Segun Odegbami is a big name in football. He has had a very enviable career. Before playing for the national team, the Green Eagles, he had played for the IICC Shooting Stars. He was, in fact, one of the pioneer players of the club.
Recently, he spoke with City People’s Publisher, SEYE KEHINDE, about how his career started years back. Below are excerpts of the interview.
There are those who feel that Segun Odegbami has been thoroughly misunderstood by some people in the football world in Nigeria. Do you agree?
Oh yes. I am seriously misunderstood. Our football should not be in the position it is today. Our football should have moved beyond this point. But all I have said fell on deaf ears. I feel frustrated. I think now that I am seriously, misunderstood, some people regard it as arrogance, that I was arrogant. I have heard people said that I am arrogant. They have said I behaved as if I knew everything. But the truth is I don’t know anything. I have experienced much, so I am expressing my experiences. That is what I am doing. I didn’t train as anything related to football or sports. I am only expressing my own experiences. Some people think I am arrogant. But I am not arrogant. I have been described as stingy, that when I get there in the position of authority, I will not distribute money and that even now with the little I am doing I am not distributing money to them.
Is that how life should be? Am I supposed to work hard and earn my living and now distribute it to people? No. I am not going to do that. I think I am misunderstood. My motivation is that of change, to just see that things are better particularly for the corner where I now find myself and I can’t get out of it. I have stopped playing now for the past 36 years. I have tried my hands on so many things, so that people can look up and say he has done well. But all they ever see is my football, not the series of so many other contributions I have made in different fields and that is frustrating. And now, I have realised finally that no matter what I do, I have to still come back to my original constituency that gave me fame and a name and from there, try to take off, if there is any take off to be done any more. My activities are now limited to things that are related, to sports that are related to football. I am no longer really ambitious, politically. In terms of seeking an office, I believe I will still do my best in my own way using my resources, and the facilities around me to continue to add to upgrading knowledge of sports and of football to help develop young ones, to provide for them a better foundation, so that they don’t end up as us, poor, neglected and really unacknowledged.
You are one footballer who loves to write and you write well. You have kept your column going in several newspapers over the years. What is the secret? Did you train for it?
Well I didn’t train as a writer. But I went to a good school, good secondary school and I studied Literature in school and I had good marks in Literature. By the time I was finishing in secondary school I was writing poems, I was an artist, I could draw, I could paint, I could write and illustrate. I know from secondary school that I had a flair for writing so much so that when I got to The Polytechnic, Ibadan, I founded, at least, 2 publications one I wrote from start to finish. The other was a club magazine of which I was a member of the editorial board. So, I had always liked to write. Banji Ogundele was Assistant News Editor, Daily Times before he went to Ibadan in 1978 to become Editor of Sunday Tribune. He came and stayed in my house because we were friends. And he founded some literature pieces I had written and drawings I had sketched and he asked me if I would like to write a column. I was a football player, I was playing. I said why not? Already, I was writing and editing a school magazine. I knew I had flair for it. So, I said yes.
That was how I started a column in Sunday Tribune in February of 1979. A few months after that, PUNCH invited me to come and write, I wrote briefly, then my friends at The Guardian also invited me to come and write and I changed to The Guardian. Then Sunny Ojeagbase came to Ibadan to ask me to start writing in Sports Souvenir, so I started.
One day he came to meet me in my office in Ibadan. I was GM of Shooting Stars, I told him I wanted to leave Ibadan for Lagos, and would he have a desk for me in his office at Sports Souvenir. He flew into the air. He said what. He said I should come and do the publication with him. He was happy. That day, I wrote a small cheque for our next publication. In truth, over night I moved to Lagos, I packed my things not too clear about what the future held for me. That was December 1976. My wife had moved to London and my children moved to the UK too. That was how I never went to Ibadan again. I came to Lagos, I went to Okota to join Sunny Ojeagbase. We decided to redesign the whole concept of Complete Sports, Souvenir. He started a new publication CLIMAX Magazine. It was hell. For 10 years he didn’t even break even. After a few years, I couldn’t cope. To survive was almost impossible, I became a Reporter there. I left full time reporting.
I was reporting sports then. I learnt much from Sunny. From 1979 to date I have not stopped that.
How did you find yourself in Shooting Stars? Why is the club not enjoying the kind of popularity it enjoyed when you were playing for the club?
That is a long story. Shooting Stars as a club has been affected by our national political development. The breakup of the Western region into more states actually created the problem that made people lose sight of what Shooting Stars originally represented.
When I joined Shooting Stars in 1974, Shooting Stars was a movement, not just a club. It was a movement of the Yoruba people. It represented Yoruba people in certain spheres including political sphere. But you had to be in there to appreciate it and understand it. There was a struggle for power in this country between the Hausas and the Yorubas.
The Igbos were just coming out of the war. They were neither here nor there. They had a statement to make. They had been vanquished in the war, even though they said there was no Victor, no Vanguish.
And they didn’t want to come out as a vanquished army. So they used Rangers International, which they named after a weapon. Rangers was named after a weapon that was an original design of the Igbos at that time. The local name for it at that time was the Ranger. It was like a Canon, you will shoot it over a long distance. It used to do much damage then. And they had a fantastic team, before the war.
The captain of the national team was Godwin Achebi. He was the Captain of Rangers. They had so many quality players who had just been wasting for 3 years of the Civil War and they now came back into Rangers and they hit Nigeria with a force that no other weapon could have done. They were vanquished in other spheres, but became Football, Nigeria’s no 1 sports. They were in the heart of everybody, followed passionately by everybody, everybody followed their exploits on the field and that was Rangers International. They defeated every team. For 4 years, they were unbeaten, they won everything in Nigeria over and over again.
So, that message was read by the other ethnic groups. The Yorubas read it. Of course. Shooting Stars defeated them in 1970. And that was the end of Rangers reign. The political leaders of Yoruba land, at that time saw the message the Igbos were passing across with Rangers and the Shooting Stars was now used as the counter measure, just as in the North, in Kano, they set up Raccah Rovers. It became a big WAR between the Yorubas and the Igbos. And you don’t want to know all the things that went on behind the scene. Because everybody in Yorubaland was right behind Shooting Stars. Every body in Yorubaland was involved. Every where there was a player in Nigeria who was of Yoruba origin, Yoruba scouts were looking for them and they will come and tell Chief Lekan Salami, we have discovered this one, we have discovered that one. When the Yoruba team, the Shooting Stars went to the East, you didn’t want to know what they would do across every river they passed until they got to the East. In 1977 there was going to be a match between Rangers and Shooting Stars in Lagos.
They met at the semi-final stage. It was WAR between the Igbos and the Yorubas.
On the eve of that match, the late Yar’Adua, who was Vice to Obasanjo directed that the match should be called off and they moved it within 24 hours to a neutral ground in Kaduna because Lagos was thronged by Buses were coming from Enugu and Ibadan. 24 hours before the game the stadium was and its surrounding were bursting at the seams.
There was fighting going on. The whole place was charged. Tension was high Daily Times carried the photograph for the first time, front cover. The photo by Peter Obe. He came to the National Stadium. He invited Christian Chukwu who was Captain of Rangers and Emmanuel Okala, who was most popular in Rangers. He called Ojebode, who was the captain of Shooting Stars and myself. We all stood on the Balomy and he took the photography and we were all laughing. And he put the photo on the front cover of Daily Times. For the very first time 4 footballers representing the Igbos and the Yorubas, laughing their heads off and they were making a mockery of the rest of the people. Yar Adua directed that the match be moved to Kaduna. And it was moved. They flew us in military aircraft to Kaduna. Both teams went to play there. On getting to Kaduna, they had never seen that kind of crowd before. That is just to tell you that Shooting Stars was really a movement of the Yorubas. They did everything to win the match. They consulted everybody humanly possible. They consulted parapsychologists, the pastors, the marabouts the traditionalists. For them, winning the game was a matter of life and death because of the level of the rivalry, between the ethnic groups.
Then a lot began to happen to the administration of the clubs. Chief Lekan Salami died. Several other people died. New governors came in. These were new military governors, who didn’t understand the dynamics of football management.
Before you knew it Shooting Stars lost much of its essence. Right now, in the past 20 years, the governors don’t even know what Shooting Stars stands for.
They just know that they cannot kill it, they cannot sell it. They don’t use it for anything. It has just become another club.
Tell us your experience at the time you try to run Shooting Stars?
It was just for one year. The moment I retired from the game, the governor, who was there, a military man, made me the General Manager, immediately. As I retired from football, I was made the GM in 1984 to 1985 season. That was the only period. By 1986, I left. There was too much politics. There was misunderstanding, lack of trust, division had started to creep in at the time. I couldn’t cope.
Why did you decide to retire at the time you did?
Well, I had an injury then. But I had retired first in 1982, because of my knee injury. It was frustrating. We failed to go to the World cup. At the last match, we failed to qualify. We lost out of frustration.
I retired in 1983. Then I was trying to establish my business and settle down. By the start of 1984, late Chief Adisa Akinloye, and Chief Lekan Salami and others invited me to come and see them and convinced me with the governor then, Gen. Oladayo Popoola, that I should please come back and play for Shooting Stars for one more year, because they had qualified for the African Club Championship. So, I agreed. And then I came back to play for that year, in 1984. That was when Rashidi Yekini joined us and Wakilu Oyenuga. We played with a few younger players. We played with Felix Owolabi. Muda Lawal. All of us were there. We got to the finals again and lost in Lagos. We lost so badly in Lagos. And my injury had worsened. So as soon as that match ended, the disappointment was so much. I just threw my boots to the crowd and I never looked back.
When you look back at that period, in football, how do you feel about it?
Oh! That was a great era. That was a fantastic era because we were all local. We were all here in Nigeria. The game of football was followed with a great deal of passion, unbelievable passion. We were living among the people. They knew us. They would feel us everyday. The adulation was so much.
The relationship was so close between us and the people.
So much so. All the stars were here. We were there. We knew each other. We appreciated each other. It was great, we respected each other. Great stars like Muda Lawal, Felix Owolabi, Ojebode. We were all in the national team.
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