Gideon George had been in the United States just a few days when he spotted the basketball shoes at the bottom of a garbage can in a dorm room at New Mexico Junior College.
It was 2018, and the young player had just flown from Nigeria to a country he only knew from the movies, hoping to build a career in a sport he was still learning. Back home, this pair of shoes would have cost his parents a month’s salary, but here, his teammate wore them a few times, didn’t like the fit and tossed them in the trash.
George reached into the can and pulled out the shoes by the strings.
“Can I have these?” he asked.
In the weeks that followed, George went from locker to locker, making his pitch for spare shoes. He explained that the shoes he wore as a kid were often torn, with holes in the soles, and he was among the lucky ones. In Nigeria, the lack of proper footwear is among the leading causes of disease, with bacteria spread through open wounds on the feet. Before long, George had a stockpile ready to send home, hoping he might spark someone else’s journey, the same way his began: With a free pair of sneakers.
The blue Nikes that first lured George to the basketball court are now long gone, worn to oblivion on the sizzling concrete courts of Minna, Nigeria, but they carried George a long way — more than 7,000 miles, across an ocean, first to New Mexico Junior College and then to BYU, where he’s now a beloved teammate with a raw but intriguing skill set. He has made it his mission to give others the same chance.
“I’m grateful,” George said, “and I wanted to be able to touch the lives of people like me back in Africa.”
George is the middle of five siblings. His father is a retired policeman. His mother works as a seamstress, making uniforms for local school children. The family lives in a one-bedroom apartment with outdoor bathrooms, and in the summer, the space is so stiflingly hot the family often sleeps outside. Still, it was, George said, a typical middle-class existence in Minna.
“It was fun,” George said. “No one ever complained. The opposite, really. We appreciated what we had, and we were really thankful.”
George was tall and lanky — he’d eventually grow to 6-foot-6 and 190 pounds — with long arms and broad shoulders, but he didn’t know the first thing about the sport. He was into soccer and wasn’t particularly interested in learning basketball.
“I didn’t know what to do with the ball,” Gideon George said, “so I just kept passing it.”
He showed up to a few more practices, but soon quit. Then came the shoes.
They’d arrived from the U.S. through a charity called Timeout 4 Africa, a nonprofit that provides school supplies and athletic gear, then found their way to a local coach named Harry Ayere, who offered them to George for free. There was just one catch: He wanted George to play basketball.
In exchange for the shoes, Ayere had George write a letter, promising to commit himself to the sport, to show up for practice each morning before school, and to stick with it through the early struggles. After a few months in the gym, George began to realize where basketball might take him.
On his first attempt in 2015, George rode a bus 13 hours to Lagos, the country’s largest city. More than 200 people were lined up at the U.S. embassy hoping for a visa. Applicants hand paperwork across a barrier of bulletproof glass, then answer a few terse questions. The official returns either a white or pink copy of the application. The white sheet represents a ticket to a new life. Pink means a long bus ride home.
There was no explanation for the denial, George said.
Over the next three years, George returned to the embassy four more times. Some nights, he slept outside the gates to ensure his name was added to the list of applicants at dawn.
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