How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust the Process
Why I'm OK with a 7-foot Cameroonian controlling my mental health.
The year is 2014. I’m at my grandmother’s house, gathered around the grill, talking shop during a Labor Day barbecue. Now in my second and final year of boarding school, my parents have signed me out from that sordid, stressful affair in honor of the long weekend. The college applications and the SAT prep and The Heart of Darkness can rot. I’m talking hoops with my uncle and my dad for the very first time.
I’ve been a closet basketball fan for over a year now. My understanding of ball is limited to the worst takes the Internet has to offer; the bulk coming from Reddit and Wikipedia threads, the rest from overheard arguments from the jocks who gather to watch the NBA in the lounge on the boys’ second floor dorm. (Among them is Mo Bamba, who will go on to play for the Los Angeles Lakers when I live there, nine years later.)
With my silver can of Barqs striving to blend in with their Coors Lights, I try to earn the respect of my dad and my uncle by spitting facts left and right about the most controversial franchise in sports:
The Process Sixers.
It’s a topic that has derailed dates and prevented friendships with Bostonians. I would talk to anyone who would listen (and several who wouldn’t) about the 76ers’ ambitious plan to turn a losing franchise into championship contenders.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from 10 years of talking, it’s that not too many people give a shit about the fine details. Allow me to keep things short.
The 76ers, a mediocre basketball team, bottomed out. They traded their good players for draft picks and lost on purpose to rebuild through the draft. That summer, they put the entirety of their faith in a Cameroonian center who might never play a single minute.
Joel Embiid, a 7-foot question mark, had a near-career ending foot injury when they selected him in the 2014 NBA draft. Their only hope was ruled out for back-to-back seasons. To assuage fan concern while the team sucked, the 76ers pleaded with Philadelphia to “Trust the Process.”
The phrase spawned a cult of fans who watched their team lose on purpose.
The Process was a narrative arc of redemption that I needed. The concept that one of the most storied, winningest teams could could eat shit for years in the hopes of glory resonated with a directionless, confused Teenage Mike.
While the Sixers were losing, I was, too. I was suspended from high school during my sophomore year on account of a whacky breaking-and-entering-with-intent-of-theft misunderstanding. (Who hasn’t been there?) I was caught smoking and drinking and was reprimanded in suit. My application to a hippie-dippie liberal arts school on the Florida Gulf Coast was deferred.
All (relatively) normal teenage rebellions that at the time seemed apocalyptic.
Watching the Sixers, another ostensibly directionless entity, gave me faith in my decisions. The team broke the record for most losses in modern NBA history, but their players preached patience. The Process mindset helped me through some difficult times.
“Sure, things suck now,” the Sixers seemed to say. “But we’ll both be better for it in the end.”
Flicking on dreadful games of basketball aided me in feeling hopeful for the future rather than anxious. If the 7-foot, injured Cameroonian dude who they drafted was determined to make his dreams come true, why couldn’t I?
Indeed, my patience was rewarded.
I graduated in 2015 within inches of seizing Valedictorian honors, and gave an impromptu speech to a crowded Quaker Meeting House full of my friends and family before graduation. Eckerd un-deferred me, coming back to offer a surprise scholarship, and so I packed things up and moved a thousand miles away to major in “Undecided” — the academic equivalent of the Process.
Though things began well, hurdles came often. My freshman-year roommate was expelled, leaving me with refugee status in 2016. By the time my sophomore year hit, two childhood pets died, I failed Spanish 201, had been punished for drinking (again), all while living with a former ROTC introvert six years my senior whose room I’d been assigned to.
Within a four-month span, I went from studying on the beach to an outcast in my own dorm, depressed, and questioning this Process. The thought of transferring out from Eckerd and back to Pennsylvania occurred often.
But while my life was careening from rough to rougher, Embiid was ramping up to finally play basketball two years after he was drafted. For his preseason debut, I sequestered myself to my dorm with a cheesesteak and fries, headphones loaded so as not to annoy my volatile new roommate. With every bucket, I celebrated silently, snapping my fingers softly like I was at a smooth jazz show and whispering, “Fuck yes!” to myself over and over like some schizophrenic.
It was just about the worst way you could watch basketball.
And, yet, I loved every second.
My angst faded for 48 minutes. I realized then and there that no matter how shit things seemed in my life, I’d always have a pointless game to fall back upon. Ten millionaires on a billion-dollar court, none of whom knew my name, competing in a sport I’d never played. I don’t question the illogic of its cure to my woes, I just enjoy it. Because in learning to trust the Sixers’ process, I learned to trust a process of my own.
Ever since, I’ve watched the Sixers during my lowest of lows, and during my highest of highs.
Post-cancer-surgery, I celebrated a lonely birthday in Covid lockdown by watching my hometown team get steamrolled in the Orlando bubble.
Conversely, I stayed up late to keep tabs on Embiid’s Rookie of the Year campaign, watching the Sixers in London where I (1) met Maddee, and (2) decided I wanted to become a writer.
Now, years later, I’m living with Maddee and working as a writer — publishing this, my own blog, and going to workshops and readings.
My Process continues, just two blocks away from the Staples Center, where I watched Embiid win back-to-back games while clinching his MVP trophy. It feels surreal to look back on his career, and realize how far I’ve come myself, through the lens of a game.
There have been moments that cast doubt upon my decision to move out west, where new losses and new loneliness are all too familiar. Friends are few and far between the strangers on the streets, and the taco trucks and cocktail bars are bereft of the cheesesteaks that remind me of home.
Yet, every week, when I flick on the Sixers, the 3,000-mile distance between me and my hometown shrinks into 94 feet of hardwood.
Number 21 from Cameroon, starting center and reigning MVP, takes the floor, and suddenly the last decade of tribulations and celebrations contract into a 24 second shot clock. It’s 2014 again, and I’m back at Mom Mom’s house. The root beer is cold and the hot dogs are sizzling. All the while, I’m preaching to my family about this Cameroonian with a broken foot, who I know can lead us to glory.
My dad and uncle are hopeful, but skeptical.
They ask, “How can you be so sure?”
My answer?
Because I Trust the Process.
Shouts out to…
My Saturday writing workshop at the LA Central Library.
The Sixers, who, immediately after publishing this essay, will either defeat Boston or launch me into a summer of misery on the anniversary of the beginning of The Process.
Sixers? Next year.