He Was Nobody’s All-American

When you think of the top running back in the NFL, you figure a guy who spent four years at tailback for USC, a guy who had 10 Texas schools fighting over him when he went to high school. You’re talking a guy who had a football in his hands since he could walk. You want him, you have to fight Notre Dame, Joe Paterno or Miami for him.

What I’m saying is, the football recruiters don’t hang around the secondary school in Enugu, Nigeria, all that much.

They may now. Because the leading ground gainer in the NFL last season was not Eric Dickerson, Marcus Allen, Bo Jackson, Roger Craig or even the remarkable rookie, Barry Sanders. Or, any other product of American sandlots. In point of fact, it was a guy who never heard of the NFL growing up, who didn’t even know what a football looked like.

Christian Okoye is the unlikeliest football hero this side of a Hollywood script. The first football game he ever saw, he was in.

He came to this country as a track athlete. In his native Nigeria, he somehow managed to perfect a decent form in the discus and the hammer and won whatever meets his war-ravaged country was able to stage.

It’s not revolutionary for football players to be recruited from track teams. Red Grange, no less, was a champion hurdler who was ordered to go out for football by his fraternity brothers. George Gipp left track for the football field to feed his gambling habit. But, they had laid eyes on a football before. They had kicked or thrown one in play.

The first American football that Christian Okoye saw, he thought was broken. “Why isn’t it round?” he complained. “That’s not a ball. It’s been run over.”

He came to little Azusa Pacific University to escape the tribal strife that devastated his homeland. The tribe to which he belonged, the Ibos, tried to secede from the government at Lagos and form their own Republic of Biafra. In the resultant civil war, Biafra became an international symbol for suffering and starvation.

Actually, it was residual animosities from the civil war that turned Okoye to football. Despite his world-class marks in the discus and weight throws, he was left off the Nigerian Olympic team in 1984. That put into jeopardy his future in returning home as a coach one day. Old enmities would not die.

So, Christian Okoye presented to the football staff at Azusa Pacific a 260-pound, 6-foot-1-inch body that could run the 40 in 4.4, the hundred in 10.15 and was used to pain and suffering. The only thing he had to learn was how to grip that funny object they called a ball. They tell the story of the first time he hit a line, and the dazed linebacker picked himself up.

“Where’d they get that?!” the linebacker demanded. “He’s from Africa,” he was told. “Oh, yeah?” was his reaction. “How’d they get the stripes off him?”

He was as unstoppable as lava. When told his African nickname was Cho Cho, a defensive lineman had a better idea. “His nickname should be ‘Ow!’ ” he recommended.

He ran for 3,569 yards and 34 touchdowns in college. His school won the NAIA track meet every year he was there. His time in the hundred, 10.15, would have won the Moscow Olympics, and his time in the 200, 20.5, was the NAIA record.

But speed and power in Division III football is greeted with cautious skepticism by NFL scouts. It often evaporates in competition where everyone runs the 40 in 4-plus and most people weigh 260 or more. Besides, there was that lack of experience.

As his fame grew, ignorance about Africa surfaced. Did he have to watch out for lions on his way to school? Do people wear bones in their noses? Okoye laughs. “They wear more things in their ears here than we do in Africa.” Enugu is actually bigger than Peoria.

Okoye was hardly a secret, but NFL general managers did not sit up and consult their draft lists till Okoye ran for four touchdowns in the Senior Bowl in 1987. Then, the Kansas City Chiefs traded up 11 places to draft him.

A cheerful, modest, deeply religious man, Okoye goes through a football game as he goes through life--with a smile on his face. If he leads the Chiefs to the Super Bowl, the NFL may conclude the experts were wrong. There’s still plenty of ivory in Africa. Only not in tusks, in helmets and pads.