“I fell in love with the sport when I played with my brother in the park. I was every day going to the park trying to play.”
“Which park?”
“Close to my house. It’s called La Citadelle.”
Then he is out in the concrete hallway, surrounded by a gaggle of press like a statesman emerging from a high-level meeting. They are all French—correspondents from Le Figaro, Le Monde, and others. The journalists are full of gossip. Ntilikina is leaving in a few hours, for a 2 a.m. flight back to Paris, because the professional team for which he plays, sig Strasbourg, is in the last game of the league finals the following night. It’s a charter flight that, one of them claims to know, cost ninety thousand dollars. A camerawoman named Gaelle mentions that Ntilikina’s childhood coach, Abdel, was among the party at his table, and was happier than she had ever seen him. I am intrigued that Ntilikina, the youngest player in the draft, had flown his childhood coach over from France to join his family on this occasion.
I ask Gaelle how she knew Abdel. She explains that he had been her coach when she attended basketball camp at age eleven. Meeting him is suddenly my top priority. Gaelle, amazingly, has his number. There is a series of texts and confused, murky phone calls. I go to an arranged spot and realize that I am scanning the crowd for a person whose only defining characteristic is that he is, as Gaelle put it, “glowing with joy.” Twenty minutes later, I am standing before Abdel Loucif in the food court, next to Cafe Habana. He is still glowing with joy. He wears a gray suit and a shirt with no tie. His frizzy hair is combed back, his forehead broad and gleaming. He doesn’t speak all that much English, and I speak almost no French. But it is wonderful to talk to him because his basketball lexicon is infused with unusual ingredients that I cannot readily identify but that make me happy, too.
