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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."
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"He's so special, you can feel that from his eyes," Master Yan'an said.
Through a video chat on WeChat, Master Yan'an seemed to mimic the steely gaze Wembanyama makes when he is in the peak of his basketball flow.
"Power comes from inside," he said. "I would look at him and say: You are not a cat; you are a tiger. For power to come out, you have to change the inside first."
Once Wembanyama did, Master Yan'an said, he could challenge him to do something nobody else could do.
One day he told Wembanyama to dribble a basketball up another dangerous mountain route to Sanhuangzhai, a monastery deep in the Song Mountains. The hike traversed cliffside plank paths, suspension bridges and ancient forests, and was five times as long as the one to Bodhidharma Cave. The trail forces you to climb roughly 2,500 feet in elevation across uneven ridges and stone.
Master Yan'an said it would take an average person seven to eight hours to reach the end.
Wembanyama did it -- while dribbling a basketball -- in four and a half.
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/48818786/how-34-generations-shaolin-warrior-monk-training-helped-build-once-generation-nba-superstar-victor-wembanyama
