Pascal Siakam explains 'demonic' viral moment: 'I have this problem where I can't really close my eyes'
OKLAHOMA CITY – One of Pascal Siakam's agents once told him after a game a camera had caught him during the National Anthem looking like his eyes had rolled up into his head. His eyes were open but his pupils weren't visible — just the sclera or the white part of the eye — so he looked like something out of "The Exorcist" or some other movie about demonic possession.
The irony was Siakam had actually been caught in the act of praying. He comes from a devout Catholic family in Cameroon and his father sent him to seminary school in hopes that he would become a priest. Though he graduated, Siakam opted against that life, but still remains religious. He prays multiple times before every game with his eyes closed — well, mostly closed.
"I have this problem where I can't really close my eyes," Siakam said Saturday in an off-day media availability at the Paycom Center before Game 7 of the NBA Finals. "Sometimes I'll be thinking I'm closing my eyes, but they are not really closed. Even sometimes having conversations, sometimes I look up and it feels like I'm thinking, and my eyes just go up."
And that's what happened Thursday night, he said, when television cameras caught him in a pre-game huddle with his teammates in the hallway outside the Pacers' locker room at Gainbridge Fieldhouse just before Game 6. He had his head bowed but then raised it up and when he did, his pupils were under his eyelids but enough of the whites of his eyes were still visible.
This of course, made the rounds on social media with various jokes about Siakam being a demon, accessing some kind of dark magic or that he'd entered the Ancestral Plane from the "Black Panther" movie franchise. Siakam didn't find out about until after the game. He said in a video on Instagram teammate Myles Turner had showed him pictures and videos. Siakam had 16 points and 13 rebounds in the Pacers' 108-91 win but he joked that he wished he'd scored 30 because he could say the spirits took him over.
"I'm glad people are enjoying it and having fun with it," Siakam said. "Literally I was praying and trying to close my eyes and I was thinking in my head my eyes were closed, but clearly they weren't closed. That's just all it is, really."
Siakam has tried to be cognizant about keeping his eyes as closed as he can, and sometimes even covering his face with his hands. But in the NBA Finals with cameras everywhere, that's not easy to do.
"I've got to do better," Siakam said. "I've got to start doing this (covering eyes with hands) or I can put my head down and y'all can't look at me no more. And the NBA with all these cameras, it's too much, man. Get the cameras away from us."
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