Despite superstar status Ujiri's heart is in Africa

A good story sometimes starts at the end, the end here being the culmination of the 2018/19 NBA season for the Toronto Raptors.

Not to be presumptuous and all, but that observation was what I thought would make this story on Masai Ujiri better.

If you have been occupying space under the proverbial rock and are not familiar with the name, maybe a quick online search will bring up topics like “the NBA Finals” and most certainly, his job title,“President of Basketball Operations for the Toronto Raptors.”

As soon as the confetti hit the floor of the Oracle centre, home of the former defending champions of the NBA, the Golden State Warriors, during last season’s finals, everyone's eyes quickly searched for the man responsible for slaying the dragon. Standing in front of me in sweats and an orange T shirt with the words "I AM A GIANT" etched across, you quickly see why the Raptors defied the odds to beat the Warriors in six games.

That moment, for me, led to this one, standing face to face with Masai getting ready for an interview on NTV.

Call it serendipity but as soon as the buzzer went off to crown the Raptors as the new kings of the hill, I wanted to know how that felt like especially from the perspective of the only African, via Nigeria and Kenya, leading an NBA franchise.

"You can't believe it when it first happens, the process of getting there is so hard when it actually happens you're blank for a minute" Masai explains.

"I thought about my family, I thought about the continent of Africa, I thought about Canada and just how different this championship is."

It sure is different.

Ujiri in his six years with the Raptors has achieved the improbable, guiding the first team outside of the US to win a major North American title as well being the first African to do it.

Winning is never easy and he had to make tough and some might say unfair decisions to get there.

As much as the Canadian team enjoyed some success in the 2017/18 season, reaching the Eastern conference semi-finals was not good enough and heads had to roll. He fired former head coach Dwayne Casey and prior to the start of the season traded franchise player Demar Derozan for what turned out to be a season rental in Kawhi Leonard with zero regrets.

"We won the championship", he laughs "I'd do it any day of the year of our lives.

“Those decisions are tough decisions, sometimes at the time it's happening it's hard, people are hurt but I always say the difficult thing in the NBA is when a player is traded or a player leaves."

He adds: "You've got to have the stomach for this, this is our business, we've got to be able to take it and also make those decisions, as long as you treat people with respect."

It's that kind of business practice that has elevated this son of the continent to heights he could only dream of while growing up in Northern Nigeria.

His dreams at the time, like every young kid from West Africa, was to be a football star but were not limited to that and by his own admission had a modest basketball career in the continent as well as in Europe. Injuries cut short those dreams but he still had an intense love for the game.

"I always say I wasn't very good," he says chuckling.

"I tried getting into coaching and then found scouting as I was helping a lot of youth from the junior national team get scholarships in the States, I landed an unpaid job with the Orlando Magic and then a permanent job with the Denver Nuggets."

It's this kind of career trajectory that Masai tries to amplify every chance he gets. Whether it's with the media or the thousands of youth he mentors through his foundation, Giants of Africa.

"What we also want to teach is we are not all going to end up being Pascal (Siakam) or Joel Embiid, these kids are going to need opportunities to be in management, sports journalists or doctors."

His passion for the game and continent is almost palpable, it's also that passion that has seen him in trouble with the NBA front office. He certainly isn't shy speaking his mind especially when he feels aggrieved. You could say, and I might be reaching here, that this the reason he does not own a social media account. There have been several instances where this has happened and you kind of get the feeling he speaks up to show the young people looking up to him that it's ok to ask questions.

I remind him of an incident in the documentary Giants of Africa - The Film, where he confronts a basketball gymnasium caretaker over the use of the facility by his GOA crew.

“You can clearly see the fire in his eyes as he tells me of another frustrating encounter just before coming to Kenya last week.

"We have an issue with that in Africa. These kids don't have places to play, we are just from a country we were at, I won't mention them," he continues with a wry smile. "There was a wedding in the gym that we had booked six months ago, just because someone has taken money from somewhere just to do this.

“That's not what we want, that's not what we want for these youth."

It's a passion for sport and the development of the youth that many admire in Masai Ujiri and it is something many wish was duplicated in the continent.

At the risk of this article coming out as a puff piece, it has to be commended that indeed passion for the sport is not an exclusivity of the various arenas that these sporting disciplines are practiced on but outside of them as well.

"That's why other countries progress more than us because there is more organisation and we pay more attention," he stresses. "We need more experts in the game, we need more experts in sports, we don't need people to be thrown into sports just to fill a position."

These kind of sentiments, to be fair are not new but they certainly resonate with athletes in various sporting disciplines in the country.

Football, rugby and basketball have certainly been through the fires with not a single sighting of a Phoenix yet.

Will things ever change?

Are we doomed to the possibility that to succeed in professional sport we have to look elsewhere?

That's not what the boss in Toronto thinks, especially with the NBA Africa League starting in November.

"This is the first league that the NBA has started outside (North America).

“To choose Africa, I think they see something in our continent. I'm excited about the start, the building of the arenas by President Kagame in Rwanda and Macky Sall in Senegal shows that people have interest in this. We need a league to showcase our own talent."

It's that kind of progressive thinking that has seen the 49-year-old Ujiri transform the landscape that is Canadian basketball and is certainly hoping that it transcends to the continent of Africa.

The future looks bright for the high flying executive, so much so that other NBA teams are looking to whisk him away from the North.

I asked him about it and especially the interest the Washington Wizards had in him.

"Toronto is where I'm going to be, I'm always humbled if there's anybody else that wants me but Toronto is where I want to be," expertly avoiding that minefield of a question.

No doubt Ujiri has put in the work to be at the summit of his chosen profession.

One would only hope that his peers this side of the Sahara would emulate if only an ounce of that effort.