He and the other kids from his neighborhood were often shoeless or equipped with a shabby pair of sneakers while they ran up and down this time-worn court, daring to dream of their escape.
PHOTOS: Access to Success helping out youth in Nigeria
His is not the only story like that. There are many.
And, separately, two of them did escape from that southern Nigerian state.
They left their families behind, came to America and played Division I basketball.
They lived 100 miles away from each other in North Carolina.
They have never met, but their lives are mirror images refracted only by time.
This is the story of soft-spoken Michael Obacha and enterprising Andrew Lovedale, and the ways in which our lives can overlap without our knowledge.
MICHAEL
Born in a town in Nigeria where soccer was the popular sport of choice, Obacha found himself drawn to the game of basketball at a young age. He embraced its irrelevance, trudging countless miles to and from the makeshift court nearest his family’s home in Kaduna.
It was there that he met up with others, who, like himself, dedicated themselves to a game that many barely understood.
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For Obacha, basketball was a precious respite from the uncertainty of living.
There were clearly defined rules. There was a purpose. But most important, there was promise.
And that was enough to propel him through the longest days.
Those were the days he’d go to school, do his homework, finish his chores and then head to his mother’s grocery store and work there to help provide for his family.
And then, if there was any time left for himself before darkness encompassed the sky, he’d walk those miles to the game that freed his mind.
ANDREW
The hand-painted court outline drew him in — it reminded him of his brothers, as they bonded over teaching him the game, and his family in general.
After the devastation of losing his father, those lines were anchors that kept him grounded — so much so that Lovedale returned time and time again to watch, even after the older kids stole his basketball shoes, leaving him unable to participate.
He kept the theft a secret from his mother, knowing that if she found out he’d be barred from whatever shred of participation in basketball he had left.
He needed it.
He didn’t know it at the time, but basketball was his way out. More than that, it was his purpose.
And someday — though he could never have predicted it — those shoes would be the platform upon which he stood, on and off the court.
COMING TO AMERICA
Lovedale came to the United States in 2005 after receiving an offer to play basketball at Davidson College, a small Division I school just north of Charlotte, N.C.
He found the transition challenging and the consistency of day-to-day life slightly unnerving.
“In Nigeria, if you don’t have it, you don’t have it. You just have to try to survive. So you have people who are constantly always living on the brink of life,” he recalls.
“You wake up, you’re thankful to be seeing another day and the struggle begins.”
His passage on the court mimicked the difficulty of the adjustment process off it.
His Wildcat debut came at Cameron Indoor Stadium against the No. 1-ranked Duke Blue Devils, a hostile basketball asylum where the dreams of Cinderella squads are piled up, buried under the hardwood.
But, used to living with the odds being stacked against him, Lovedale refused to be deterred by American customs and continued to welcome them into his life.
Except there was one thing he never understood: the pile of discarded sneakers that littered the locker room floor.
Obacha recognized that, too.
Just 16 years old when he immigrated to the U.S., he was used to a life of simplicity, not excess.
He began his collegiate basketball career at Appalachian State University, a small Division I school nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, in 2012, seven years after Lovedale started out at Davidson.
THE SHOES
In most cases, they were gently worn, discarded after their wearer had a bad game and felt they were tainted or, perhaps, had simply tired of them.
Where their teammates saw trash, Lovedale saw opportunity and began quietly squirreling away pairs of sneakers to bring back to Nigeria for his neighborhood friends.
Seven years later, in a locker room 92 miles away, Obacha did the same.
He continued to stow away the sneakers for the next year until he approached Ryan Bower, an associate sports information director at App State, about starting a shoe drive.
“I just wanted people back home to have the feeling that there are people out there that care about them and want them to succeed,” he explained.
That home?
Edo State, Nigeria — a southern state where Lovedale and his family had once lived as well.
HOW SHOES UNITED TWO STRANGERS
After Obacha told Bower about his intent to start a shoe drive at App State, the two began to research together.
It was an involved process logistically; they had to figure out everything from the cost of shipping one pair of shoes to Nigeria ($5) to where the massive pile of shoes would be housed until then (Bower’s basement).
Additionally, Obacha’s drive had to be approved by the NCAA, naturally.
“Basically, schools have to submit a waiver if you’re doing the charity work on your own to make sure that the school isn’t receiving any recruiting benefit from it because you’re going to talk to potential student-athletes,” Bower explained.
“They just have to determine if the benefit to the community outweighs the benefit to the school, basically.”
Bower and Obacha submitted a request for a waiver this winter and hoped for the best. They were eager to get started as soon as possible and had begun to spread the word about the impending collection.
The NCAA’s response wasn’t quite what they had expected.
“We had a great shot of getting the waiver put through but the NCAA told us it’d be easier if we went through an umbrella organization — we wouldn’t even have to worry about the paperwork and they wouldn’t have to review it,” Bower said.
A few days later, Lovedale stumbled upon a local writer’s story about the shoe drive.
The further into Obacha’s story he read, the more he recognized his background as a carbon copy of his own — all the way down to his home state.
“I could just see a lot of myself in that article. It was exactly where I started,” he said nostalgically.
He immediately fired off an email to Bower offering to help Obacha.
After all, he had his own charity organization, “Access2Success,” that just so happened to be involved with bringing basketball shoes and education to Nigeria.
“Andrew randomly emailed us because he read a story that one of our local writers did and he was like ‘Hey, my name’s Andrew Lovedale, I played at Davidson. I’m even from the same part of Nigeria that Michael’s from. I started a foundation when I was in college to help out people in my home country and I’d like to help Mike out with his project,’” Bower said.
“I was just so fortunate. I don’t even know Andrew,” said Obacha of the experience. “I didn’t even know he went to Davidson.”
Even though the two have never met, together they draw on an incredible wealth of shared experiences.
“It’s amazing how similar our stories are. Where he was raised is actually where I was raised in the south,” Lovedale explained.
“I went to primary school in Kaduna, which is where Michael went. We’re both originally from Edo State. Last time we talked, I told him where I lived in Kaduna and he was just like screaming, “Yeah, I know that street!”
THE DRIVE
Obacha’s shoe drive began at App State on Jan. 9 under the umbrella organization of Lovedale’s A2S with the goal of gathering 500 pairs of shoes and $2,500 — enough money to ship all those pairs overseas.
So far, Obacha has collected 75 pairs of shoes and $500.
Every fan who donates a pair of new or gently used athletic shoes through the end of the Moutaineers’ season will get a free ticket to an App State game.
Once basketball season ends, all of the shoes will be driven down to Davidson where Lovedale and his crew will prepare them to be shipped to Nigeria.
But, thanks in large part to their budding relationship, Obacha’s participation no longer ends there.
He plans join Lovedale this June as part of the crew of volunteers who will go back to Nigeria to distribute the shoes and run basketball clinics for neighborhood kids.
“If someone had just given me a pair of shoes and then walked away, what happens when those shoes wear out? I’m back to being the same guy that I was. Now I have people helping me every step of the way,” Lovedale said.
“Going to college and playing Division I basketball is a full-time job, but for Michael to rise above that and look back to his roots, it’s worth a lot of commendation.”
And so the invisible thread of fate that has stitched together Obacha and Lovedale ensured that the pair will return to the very same community that they didn’t know they once shared to make sure that other kids will never be forced to watch from the sidelines as they once were.
Their shoes, once holding them captive by necessity, now have the power to set others free.
