It could be in the middle of the night in his hometown of Warri, Nigeria, when Prince Tega Wanogho sends the text to one of his eight siblings.
“It’s time.”
At some point this weekend, likely during Day 2 of the NFL draft, a team will have called Wanogho from his host family’s home in Montgomery, Ala., to draft the offensive tackle out of Auburn. He will then call his siblings, who range in age from the 40s to 16, to join him in celebration of a relatively new dream achieved six years after Wanogho came to the United States on a scholarship to play high school basketball and pursue an American education.
Advertisement
In a time of social distancing, Wanogho and his siblings are already well-accustomed to long-distance relationships. FaceTime and Facebook are how the family has remained almost constantly connected. They’ve celebrated Tega’s high school and college graduations remotely. And while separated by thousands of miles, they mourned their mother, Princess Onome Wanogho, following her sudden death in February 2017.
“He’s naive about some things,” said Christy Taylor, Wanogho’s host mother since he moved in Alabama six years ago. “On the other end of the spectrum, he’s not naive in loss and hurt and sacrifice and those big things in life.”
If anything, these years of distance and disruption have perhaps made Wanogoho uniquely equipped to deal with the upheaval to the NFL draft process, the ensuing isolation at an apartment in Pensacola, Fla., where he’s been rehabbing from surgery to repair a meniscus injury, and the uncertainty about the start of the 2020 NFL season.
“The timing is just pretty crazy,” Wanogoho told The Athletic in a phone interview. “My momma always told me, just control what you can control. That’s what I’m trying to do, just stay positive with this whole situation. All of this stuff is way bigger than me, so I try to take care of myself and just handle my business.”
Wanogho’s draft prep over the last month has consisted of visits to Dr. James Andrews’ medical office in Pensacola for rehabilitation, which has been deemed essential. A nurse takes his temperature upon his arrival each day. His rehab from the January meniscus procedure now includes on-field work, and he’s been allowed to run and go through limited offensive line drills under the supervision of a member of Andrews’ athletic training staff.
On an outdoor field, a trainer records Wanogho’s process, and Wanogho sends the videos to his agent, Michael Perrett, who passes on relevant videos on to NFL teams. Wanogho hopes the videos will show NFL decision-makers how much progress he’s made since going through medical exams at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis in late February.
Advertisement
In the meantime, he’s spending his free time watching his old college games from Auburn and, like so many of the rest of us, binging television shows on Netflix. Wanogho’s current obsession is “The Office,” a show he first tried to watch as a freshman at Auburn in 2015. He didn’t get the humor then, but after six years in the United States, his tastes have adjusted, and he quickly burned through eight seasons since he went into lockdown last month.
“At first I didn’t really like Michael (Scott),” he said. “I thought it was selfish and real childish, but then he made the whole show.”
Like all other draft prospects, Wanogho’s in-person visits with teams have been replaced by video calls over FaceTime or Zoom. He has set up a large whiteboard in his apartment for the times NFL coaches or evaluators ask him to diagram plays. But he’s found that coaches and execs want to know less about his football acumen and more about his personal story of leaving Nigeria as a teenager, how is basketball aspirations morphed into football goals and his dreams to get his two younger sisters to join him here in the United States.
“Teams are really interested in that, about how I’ve only been playing football for six years now,” Wanogho said. “Every team I’ve actually talked to and coaches I’ve talked to, that’s what they really want to do — to make sure that this kid they are trying to bring in has his priorities right and has his head in the right place.”
That story starts with Wanogho as a basketball-obsessed teenager in Warri, an industrial coastal city about seven hours from the Nigerian capital of Lagos. He attended basketball clinics and camps, hoping to catch the attention of American talent scouts, and in 2014, he was offered a scholarship to attend Edgewood Academy in Montgomery, Ala.
Advertisement
“If you grew up in Africa, that’s a big turning point for you and your family, that’s one of the sacrifices everyone in your family is willing to make, so it wasn’t much of a discussion,” Wanogho said. “As soon as the opportunity presented itself, my mom was like down for it. My siblings were all really happy for me. It was a sacrifice every one of them was willing to make.”
That didn’t mean the day he boarded his flight to the United States — from Lagos to Amsterdam to Atlanta to Montgomery — wasn’t sad. But mostly he was hopeful. Wanogho carried with him a single backpack with two pairs of jeans, a couple of shirts, one pair of shoes and a new Bible, a gift from his mother. “The inscription was about me going to church on time,” he said.
Everything else he would need would be waiting for him in his new life in Alabama: a host family, with a brother in his grade at Edgewood Academy, school, basketball.
And … football?
The game was never supposed to be part of Wanogho’s long-term plan, but he was big (already 6-foot-7 when he arrived in Alabama) and athletic, and he figured playing would be a good way to acclimate to American culture and fit in at his new school. He wasn’t expecting to immediately draw the attention of college football recruiters intrigued by his rare size and speed.
About a month into his only high school football season, a newspaper reporter asked Wanogho if Alabama head coach Nick Saban was among the coaches who had offered him a scholarship. “I was like, ‘Who is Nick Saban?'” Wanogho said, laughing. “Everybody was like, How the heck does he not know who Nick Saban is?”
Taylor welcomed Wanogho into the home she shared with her husband, Todd, a basketball coach and son Zack (the Taylors’ daughter, Lauren, had already graduated from Auburn and was living in Mobile). She was determined to document all of it for Princess Onome back home in Nigeria, so Christy took photos of everything — sports practices, school events like Edgewood’s “Beauty and Beau” pageant, academic award ceremonies — and created a scrapbook. She also added a growing collection of articles from the Montgomery Advertiser about Wanogho’s burgeoning athletic career.
Advertisement
Wanogho’s two mothers exchanged text messages daily, co-parenting from 6,000 miles apart.
“I wanted to make sure that he felt comfortable in his new home and knew he was welcome,” Taylor said. “I wanted to make sure I was on the same page with her, with what she wanted and what she felt. I wanted her to be very much a part of things.”
And Princess Onome was, except for one very big decision that Wanogho had to make on his own.
In January 2015, Wanogho suffered a broken leg while playing basketball. The injury came after he rushed back from a stress fracture and required surgery. While recovering from that surgery, and under a tight deadline to accept a college football scholarship after he was reclassified from a junior to senior because of his advanced academics, he decided to abandon his dream of playing basketball.
He was nervous to call his mother and tell her that his plan had changed. After all, basketball was one of the two reasons she agreed to let him leave home. But Princess Onome eventually gave her son her blessing to switch sports because it was his path to college.
“It was sad leaving my family, being that young, but my family believed in me,” Wanogho said. “They knew I’m a hard worker, they knew I was going to make the right decisions; that’s something my parents taught me growing up — respect people, work hard. My momma trusted that. She knew what her little baby was going to be able to do.”
Wanogho sifted through 28 Division I offers and would up choosing Auburn, the school closest to his new home, in part because of how Auburn’s coaches had stuck by him following his basketball injury, a time he recalls now as traumatic but also life-changing. As his athletic future came into focus, his bond with the Taylors strengthened.
“We had lots of time to be able to get into more in-depth conversations during that time at the hospital,” Taylor said. “I think that was the true time that he knew we were in his corner. It didn’t matter where he was, where he ended up going to school … We weren’t going to just send him off and forget about him.”
Wanogho with the Taylors, his American family. (Courtesy of Prince Tega Wanogho)In February 2017, Wanogho’s oldest sister called Christy and Todd to share the devastating news that Princess Onome had died suddenly. The family in Nigeria wanted the Taylors to deliver the news to Tega in person, so the Taylors immediately drove to Auburn to comfort the young man they now considered a son.
Advertisement
He returned to the Taylors’ home and shut himself in his room. Christy, Todd, Zack and Lauren, who left her home in Mobile to be with Tega, took turns sitting with him. Sometimes they prayed. Sometimes they sat in silence.
His siblings in Nigeria feared for his safety should he return home for the funeral — as a successful American college football player, they feared he or they could be the target of kidnapping should he return — and he contemplated giving it all up, his college football career, his academics, and his blossoming NFL dream, to go home. If his mother was gone, what was the point in staying?
“She was his whole reasoning for leaving his family and leaving his country and making that sacrifice,” Christy said. “She was the main thing, to make her life better.”
After a week of solitary contemplation, Wanogho approached Taylor and said he wanted to go out to eat — to Waffle House — and he wanted to talk. He had made his decision to return to Auburn, dive back into spring football and his classes. Football might not have been part of his mother’s plan for him, but it was his gateway to a college degree (which he earned in 2018) and, hopefully, prosperity. Though he missed his mother’s funeral, he was able to return to Nigeria in 2018 to renew his visa and reunite with his siblings. It was a bittersweet moment as he came to terms with all he had lost, but it reinforced what was now a bigger purpose.
In the two years since, Wanogho, with the help of the Taylors, has twice applied for student visas for his two younger sisters, Gloria, now 18, and Victoria, now 16, to join him in the United States. Both times the requests have been denied, but he will continue to try. He dreams about the time when they’ll be able to watch him play in the NFL.
He had hoped to use the platform provided by his private pro day earlier this month to raise money for the Effiong Foundation, the organization that put on the basketball camp in Nigeria that helped facilitate his immigration to the United States. Those plans fell through when his pro day was canceled, but once in the NFL, he plans to work the foundation and help kids like him.
“If I can help them and change lives, that’s one of the biggest investments ever you can make, pouring it into someone’s life,” Wanogho said. “The Effiong Foundation invested in my life. That’s a big deal for me. That means a lot to me.”
Advertisement
For now, he communicates with all eight of his siblings on a near-daily basis. Lately, he’s been sending them articles about the coronavirus pandemic and urging them to stay home and stay safe. He finds joy in how much pride they’ve taken in his football career, even if none of them really understand much about the game yet.
“They are really proud of me, they’re dropping likes and comments,” Wanogho said. “It might even be a bad play or something, and I’m really not trying to see that, but if they come across it they’re going to repost it. It’s so funny to see them do that.”
Wanogho at home in Nigeria with seven of his eight siblings, four of his nieces and nephews, and his late mother, Princess Onome. (Courtesy of Prince Tega Wanogho)Wanogho is one of the 58 draft prospects selected by the NFL to receive kits to broadcast from home during the NFL draft. He’ll return to the Taylor home in Montgomery, with a gathering that’s supposed to be his immediate American family only.
Wanogho’s agents are preparing him to be a second-day pick, but his draft status comes with uncertainty because of his disrupted training and lack of testing.
Though he was selected to participate in the Senior Bowl, the meniscus repair forced him to pull out of practices and games. He attended the combine but was unable to work out in Indianapolis. His Auburn teammates had their pro day without him in early March, before the NFL shut down travel and canceled pro days and on-site visits for the rest of the spring.
“It’s unfortunate for all the guys that fall into the situation Tega has,” Senior Bowl executive director Jim Nagy said. “You’d like them to complete all three phases — all-star game, combine, pro day. All the boxes are checked. For Tega, it’s testing stuff. Missing combine and pro day hurts him because I think he would have tested well.”
Despite playing five years at Auburn, he remains a raw NFL prospect, and The Athletic’s Dane Brugler has Wanogho rated as the ninth-best offensive tackle in the 2020 class. Nagy projects Wanogho, who measured 6-foot-5 and 308 pounds, as an NFL left tackle.
Advertisement
“I have no reservations about him transitioning to the NFL,” Nagy said. “He’s mature, good head on his shoulders. He’s been through such hardship in his life already. This won’t overwhelm him.”
The Wanogho siblings will be ready. Tega said he’ll enlist one of his older siblings to stay awake into the night on Friday, despite the six-hour time difference from Alabama, to be on alert for his text whenever it is that an NFL team calls him. Hopefully by the time the TV broadcast connects to the Taylor living room, the siblings will have joined the virtual party, yet another surreal moment in a life none of them could have envisioned when he first left.
“It’s going to be life-changing and I know that, but at the same time I don’t want to get too carried away because I feel like this is just the beginning for me. Just another page of my story,” Wanogho said. “Someday when I’ve played to the rightful amount of time, I can sit back and recap and think about how great and crazy this whole story has been. But right now I’m still writing the story.”
(Top photo: Mark LoMoglio / Getty Images)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kHBsbnBjbXxzfJFpZmlsX2d%2FcLzRoqWcnV2psqitjLCYp6eXnbxutdJmp6udoJa%2FprCMn6arZZiewG7BzZ6vqZ2TqbKlecWopq2akaG5br%2FTqKmyq12jsrnAjJyfmqikmr9w