Ikem Ekwonu woke up the morning of the first round of the NFL draft and felt nervous for the first time in as long as he could remember. The gravity of the day finally hit him: "Like, dang," he said later, recalling his thoughts. "This is really crazy. My whole life is about to change."
For a little while, at least, there were people to see and things to do. There was a brief pre-draft meeting with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Ekwonu then met Thomas Davis, the former Carolina Panthers linebacker whose jersey Ekwonu wore as a kid, growing up in Charlotte.
Then suddenly there was nothing to do but wait. Ekwonu decided to get dressed. He put on his suit at around noon Las Vegas time, a good five hours before the draft was set to begin. Like most prospects who'd traveled to hear their names called, and be there in person to experience the fulfillment of a longtime goal, Ekwonu had put a lot of thought into his outfit.
He made sure to include certain symbolic touches: a chain featuring "704," his hometown area code, and "Ickey," which is half-nickname and half on-field-alter-ego. Red bottom shoes, in honor of his time as an all-ACC left tackle at N.C. State. And, starting on the left lapel of his suit jacket, green and white stripes in homage to the Nigerian flag.
All of it represented "stories about my life," Ekwonu said later, and the green and white stripes were especially significant given the story they told. Ekwonu, along with his two older siblings and a twin brother who plays football at Notre Dame, is among the first generation of his family to have been born in the United States. His parents immigrated here from Nigeria.
Before the draft, everyone — his mom and dad, his siblings, his college coaches and even ones from his days at Providence Day School in Charlotte — had gathered in Las Vegas to be with Ekwonu for his moment. It was an American dream come to life: the son of Nigerian-born parents on the cusp of becoming a top-10 NFL draft pick; an instant millionaire at the top of his profession.
When Ekwonu put on his suit with the green and white stripes, the look surprised and delighted his father. Dr. T.J. Ekwonu is a Charlotte-area physician who played college basketball in Nigeria and attended medical school there before making his way to America. When the older Ekwonu saw his son's draft-night outfit for the first time, "I didn't really have to say anything," he said.
"I'm sure I had a big smile on my face. ... It's like, this guy's been paying attention to what I've been saying. He knows where he comes from."
When the Panthers selected Ikem Ekwonu with the sixth overall selection — "the best-case scenario for us," general manager Scott Fitterer said the night of the draft, given nobody expected Ekwonu to remain through the first five picks — the obvious storyline emerged immediately: Here was a Charlotte native picked in the top 10 by his hometown team.
Ekwonu had grown up going to the occasional Panthers game, and had end zone seats with his dad and twin brother, Osita, when Carolina defeated the Arizona Cardinals to win the NFC Championship Game in 2016. He could name his favorite restaurants in Charlotte and the city was a part of a lot of smaller childhood memories, like the time he went to a festival in a park near his family home and tried fried Oreos for the first time. Ekwonu could still recall the day.
Now he was coming home to play in the NFL. Yet in another way, home, to Ekwonu, was also thousands of miles and an ocean away. It was back in Nigeria. His father left in the 1990s but the lessons of his homeland, and journey, never left him. He carried them to London, early in his career in medicine, and then to the United States, and then instilled his experience into his children.
Now one of them was coming home but Ekwonu's relatively short journey from unheralded college prospect to N.C. State to top-10 NFL draft pick cannot be fully told without understanding the longer familial journey from Nigeria. The day after the draft, a reporter asked Ekwonu what he preferred to be called: Ikem (pronounced Ee-kem) or Ickey, which rhymes with sticky.
Ekwonu said he was OK with either, that "I guess on the field, I'm more Ickey" but, "obviously I have pride in my name. The roots of it." And there was a story there, too, that began a world away.
A family of doers
Long before he became a doctor, T.J. Ekwonu, who also goes by Tagbo, a shortened version of his first name, grew up in Enugu, a city of more than 700,000 people in southeastern Nigeria. The country gained its independence in 1960 but Enugu, like a lot of cities, became a battleground during the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s and early '70s.
As a child, T.J. Ekwonu found comfort in literature and he was 11 when he first read Things Fall Apart. The book, by prominent Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, details the effects of European colonialism on Nigerian tradition and culture, and among its stories is that of a character named Ikemefuna, who in the novel is a 15-year-old boy seeking to navigate tumultuous circumstances.
"I liked the character," said Ekwonu, adding that he has read Things Fall Apart about 20 times, including as recently as three years ago. "He was a very strong character in the book. And hard-working ... industrious."
Decades later, when Ekwonu and his wife welcomed twins, they named one of them after Ikemefuna. Soon enough his name became informally shortened to Ikem and then others took to calling him Ickey. In one of his two youngest sons, though, T.J. Ekwonu still sees the characteristics that inspired his name.
He sees the industriousness. The proclivity to overcome his circumstances with an unrelenting work ethic. In English, the name Ikemefuna roughly translates to "my strength will not be in vain." In a literal sense, it fits the 6-foot-4, 310-pound man the Panthers selected sixth overall in the NFL draft. In a more figurative sense, it fits his journey and the promise of his family's legacy.
Ikem Ekwonu entered the world with a first name that portended a certain kind of destiny. His parents, meanwhile, did their best to make sure he remained on track to fulfill it. The Ekwonus are a family of doers, so much so that their latest collective achievement — Ikem becoming a top-10 NFL draft pick — doesn't stand out as much as it blends into a long list of family accomplishments.
There's Dr. T.J. Ekwonu, who learned to practice medicine in his homeland before beginning a successful family medicine career in Charlotte. His wife, Amaka, immigrated from Nigeria to the United States as a teenager, after she became a track star back home. Ikem's older sister is in medical school at the University of Chicago; his older brother is an animator who graduated from the prestigious Savannah College of Art and Design; his twin brother is a linebacker at Notre Dame.
Ikem and his siblings, their father said, "saw how hard we worked, and where it got us," and they grew up, too, with an understanding of why T.J. and his wife came to the United States in the first place. It wasn't necessarily that life in Nigeria had been especially difficult — T.J. grew up in what he described as a middle-class Nigerian home, with positive role models who directed him toward his life in medicine — as much as the potential they saw in America.
"The U.S. has always been a beacon of light for people from different parts of the world," T.J. Ekwonu said. "Which is why we came. ... If you work hard, you get rewarded.
"I know that, I see that."
It was there when he paused and said, "We understand the complex American history and American past. But I think that, as immigrants, we recognize that but also come from a place that had its own issues."
About a decade ago, T.J. said, he and Amaka took their children back to Nigeria for a two-week visit. It included a large family gathering, a chance to meet cousins and grandparents and to experience the culture and authentic Nigerian cuisine and to "see what life is like," T.J. said. It offered Ikem and his siblings a glimpse of where the family had come from and perhaps a fuller understanding of why their parents had left and what they sought to find.
In Nigeria, young people grow up with the same kind of sporting dreams they do in America, but those dreams are often centered on soccer or basketball or sports other than football, which "is probably number 20" in Nigeria in terms of popularity, T.J. Ekwonu said with a laugh. At first he didn't allow Ikem and his twin brother to play the game.
A YMCA flag football league provided a taste, though, and soon Ikem and Osita convinced their parents to allow them to play tackle football. They both developed into college prospects, though Osita ranked among the top-five prospects in the state in the class of 2019, according to 247sports. Ikem, meanwhile, ranked 26th. He earned offers from Harvard and Yale and Georgia Tech and Charlotte and Appalachian State, among others, and he committed early to N.C. State.
Sometimes, when a bigger school eventually came calling, Ikem came to sense an ulterior motive, that the school might've only been talking with him in hopes of becoming closer to his brother. And that, his father said, "pissed him off, I think."
"He didn't feel happy about it," the elder Ekwonu said. "But he's a guy that doesn't let those things get him down" and Ikem, from a family of doers, went to work to prove himself more than he already had.
Ickey and Ikem
The people closest to Ikem Ekwonu rave about his energy and his positivity and his thoughtfulness. John Garrison, Ekwonu's position coach at N.C. State, said recently that he couldn't recall Ekwonu ever having a bad day. A bad moment, maybe, or the inevitable bad play, sure — but "I've never seen anything take his joy," Garrison said.
Grant Gibson, the Wolfpack center, could tell stories about Ekwonu's jovial nature and his sense of humor, or one about the time last fall when Ekwonu brought in a Nigerian dish for everyone on the offensive line to try and share. Gibson only remembered that it contained goat meat and that it tasted quite good, he said, and that it went quickly.
That's part of the Ekwonu whom Gibson came to know: upbeat, generous, proud of his heritage.
Then there was another part, too, the one Ekwonu alluded to when he noted that on the field he's more Ickey then Ikem. Gibson put it like this: "This is a guy, six days out of the week, he laughs and jokes. And then the last day of the week that he doesn't joke is game day. Like we know on game day, don't mess with Ickey."
Ickey and Ikem reside in the same body and yet they are different people. Ikem is a charismatic gentleman, easy to laugh and to smile, and he connected quickly with Fitterer, the Panthers' general manager, and head coach Matt Rhule, who left a pre-draft meeting with Ekwonu thinking, "Like wow," he said. "That's a grown man." Ickey, meanwhile, wants to put his opponents on their backs.
During a press conference the day after the draft, Ekwonu at least three times used the word "violent," or a variation thereof, to describe his approach on the field. He'd used the same word the night before, about 30 minutes after Goodell called his name.
"Violence, physicality, strength," Ekwonu said, describing his game, and a few moments later he was naming his favorite hometown restaurants and recalling the time he'd first tasted fried Oreos. The two versions of himself complemented each other and without the more well-rounded Ikem it was fair to wonder whether Ickey would've come to exist.
And yet they were more similar, perhaps, than anyone knew. In football, Ekwonu said, he'd learned to play "with everything you have, with every single emotion, every fiber of your being, every time you're on the field." The same philosophy applied, in a different way, in the classroom, where Ekwonu made the Dean's List at N.C. State, and in high school wrestling and even at home, where his parents still made him do his chores.
"Every time I come home I've got to take the trash out," he said, "(and) do the dishes like I never left. So I'm sure that's not going to change."
So many other things had, though, in the past few years. For one, Ekwonu had arrived at N.C. State as a mostly anonymous prospect and quickly defied the modest expectations that surrounded him. From his first preseason camp, Gibson said, Ekwonu "was out here dominating older guys." And from the first college game Ekwonu started, midway through his freshman season against Syracuse, Garrison was wishing he'd started him sooner.
The first play of his first start, Ekwonu "pancaked the guy like five yards down the field," Gibson said. He went on: "We thought that a young player like that shouldn't be able to just toss grown men like that. As the years went on, it kept happening and happening."
Greater aspirations
It was "obviously a pretty big mistake," Garrison said, for Ekwonu to have been overlooked the way he was during his days at Providence Day. That was before Ekwonu more fully developed what Garrison described as "old-man strength," yes, but it was also before Ekwonu realized what might be possible.
After his freshman year at N.C. State, Garrison met with Ekwonu the way he met with all of his offensive linemen for a discussion about goals. Ekwonu's loftiest, at the time, was to become an all-ACC player. As Garrison recalled the moment recently, he stopped Ekwonu midway through their talk.
"I was like, 'Let's start this over,' " Garrison said, and he guided Ekwonu to greater aspirations: All-American recognition and winning the Jacobs Trophy, awarded to the ACC's best offensive lineman, and becoming a first-round NFL draft pick.
"Pretty amazing," Garrison said, about two and a half years later, that Ekwonu accomplished all of those aspirations. Over the phone, Garrison sounded a little hoarse. It was the morning after the draft and Garrison was in Las Vegas, like everyone else close to Ekwonu, and "not having that big jovial guy" to coach anymore — "It kills me," Garrison said. His overriding emotion was pride.
It was the same thing all of Ekwonu's former coaches felt, and what his family felt, too, after being a part of his journey. It was the same thing Ekwonu's family felt back in Nigeria upon watching the draft on the other side of the world. When the Panthers selected Ekwonu the cameras showed part of the reaction, the embraces with family and those present in Las Vegas.
Soon, T.J. Ekwonu's phone began buzzing with texts from back home, he said, friends and other family members sending him congratulatory messages and video clips of a moment he'd experienced live. "Home," to Ekwonu, represented a couple of different places. Ikem, or Ickey, saluted both on the biggest night of his life. There was the "704" he wore around his neck. And the green and white of the Nigerian flag he wore on his shoulders.
He'd come a long way to get where he's going. His parents had come even farther to allow him the chance.
