Last spring, in his quest to become one of the greatest basketball players of all time, Victor Wembanyama, a 7-foot-4 Frenchman now in his third National Basketball Association season with the San Antonio Spurs, decided he wanted to do something unusual in the offseason to boost his training regimen. But he didn’t know exactly what. So he and Bouna Ndiaye, one of his agents, brainstormed together.
What if he did workouts standing on his hands — too wacky? What about training like a ninja? Something in the martial arts?
Mr. Ndiaye saw the vision. So he found a 1,500-year-old Buddhist temple in the Henan province of China, where Mr. Wembanyama could live with the monks and train in kung fu. This idea delighted Mr. Wembanyama. In China, he lived in seclusion for 11 days. He shaved his head, he meditated, he contorted his body in ways even people only three-quarters his size might struggle to do.
This was one piece of a busy offseason that Mr. Ndiaye helped orchestrate for Mr. Wembanyama, a once-in-a-generation type of star who was coming off a season that ended early because of a potentially life-threatening blood clot in his right shoulder.
Nearly 30 years ago, Mr. Ndiaye, 59, and his best friend, Jérémy Medjana, 53, started an agency called Comsport, which is now the premier agency for French players at a time when the country’s influence on basketball is exploding. France won the silver medal in last year’s Olympics. Two of the last three top picks in the N.B.A. were French.
The French ascendance has been good business for Comsport. In recent years, the agency has guided its clients through deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, with Mr. Ndiaye in Dallas and Mr. Medjana in Paris. Now, they represent Mr. Wembanyama, who had played so well this year that there was talk early in the season that he could win the league’s Most Valuable Player Award. The agents’ story will even be told in a movie called “The American Dream,” which was produced by a prominent French production house, Quad Entertainment, and will be released in February.
“You forget the struggle,” Mr. Ndiaye said. “Ten years, you’re not making any money. You keep believing that you’re going to make it.”
When the pair started their agency in the 1990s, they set out to represent players from Africa and France. But there had only been only a handful of players from those areas to make it to the N.B.A.
Then came Tony Parker, who grew up in Normandy, was a 2001 first-round pick and went on to win four championships with the Spurs. Mr. Parker inspired a new generation of French basketball players, including Mr. Wembanyama. France invested in an effective youth system, and talent flourished.
Mr. Ndiaye, who spent his childhood in Senegal and moved to France as a teenager, met Mr. Medjana, who grew up in France near the Belgian border, on a basketball court in the south of France. Both were obsessed with the sport. They started a touring dunk competition called Slam Nation in 1997.
That partnership turned into a sports agency. For a decade, they made only enough money for the agency to stay afloat — not for salaries for themselves, certainly not enough to save anything. Mr. Ndiaye worked odd jobs in construction and cleaned airplanes to help support his young family; Mr. Medjana taught sports at an elementary school and sold knockoff designer clothes and worked shifts at his father’s video rental store.
“My family was thinking: ‘Are you crazy? What are you doing?’” Mr. Medjana said.
As they grew their business, a pipeline from France to the N.B.A. emerged, and Comsport was a key hub. Mr. Ndiaye and Mr. Medjana would scout talent from youth programs and begin developing relationships when the players were teenagers.
“This is such a very competitive business,” said Boris Lelchitski, a sports agent who teamed up with Comsport when it needed a presence in the United States. “The clients and players that they represent are very difficult to even get signed.”
Ian Mahinmi, who played 12 seasons in the N.B.A., remembers Mr. Ndiaye’s coming to his home in France when he was 16. His parents, his uncles and one aunt had gathered to hear pitches from potential agents. Mr. Ndiaye and Mr. Mahinmi’s family bonded over their common roots in Africa. (While Mr. Mahinmi grew up near Paris, his father is from Benin.)
“As soon as he left, we all looked at each other, and we were like, ‘OK, that’s him,’” Mr. Mahinmi said.
In 2005, Mr. Mahinmi became Comsport’s first N.B.A. first-round pick, an important milestone.
But there continued to be challenges. The pair worked with one U.S.-based agent who never paid them. Another time, a client who had been with them for more than 10 years, on whom they had spent resources they were hoping to recoup, fired them before his first big N.B.A. payday.
Mr. Ndiaye said the player, Ronny Turiaf, had told him, “You’re like my dad, but you’ve never negotiated free agency.” He wanted someone with more experience. (Mr. Turiaf declined to be interviewed for this article.)
As a result, Comsport went bankrupt. For seven years, the French government administered a recovery plan for the agency’s finances.
Soon, though, its clients in Europe and the United States started making real money. Nicolas Batum became a first-round N.B.A. draft pick in 2008, Evan Fournier in 2012 and Rudy Gobert in 2013. Mr. Gobert has won the league’s Defensive Player of the Year Award four times.
R.C. Buford, the chief executive of the Spurs, who drafted Mr. Mahinmi in 2005, credits Mr. Ndiaye’s work with helping to bring about the N.B.A.’s modern-day French influx.
“That has to be some reflection of the work that he has done with Batum and Rudy and the other people that he has represented and helped grow,” Mr. Buford said.
In 2015, Mr. Batum, Mr. Gobert, Mr. Fournier and Mr. Mahinmi presented a tearful Mr. Ndiaye with a Rolex watch at his surprise 50th birthday party. The next year, the four signed contracts worth a combined $371 million.
And so, when they had the chance to pitch a 15-year-old Mr. Wembanyama and his parents on representing him, five years after they became aware of him, Mr. Ndiaye and Mr. Medjana could tell them that they had done almost everything: They had represented undrafted players and first-round picks, but now they had also negotiated free agency and built relationships with sponsors. They had also known Mr. Wembanyama and his family for much longer than anyone else who might have competed for his business.
Comsport doesn’t get every French player. In the 2024 draft it represented Tidjane Salaun, whom the Charlotte Hornets took sixth overall, but two other French players went earlier — Zaccharie Risacher, first overall, and Alex Sarr, second — and neither is represented by Comsport.
These days, the pair’s roster has expanded beyond French and African players, but they still scout talent the old-fashioned way, scouring youth tournaments and college programs around the world. In fact, one month after Mr. Wembanyama was drafted first overall in 2023, they found themselves stuck on a Bulgarian highway in a miles-long customs line trying to get to Serbia for FIBA’s U-17 European Championships.
It had been Mr. Ndiaye’s idea that they fly to Bulgaria instead of straight to Serbia, still interested in saving a little money. What’s normally a two-hour trip took seven. Mr. Medjana was furious. Mr. Ndiaye assured him it would be much easier on the way back.
It took eight hours to drive back to Bulgaria, and Mr. Medjana cursed his best friend the whole way. Both missed their flights home.
“I was like, ‘Guys, why are you still putting yourself through this?’” said Issa Mboh, the head of global marketing at Comsport. Their success surely permitted them a chance to relax a bit. “There’s no need anymore.”
He couldn’t convince either of them.
Tania Ganguli writes about money, power and influence in sports and how it impacts the broader culture.
The post Call My Agent, the Basketball Version appeared first on New York Times.
