When you meet a man who has been called the “Father of Nigerian Basketball,” a man who has spent over 50 years—the vast majority of his life—on this soil, you expect the legend to hit you first. You expect the stories of a young American who looked at Nigeria in the 60s and didn’t see a “project,” but a home. Oliver Berdeen Johnson didn’t just move here; he was reborn here, taking on names like Babatunde, Bala, and Bassey—west, north and south—as if to anchor himself to every corner of the map.
But for me, it wasn’t the legend that arrived first. It was the weight of the infrastructure of his life.
Today I am thinking about how I met him.
There's more on the other side.
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