Just Wanted to Try It Out

The best things people do tend to start without ceremony. Nobody announces them. You wander onto a court because it is there, and years later you are still on it, and somewhere in between the thing quietly became yours. Bolu’s basketball began exactly like that.

“Initially just wanted to try it out.”

Initially. That one word is doing a lot. It admits the beginning was casual, no calling, no plan, just curiosity, and it quietly tells you the ending is not. There is a freedom in a start like that. He owes the game nothing. He was not sent to it by anyone’s expectations, and he did not come with a story he has to live up to.

“5 years.”

He is nineteen, and five years of basketball means the maths puts him at about fourteen when he started. That is a particular age to pick up a sport. Old enough that nobody is making you. Young enough that the body is still deciding what it is going to be. Whatever shape his game has now, most of it was built while he was growing into it; the 6’1" he stands at today was, at some point in those five years, still arriving.

Five years is also more than a phase. Plenty of people try basketball at fourteen. Far fewer are still on the court at nineteen, entering a knockout bracket. That is not something you fall into. Somewhere in those five years the trying-out ended and the playing began.

“Impact lives with the gift of the sport.”

This is the sentence to read twice. It is a striking thing for a nineteen-year-old to say. His dream for the sport is not about himself. It is about other people’s lives, and it calls the sport a gift.

A gift is something you were given. You did not earn it; it arrived, and the proper response is to pass it on. Impact lives with the gift of the sport. It is a dream with him standing slightly to the side of it, holding the ball out to whoever is next.

On the night, he is in a knockout 1v1, and 1v1 is a selfish format by design: one ball, one basket, nobody to pass to. For a few minutes he will have to be the opposite of what his dream describes. That is fine. The gift has to be worth something before it is worth giving.

6’1". 75kg. Nineteen. Lagos. Number 6.