Ohio State's Felix Okpara striving to turn 'terrible process' into life-changing career
There are parts of the journey Felix Okpara doesn’t like to talk about.
The generalities of it are mostly fine and easy enough to dive into. A native of Nigeria, Okpara grew up playing soccer, continued to grow in stature and eventually emigrated to the United States while in high school to pursue a basketball career. Now, after stops in Tennessee and Missouri, Okpara is Ohio State’s starting center as a sophomore.
It’s the in-between that is tough. Okpara has a word or two for it.
“It’s, some would say a terrible process,” he told The Dispatch. “I would say it’s a really dark and terrible process to talk about.”
And yet, it was one Okpara said was necessary for him to endure in order to emerge where he is now. Before finding some light, there was darkness to navigate.
It’s not just about basketball for Okpara. It never has been.
Family upbringing shaped Felix Okpara
As far back as he can remember, Okpara was surrounded by family. Life in Nigeria was mostly school, home and time with a large extended family.
His father runs an estate, a job Okpara likened to an account manager who helps a neighborhood address its needs or wants. His mom is a cook who currently bakes cakes. (Okpara’s favorite was vanilla on his birthday.) Home life was strict, but Okpara said he has memories of playing board games and his mother and siblings and watching television together in what he described as a big house. Everyone had chores, and Okpara’s was mainly to wash the dishes.
In school, students were taught English and while Okpara said he’d occasionally talk to his parents using that language, they primarily used their native language, Igbo. The only time he hears or speaks that now, Okpara said, is when he talks with his parents on the phone.
Okpara said his father encouraged him to get into engineering and that he had an interest in becoming a mechanical engineer but that changed as he grew into a basketball player.
The physical part of that growth took off as Okpara’s teenage years approached. Although his dad stands about 6-1 and his mom is roughly 5-10, Okpara said his paternal great-grandfather was 7-1. His older brother, David, is about 6-9, and Okpara said he was 12 or 13 when the two could look each other in the eye.
Then he just kept growing. Eventually, that frame and his athletic ability, coupled with his young age, caught the eyes of a few power brokers with the potential to alter the trajectory of his life. And here’s where it gets complicated.
“They were in it for themselves”
This is not part of the story that Okpara likes to talk about: the agents, handlers, whatever you want to call them. The ones who find kids overseas, promise their families untold riches and then spend their time trying to control the player and their path.
“I’ve talked to a lot of African kids, and (handlers) go to a lot of countries and exploit their parents and try to get money off of them, tell them they can give their kid a better life,” he said. “I thought they were coming with good intentions, but they were in it for themselves.”
Meanwhile, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the Levitt family had been considering doing missionary work through their church. But with three children, the youngest of which was 7 years old, Adam and Brittany Levitt needed to look more locally for opportunities to make a similar, long-term impact.
Adam Levitt ran into some old friends who were affiliated with Hamilton Heights Christian Academy. They were hosting a young man from the Dominican Republic, and through that connection, the Levitts met with the Hamilton Heights coach, Zach Ferrell.
“His heart was third-world-country kids,” Adam Levitt said. “They had other kids from Europe and other places, but his mission was, ‘I want to help these third-world kids because they don’t have the opportunities where they come from.’ ”
Near the end of the 2017-18 school year, the Levitts hosted a teenage boy from the Dominican Republic. Three months later, in August 2018, Okpara arrived to live with the Levitts and play for Ferrell. In seven seasons at the school, Ferrell would recruit and sign 23 eventual Division I players including two first-round NBA draft picks: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (2018) and Nickeil Alexander-Walker (2019).
On the court, he would help Okpara grow. But it’s hard to say where Okpara's adjustment was greater: on the court, or away from it.
“I remember I didn’t talk,” Okpara said of his arrival in Tennessee. “I only said one or two words every now and then. I didn’t really speak a full sentence for three or four months. I wasn’t comfortable speaking English, and I was far away and it didn’t feel good at first.”
In hindsight, Levitt said he could have done more to help Okpara feel more comfortable with the language barrier. Eventually, Okpara warmed up to the family and went from texting a lot of his thoughts to developing a reputation as a funny, confident English speaker.
That relationship would lead to Okpara being legally adopted by the Levitts. Not only did that allow him to remain in the United States without having to worry about travel visas, but it helped him finally break free from the handler who wanted to control where he went to school, among other things.
“We ended up getting into a pretty heated, nasty interaction with this handler,” Levitt said. “The guy that brought him over, we believe – we don’t know all the details, but he had already promised him to a different university. When Felix started getting good, the handler told us, ‘I’m going to take him and bring him down to my school in Atlanta, and he’s going to end up going wherever.’
That wasn’t what the Okparas wanted, nor was it the plan they had agreed on when he left Nigeria. So the Levitts legally adopted Okpara and allowed him to focus on what he wanted out of basketball.
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“I just felt like, at this point, I have to do something to help my family,” Okpara said. “I also fell in love with the sport, so why not just keep going?”
It helped, Okpara said, that the Levitts were a lot like his birth family, and that they were in constant communication with each other throughout the process.
“We’re not trying to replace his parents,” Levitt said. “We’re not trying to make him forget them or not respect them or honor them or love them. That helped a lot, too, knowing we’re not in this trying to take him away from them. We were in it strictly for him and his future and his benefit.”
An unintended consequence at the time: Getting his green card also allowed Okpara to legally profit from his name, image and likeness when the NCAA passed legislation for athletes to do so in 2021. One of Okpara’s goals is to use his NIL profits to help fund a youth basketball academy in Nigeria to provide the kind of exposure to the game he never had.
When Okpara gets a break from Ohio State, he returns home to Tennessee. When the Buckeyes played in Niceville, Florida, as part of the Emerald Coast Classic in November, the Levitts were there to cheer him on.
The leap of faith required to make this bond happen is something Okpara believes was more than luck or random good fortune.
“I still think to this day it was God,” Okpara said. “They just showed me love. They treated me like one of their own. Anything I needed, they provided and also encouraged me to work hard.”
Chasing a dream
Sometimes there will come a bad moment in a game, or maybe a sequence of tough plays, that weigh on Okpara. When it comes to basketball, the goal is obviously to play well and win. And if things don’t go well, it’s not just his fellow Buckeyes Okpara feels he’s let down.
The goal is to eventually move his family to the United States and provide a better life for them.
“Everything I do, I have to do it for my family,” Okpara said. “I’m not saying the life in Nigeria is bad. I just feel like they deserve way better. Here, some days can be good, but it’s definitely better than Nigeria.”
It’s that kind of motivation that kept Okpara going once he realized that his involvement in the sport was the result of manipulation by his handler. Once he had moved to America and devoted himself to basketball, Okpara said he felt compelled to give the sport his best and try to turn it into a positive.
Those deep-seated passions have helped sustain the sophomore as he has remained six time zones from home. He has not returned to Nigeria since arriving in the United States, and his birth parents have not been able to visit him, either. All contact has been via FaceTime and phone calls.
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“I can talk to them, but it doesn’t feel real, talking to them on the phone and not seeing them,” he said. “Regardless of if my path goes right or not, they’re still going to be there. They’re still going to love me, and I’m still going to fulfill my dreams of bringing them to the States and having a good life.”
In the meantime, Okpara continues to work on his game at Ohio State. As a sophomore starter, Okpara has roughly doubled his rebounding average from a year ago and increased his scoring while affecting the game defensively and emerging as one of the Big Ten’s top shot-blockers. Through Sunday’s games, Okpara was second in the Big Ten in blocked shots and 9th in rebounding average
There’s still lots of room to grow, and Levitt said he’s had to remind Okpara that he did not grow up playing the game.
“He's one that’s very sensitive to (poor performances),” he said. “Some of his struggle has been he wants to be really good really fast because he knows the importance of it.”
Each practice, each game is an opportunity for progress. It’s not a straight line to where he wants to get, but then again, nothing has been in Okpara’s journey. The only constant has been family – both the one back home in Nigeria and now the one he has in Tennessee.
“It’s just pretty much, it’s part of me,” he said. “Everything I do, I have to do it for my family. It took out the selfishness from me and made it do things for others. Instead of thinking of myself, I think of others.”
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: With family on heart, Ohio State's Felix Okpara strives for more
