Study by YouTube
The death of his father shook what had been a happy childhood.
Born and raised in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, Jerry describes the world outside his family home as ‘unruly and violent’, with regular fighting and even killings as a result of cultism.
“You have choices to make,” he muses. “It depends on what you want in life. That’s just the mindset. But my parents trained us well.”
The discipline and positive values instilled in him by his upbringing would prove profoundly consequential as Jerry adjusted to his new set of circumstances. Now living with his brother, he had to shoulder responsibilities well beyond his years.
“When I lost my dad, I needed to hustle for myself because if I didn’t do it, nobody would be able to feed me,” he says plainly. “[My brother] said, ‘You need to stand up and then do everything yourself because now that we’ve lost our dad, this is where the whole thing changes’.“
Things then did indeed change.
In 2019, a school coach reached out to Jerry via text, encouraging him to take part in American football trials run by a talent scouting friend from the United States.
Jerry didn’t hesitate. With no idea what the sport was, but desperate not to let the opportunity go past, his bewilderment ballooned when he was handed a pair of cleats.
“Let me use the word ‘big shoe’,” he says, laughing, using his hands to scale out an enormous imaginary piece of footwear. “That’s how I saw it when I saw it for the first time.”
The trial ultimately didn’t lead to anything, but it did spark a curiosity in Jerry, who furiously turned to YouTube to begin studying more about this new sport.
He learned from his searches that there were multiple positions to play and certain drills and specific skills needed to be mastered.
Absorbing as much information as he could, he decided to try it all out, regularly hitting up an empty field outside his school. Taking out chairs, stones, and anything he could get a hold of, he built obstacles to run past. “There is a tree in Nigeria, where I’ve hit my head so many times,” he says, smiling fondly.
His makeshift setups and obvious passion soon caught the attention of passersby. And one day, while enacting a football move, someone came over to him, intrigued by what they saw.
They explained they were a cousin of then-Texas A&M offensive lineman Smart Chibuzo. The hungry teenager immediately seized his chance and began filming and sending videos of himself practising to Chibuzo, with the college player responding with advice.
“I was taking everything I watched to training. So, every day I started getting better, like one per cent daily, one per cent daily, one per cent daily.”