You’re there, you read the newspaper quietly between cheese and dessert, and you come across this info in the central pages, between marriages, births and obituaries: Joel Embiid now has an American passport. A lambda info on the surface, but which obviously blew up the world basketball community, and a little more in France.
But why so much noise around a simple piece of paper, around the name of a country inscribed on a small notebook? You know it but we repeat it for those who arrive: Joel Embiid, aka the best scorer in the NBA and incidentally MVP candidate for a few seasons, was born in Cameroon but had hit the headlines a few weeks ago by announcing that he had become… French, passport also, because of his links with our beautiful country, he who speaks fluent French, for example, better than any reality TV star. Shortcuts were quickly made with the French basketball team which, two years from “its” Olympic Games, would probably not hesitate to recover one of the two or three best pivots on the planet in its roster. Joel Embiid with Rudy Gobert in the racket, Victor Wembanyama taking off, don’t throw away the cup is full, France with the orange ball has stars in their eyesat least the one that positions itself in favor of these small arrangements that can sometimes be very strategic for certain federations when they are not the result of a more nationalist reflection that is therefore better accepted.
In short, following weeks of debate as to whether yes or no Joel Embiid in the French team it’s goodwhile he himself has never positioned himself, let’s remember, here we learn that the Franco-Cameroonian pivot of the Sixers has therefore become a pivot… American-French-Cameroonian. It was two weeks ago, and in the greatest calm and far from the animated discussions of Twitter or the PMU (the same ones, sometimes), Jojo therefore recovered a third passport. Four more and he will be able to hit the game of the 7 families, Bolivia, Norway, Laos and Austria hold the rope but we get lost, unlike the player who explained his approach very simply on the occasion of the first Sixers rally in Philadelphia:
Let’s say I’m Cameroonian, American and French. I have been in the United States for a long time, my son is American, I live here and it is an honor to be an American. So I thought… “why not”? –Joel Embiid, via Associated Press
Important note, to compete in an international competition and in the event that this interests our almost national Jojo, it is the FIBA passport that is authentic. That is to say that only this passport will decide whether Jojo can play a World Cup or the Olympics with a national team, whether Cameroonian, French or American. And as long as this passport does not become Spanish everything will be fine, well that’s what it would have been like if the seum of defeat at the last Euro was still there. In any case, the France of basketball has a new subject to discuss today, between the pros and the anti, between those who had made the presence of Embiid with the Blues a certainty and those who are now afraid to see him humiliate Rudy Gobert in Paris with Team USA or Poland, it doesn’t matter.
What you must remember ? It is that such a bankable actor Joel Embiid today has several international possibilities to gauge, that he will very probably have a lot of phone calls in the coming weeks and in the coming months, but that for a few days the the idea of seeing him put on the EDF jersey slipped a bit into the funnel.
