retired Chicago Bulls center is another big man originally from France, having moved from Paris to New York when he was 12. He enthusiastically played the “black hat” when he saw it as a means to motivate his teammates or irritate opponents. Noah says some players are wired to feed off the negative energy of tens of thousands of opposing fans raining boos on them.

“I felt like it was us versus the world, and I loved that,” he says. “I always played my best.”

The same could be said of Dillon Brooks of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns (known as Dillon the Villain), as well as “bad guy” racecar drivers of the past, such as NASCAR’s Kyle Busch or F1’s Michael Schumacher.

The Spurs' Victor Wembanyama reacts to a call during a game against the Kings in Sacramento on Nov. 7. | IMAGN IMAGES / VIA REUTERS

To see Wemby as only a heel, however, is to overlook much else about him.

Not that it registered with most Americans, but this fall he spoke out in support of the hundreds of thousands in France who’d taken to the streets to protest neglect of the country’s public education system.

And unlike nearly all of his peers and every major professional sports league, Wemby has refused to work with betting companies or prediction markets.

“I will never do that,” he told reporters. “Honestly, I think it’s very sad to see some players promote it.” 

For a 22-year-old, let alone one of the greatest athletes alive, he’s intellectually and culturally curious. While on the road for a game in New York in 2024, Wemby  played chess against fans in Washington Square Park. He spent part of his offseason in 2025 in a Chinese monastery training with Shaolin monks — meditating, hiking, practicing kung fu. It was like Batman’s hero’s journey.

There’s a video that went viral from the 2025 NBA All-Star Game of Wemby in the locker room with a book. Three-time MVP Nikola Jokic teases him.

“I read before every game,” Wemby replies. “Is that crazy? It’s not like I brought an octopus or something.”

He and teammate Harrison Barnes, who is 12 years older, started a team book club, and the San Antonio Public Library launched the “Read Like Wemby” initiative so people can check out his reading list. It includes George Orwell’s 1984, the Dune series, lots of fantasy. 

In her TED talk, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie doesn’t bring up basketball or Wembanyama, but she focuses on what’s missed when someone’s humanity is reduced to a single story: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

Wembanyama told 60 Minutes recently that he learned from his immature outbursts during last year’s postseason: “It showed my limits more than anything else. Going out there, you need to play basketball. You don’t need to beat the s--- out of people — if you want to win, at least.”

Wemby should remain in the spotlight for years to come. I suspect the heel label won’t stick, even among opposing fans. He may break their hearts, but he doesn’t need to play a character to dominate on the court.

“Hate it or love it,” Noah says, “we are blessed to be able to watch what the future of the NBA is, and it’s him.”