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If you know his past, you know he deserved better
Published: 1/2/2012 3:39 PM
Last Modified: 1/2/2012 4:33 PM

Jean-Paul Olukemi deserved better.

Oklahoma State basketball coach Travis Ford confirmed Monday that Olukemi, a junior starter, will miss the 2012 portion of the season due to a torn ACL.

Who do I say he deserved better? That goes without saying since no college athlete deserves to sustain a season-ending knee injury. But Olukemi has already dealt with more than his share of adversity, so this latest bolt of bad news was an unnecessary evil.

I wanted to write a profile on Olukemi midway through last season and didn’t have any idea what the topic was going to be. So I went “fishing” and sent an email to his former junior college coach (David Ragland, now at Indiana State) and asked if there was anything I should know about Olukemi.

Ragland’s reply was this: “Ask him where he gets his passion for playing basketball and wanting to get better. What makes him do right away from the court when others around him may not be doing the right things? He graduated in three semesters at Vincennes, with As and Bs (to me, that was pretty amazing).

“He would always go to class, be there on time, get his work done. When he wasn’t doing that, he was always in the gym working on his game, working on his handle, working on his jump shot. He was always honest and loved honesty. When I told him he wasn’t working to his full potential and needed to do x, y, z, he did it. Usually prior to me telling him, he would start agreeing that he was not working to his full potential. However, we didn’t have those conversations much.

“Great kid, great work ethic, great mother.”

Armed with that intel, I sat down with Olukemi and asked him all of the above. He told me his past is what drive him to succeed. More specific? There were times when he was homeless during his childhood in California.

I asked for his mother’s phone number. When I called, she said she moved her family from shelters to motels to apartments. She said they were homeless two or three times and, when better options weren’t available, she and her children lived in the family car, sometimes for months at a time. She suggested watching the Will Smith movie “The Pursuit of Happyness” for insight into what they endured.

“I’m not going to lie,” Olukemi said during the interview last season. “I had it tough. I don’t like talking about it very much, really. But I still remember it and I look back on it and try to use that to just help me keep moving forward because I don’t ever want to have my family in situations like that.”

There’s a rule against cheering in press boxes. But I would be a liar if I said I wasn’t rooting for Olukemi to come back stronger than ever before from his knee injury and someday make enough money in professional basketball to take care of himself and his family.

Olukemi doesn't want sympathy for his past. He just wants better. He deserves better.


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Tulsa World sports writer Jimmie Tramel is a former class president at Locust Grove High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern State University with a journalism degree and, while attending college, was sports editor of the Pryor Daily Times. He joined the Tulsa World on Oct. 17, 1989, the same day an earthquake struck the World Series. He is the OSU basketball beat writer and a columnist and feature writer during football season. In 2007, he wrote a book about Oklahoma State football with former Cowboy coach Pat Jones.

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