Abuja, Nigeria, and Oulu, Finland \u2014 Off the field, Daniel \u201cThe Bull\u201d Amokachi rarely raises his voice. He speaks in a modulated, lyrical drawl, tilting his head up and to the side when he talks.<\/p>\n
I had written to him asking for a chat after missing him in Finland and he had invited me over to hang out at the Reiz Carlton, a modest hotel in Abuja\u2019s central business district.<\/p>\n
On a damp, gloomy evening, he signals me to join him at the pool bar in the company of friends.
\nAs he waits for his order of fries and sandwiches, he banters with the hotel staff in the sing-song Hausa language that rolls off his tongue with the ease of a native.<\/p>\n
He is at home in a tiny blue leather chair, shaped in a semicircle with ridiculously high arms. A tall, patterned fila in shades of browns and oranges is perched on his head. His bulging, tattooed muscles, normally visible in his many Instagram pictures, are hidden by the long sleeves of a powder-blue traditional kaftan that matched his trousers. Occasionally, he lowers his head, typing on his phone.<\/p>\n
Despite working some 5 000km away in Finland, Amokachi often finds time to come home to Nigeria \u2014 at least four times a year, he says, especially after the Finnish football season is over. His many brand commitments require his attention.<\/p>\n
So do his other responsibilities. \u201cThe bills are here,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s Christian and can\u2019t go two sentences without mentioning God\u2019s grace. But he comes home to predominantly Muslim Kaduna to hand out bags of rice during Muslim festive seasons such as Eid al Adha.<\/p>\n
And now, having been recently promoted to technical director at JS Hercules, the second-tier Finnish club he coaches, there will be more frequent visits, longer stays and the flexible hours will allow him to \u201cgalavant\u201d, he quips, flashing a gap-toothed smile.<\/p>\n
In another interview, Amokachi had vented his frustration with coaching in Finland where he described football as \u201ctoo nice\u201d.<\/p>\n
Sanjo Olutayo, a young coach with JS Hercules\u2019s junior team, who describes Amokachi as \u201can open guy\u201d, shares his pain. The level of aggressiveness and cockiness that is needed to go pro in football is missing, he tells me. Coaching in a country where ice hockey, and not football, is the number one sport is also tricky.<\/p>\n
Harsh winters
\nOn a recent August evening in Oulu, Olutayo pointed out JS Hercules\u2019 office and walked me past the Raatii stadium, a 4 000-capacity multipurpose stadium built in 1953, where Amokachi usually drills the players during the season.<\/p>\n
The sun, which stayed up until past 10, spilled orange light onto the surface of a lake next to the roadside as we walked.<\/p>\n
When Oulu-based JS Hercules approached Olutayo last year, Amokachi\u2019s presence as senior coach was one of the reasons he took it. The 24-year-old\u2019s first encounter with The Bull had involved a frustrated Amokachi yelling \u201ccoach, get behind that line!\u201d at him, he remembers fondly between fits of laughter. The conditions the team have to train in, he tells me, can certainly get one riled up.<\/p>\n
Temperatures in the small city north of Helsinki dip to dangerously low levels in the winter, making training sessions hard.<\/p>\n
Paul Obi, a JS Hercules striker who was scouted from Lagos three years ago, tells me getting through the dark winters is mentally tasking. When Amokachi himself arrived last fall, the temperature was -38\u2103 and he had bled through his nose.<\/p>\n
A day before, Nadia Amokachi, his wife, had asked him if he really wanted to do this, and he had shrugged it off with a \u201cWhy not?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFor a club in Europe to get a phone number and call a black coach from Africa is a grace on its own and you can never turn that down,\u201d Amokachi tells me, fiddling with his phone.<\/p>\n
He is a genuine African footballing superstar. His club career took him to Club Brugge, Everton and Besiktas, among others, and he was the driving force when Nigeria secured the most glittering result in its history: the gold medal at the Olympic Games in 1996. Amokachi, of course, scored in the final.<\/p>\n
He has lived the life, he reminisces. \u201cI did a lot of crazy stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
He owned a private jet and modelled for brands such as Donatella Versace and Hugo Boss. \u201cBut I\u2019m a grumpy old man now,\u201d he jokes with a shrug.<\/p>\n
An army brat, Amokachi was born to Tiv and Idoma parents originally from Benue in Nigeria\u2019s middle-belt region. The family lived all their life in Kaduna, a state in Northern Nigeria that practices sharia law and where celebrations such as Eid are rooted more in tradition than religion.<\/p>\n
Amokachi talks fondly of his father, a smart military man who understood what it would take to succeed in life and had only one agenda for his children \u2014 education. \u201cWhat we wore, what we ate, wasn\u2019t a priority.\u201d<\/p>\n
To fund the American-style education he wanted his children to have, his father erected a compound big enough to accommodate 18 paying tenants. Pa Amokachi died in August 2016.<\/p>\n
On Amokachi\u2019s WhatsApp profile is a black-and-white snapshot of a straight-faced man in military headgear. On his status, a simple message: \u201cYou will always be in me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Raging Bull
\nAmokachi doesn\u2019t like vegetable fillings in his sandwiches.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis one is oyinbo food,\u201d he grumbles to me, minutes after the bartender placed a platter of sandwiches and golden crisp fries on the rounded table between us.<\/p>\n
Back when he was on the field, he didn\u2019t like playing half-heartedly either. \u201cIf I\u2019m not giving 120%, it\u2019s not good enough for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is evident in the way he played. Watching Amokachi on the field was like watching an angry bull charge. It\u2019s different from the dance of his former teammate and fellow striker, Kanu Nwankwo, who was light, lithe and subtle \u2014 a long-legged butterfly man in green and white. Amokachi was a bullet, barrelling past defenders in a blur. Dribbling, falling and getting back up to net the ball from impossible angles.<\/p>\n
Often, talented players get discovered past their prime; the talent is there but age quickly catches up with them. Amokachi was one of the lucky ones who got discovered early on and who didn\u2019t need to cook up a phoney \u201cfootball age\u201d to comply with requirements in going pro.<\/p>\n
At 16, he got signed to Rancher\u2019s Bees, a local club in Nigeria. Even then, there was a way he played, a power he possessed on the field that forced people to pause, forced them to pay attention.<\/p>\n
Clemens Westerhof, a Dutchman and then Super Eagles coach, was certainly hooked. He got in touch one day in 1989 and convinced a doubtful Amokachi to join the senior team at 17. Amokachi would help his team secure a regional cup later that year.<\/p>\n
At the same age, when he was certain he wasn\u2019t meant to go the academic route, he quit studying law at the University of Texas, signed on with Club Brugge in Belgium and moved to Europe.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of us did not even know what we did,\u201d Amokachi says now, reflecting on Nigeria\u2019s gold win at the Atlanta \u201996 Olympics.<\/p>\n
He munches thoughtfully on his fries as though he was still trying to grasp the enormity of what the Dream Team had done all those years ago.<\/p>\n
Head coach Johannes Bonfrere, another Dutchman, had lined Amokachi up alongside other greats: Jay Jay Okocha, Sunday Oliseh, Celestine Babayaro, Emmanuel Amunike, Kanu Nwankwo. It turned out to be a line-up that would announce the arrival of African football on the world stage.<\/p>\n
Argentina stood no chance after Nigeria had beaten Brazil in the semis, Amokachi says. In the final game against Argentina, his goal, the second, seemed to defy physics \u2014 body facing north, legs kicking south \u2014 and he was enveloped by his jubilant teammates.<\/p>\n
At the final whistle \u2014 3-2 to Nigeria \u2014 the whole country went wild, relishing the distraction from the brutality of a military dictatorship led by General Sani Abacha.<\/p>\n
Back home in Kaduna, Pa Amokachi was a hero. \u201cPeople came to the house picked him up and went all over. They were celebrating, spending money. It wasn\u2019t a Nigerian moment, it was a continental [moment]. The way we celebrated in Nigeria, that\u2019s how they celebrated in Ghana, Ethiopia. That\u2019s how it was.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finding love
\nAmokachi was not looking for love when he found it. During a 1994 African Cup of Nations game in Tunisia, he saw a girl in the lobby of a hotel while waiting for his room to be ready. With the help of a translator, he told her he would like to get married.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was shocked, like, \u2018What is he talking about?\u2019 I told the translator to tell her that we want to see her parents tonight. We took her address and in the evening we went.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the house, they were welcomed and served.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told the dad why I was there. Told him I came to marry his daughter. He said, \u2018Do I know her?\u2019 I said, \u2018No, we met, but that\u2019s all.\u2019 He asked, \u2018Are you sure you know what you\u2019re saying?\u2019 I said, \u2018Yes.\u2019 We kept talking through a translator and then he called his wife. He told her, \u2018This crazy boy wants to marry your daughter.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then they called her [Nadia] and told her the same thing. Her father asked, \u2018Do you want to marry him?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d a young Nadia had said.<\/p>\n
One year later, the two got married.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe is a beautiful woman,\u201d Amokachi says without missing a beat when I asked why he chose to approach Nadia that way, before cracking up at his own forwardness. It was ordained, because he was usually too shy to pull something like that off, he says.<\/p>\n
The pair now have three children. Kalim and Nazim, their 22-year-old twins, are identical and have their father\u2019s gap-toothed smile. They also share Amokachi\u2019s passion for football; last year they signed on with JS Hercules after a brief stint with Turkish club Besiktas \u2014 the same club Amokachi had played for until his retirement.<\/p>\n
At first, the couple struggled because of language barriers, Amokachi says. \u201cI don\u2019t speak French, I don\u2019t speak Arabic. She doesn\u2019t speak English.\u201d<\/p>\n
So Nadia learned English.<\/p>\n
Amokachi\u2019s father was a big fan of their union. \u201cHe called her my queen till he passed away.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fall
\nTwo things caused Amokachi\u2019s eyes to water in the course of our chat. The first was the memory of the late Stephen Keshi, his former boss and Super Eagles captain who he had worked with first as a player and then later as coach.<\/p>\n
\u201cI met him way back. They were in their final years when we came in and he had always had that leadership quality.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amokachi had assisted Keshi in leading Nigeria to their African Cup of Nations win in 2013. Two decades ago, they had both won the same cup as players. They remain the only two to have achieved that double feat in football history. They had been close.<\/p>\n
When he talks of Keshi in one video interview, Amokachi pulls his cap low on his face and then buries his head in his arm, voice starting and stuttering. Before Keshi died in mid-2016, he had coached foreign national teams in Togo and Mali.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you want to learn stuff, you always look up those people pick one or two things and he has always been there.\u201d<\/p>\n
The second was his injury. I had resolved to ask Amokachi about it towards the end of the interview, but he brought it up in the first five minutes after we began to talk, and it came up almost everytime after.<\/p>\n
\u201cTell me about the injury,\u201d I finally say.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2019Ahh!\u201d he grunts. He throws his head back and looks away, eyes narrowing, as though the mere thought brings him unseen physical pain.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was not my wanting, of course, to stop at an early age,\u201d he says after a long pause. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t what I wanted, it wasn\u2019t what the fans wanted, it wasn\u2019t what Nigeria wanted but I just had to let it go.\u201d<\/p>\n
The thing about great things and great careers is that they have to come to an end. For Amokachi, the end had snuck up on him a decade too soon. Right before a 1998 World Cup match with Spain, a match he was supposed to captain, he had suffered an injury to his knee.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just happened,\u201d he says, his tone heavy with regret. \u201cThe bad part was it happened in training. That\u2019s what made me furious. In training, not when I was on the field playing a game. I stumbled with one of the players and that was it.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the time, 25-year-old Amokachi had struggled with accepting that it was over. He played for one more season, battling excruciating pain after a corrective surgery gone wrong, leaving cartilage in his knee grating against each other.<\/p>\n
In 2001, after failing several medical tests in Europe, he joined the Colorado Rapids for pre-season training. But one day after 9\/11 had happened, he just couldn\u2019t do it anymore \u2014 not the tests, not the rejections, not the false hopes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wasn\u2019t happy with what I was giving on the field. The way I play on a bad day, I give 120%. If I don\u2019t give that, it\u2019s not good enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was the end of an era. After some 10 glorious years on the field, the striker knew it was time to exit. \u201cI just decided that I shouldn\u2019t hold back any team I play for. I gave up.\u201d<\/p>\n
New chapter
\nThese days, when he\u2019s not drilling his team in minus 38-degree weather, Amokachi is home in Nigeria making brand videos or lobbying for African sides.<\/p>\n
Earlier in 2018, Amokachi gave an impassioned speech before Fifa officials in support of Morocco\u2019s bid to host the 2026 World Cup.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor Africans, football is life, football is religion,\u201d he had said, looking suave in a dark blue suit.<\/p>\n
Just recently, he posted a commercial he had done for a betting company, encouraging his fans to sign up. He also runs One Child, One Pen, his charity organisation.<\/p>\n
The thing about legends like Amokachi is that they stumble, they fall, but they don\u2019t stay down. Barely five years after his retirement, Amokachi was back on the pitch, a new force coaching local sides such as Nassarawa United and Ifeanyi Ubah to major wins, as well as helping out with the national team. His transitioning from player to coach was way easier than he had initially thought.<\/p>\n
A deeply religious man, Amokachi believes faith saw him through. \u201cI\u2019m still enjoying it. I don\u2019t allow nothing to stress my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is still one thing left for him to achieve, however. His great ambition is to coach the Super Eagles to another major win. He\u2019s in love with the crop of players in the team right now and he\u2019s certain that, under his tutorship, Nigerian football would soar once more.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I end up coaching this team, we will win what Nigeria has never won before.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is, in fact, ordained, he says \u2014 and who would bet against him?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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