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  • SLAM Philippines

    FIRST STEP

    May 11, 2020 5 minutes
    WORDS YARON WEITZMAN

    Excerpted from Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports by Yaron Weitzman. Copyright © 2020 by the author and reprinted with permission from Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.

    JOEL EMBIID is fond of comparing his life to a movie. The story, in his account, begins with a scout discovering him on the streets of Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, where Embiid grew up. It’s a good opening scene, but not exactly true.

    The story actually begins with an email.

    “Best wishes brother!!!” Didier Yanga wrote to Joe Touomou in January 2011. “I’m sending you pictures of my nephew…Thomas’ son, who is 2m06 tall and 17 years old. He’s in 11th grade.”

    Eighteen months earlier, Yanga’s nephew Joel Embiid had watched

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