Emeka Okafor’s iconic No. 50 will become a permanent part of the furnishings at Gampel Pavilion Wednesday night, a fitting honor for a player who led UConn to a national championship and went on to success in the NBA.
But his consequential three years at UConn left its mark elsewhere on campus.
This will not be his last ceremony.
“It really did a lot for UConn’s prestige to have such a good student that was also a great basketball player,” says Tom O’Brien, professor emeritus with the School of Business, and Okafor’s academic advisor back in the day, “and have everybody know about it. He deserves everything he’s getting.”
Okafor was at UConn for three seasons, and it would be hard to find another player who made so much of their time in Storrs, never wasting a waking moment. He graduated graduated magna cum laude with his degree in finance in three years with a 3.8 GPA, and O’Brien was a bit perplexed about the 0.2 points that separated Okafor from academic perfection.
Dom Amore: On an unusual Gampel night, UConn men honored one-of-a-kind Hasheem Thabeet
His jersey will join Ray Allen, Rip Hamilton, Rebecca Lobo, Swin Cash and Sue Bird’s atop Gampel during the game against Creighton Wednesday night. On April 24, Okafor, 43, will be among five new inductees into the UConn Business Hall of Fame in Hartford. A unique dual-achievement for a one-of-a-kind alum, a renaissance man.
“He didn’t sleep a whole lot,” says Ted Taigen, who was the men’s basketball academic advisor during Emeka’s time as student and athlete. “Three years in the difficult curriculum of business. And as part of that journey, and the thing I thought was amazing, for Emeka, he only needed about four hours of sleep a night. He would study and work and push himself and be on the road somewhere, and he’d be walking around at 3 in the morning, he couldn’t sleep. That contributed to his ability to get so much done. He was a remarkable student.”
What Okafor, 6 feet 10, did on the basketball court after arriving from Houston in 2001 speaks for itself, and let’s let some of those accomplishments repeat themselves for a moment. In 103 college games, he averaged 13.8 points. 10.6 rebounds and 4.3 blocks per game, the latter number not quite matched even by 7-foot-3 Hasheem Thabeet, who joined Okafor in the Huskies of Honor last Saturday. The Huskies were 83-23 over Okafor’s career, which culminated with national championship in 2004. He was a consensus All-American that third and final season, Big East player of the year, national defensive player of the year and Most Outstanding Player in the NCAA Tournament.
“Emeka didn’t just want to know things,” coach Jim Calhoun said, “he wanted to know why.”
That curiosity carried over into the classroom. He’s the only men’s basketball player to be an Academic All-American and a consensus player of the year in the same season.
“He had all A’s his entire three years of college with the exception of one course in my department, finance course,” O’Brien remembers. “I was real good friends with the professor and I went to talk to him, ‘What happened?’ Because Emeka, the word ‘memorize’ is not the correct word, but dominate. He had that capacity to ace courses. (The professor) said, ‘well, he didn’t show up for a lot of classes,’ and we would always talk in the department about whether someone should be penalized for that if he could answer all the questions. I had to let it go, it was his prerogative to do that. But besides all the studying he did, and he had to go to basketball practice all the time and travel, but he also went at night into Hartford, to hospitals, and paid calls on kids. He did all this community service that I never heard anyone ever talk about. So for him to be such an outstanding student and basketball player, you just didn’t know where he gets the hours to have done it all.”
Dom Amore’s Sunday Read: Here is Emeka Okafor’s second act; UConn stars help Jamaica recovery, more
Taigen, who was at UConn for 32 years, compares Okafor as student and athlete, to Leah Curl, women’s basketball player who graduated in 1985, went on to Johns Hopkins and is still head orthopedic surgeon for the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens.
“She is a fabulous success story for UConn, too,” Taigen says. “She’s the one that was involved in athletics that I always thought was so similar to Emeka.”
O’Brien was reminded of another famous scholar-athlete.
“I’ve never heard of anybody graduating in three years from UConn as a business major,” O’Brien says, “He took extra courses, and I don’t know what his other curriculum was, but I don’t expect it was basket weaving. He wanted an education. He was so good, that he brought up memories of Bill Bradley. Now, UConn may not be Princeton, but I thought Emeka could at least apply for a Rhodes Scholarship. I asked him if he had any aspirations in that regard, and he said, ‘no, my objective as a finance major is to learn how to manage a lot of money.’ He was being honest, I didn’t get it at first, but he was planning to make a lot of money as a pro basketball player.”
“Dollar Bill” Bradley went on to a Hall of Fame career with the Knicks and became a U.S. Senator. Indeed, Okafor declared for the NBA Draft, was picked second overall by Charlotte in 2004, and went on become Millions-of-Dollars Emeka, earning more than $90 million over his 10-year career in the league and he all the expertise he needed to manage his fortune. At UConn, he was in an investment club, where students are allowed to make investment decision with a pool of money allocated for that purpose.
Dom Amore: What’s in a number? UConn women raise the perfect ’10’ to the rafters at Gampel Pavilion
Okafor did all of this in the days before online courses, traveling the country with Calhoun’s teams that went deep in the NCAA Tournament, while carrying the heavy course loads required to complete the academic job in three years. “And it always seemed so effortless for him,” Taigen says.
Back injuries curtailed Okafor’s NBA career, which started with a Rookie of the Year award, but he overcame them to make a comeback after a three-year absence and finish playing on his terms in 2018. Husband and father of two, he’s launched a new career as college basketball analyst for ESPN, characteristically throwing himself into it.
For Calhoun, Okafor has always been as close to perfection as it gets.
“Every once in a while, a player comes along who is everything you’d want a player to be,” Calhoun said. “Whether it be a great player, one of the greatest I ever coached, great student and great person. I feel fortunate to be able to take his jersey Wednesday night and give it to ‘Mek and let him know that we’re not just going to remember him tomorrow, but for as long as we play basketball at UConn.”
