We the North by Doug Smith

Author:Doug Smith [Smith, Doug]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

14

MASAI UJIRI

The first time I met Masai Ujiri in person was July 2007. At age 36, he was hired by general manager Bryan Colangelo as the director of global scouting. Colangelo had called me to say they had hired this guy from the Denver Nuggets and that I should meet him because he had a very interesting backstory. And so on a Saturday morning, I went to Ujiri’s office at the Air Canada Centre to chat. It was the first of many conversations we’d have over the years, and it was illuminating.

I also had no idea I was about to talk to the man who would one day build a championship team in Toronto.

Ujiri came from humble beginnings in soccer-mad Nigeria, where he grew up in Zaria idolizing Hakeem Olajuwon and fighting long odds to even make it out of the country as a basketball player, let alone emerging as one of the top young minds in the game. But his story, one that was commonplace for young African basketball players of the time, was also a story of missed opportunity.

“When I played, you had to go to the basketball court between three and four in the hot, hot afternoon until the main players came,” Ujiri told me in that first meeting. “When they came in, you couldn’t play, there were only two courts. When it got cool at night, and the floodlights came on, the older, better players played. That affects the growth of the game because kids are not getting the right opportunity on the facilities.”

I came away from that first meeting really impressed. Ujiri was this bright young guy who had a lot of big ideas and an infectious personality. His passion was obvious, and you could tell it was genuine. A lot of young executives would parrot company lines and subtly boost their own reputations; it wasn’t that way with Masai that first day. You wanted to know him and about how he had travelled the world first as a player and then made it way up the NBA ranks as an unpaid scout. He would tell me stories about sleeping on couches of assistant coaches and scouts. You could tell that even now he was eager to keep improving.

He also spoke passionately about what he wanted to do in helping to develop the sport of basketball in Africa. It was and still is part of Ujiri’s life work to make sure those opportunities denied to him are eventually available to all young African players. He hadn’t had his chances, and he seemed bound and determined to make sure future generations weren’t held back in the same way.

While his first task with the Raptors was identifying talent and nurturing it into something that would help the franchise, finding how to improve conditions throughout the continent of Africa was and will forever remain his passion.

It is something he began as director of the NBA’s Basketball Without Borders program, something he continued as director of international scouting for

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.