Weekend Plans With Enes Kanter Freedom, The NBA Star Who Identifies As A WNBA Prospect

Weekend Plans is our exclusive lifestyle feature where we highlight the real off-duty routines of the most exciting people in culture. 

This weekend, former NBA star center Enes Kanter Freedom stops by The Daily Wire HQ to share his personal journey from first-round draft pick for the Utah Jazz to becoming a high-profile political activist. A Nobel Peace Prize nominee and New York Times best-selling author, he freely talks trash on the court, takes world leaders to task, and advocates for human rights around the world.

He also launched the Enes Kanter Freedom Foundation, which brings free basketball camps and education to communities that need them, while giving voice to political prisoners on several continents. Here’s what he’s up to when he’s not leveling the playing field by telling it like it is. Let’s just say his nickname isn’t “Enes the Menace” for nothing.

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Standing next to 6-foot-10 Enes Kanter Freedom, I feel like a corgi just trying to get by on stubby little legs. He smiles easily and lobs jokes as if he doesn’t have a $500,000 bounty on his head, courtesy of the Turkish government.

Death threats aside for a moment, I have one question after glimpsing headlines spotlighting Enes’ recent decision to become a 2027 draft prospect for the WNBA as, yes, a woman: “So, how far would you go?” Is this a matter of uniforms cut a little higher on the leg, or does the pursuit require a deeper level of commitment?

“I will go as far as I have to go,” he says, pulling the mic closer for a crucial bit of clarification.

“Let’s make this very clear. According to their rules, all you have to do is just identify as a woman,” Enes tells me. “So you don’t need to get surgery, you don’t need to shave your beard, you don’t need to change your name or anything. Article XIII, Section 1(a) says if you identify as a woman, you’re allowed to play.” Reading the room in the current social climate, he’s hoping to exploit the loophole to make the point.

“I’m just very excited because I’m finally gonna get to play basketball again,” he says with a delicious sense of irony. After earning more than $106 million over his 11 seasons as a pro baller, Enes left the NBA when the Houston Rockets released him from his contract in 2022. He points to his criticism of China’s politics and close ties with the league as the final straw.

Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images

So which team might he aspire to join as the first biological male to play for the WNBA? Come on, guys. This one’s not hard.

“Indiana Fever,” he says, painting a picture of total domination. “I think Caitlin Clark and myself will be the modern day Kobe and Shaq. We will just destroy anyone out there. Just imagine — Caitlin Clark dribbles in and throws a lob, and I’m just dunking the ball over anyone out there.” Other than the New York Liberty’s Han Xu, who bests him by an inch, and 6-foot-10 Bernadett Határ, who’s on reserve for the Washington Mystics, Enes towers over all the other women in the league. So, what was that again about an open door for biological men to play women’s sports?

Enes legally added “Freedom” to his name when he became a U.S. citizen in 2021. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, he was raised in Turkey. “My dad was a volleyball player and my mom did track. So, yeah, I come from a sports family,” he says. Now a prominent advocate for banning men from women’s sports, Enes promises that if the WNBA would “come out and add the word ‘biological’ in their collective bargaining, I’ll disappear. I’ll walk into the sunset and they will not hear the name Enes ever again, I promise you.” 

Flying Solo

Always dabbling in a matchmaking side hustle, I establish that Enes is, as he describes it, “single and very available.” But when I ask for his non-negotiables, he offers an important footnote. 

“The reason I have not had a girlfriend,” he says, has to do with his work in “fighting all these dictatorships out there.” He claims the Turkish government “pretty much took my family away. I haven’t seen them for 14 years, so I didn’t want to give another reason to my enemies to hurt me again.” As a U.S. citizen he’s free to leave the country, but he sticks close to home to avoid retaliation from foreign governments.

“It just would be very selfish of me to bring someone in my life, and now her life is ruined, and then she’s gonna get death threats for the things that I’m doing because it’s gonna be all over the internet. I decided to just stay single till this whole war ends.” Looking for a single gal who enjoys sports, long walks on the beach, and evading extradition by Interpol. 

He shows me today’s collection of violent threats. “My DMs are full of pictures and videos of Charlie Kirk and they’re saying that I’m next,” he explains. “Just for me coming out and saying I would like to support women, and men should stay very far away from women’s sports, locker rooms, showers, and bathrooms.” 

When I question whether he ever feels afraid, I understand how he became such a success in the first place. None of that heat could possibly throw him off his game. 

Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP

“You start to question yourself, like, is it worth it?” But he says just one father thanking him for standing up on behalf of his daughters makes it all worthwhile. “This is God’s work. I’m not doing this for clicks,” he says. “I have made enough money that not only myself but my grandkids will be comfortable. This is bigger than myself and bigger than everything I’m standing for.” 

Discipline In Practice

As a devout Muslim, Enes rises at daybreak for Fajr, the first of his five prayers for the day. “I wake up around 4:30 to 5 a.m. and pray,” he says. “Sometimes I work out right after that or sometimes I go back to sleep.” 

Hearing no mention of protein or caffeine, I circle back to be sure. “No coffee,” he confirms. No tea, either. “I am allowed to drink caffeine, but I don’t drink.” He also doesn’t eat until much later. Shockingly, other than an added snack, he ate like this when he was playing professionally. “I eat once a day. I ‘intermittent fast’ every day,” he notes. I assure him that this is more like intermittent eating, but he says it’s the key to waking up energized and maintaining abs (I’m working off hearsay) without intense workouts. He dines more socially when he’s on the road, but when he’s at home, he says, “Usually I eat around 7 or 7:30 p.m. I drink water, but no tea, no coffee, no energy drinks, no juice.”

As for what makes it onto his plate for the day, he reports, “I can just eat whatever I want.” Of course, I want specifics. “I try to eat pretty healthy, a lot of rice, a lot of salmon.” He tells me about a low-carb rice cooker he just got for his “twenty-five pounds of organic California rice, plus Mighty Rice,” which farmers grow on the island of Mauritius near Madagascar. While he bulks up his meals with lots of veggies and fruit, it’s no holds barred on cheat day. 

“I love cheesecake and I love chocolate cookies,” Enes says. He also enjoys treats that stir up a bit of nostalgia, adding, “As someone from the Middle East, I’ll eat knafeh or baklava.”

Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images

Aligning with his faith, he’s alcohol-free. This has made him the most dangerous man at an NBA afterparty. “I’m always awake. I always see what’s going on,” he assures me. “They used to drink and do all kinds of crazy stuff. And I was just there to take videos of them so I can show them the next day.” 

“My career was so successful, and 11 years is a lot,” Enes remembers. “But if they didn’t kick me out, I could have played another 56 years because I never drink alcohol and I worked out all the time. I was taking care of my body.”

Something To Take The Edge Off

Since Enes spends so much of his time battling sinister forces, I ask what daily rituals or restorative practices he taps into when he needs to calm his spirits. “I watch ‘Love Island,’” he says. He can’t help but laugh at his own joke since he can’t stand that show. “I do watch ‘Dancing with the Stars’ though,” he admits with an earnestness that brings down the house.

“I’m watching Guillermo and I’m cheering for him,” he shares (at the time, Jimmy Kimmel sidekick Guillermo Rodriguez was still in the running). “I think it’s awesome.”

It all makes more sense when you understand how Enes came to grasp American English as more of a vibe. While he was enrolled at the University of Kentucky, he remembers, “I asked one of my teammates, ‘How can I learn English?’ He said there’s a show called ‘Jersey Shore.’”

If you don’t remember the smash hit MTV reality series that brought us over-tanned “guidos” and “guidettes,” Ron Ron juice, and the “GTL” (gym, tan, laundry) life, Enes sure does. “It was one of the craziest shows I’ve ever watched. I became friends with some of them actually, like Mike ‘The Situation’ [Sorrentino].”

“I watch TV, but just because the things that I deal with are so heavy,” he adds. “You need to watch ‘Dancing with the Stars’ so you’re not going to think about work. You’re just going to focus on how crazy the show is.” His reading material is just as reality-free, and he admits he’s a “huge fan of ‘Harry Potter.’”

Current Life Motto

Enes clearly has the kind of bankroll that could allow him to spin the world around like a basketball on his fingertip. But he’s not pulling up the ladder behind him as he continues to blaze a trail with the mission of living for others.

Photo by David Livingston/Getty Images

“While we have the most comfortable lifestyle in this country, on the other side of the world, people are losing their loved ones, losing their lives, and losing their homes,” he explains. “It is so important to be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes and feel what they’re feeling and see what we can do to use our platform to help those people.”

He’s also doing everything he can to invest in future generations and bridge the gaps. “I organize a lot of basketball camps around the world, and I bring Christians and Muslims and Jewish kids together,” he says. “We play basketball, eat free pizza, we have fun, and then after that we all sit down and we have these conversations about coexisting and what we can do to build bridges between cultures and religions, right?”

“To put a smile on kids’ faces is priceless,” Enes says. As he talks, he lights up with the levity of someone carrying the weight of the world at the same time. It’s magnetic. “I want to be known as someone who tried his best and who sacrificed everything for the things that he believed in. Without sacrifice, there is no freedom.”

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