Check Out SI’s Story On Zion Williamson

We don’t know Zion Williamson personally, but we have paid attention. And if you do too, you know there’s a difference between the exuberant showman and the guy he is at heart.

Williamson is closer to an introvert than most people realize. He loves the game, loves that he can play it at such a high level, but if you asked him what he’d like to be doing, there’s a pretty good chance he’d say playing video games or watching anime with his littler brother Noah.

He’s an earnest young man too and takes things to heart. So hearing the mocking and the laughter he heard last year when, as it turns out, he was truly suffering, was very difficult.

As it turns out Williamson, who is on the cover of the latest Sports Illustrated, had a very difficult time last year. First he thought he was almost recovered from his foot injury only to find out that it had actually gotten worse. And then the ridicule was tough to take.

As it turns out, Williamson had some very dark times while he was recuperating as he says in the SI article. But he also grew up a lot. The outward evidence is his tremendous physical conditioning. The rest? It’s more for him. We can’t see the ways he’s grown up internally. But we’ll see it on the court.

One telling detail from the article: he ran a quarter mile in less than 60 seconds. That’s even more impressive when you realize he had already been running for a while when he did it. The 400 meter record is 43.03 seconds. Williamson is not training for that, but for a man his size, really for just about any basketball player, a sub-60 second quarter mile is damned good.