Ravens rookie finds way from Zambia, JMU to NFL
His mother had urged him to always have a backup plan, but John Daka was stuck. He’d told her he was going to play in the NFL one day, but now that dream seemed more impossible than inevitable — as far away as Zambia, the homeland he couldn’t really remember.
What could he do? Transferring down a level for the 2018 season, from James Madison to a Division II school, would feel like giving up. Enrolling at another school, without a scholarship to cover his tuition, wouldn’t be fair to his mother. She had already given him so much. Remaining with the Dukes wouldn’t be easy; his relationship with the staff was strained.
“I was just, like, lost,” Daka recalled thinking last week. He texted his high school coach, who’d been gauging schools’ interest in him. He said he was going to stick around at JMU. It was the right thing to do. It was the hard thing to do. His mother had left home almost two decades earlier in search of a better life for her family. Now he would have to summon her courage, her conviction, to do the same.
“I just bucked up, made a decision and said, ‘I’m going all or nothing. This is the only thing,’ ” Daka said. “Honestly, it was like, at that moment, I was going to be successful or I’m going to die trying. It might sound serious, but that was literally my mindset.”
Two years later, Daka’s vision of American exceptionalism — “I’m going to chase what I love because my perception of the United States was that you could do that” — has come to life. After a recordbreaking career as a Dukes defensive end, Daka signed with the Baltimore Ravens as an undrafted free agent. According to the Zambian embassy, Daka is the first player from the south-central African country to make it to the NFL.
But Zambia’s place in the sport’s history, like Daka’s path to glory, is more complicated than that.
Fifty years before Daka, there was Howard Mwikuta. Born in 1941 in what was then known as Northern Rhodesia, a British protectorate until its 1964 independence, Mwikuta emerged as a standout soccer player. But in 1970, after three years in American soccer leagues, he joined the Dallas Cowboys as a kicker. The first nativeborn African to be signed and play in the modern NFL, he was cut before the season started and never played again.
That Daka would follow him all these years later is no surprise. He
The dying man greets his visitors with a smile. “C’mon in,” he says, extending a grip made strong by 25 years of catching — for the Red Sox of the old Phoebus Pony League to the New York Yankees. His left hand rests clenched near his waist, immobile.
“We can go sit in the sun.” Stepping confidently with his right foot, but sliding the stiff left side of his body along, Johnny Oates plods through his living room. He often supports himself on furniture. It’s what the brain tumor and operation has done to him.
Oates, 56, leads us through his humble, ranchstyle house with a view of Lake Chesdin, near Petersburg. It’s the house his son, Andy, convinced him to buy six years ago because the fish just had to be caught.
His walk ends on a glassenclosed porch bathed in
Daka earns reward for sticking it out, seeks to make impact as pass rusher