When he was selected in 15th choice of the NBA draft in 1999, Frédéric Weis is light years from the American universe of the Great League. The pivot of the CSP Limoges is with the French team which will play a quarter of the highly anticipated European championship (against Turkey in Bercy), because qualifying at the next Sydney Olympic Games. The avowed objective of the Blues for this euro at home.
Drafted after Jean-Claude Lefèbvre (1960) and the duo Oliver Saint-Jean-future Tariq Abdul-Wahad-and Alain Digbeu (1997), the Pivot Limougeaud is then the great hope of French basketball. Above all, he is simply the first French formed in France which is selected in the first round of an NBA draft, a sacred challenge. Especially at the time.
Like Christopher Columbus …
“It was Christopher Columbus”narrates his teammate of the time, the leader Stéphane Dumas, in the documentary of Canal + entitled “Little Big Fred”and signed Clément Repellin. “It is not like today when there are four flights a day for New York. He went to conquer the United States in quotes. It was something exceptional.”
But, hué (free of charge) by the fans of the Knicks, when he announced his selection by the commission agent David Stern, the American dream of the tricolor pivot takes a direct cold. And Weis is not at the end of his sorrows with the New York audience.
“Knicks fans have hooked him [à la Draft]. Because he was French and no one knew him ”, tells Frank Catapano, his American agent. “The Knicks thought Fred had a lot of qualities. He was a good athlete for his size, it was a good bastor. They had scoured it closely.”
Chosen in place of Ron Artest, the premises of the stage
Issue. And size. It is that the Knicks made a daring choice, a very risky bet, by going to look for a little -known French pivot … while a raw formwork winger grew before their eyes, in their garden, in St Johns.
“There was general hostility [envers lui] From the outset, because the whole city of New York wanted the Knicks to draft Ron Artest, who played in St Johns ”, Specifies Fred Kerber, New York Post journalist for 28 years (and 48 in total in the New York media). “A guy in the neighborhood, born in Queens, who played in St Johns. He was the player everyone wanted.”
For Weis, this is the beginning of chaos. A series of misunderstandings and misunderstandings, which will lead him straight in the wall of the big apple.
“You say to yourself, but what did they do the knicks? They took a guy that nobody knows. While they had a New York player right next to it, they could have taken. From the start, the fans are very mixed. And it's going to be even worse after …”
Even though the summer league in which he had to participate in 2000, the Shaw's Pro Summer League, was precisely supposed to allow him to acclimatize quietly to the American universe, the Knicks send him outright to the pipe breaker. With a chief coach, Jeff Van Gundy, who does nothing to facilitate the task of his Paris rookie, mocking his stammering English and making himself a malicious pleasure of speaking jargon and street language to a weis obviously dropped.
“We should probably have left him more time”
“At the time, being drafted in the NBA is not the same as now. At the time, it didn't happen to anyone. I find myself in the franchise of New York Knicks. Guys I had the posters in my room. It is something unimaginable. I tell myself that I am never at that level! In addition, I am burnt out, because I had just been operated. [la ligue d’été] is a kind of tour and there, you have a match every day against guys who died of hunger and who dream of having a contract. WOW! Frankly, I was 'Lost in Translation'… really. ”
Out of shape because of an operation on the back which immobilized it for more than six months, Weis also takes the wall of the NBA sound in full pear. In a league where everyone plays for their apple and where you push the ball to play the counterattack as often as possible, the Lorraine giant is simply humiliated in public place.
“When we watched him play, he was not sharp at all, he committed a lot of mistakes. And that is a first choice of Draft of the Knicks! Many people criticized him very hard”, Resumes Kerber. “After his first game, if I don't say stupidity, the NY Post made its front page by titling 'French toast'. In normal times, a Summer League match never makes the front page of the post. I do not regret what I said about him, but to be quite right with him, with hindsight, we should probably have left him more time.
Disgusted in the summer league
In fact, and if Weis actually made very small games on his first outings with his n ° 50 of the Knicks on his frail shoulders, including a 2 -point match, 2 rebounds and 5 faults in 17 minutes for his first, which will earn him this famous post, the tricolor international was still able to show his talent on his last match against the Celtics…
“I have been criticized for not having been hard enough to play in the NBA. For being drafted on potential, but they no longer see. [Les médias] put me lower than earth actually! Until I made my last match, against Boston, where it goes well and I finish double – double. And there, guys start to say that in the end, it's not that bad … ”
Despite its image not that a little dorned by the New York media incisors, of which it is nature, Fred Weis remained in the small papers of the Knicks. According to his agent at the time, the pivot could have (or even had to) persevere and sign his 3 -year contract to have time to adapt, and prove that he was not just an unexploited potential.
“They didn't even give him a chance in the end”
“He was not used to the speed of all these players. And, in the summer league, it's even worse. The players are small and fast, they ran in all directions at full speed. [Les médias] based on a very small sample, on very little information. They didn't even give him a chance in the end. The Knicks still offered him a contract after the summer league. It was $ 700,000 in the first year, then 1 million then $ 1.2 million the next two years. But, after his experience in the summer league, he may realize that he did not want as much as that to play [à New York]. “
In his discharge, it must be said that Weis was clearly not put in the best conditions to perform during his first American steps. Neither by his new franchise, nor by its own camp …
“The NBA is preparing. We do not go like that. Besides, the young people of today are preparing for it, with coaches, physical preparers”a posteriori underlines Jean-Pierre de Vincenzi, the coach of the Blues at the time. “I think Fred did not know that and it was detrimental to him.”
Likewise, the New York context could only be toxic to Weis, expected as a possible heir to Patrick Ewing, the local All Star, with Knicks who had just made an incredible run of the 8th and last qualifying place in playoffs to the NBA finals (lost to the Spurs of David Robinson and Tim Duncan). “They are looking for a successor [à Patrick Ewing] And Fred, he gets in there, he takes the face! ”blows his teammate in the racket of the Blues, Cyril Julian.
And if he had landed in Utah …
In the “What If” series, Weis could also have experienced a completely different NBA fate. If the draft tracks had brought him to Utah, where another French pivot will shine later, he could have found an environment much more favorable to his personality, and his progress. An NBA career is often played for little …
“Has one or two choices [quatre en vérité, ndlr, le Jazz avait le 19e choix]I could have fallen into Utah. And maybe I could have had a NBA career. Because Utah is a small market and it probably corresponded more to whom I was. May New York, the city that never sleeps. I come from the countryside. I am a boy who comes from Kœnigsmacker, a small village of 1,000 inhabitants… ”
Not frankly welcomed with open arms by the franchise that chose it, scalded by the growing dissatisfaction of demanding fans around a team that came out of a final, and itself a little apprehensive with a new life in a radically different setting from Cocoon Limougeaud, Weis did not seem to be able to pass the course. Neither mentally nor physically.
“Maybe also European basketball, it was just more reassuring for me”
“After that, the whole case quickly cooled. I no longer talked to Frédéric at all…”, regrets his American agent at the time. “If he had stayed [à New York]he would have played in the NBA. With what success? I don't know. Because it was obviously lacking in the intensity it takes to play it. Otherwise, he would have tried. ”
In contact with Olympiakos and a few other major European basketball houses at that time, Fred Weis will therefore take the opposite of the NBA by going into exile in Greece, at PAOK Salonica. Before switching to Spain and Malaga for what will be the next chapter of his career. Definitively turning his back on the big league.
“There were misunderstandings with New York. We didn't do what needed, but that, on both sides”, concludes Weis. “But maybe also European basketball, it was just more reassuring for me.”
