Joe Uchebo called his mom in Nigeria in despair. It was the summer of 2012, and he was despondent over the state of his right knee and what it meant for his basketball career. He had been in America for five years, and not only was he nowhere near his goal of playing at the Division I level, but he also feared he might never play again at any level.
Uchebo, once a heavily recruited high school player, was a rising sophomore in junior college and recovering from microfracture surgery, from which returning is notoriously difficult. He wondered whether his move to the United States to play basketball in 2007 and the five years he spent working on his game were all going to turn out to be a waste of time.
“I felt like my dream is going down,” he says. He poured his fears out to his mom. She promised to pray for him and told him not to worry, that the injury was not the end of his career but a valley for him to climb out of.
Two-and-a-half years later, his dream has new life.
It’s a bitingly cold November afternoon as Uchebo and I drive to his apartment near the Pitt campus. Uchebo, now a junior center for the Panthers, has agreed to cook for me his Nigerian fish stew that is famous among his coaches, friends and teammates. He tells me his kitchen is small, so we’re going to grab the ingredients and utensils and go to one of his teammate’s apartments to cook.
I think he’s being modest about the kitchen…and then I see it. It is maybe six feet long and three feet wide. Uchebo stands 6'10" and weighs 245 pounds, and he barely fits in it by himself. There is no way we both could stand in there, let alone cook.
He cooked often in junior college, too, and he cooks when he visits his host family and friends in his “home” state of North Carolina and always for the same reasons: The smell, the taste, the trips to the African grocery store to buy the ingredients, all transport him to Enugu, Nigeria, to his beloved mother’s kitchen.
And in his roller-coaster seven years in the United States, he has sometimes wished he could return there.
Uchebo lost 40 pounds in his first year in America, in part because he didn’t like American food and in part because he says he wasn’t getting enough of it at his boarding school. He bounced to four high schools in four years. And just when he finally seized control of his basketball career in his freshman year of junior college, he blew out his knee and didn’t play for two years.
But he saw smidgens of playing time last year at Pitt as he worked his way back to health. And after a strong run in summer play and solid stretch of exhibition performances this year, Uchebo, 22, again looks like the player who drew attention from Kentucky, Florida and North Carolina State as a high school recruit. After nibbling on success in big-time college basketball, he wants to feast on it.
Uchebo was 6'9" and 15 years old and playing soccer in Nigeria when the basketball coach at his school saw him and asked, "Why isn’t that kid playing basketball?"
With his size and length, he certainly looked like a basketball player. He couldn’t even dribble at first, and he laughs when he talks about watching other kids bounce the ball between their legs and behind their backs when he could hardly manage bouncing it up and down.
He liked the game, though, and as he progressed by practicing at a local park and playing in tournaments, he added rebounding and solid passing to his impressive size and the good footwork he brought from soccer.
Uchebo drew the attention of American coaches scouting for talent. They convinced him to move to the United States to pursue basketball as a means to an education and maybe a career.
He arrived in Atlanta in the fall of 2007, and as he stepped outside the airport, cold he never knew existed sliced him in half. Or as he put it: “It was super cold. Freezing. I never felt that cold before in my life. Freezing. Like, I’m freezing. Oh, my god. Freezing.”
Everything was harder than he thought it would be. Uchebo felt like an outsider as he didn’t like the food and struggled to communicate. "He could maybe speak 10 words," says Jim Caddell, who became his host father. "He could not communicate with us or anyone in English besides 'thank you,' 'hello.'"
Uchebo met a player from Ghana named Bawa Muniru, who became like a big brother and mentor to him. "Be patient," Muniru told him, "things will get better." And they did, albeit gradually.
College basketball recruiting can be difficult for kids who grew up in the United States. For Uchebo, it proved baffling. “Not knowing the whole system, not knowing left or right, who do you want to trust, what you have to do, that’s the kind of thing that messed me up,” he says.
Still, Uchebo emerged as a consensus top-100 player as he played on high school and AAU teams and picked up the game's intricacies to go along with his size and natural ability. He committed to N.C. State, but that fell through—he didn’t qualify because he hadn’t taken the proper classes in high school.
He was disappointed, of course, and by the time he graduated from Word of God Academy in Raleigh, N.C, in 2011 he faced a crossroads. Try to find another D-I school? Settle for D-II? Or start over at a junior college and try to work his way back to D-I?
He enrolled in Chipola College, a junior college in Florida’s panhandle. “Even though I didn’t make it to D-I, I still got one more chance. All it’s going to take is hard work. I have to do it,” he says.
Uchebo fills the doorway that leads into his tiny kitchen. He wears a crucifix around his neck and a rosary ring on his left pinkie, which reminds him to pray. As he grabs a spatula and pot, I look around his one-room apartment.
His bed, TV, dozens of pairs of shoes and a prayer altar upon which sit bottles of holy water fill the space. He has room enough to eat, sleep, pray and study, and that’s it. He likes it that way because there are no distractions.
He hands me a stack of photos two-inches thick. I thumb through pictures of his late father, mom, three brothers and sister. His mom and sister live in Nigeria. His brothers live in Europe, where two of them play professional soccer. One played for the Nigerian World Cup team last summer.
Uchebo sorts through his spices, which he buys in bulk and stores in Gatorade bottles. He pushes aside the nutmeg, which he grinds himself. He opens his freezer and grabs two trout.
“Do you like peppers?” he asks me. “They’re hot.”
I say yes, so he grabs two orange ones.
We drive to teammate Tyrone Haughton’s apartment. “Clean up when you’re done,” he tells Uchebo.
Uchebo agrees.
“No, I mean all of it,” Haughton teases, waving his arm across the apartment, “the whole thing.”
Chipola College has one of the best basketball programs in one of the best junior-college conferences in the country, and Uchebo thrived there. He bought a portable two-burner stovetop and used it to cook stew, goat and other dishes in his dorm for his teammates, recreating the meal-as-a-communal-event atmosphere that is part of Nigerian culture.
He progressed on the court, too.“He was a walking double-double,” said Jake Headrick, Uchebo’s head coach at Chipola. As a freshman in 2011-12, he averaged 12 points and 12 rebounds a game, which again made him a sought-after D-I recruit.
But in early January, Uchebo knocked knees with an opponent. He limped through a few games before being shut down. The surgery and the desperate call to his mom followed six months later.
Over the next year, there was little improvement. Chipola doesn’t have a medical staff like a big school, and because Uchebo’s physical-therapy appointments required a two-hour round trip and he had to find a ride to each one, he often missed sessions. He didn’t play in the 2012-13 season.
“I thought my basketball (career) might be over,” he says.
Then he caught a break.
On April 3, 2013, Pitt center Steven Adams declared himself eligible for the NBA draft. That left Pitt coach Jamie Dixon short on big men late in the recruiting cycle.
Assistant coach Bill Barton had seen Uchebo play in high school and liked what he saw. Pitt coaches watched Uchebo’s game tape from Chipola and liked that, too. Along with his rebounding, passing and footwork, they saw good interior defense. But Uchebo was still hurt. “He was not even close to what he was on tape,” Dixon says.
Pitt was in enough of a bind to keep recruiting him. They flew him to Pittsburgh, showed him the city’s churches and took him to Mass. They talked up their medical facilities. Uchebo liked Barton, his main recruiter. And he bonded with Dixon because they are both Catholics.
Uchebo could barely run or jump.
Dixon signed him anyway.
Uchebo chops off the trouts’ heads, whacks off their tails and slices off their fins. Holding the knife in his right hand and the fish in his left, he saws each fish into pieces, gritting his teeth when feeling the cold of the fish. He adds the fish—bones still in, scales still on—to the pot, which already simmers with the peppers and spices.
He sings to himself.
He washes rice and puts a pot of it on a second burner. He talks to himself, ticking off the ingredients on his fingers. He realizes he forgot two, so we leave the rice and stew cooking and run out to get two red onions and a can of sardines. Soon they join the pot.
Now all Uchebo has to do is wait for the ingredients to come together.
His basketball career is in the exact same condition.
Uchebo called his mom before Pitt’s home game against Maryland last January, as he does before every game so she can pray for him. She told him to kneel. She asked God to keep his knee healthy and to give Pitt a win that day.
Pitt blew out Maryland, and as the clock wound down, Dixon emptied his bench. "Joe," he said, "get in there."
For Uchebo, sitting at the end of the bench, the moment he had been waiting for had arrived. Seven years after he moved to the United States, his dream of playing D-I basketball had finally, mercifully, unbelievably come true.
The only problem was he didn’t know it.
He wasn’t expecting to play, so he wasn’t paying attention and didn’t hear Dixon summon him.
“Joe!” his teammates yelled. “Joe! Joe!”
Snapped out of his reverie, he ripped off his warm-ups like they were on fire. He picked up a rebound that night, and he scored his first field goal of the season five days later. Both times, the Oakland Zoo, Pitt’s student section, screamed its delight.
Last summer, Uchebo called his mom after his brother scored in a friendly for the Nigerian soccer team against Scotland. His sister said she couldn’t come to the phone because she was running around the house, hooting and hollering in celebration.
She had been approximately that happy when Uchebo told her he had scored his first points for Pitt.
To Uchebo, her joy sounded beautiful.
In those brief appearances last season—nine games, totaling 23 minutes, four points, seven rebounds—Uchebo hobbled up and down the court, his knee still nowhere near healthy. Nobody thought he’d be capable of starting at center for Pitt this year.
Meager as those few games were, they gave him a taste of the big time. So he added fire to his game. He pushed himself in rehab, fighting through the pain that once held him back. “No cheating, no cutting, no halfway done,” he says. “I have to do it. This is my chance to prove everybody wrong.”
When summer practice opened, Uchebo looked transformed. He became more vocal and aggressive in practice. Before he could barely dunk. Now he wants to dunk everything. “If you had seen (him) a year ago,” Dixon says, and then he stops and looks at me. “You wouldn’t be writing the story, put it that way.”
But like the stew without the onions and sardines, Uchebo is an incomplete dish. He’s fine in a half-court setting. But he can’t run up and down the court for a full game because his knee isn’t 100 percent.
That makes it tough for Pitt coaches to assess how good Uchebo can be or how big of a role he’ll play this year. Early results are tantalizing. He averaged 7.5 points and 12.5 rebounds in a four-game tournament in the Bahamas in August.
He started the early-season games but was used sparingly. He nearly pulled off a double-double (12 points, nine rebounds) in just 14 minutes against Duquesne earlier this month. Dixon expects him to provide key defense and rebounding in the middle against the big men of the ACC.
The improved health and encouraging play so far has fueled Uchebo’s confidence. “If my knee was OK, there’s no doubt I’d be here dominating every day,” he says. “I don’t think anybody’s going to stop me on the post.”
Assuming Uchebo continues to progress, Barton says Uchebo’s interior defense and rebounding would allow him to play pro ball somewhere. But that’s as much of a prediction as anyone can offer.
A clue about Uchebo’s future in basketball might come from his schoolwork.
When he enrolled at Chipola, the school asked him to take remedial English and writing. He blanched, but Caddell talked him into it. That turned out to be huge.
“I can remember him being on the bus. Some guys would be goofing off. Joe would be trying to study,” says Headrick, the Chipola coach who is now an assistant at Samford University. “He wasn’t big on wasting time, if that makes sense. If somebody was distracting him, he was quick to let them know. 'Hey, I’m trying to do this, leave me alone.' With him being 6'10" and 250 pounds, they weren’t messing with him anymore, I can tell you that.”
Now Uchebo has been on the ACC Academic Honor Roll, will graduate from Pitt this month with a degree in social sciences and plans to start graduate studies in January.
Uchebo towers over the stove, working two burners at once. He checks the rice…not ready yet. He spoons a drop of stew onto the palm of his left hand and brings it to his mouth. He rolls it around on his tongue, savors it for a second, mulls its quality…then dumps more salt into the pot.
A few minutes later he declares the meal ready. He plops a heaping pile of it onto a plate. It’s enough to feed a small family. “Is that enough?” he asks me. Then he piles stew with huge chunks of fish on top of the rice. “Do you want more fish?” he asks.
Roughly two hours after this cooking expedition started, we dig in. I ask Uchebo why he goes to all this time and effort to cook Nigerian food. He says the food creates a bridge that spans nearly 6,000 miles, all the way back to his home in Enugu. Also: He thinks it tastes far better than American food. The smile on his face as he eats shows he believes it is worth it.
Will his basketball career prove worthy of all the time and effort he has put in? The answer to that question is already yes, no matter what happens next. “My knee is getting fine. They’re taking good care of me,” he says. “I’m enjoying myself like I should. I feel like I’m an American.”
And his stew is delicious.