Festus Ezeli and the long, strange trip to the NBA
By Jeff Faraudo
twitter.com/Jeff Faraudo
jfaraudo@bayareanewsgroup.com
Updated: 05/25/2015 10:00:42 AM PDT MercuryNews.com
HOUSTON -- Festus Ezeli's parents sent him to the United States when he was 14 years old so he could begin work toward becoming a doctor.
No one back home in Nigeria was excited when he made a career detour to the NBA.
"My parents are very academically oriented and they weren't very happy about that," Ezeli said. "They thought I was throwing my life away."
Far from it, the Warriors are now one victory away from the franchise's first berth in the NBA Finals in 40 years and Ezeli's recent contributions have been significant. A win Monday night against the Houston Rockets would close out a sweep of the Western Conference finals.
"My mom's actually warming up to the idea," Ezeli said of his career path. "At first, even being in the NBA, she still wasn't the biggest fan of it."
No one, including Ezeli, 25, could have imagined where his life is taking him. He graduated from high school in his Nigerian hometown of Benin City when he was just 14 years old -- skipping kindergarten, then jumping from fourth to seventh grade.
Education is first with his parents -- Festus Ezeli Sr., a businessman, and Patricia, who is an attorney and owns a school in Nigeria. With their son's college future in mind, the family made a trip to California to have Festus live with his uncle.
Chuck Ndulue, a pediatrician in Yuba City, hadn't seen his nephew since he was 3 years old. When he met the sprouting 6-foot-6 teenager, he immediately introduced him to a game he'd never played.
Ezeli attended Jesuit High School in Sacramento for a year and a half while beginning to learn basketball on an entry-level club team. His growth in the sport was painfully slow at times.
Asked to verify a story that he scored points at the wrong basket in one of his first games, Ezeli cringes while laughing.
"I'm not going to deny or confirm that," he said. "I literally didn't know anything about the game. I didn't even know you switch ends at halftime. That's what it was."
"All the other kids made fun of him because he didn't even know what the rules were," Ndulue said. "He also worked very, very hard at it."
Having grown to 6-8, Ezeli enrolled in classes at Yuba College. "I took basketball classes," he said. He did not play on the junior college team, but served as the team videographer.
"I was one of the bigger ones and the other team would be thinking, 'Oh, we're in trouble now.' Then I set up my video pod, and they were like. 'What's going on?'"
Ezeli's basketball turning point was attending the 2007 Reebok All-America camp in New Jersey. He had grown to 6-11 by then, but was a complete mystery to the basketball world. Sports Illustrated wrote in 2011 that recruiters regarded him as if he were Bigfoot.
"All the colleges were, 'Where did this kid come from?'" Ezeli said. "Because all the basketball programs are following these kids from when they were sixth-graders. And I'm in the 12th grade and they've never heard of me."
Warriors assistant coach Jarron Collins, who began playing basketball at age 6 and eventually was a star at Stanford, finds Ezeli's path to the NBA remarkable.
"Honestly, he's still learning the game," Collins said. "But he's got so much talent and potential. He's got a terrific ceiling."
More than two dozen colleges, envisioning that potential, offered Ezeli scholarships, including one his parents strongly favored.
"When Harvard called, that's all they saw," he said. "Vanderbilt was the best of both worlds -- great school and great athletics. It was the only way I could justify to my parents not going to Harvard."
With his mother pushing for a career in medicine, Ezeli began work in a difficult biology major. After his sophomore season, when it began to look like he could play basketball beyond college, he changed his major to economics.
"In the end," his uncle said, "he sort of won us all over."
He blossomed on the basketball court as a junior at Vanderbilt and, despite a knee injury his senior season, was drafted by the Warriors at the end of the first round in 2012. Health issues interrupted the first two and a half seasons of Ezeli's pro career, but he has gradually become a dependable backup to center Andrew Bogut.
"Festus is a very talented guy," Warriors assistant Ron Adams said. "He's going to be a real force for this team -- he is now."
Ezeli's parents now live in Sacramento, and the whole family watched on TV Saturday night as Ezeli contributed 10 points and six rebounds to the Warriors' Game 3 victory. "A great performance," coach Steve Kerr called it.
"Sometimes when I look at this," Ndulue said, "I wonder if it's real."
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