City People Reveals Excerpts Of His Book
Late Prince Peter Rufai was buried a few days ago. He was a Legend in his time. Many don’t know his story. Prince Peter”Dodo Mayana” Rufai was born on the 24th of August, 1963 in Zaria, present day Kaduna State in Northern Nigeria. His father was Prince Thomas Akanbi Rufai of a Idimu Royal Family in Lagos State, while his mother Christy Rufai, is from Opobo in Rivers State. Peter grew up in Port Harcourt, Rivers State and would go on to become one of the best goalkeepers to come out of Africa.
After he was discovered by Sharks Football Club in Port Harcourt for whom he only played one competitive game under Coach Monday Sinclair, Peter’s raw talent earned him a place at the famous Lagos club side, Stationery Stores Football Club, as a 16-year-old. He was then called up to the Nigerian national team only 17, going on to collect an impressive 65 caps in 14 years of excellent service to his country. His daring saves, highlighted by an uncanny skill for stopping penalty kicks, earned him a cult following among Nigerian football fans and he became well known across the whole of Africa.
After several years (1980-1984) playing for Stationery Stores with whom he won the 1982 Nigeria FA Challenge Cup, Peter joined Femo Scorpions Football Club of Eruwa in Oyo State in 1985 where is presence drew unprecedented crowds to the stadium. He then became the first Nigerian goalkeeper to play for a club side outside the shores of his country in a professional career that took him to Dragons de l’Ouema (Benin Republic), K.S.C. Lokeren and K.S.K. Beveren (Belgium), Go Ahead Eagles (The Netherlands), S.C. Farense and Gil Vicente (Portugal), Hercules and Deportivo La Coruna (Spain).
Popularly known by his nickname “Dodo Mayana,” Rufai featured at four Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) tournaments in 1982, 1984, 1988 and 1994, coming out victorious as an African Champion with Nigeria’s Super Eagles in 1994 in Tunisia. He went on to cement his legacy as captain of the Nigerian team in their debut FIFA World Cup at USA’94, followed by a second World Cup appearance at France ’98.
Altogether, Peter’s playing career spanned a remarkable 20 years (1980-2000). Following his retirement, he returned home to Nigeria to set up Staruf International Limited and Peter Rufai Sports Academy through which he got involved in sports management consultancy and coaching of young talents.
Before his death on the 3rd of July, 2025, Peter had completed his biography. Titled “PETER RUFAI: MY STORY” which was written by a front-line Nigerian journalist, Dr. Mumini Alao, Peter narrated the full story of his life and upbringing and the trajectory of his remarkable football career. The book now remains as a worthy legacy that he has left behind.
The first chapter of Peter’s book is titled “THE BEGINNING”. It has been reproduced in full in this funeral programme so that readers can have a taste of Peter’s narration of his humble beginnings in his own words. May his gentle soul rest in peace.
My full names are Peter Rufai. I have no middle names and no traditional names. In Yorubaland where my father comes from, children are given traditional names, apart from their baptismal names, to depict the nature of their birth or the day of their birth or some incidents or events that took place when they were born. In my case, I was told that there were no complications during my delivery and the only names that my parents ever called me was Peter. They never told me about any other names.
I was born on the 24th of August, 1963 in Zaria in present day Kaduna State in Northern Nigeria. At the time of my birth, the whole region was known simply as Northern Nigeria. The British Colonialists only bequeathed three regions to Nigeria at independence in 1960, namely North, East and West. It was successive governments led by Nigerians themselves that further divided the three regions into several states, such that now we have 36 states in the country, plus a Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
Neither of my parents is from the Northern region. My father is from the present Lagos State in the former Western Region while my mother is from Opobo in the present Rivers State in the former Eastern Region.
They met when my mother visited Lagos on a business trip. My father followed her home to Rivers State to marry her in a traditional wedding after which they held another ceremony in Lagos. Thereafter, they relocated to Zaria where I was born.
My father, Thomas Akanbi Rufai, was a Prince from a royal family in Idimu, in present day Alimosho Local Government Area of Lagos State. He was a politician and businessman. I was told that when Queen Elizabeth of England visited Northern Nigeria just before our country’s independence, my father was one of the delegates that received her.
During my early years, I remember that my father was called, in the local Hausa language, the Sarkin Yorubawa (Chief of the Yorubas) in the area where we lived in Zaria. We lived in a big house in a big compound and my father used to receive a lot of visitors from amongst both the local Hausa community and the settler Yoruba community which he headed. My father also owned a hotel. Much later when he relocated
back to Lagos, he converted the hotel into a Mosque and donated it to the Muslim community.
Historically, the Rufai family are Muslims. But in the course of his journey through life, my father became a Christian and took the name, Thomas. Some of his siblings have remained as Muslims while some others also converted to Christianity and even built a church as a mark of their devotion. Some of the Christians changed their surname from Rufai to Rufus, but others like me decided to keep the name, Rufai. Today, there is a good mixture of Muslims and Christians in the Rufai family. I am a Christian.
My mother, Christy Rufai, was also from a royal family. She was the granddaughter of the famous King Jaja of Opobo Kingdom in Rivers State. Opobo is very close to Bonny which is famous for crude oil production in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. My mother was a trader. She sold unique clothes and jewelry. It was on one her trips to buy supplies from Lagos that she met my father.
My parents had six of us, four girls and two boys. A girl, Gladys, is the first. I am the second, followed by Sunny Bruce, Bose, Dele and Patience. Sunny Bruce and I are the only boys. Unfortunately, we lost our youngest sibling, Patience, in June 2022.
One of my earliest re-collection in life was an episode when my father went to the Zaria Township stadium to watch a football match and he took me along. I cannot recollect the match itself, but I remember that the chair
that my father would sit on was carried to the stadium by one of his hotel staff, while my father and I walked behind him. The Township stadium had spectator terraces with no seats, so people brought their seats along or stood on the terraces throughout the game. I remember that incident very vividly.
In another incident, I remember going on an errand for my mother to bring a small cupboard from my aunt who lived a short distance away from our house. I carried the cupboard on my head without noticing that a snake was in one of the two small drawers. As I approached our house, people started running towards me and shouting in Hausa: “Yaro, Ga ma chi ji! Gama chiji! Tu rechi akasa!” (Small boy, there’s a snake on your head! Throw it away!). I didn’t realize the danger until they reached me and yanked the cupboard away from my head. It was then that I saw the snake.
Yet another occasion was when Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s first indigenous President paid a state visit to Zaria. I had begun to attend classes at a kindergarten school in Sabon Geri (Township School) and I remember how we school children lined up by the roadside to wave the Nigerian flag to welcome the President. I was so excited leaving home that morning with a lunch box that my mother had packed for me.
But all the excitement soon disappeared when we waited for several hours without seeing the President. I was so exhausted.
My mother also told me an amazing story about how I started walking as a six-month old baby. She said the incident happened in Church. The amazing thing for me was that, when she told me about it when I was older, I could actually recollect the episode! It was rather strange, but I did remember that I lived that episode in a Church. Those were some of my earliest recollections in life.
I was three years old in 1966 when the first military coup took place and led to a change of government in Nigeria. It was a bloody coup and many top politicians including the Prime Minister, Sir. Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, were killed. The following year, there was a counter-coup which also took the life of the then Military Head of State, General Aguiyi Ironsi. Because of the inter-tribal nature of both coups, there was great tension in the country which eventually led to the Nigerian Civil War in 1967.
In order for his family not to get caught in the crossfire, my father directed my mum to take us the children from Zaria down south to live with her relatives in Rivers State. There were only three of us then, Gladys, myself and Sunny Bruce. I remember that Sunny Bruce was born because I carried him in my hands on the train journey from Zaria to Port Harcourt. That was how my life changed suddenly and dramatically from being a “Zaria boy” to a “Rivers Boy.
“The first house that we lived in Port Harcourt when we arrived from Zaria was Number 120, Aggrey Road. It was the Jaja Family house in Port Harcourt. Back then, Port Harcourt was already like the regional capital of the Niger Delta. Every nationality from Bonny, Ijaw, Opobo, Okrika and the other riverine areas in the region had a base in Port Harcourt.
We didn’t stay long at the Jaja Family house. My mum felt unwelcome by the behaviour of some of her family members, so she spoke to my father to send her money to rent an accommodation of our own. We found an apartment at Harold Wilson Drive, also in Port Harcourt. That was where I grew up into a true Rivers Boy.
During the Civil War, I had a close shave with death at the hands of the Nigerian Army when they invaded Port Harcourt in order to liberate the city from the hands of the secessionist Biafra Army. I was about six years old then. There was no pipe borne water in our neighborhood because the water infrastructure and other utilities had been destroyed, so we had to go to a nearby stream to fetch water. All of a sudden, gunfire broke out at the riverside and everyone started running for their lives.
I had gone to the river with my sister, Gladys, and some neighbours but I couldn’t find any of them during the confusion. I didn’t know in which direction to run, so I decided to wait for my sister. Then. I looked up at a tree and saw a Nigerian soldier looking down at me with his gun pointing at me. Our eyes locked together for a brief moment, then he nodded his head to one side as if to indicate which direction I should go. I quickly ran off in that direction. Luckily for me, it was the way home. As I ran, I saw on my way water buckets and other containers that had been abandoned and dead bodies strewn everywhere. That was my first and only direct encounter with the Civil War and it is a memory that will stay with me for the rest of my life. The soldier might have killed me.
Yet another occasion was when Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s first indigenous President paid a state visit to Zaria. I had begun to attend classes at a kindergarten school in Sabon Geri (Township School) and I remember how we school children lined up by the roadside to wave the Nigerian flag to welcome the President. I was so excited leaving home that morning with a lunch box that my mother had packed for me.
ALTHOUGH I had started kindergarten school at Sabon Geri in Zaria, I had not attended classes for more than a few weeks when we had to leave town because of the impending Civil War. I was still very small, so I started school afresh when we arrived in Port Harcourt.
My first school in Port Harcourt was the Municipal Council School, along Churchill Road. From there, I moved to Ibadan State Primary School on Ibadan Street which shared a fence with Saint John’s Primary School. Saint John’s Primary School also shared a boundary with the market where my mother sold her wares. Each time I closed from school, I would simply cross the road through St. John’s to arrive at my mother’s shop.
Saint John’s Primary School is important in my recollection of events because that was where I played my first serious football with the boys in the neighborhood. Because the school shared a common boundary with the market, I always felt confident that I would arrive at my mother’s shop early enough to avoid any trouble. But before l knew it, I would have overstayed on the football field and still arrive late at the shop where my mother would be waiting with a cane to flog me.
The only thing that I remember about my time at Ibadan State Primary School is football. I don’t have any re-collections of the academics or the names of my teachers or the school headmaster because I never paid much attention to academics. Actually, I was not a very smart student. I didn’t like going to school. In fact, I hated going to school.
I remember that in order to persuade me to attend school, my mother would give me a football to carry along. During the recess in classes, I would bring out the football and play with my friends until we heard the bell ring to indicate that recess was over. Then, when school closed for the day at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, I would go out to play again until 6 o’clock in the evening when hunger would remind me that it was time to go to my mother’s shop!
When I arrived at the market, my mother would be packing up for the day. Usually, it took up to an hour to finish packing all her wares into boxes that we would carry home on our heads. I would sneak up to the shop entrance and keep a safe distance from my mother. Her shop neighbours would announce my arrival in Pidgin English: “Mama Peter, Peter don come o!” (Mama Peter, Peter has come). She would pretend as though she wasn’t upset with me and invite me to join her in packing. But when I moved closer, she would grab me and beat the devil out of me. The shop neighbours would intervene and rescue me. My mum would threaten that there would be no dinner for me. The neighbours would plead on my behalf that I would turn a new leaf. But a few days later, I would arrive late again from the football field.
I cannot explain where or how my love for football developed at that early age. I didn’t have any access to watch the game on television and no one had told me any stories about some famous
footballers which might have inspired me. The only explanation I can guess is that most young boys in Nigeria developed a natural affinity for the game because it was fun and is easy to play.
All you have to do is kick the ball and it will start rolling. Especially at a very young age, you didn’t need any special skill to kick a ball. You just kicked it.
Perhaps a more plausible explanation for how I developed an interest in football could be during my time in Zaria when my father used to take me to the Township Stadium. I cannot recollect watching any match there, but it is possible that I did watch a game or two which might have sparked my interest. AIl I know is that when I arrived in Port Harcourt and started going to school, football was my first love.
I remember a few names from amongst my friends that we played football together in those early years.
Boma and Okon are some of them. We didn’t care much about positioning ourselves as a team. Apart from the goalkeeper who had to stand in goal, every other player was a defender, mid-fielder and striker at the same time. There was no refereeing, no offside play and no fouls except for handball. If you got fouled otherwise, you simply got up and got on with the game.
Aside from football, I also loved grooming pigeons. I was fascinated by the bird’s peaceful nature. When I wasn’t grooming pigeons, I was going to the riverside with my friends to catch crabs.
I remember an episode at the river when I nearly got drowned. About five or six of us had gone to catch crabs as usual. But on this day, one of my friends, Sunday, suggested that we should go into the water to swim.
Sunday was an excellent swimmer for his age. He could stay underwater for quite a while and when we thought he had drowned, he would pop up to the surface again. Most of the other boys could swim, too, as they all had been born in the riverine areas, but everyone knew that Sunday was in a class of his own.
At that time, I didn’t know how to swim. I was born in Zaria, Northern Nigeria which is a relatively semi-arid region where rivers were hard to come by. But I didn’t want to be seen as a weakling amongst the other boys, so I agreed to the swimming expedition. Initially, the tide was not strong and I was able to cope with the flow of the water and stay afloat by splashing my arms and kicking my feet as I saw the other boys doing.
Somehow, I managed to get to the other side of the river with a combination of crawling in the shallow water while pretending to swim. Then, we headed for the crab holes.
Sadly, the day went horribly wrong when a sharp object pierced my finger as I dipped my hand into one of the crab holes. My hand was bleeding profusely and we were all confused about what to do to stop the bleeding.
Eventually, we crushed some leaves and used a rag to tie the crushed leaves on the face of the wound. We couldn’t hunt crabs any more for the day and decided to return home.
Unfortunately for us, the tide of the river was stronger by the time we were heading back. The water level had risen so high that even some of the other boys were scared to swim. Sunday re-assured us that there was no danger, but we were not convinced.
Sunday’s mum was an adherent of traditional religion. She was known to worship the goddess of water. Because of that, we always regarded Sunday as having some spiritual powers or protection. There were occasions when we would see some fetish sacrifice which included edible items on a road intersection or at the riverside. To our dismay, Sunday would go there and pick things to eat or drink from the sacrifice. On one occasion, he picked up and drank a bottle of Fanta from a sacrificial pot. The rest of the boys held Sunday in awe.
I could recollect some of the stories that Sunday usually told us about himself. He would say he was hungry and that he was confident to find something to eat whenever he got to the river.
Truly, as soon as he went into the water, we would see him coming out with his hands oily and his mouth full.
We never knew if truly he found things to eat under the water.
So, when he asked us to swim despite the high tide of the river, I was scared that Sunday probably wanted me to drown so he could use me as a sacrifice to the water goddess or eat me under the water himself! I refused to jump. But after the other boys jumped and made it to the other side of the river, I decided to brave it. It was a stupid decision. I went straight under and started gulping mouthfuls of water. Ironically, it was Sunday and the other boys that came to my rescue and dragged me to the shore.
I would have drowned definitely because I didn’t know how to swim.
I didn’t report the incident to my mother but she got to know eventually because I couldn’t do my house chores as a result of my injured finger. She treated me and warned me never to go swimming again.
Unlike my experience at the river, I never suffered any scares on the football field while growing up.
When it came to football, I was very much at home. I started out as an outfield player because nobody loved to play as a goalkeeper back then. We all felt that it was too boring to stand in goal while your teammates were chasing the ball around. I wasn’t any different from the other kids. I always wanted to play as the striker who scored all the goals. I became a goalkeeper purely by happenstance. I never thought about being one at all.
The boys in the neighborhood usually organized small competitions amongst ourselves and we would form teams to participate in those competitions. On this particular occasion, my team was losing 3-0 to our opponents but we found a way back to even the score at 3-3. We were quite jubilant and, with the momentum now on our side, we wanted to go for the winning goal. Unfortunately, our goalkeeper committed a serious blunder which gave our opponents the lead again at 4-3.
We were very angry at our goalkeeper and some of my teammates began to insult him. He also got angry and quit the goalpost in annoyance. He said he wasn’t playing for us any more. We got stuck because he was our only goalkeeper. Nobody else in the team offered to step in, so I volunteered myself.
When the game resumed, I found myself stopping every ball that came in my direction. I would stick out a hand to stop one shot and stick out a leg to stop another shot. If the shot was high, I found myself jumping up to catch it. If the shot was low, I saw myself sprawling on the ground to push it away. In some situations, the ball would just hit me and stay out.
It turned out that my team scored one more goal and the game ended in a 4-4 draw. All my teammates started congratulating me on my performance. Everyone said I did a good job and I would be keeping goal for the team henceforth. I didn’t object to their suggestion. That was how I became a goalkeeper.
After that game, I became the automatic first choice in goal for any team that I played in. In fact, teams would struggle to have me on their side. At that stage of my development, I didn’t have any goal keeping skills. I kept goal only with sheer raw talent and I was stopping a lot of balls. I realized that I could jump very high and I could dive to either side when occasion warranted it. By the time I graduated from Ibadan State Primary School, I was the most popular goalkeeper in our neighborhood. It was easy for me to stand out because there wasn’t too much competition for my position anyway.
At this stage, the only problem I was still facing was my mother who would stop at nothing to stop me from playing football. She wasn’t succeeding at it but she never stopped trying. If words were getting to her about my growing popularity as a goalkeeper, she never acknowledged it. As far as she was concerned, football was a distraction from my studies.
My mother was very influential in my upbringing because my father never moved in to live with permanently in Port Harcourt. After he returned to Lagos from Zaria, he and my mum maintained the marriage only by visiting each other for lengthy periods. My father would come to Port Harcourt and stay with us in our apartment for several months after which he would return to Lagos. Then my mother would also visit him when she went to Lagos on her business trips. The Nigerian Civil War ended in 1970 when the Biafran Army surrendered to the Federal Government forces. It was after the war that my three other siblings Bose, Dele and Patience were born.
All my adolescent years were spent in Port Harcourt under my mother’s guidance. She taught me moral values of having respect for elders, dedication to duty, honesty, discipline, punctuality, contentment and hard work. Despite all her influence on me, however, she made sure that I didn’t forget my father’s roots in Lagos. At every opportunity, she would tell me that my family ancestry is Lagos.
My mother also trained me to see the Church as an important part of my life. We worshiped with the Cherubim and Seraphim Christian Movement and my mother would ensure that I went to sweep the church floor every weekend. Anytime I failed to do so, she would flog me or deny me food.
I was a member of the church choir. I played several musical instruments and I could also sing. The Cherubim and Seraphim or “C & S” as they are also called is a Nigerian church. I went because of my mother. But when I grew up and started making my own decisions, I became a Catholic.
After Primary School, I did not attend a regular secondary school running a strictly academic curriculum.
My mother enrolled me in an institution with a vocational curriculum to learn a skill. Although I didn’t have a say in the decision, the vocational school fitted my temperament because I always preferred to use my hands to do practical things rather than read books on theories or formulas that I hardly understood.
Following my application, I was offered admission into Government Vocational Training Centre on Aba Road, Port Harcourt. “GVTC”, as we called it, did not prepare students to become future doctors or lawyers.
The school prepared its students to become technicians and artisans. I applied to be trained in electrical installation.
My choice of that vocation must have been influenced by another experience that I had when we had just arrived in Port Harcourt and were living in the Jaja Family house. I was always curious about a radio transistor belonging to one of the family members and I would wonder about where the people talking in the radio set were hiding. Luckily, it never crossed my mind to break the radio set open which might have led to a serious reprimand from my mother.
Instead, I was playing around one day with a cable that led to the radio set from the electrical mains on the wall. I was too young to understand the implication of having a cable plugged into the mains. I took a knife to cut open the cable. All of a sudden, I saw myself flung violently across the room. I hit my head on the wall, then fell back on a stool on the way to the ground.
My agonizing cry brought several people running into the room. My mother screamed when she
saw me on the ground. Someone picked me up and I was taken care of. Luckily, I didn’t break any bones in my body. Perhaps it was that encounter with an electrical device that made me choose electrical installation when I got to GVTC. That is the closest connection that I can make, as ridiculous as it sounds.
GVTC was where l grew up to become a man. It was a coeducational vocational training school and we lived in a boarding house. My talent for goalkeeping became easily noticed by the school games master and I was drafted into the school team even while I was in the junior classes. I became very popular especially with the girls and that got me into a lot of trouble with the senior male students and school prefects.
Whenever the prefects saw me speaking to a girl, they would punish me by asking me to kneel down right there on the spot. They would instruct the girl to go away but keep me on my knees for a long period.
During prep time in the evenings, you might find only six or seven students studying in a classroom. As soon as I entered to sit there, the classroom would start to fill up with other students, especially girls. It would be like they had gone to tell each other that Peter Rufai was there.
Most of the girls would want to sit close to where I sat. There would be a row of five girls sitting to my right and another row of six girls sitting to my left. Then, some senior male students or prefects would come around again to ask what was going on. They would accuse me of noise making and punish me in the presence of the girls just to embarrass me. Sometimes, they would send me to the kitchen to go and wash all the plates and the pots used for cooking the meals. It was quite obvious that they were jealous of me, especially as some of the girls would have rejected their advances. The persecution was so much that I nearly asked my mother to find me another school.
Aside from my goalkeeping talent, I was also different from most other students on campus in a lot of ways. I was the only Yoruba boy from the western Nigeria amidst the hundreds of students in the school. I also had some unique Hausa mannerisms and dress sense that I brought with me from the north. And I had natural dreadlocks which stood me out in a crowd.
There were many significant incidents that I can recollect about my four-year stay at GVTC, but two of those events stand out. On one occasion, I flouted the school regulations by going out to the cinema with my friends. To make matters worse, we returned to the boarding house well beyond the deadline that we were supposed to be in our rooms.
I was suspended for two weeks along with my friends. I couldn’t go home to my mother because I wouldn’t be able to explain what brought me home from school. Instead, I went to stay with one of my friends, Emmanuel Omihen, while waiting for the suspension period to lapse. Coincidentally, Omihen was related to
David Ngodigha, who would later become my goalkeeping rival in the Nigeria national team. That is just by the way.
Back to the incident at GVTC, it happened that my school had a very important football match against another school which fell within the period of my suspension. Our games master told the school principal that if I didn’t play the match, we would concede too many goals and lose. The principal himself was crazy about football and he always gave members of the school team some special privileges. He told the games master:”You mean the Yoruba boy? Okay, go and bring him. Tell him his suspension is cancelled!”
Luckily for me, I had a great game, made many spectacular saves and we won the match. I justified the lifting of my suspension. But a greater benefit awaited me that would change my life forever.
The coach of Sharks Football Club of Port Harcourt had come to watch the match. In those days, it was common for coaches of club sides to attend football competitions amongst schools to scout and recruit budding players for their club sides.
After the match, the coach approached me and introduced himself as Monday Sinclair. He commended my performance and invited me to join them at their training sessions. I couldn’t believe it. Me? To come train with Sharks?!
Sharks were the biggest football club in the whole of Rivers State at the time. They were the traditional club of the Rivers people and they enjoyed financial backing from the state government as well. Sharks played in the first division of the Nigeria football league and they were serial winners of the Rivers State Football Association (FA) Cup which qualified them to represent Rivers State regularly in the national FA Cup.
Sharks were clearly the top dog in Rivers football and it was a big privilege to be invited to join them in training. I was stepping into the big league!
Coach Monday Sinclair was not the first coach to spot my talent or offer to train me. The credit for that goes to a certain man known as Tiger. I cannot recall his real names because, even back then, he was mostlyknown as Tiger. He was a footballer with the Nigeria Ports Authority (NPA) Football Club of Port Harcourt.
I was still in the primary classes and playing as an outfield player at Municipal Township School when Tiger saw me during a friendly match. After the match, he came over and introduced himself and asked me to take him to my parents so he could ask their permission to train me. Certain that my mother would reject his request and probably turn around to flog me, I refused.
Tiger was persistent and people soon gathered around us to find out what was going on. When he explained his mission to them, some elderly people that I knew and respected persuaded me to take him to my mother.
On reaching my mother’s shop, I kept a safe distance and pointed her out to Tiger. To my greatest surprise my mother granted Tiger’s request and said I could be going to him to train me. Initially, I thought she was just being sarcastic but when we got home that night and she didn’t fog me nor cancel my dinner, I realized then that she wasn’t kidding. That was the first time my mother would show any kind of approval for my football. Tiger must have really impressed her to win that approval.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t take full advantage of Tiger’s invitation. I was still in Primary School anyway and the stress of going to the NPA training ground at Lagos Bus Stop was too much for me. I would go for a few days, then absent myself for a few weeks. I was not consistent. Later, I stopped going altogether.
I lost touch with Tiger but he found me again when l got to GVTC. By then, I had converted from playing to goalkeeping and he invited me again to train with them at NPA Football Club. l had not responded to his new invitation when the match that brought me to the attention of Sharks FC took place didn’t honour Tiger’s invitation eventually, but I will like to place on record that he was the first man to spot my talent for football and took concrete steps to mentor me.
When the news circulated at GVTC t that I had been called up by Sharks FC, my popularity soared higher. Even the senior students who took delight in punishing me started treating me with respect. I had become a superstar on campus.
athlete. I was an all-rounder. Aside from football, I represented the school in the 100meters and meters sprint. I also played hockey and volleyball for the school teams. Sometimes, the games master would be confused about which event to register me for, if there was a clash in the scheduling.
I was warmly received on the first day that I reported for training with Sharks Football Club. Aside from Monday Sinclair, they had another expatriate coach whose name I cannot recollect. They encouraged and
taught mea lot.
The first goalkeeper for Sharks at the time was a half-caste player called Fente. He was very good with sharp reflexes. The second goalkeeper was Raymond Kpakopone, a Ghanaian, who was very fond of me. He became my best friend at the club. He loved me to the marrow and would do just about anything to make me happy and comfortable.
Some of the other players that I met at Sharks were Martins Owolo, Dediare, Yebofra, Dombraye, Allison and Orufe. Orufe was a young player like me and we used to hang around together a lot.
I never signed a contract with Sharks. As I was still in school, I only attended their training sessions and played a handful of preparatory matches with the first team. The only official match that I recall playing for Sharks was a National FA Cup game in Kaduna in 1979. Fente and Raymond were unavailable, so the club approached my school principal to request for my release which was granted.
I cannot recall the club side that we played against in Kaduna, but that was my first official game for Sharks.
Also in the team on that day was Hamilton Green, older brother to Christopher Green who would later become a member of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) and Commissioner for Sports in Rivers State.
Hamilton later relocated to the United States of America. The Green family were always known as a football family in Port Harcourt.
Although I hadn’t signed a contract with Sharks, I knew by this time that I was going to make a career as a footballer. I had some other friends at GVTC who nursed similar ambitions and we were always on the look out for news about major happenings in Nigerian football.
I would most probably have signed for Sharks after my graduation from school since I was already training with them and even played a game for them. But then, one of my friends brought the information that Stationery Stores Football Club of Lagos were planning to organize a screening to recruit new players.
Stationery Stores were a big club and we had been reading a lot about their exploits in the Nigeria Football League and FA Cup.
We were writing our final examinations at GVTC when we got the information about the Stationery Stores screening. My friends and I decided to attend the screening. On the day that we finished writing our last paper in the final examinations, we took a night bus from Port Harcourt to Lagos. I didn’t inform my mother about the trip. I just left straight from school. My football career was about to begin.
