Zion Williamson isn't just a generational NBA prospect. As one teacher at Spartanburg Day School tells it, the Duke University sensation is an extremely gifted poet, too – to the extent he could have potentially made a career as a writer.
“I hope he won't mind me saying this, but he's a hell of a poet,” Bill Pell, Williamson's create writing teacher in high school, told ESPN's Mina Kimes. “The kid can write.”
Williamson first tried his hand at short stories in Pell's largely unstructured class. He never quite felt comfortable, though, eventually leaning into poetry due in part to Pell sometimes beginning class by reading Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas, of “Do not go gentle into that good night” fame.
“He'd give them to me – he was very cautious,” Pell says of Williamson's short stories. “I began making suggestions. Then all he did was write poems…and the deeper we got into the year, the more complicated and sophisticated they became. They were remarkable.
“I said, ‘Zion…you're going to be as good a writer as you are a basketball player if you follow through on this,” he continued.”
Williamson, the consensus National Player of the Year as a freshman, averaged 22.6 points, 8.9 rebounds, 2.1 assists, 2.1 steals, and 1.8 blocks per game last season.
At 6-foot-7 and a chiseled 285 pounds, his combination of sheer size and overall athleticism is unlike any the game has ever seen before. But Williamson is much more than an athlete, too, combining his singular physical tools with advanced basketball IQ and an unrelenting motor to make him a potentially transcendent player at the next level.
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