Nearly 200 children were clamoring for Rudy Gobert before he set foot in Foxboro Elementary School, chanting his name. He smiled as he ducked his towering frame in the door, causing the crowd sitting in the cafeteria to erupt.
The 7-foot-1 Jazz center was also excited that for half of his visit, he got to speak in his native tongue.
Gobert answered questions for two groups of children at the North Salt Lake elementary school on Wednesday afternoon — including one session for French immersion students who asked questions in French. Sitting back in a chair, Gobert looked comfortable conversing in his first language, fielding questions from when he started playing basketball (three years old) to his favorite movie (Space Jam).
Many nerve-wracked students only managed to ask him how tall he is, or how old he was.
“I’m still 25,” he said cooly when one asked him his age for the umpteenth time, never losing his patience.
“It’s always fun,” he said afterward. “It just makes me remember when I was a kid and how I would’ve loved to meet an NBA player.”
While his opportunities were limited to brush elbows with NBA stars growing up in Northern France, Gobert has now grown into the franchise star of the Jazz after an all-NBA season last year. With the departure of All-Star Gordon Hayward, the stage appears as open as it’s ever been for him to assert himself as the face of the team.
Even a student asked him how he felt about Hayward leaving. But both with the assembly and with local media, Gobert took a forward-looking approach when asked about being more of a leader on the Jazz.
“I think I already was, but I’m excited for this year,” he said. “I think together we’ve got good guys on this team. Either the young guys like Donovan [Mitchell] and Tony Bradley, or older guys like Ricky [Rubio] or Thabo [Sefolosha]. I think these guys are going to help us a lot. We got competitors, we got guys who like to play defense, we’ve got guys who like to share the ball. It’s going to be fun.”
