As it turned out, basketball legend Tim Duncan was a player of World of Warcraft. At his time, about 10 years ago, the game was quite popular in the NBA. Some of them really took it too far.
PvPLive reports on a podcast “Road Trippin” (link opens a new window.) Former superstar Tim Duncan (played from 1997-2016 for the San Antonio Spurs) appeared on this podcast with other basketball players like Channing Frye and Richard Jefferson.
About 6:30 minutes into the podcast, Channing Frye said, “Tim Duncan and I were in the same WoW guild. We took it seriously, but … man, Andrei Kirilenko – he overdid it.“
Andrei Kirilenko was probably a real WoW junkie
Andrei “AK 47” Kirilenko is a former Russian basketball player who played for the Utah Jazz for 10 years. As Channing Frye recounts, Kirilenko had several characters at max level and could have sold them for a lot of money because WoW was so popular back then.
At 3 AM, the night before an important basketball game, they reportedly saw Kirilenko running around with a character in WoW and asked him, “Hey, aren’t you playing tomorrow?” Kirilenko replied, “Yeah, probably.”
Everyone was like that back then, Frye says. Especially during exhausting away games with time differences, the stars felt the late-night WoW hours during the matches painfully.
Interestingly in this context: Kirilenko’s career took a turn for the worse in the 2006/2007 season. Until then, he had played strong years in the NBA, but from 06/07 onwards, it didn’t go so well. 2006/2007 was the peak phase of WoW.
But it’s unclear whether Kirilenko’s problems really had anything to do with his time in WoW or if there were other sports-related reasons, like a reshuffling of the Utah Jazz roster that season.
Dickpuncher and “WoW = Virgin”
The conversation of the former top athletes sounds like playful banter, as if old WoW friends are meeting. Frye talks about his hunter in WoW. He named his pet “Dickpuncher,” which led to a lot of laughter. “Nerd alert,” it is said multiple times.
However, the third former NBA star Richard Jefferson never played the MMORPG WoW. He played the strategy games Warcraft, but WoW always sounded to him like “virgin,” he says.
Gaming is a big deal in the NBA – not just WoW
As the conversation reveals, gaming in the NBA is not limited to WoW. Nowadays, many NBA players exchange their gamertags to compete against each other in NBA2k or Madden.
Tim Duncan was probably a feared player in “Call of Duty” on the PlayStation during his time. What his teammates never really understood was: How could Duncan even hold the controller with his huge hands?
Tim Duncan is considered one of the best players in the North American professional league NBA overall. The 2.11m tall power forward played 19 years for the San Antonio Spurs, won 5 NBA championships and was elected twice as the most valuable player. Duncan is a 15-time NBA All Star and is regarded as the best power forward of all time.
The title image comes from PvPlive
Not only top athletes play a round of WoW, movie stars do too:
WoW: Vin Diesel – A round of PvP in Warcraft is always a good idea
