There's a kid named Zion Williamson whose high school hoops highlights will blow your mind
Man ... what? What is going on here? How is this real life? Is this real life?
There's a high school kid in South Carolina named Zion Williamson, and we need to talk about him right now.
Williamson is one of the best basketball-playing high school juniors in America. He went off for 47 points in a game over the weekend, and now The Blogs™️ have begun picking up the highlights.
Because those highlights are insane. Like, freaking. Insane. Man. The junior (did we mention he's only a junior?) appears to be redefining the phrase "man among boys."
These clips -- there's a full edit embedded atop this post, and a condensed version below this paragraph -- look like the premise of a Hollywood flick in which an NBA All-Star is for some reason sent back to middle school.
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But that's not all! These other clips of Williamson, below, from earlier in the season, might be even more wild.
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None other than back-to-back NBA MVP Steph Curry took notice of that compilation.
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Williamson, of course, appreciated that.
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At this point you probably have a simple question.
Who is Zion Williamson?!?
He's a junior, as we mentioned above. He's ranked third in the high school class of 2018 by ESPN.com. He's 6-foot-7 and weighs 230 pounds. He plays for Spartanburg Day School in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Now, do some viral high school highlights a future NBA star make? Of course not.
Three-and-a-half years ago, highlights from a 14-year-old named Seventh Woods spread across the web like wildfire. Woods is now a freshman at North Carolina. He's averaging just three points per game, proving that even college stardom comes neither immediately nor easily. Then, more dramatically, there are the cautionary tales of onetime hoops prodigies such as Lenny Cooke.
So we're not anointing anyone as anything here. But for now, we can say with all certainty: Holy crap, this Zion Williamson kid is an unfair high school basketball player.
Sam Laird is Mashable's Senior Sports Reporter. He covers the wide, weird world of sports from all angles -- as well as occasional other topics -- from Mashable's San Francisco bureau. Before joining Mashable in November 2011, his freelance work appeared in publications including the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Slam, and East Bay Express. Sam is a graduate of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, and basketball and burritos take up most of his spare time. Follow him on Twitter @samcmlaird.