Mother jumps through hoops to get to game
SAN ANTONIO — Udoka Azubuike doesn’t remember when he last saw his mother. It might have been when he was in the ninth grade. Or maybe when he was in the eighth grade.
The Kansas center was unsure when he would see her next. He was hoping this weekend. He was praying her visa would come through by then.
“Hopefully everything is gonna wo r k out,” Azubuike said Thursday afternoon. “It would mean the world.”
A few hours later, the world got smaller.
Thanks to Kansas officials and politicians who helped expedite the process, Azubuike’s mother, Florence, had her visa approved, allowing her to travel outside Nigeria for the first time in her life and to watch her son play basketball for the f irst time — in the Final Four.
Though t he NCAA offers a stipend of $4,000 to families of players to cover flights, hotels and meals, it was unclear whether visa complications would to prevent Azubuike’s mother from being at Saturday’s national semifinal game against Villanova.
“It’s going to be an emotional moment for me,” Azubuike said. “I don’t know how I’ll handle it.”
Azubuike, who leads the Jayhawks in rebounding (7.1 per game) and blocks (1.7) and leads the nation in field-goal percentage (77.2), is the youngest of his widowed mother’s five children.
He was raised in a city (in Nigeria’s Delta State) he estimates had only one or two hoops and grew up largely playing soccer before being discovered at a Basketball Without Borders camp. He moved to Florida when he was 13 to attend The Potter’s House Christian Academy in Jacksonville, where he played organized basketball for the first time.
“It wa s n ’ t easy for us back home,” Azubuike said. “We had a lot of hardships and bad stuff happening. It wasn’t good for me. My mom worked really hard. To be able to travel to the U. S. and play basketball and go to school, I didn’t think twice about it. My mom was pretty excited.
“When I was leaving, she gave me a Bible in my hand, and she said, ‘Don’t forget this. Keep this in your mind and allow God to guide you.’ ”
They talk on the phone every few weeks because the “internet is kind of bad over there.”
Now, she will finally see her son again, together with the world.
“We had to go through political people to deal with their embassy in Nigeria, for the passport, but also to set up a meeting to get a visa, and she had to fly I don’t know how many hours just to get to the city where she had the visa meeting, and then try to get her on flights, which will take over 24 hours, to get her here,” Kansas coach Bill Self said. “So it will be worth it. Can you imagine you’ve never seen your son play basketball and the first time you do it is in front of 70,000 people at this thing? I can’t even imagine what’s going to be going through her mind.”