Dad did not spare Sadiq Abdullahi for jumping wall to go pick balls at the Lagos Tennis Club. As a servant in the Ambassador Hamza Ahmadu household, the senior Abdullahi wanted his son to be educated enough.
Sadiq said : “My father did not approve my picking up ball because it kept me outside into the night and this affected my early education.”
His father’s boss, Ahmadu, was Principal Secretary to Head of State, Gen. Yakubu Gowon, and lived very close to the Lagos Lawn Tennis Club,Onikan. He had held the same position under Nigeria’s first military leader, Gen. Johnson Aguiyi Ironsi, who was assassinated on July 29, 1966.
But there was no separating the boy from the ball. Abdullahi repeated a class in Secondary school but killed two birds with one stone. He became a national champion, played at the Olympics, quit after the United States Open in 1989 and is today an adjunct professor of Education at the Florida International University, Miami.
Born in Jos eight months before the country’s independence in 1960, Abdullahi became a Lagosian early enough. From Holy Cross Catholic School between 1967 and 1972, he moved to Premier College, Yaba, from 1972 to 1975.
His father had to send him back to Kaduna, their state of origin. He was at St. Paul’s [Kufena] College until 1977 and had to repeat class five in 1978. Apparently tennis was taking more of school hours than academics.
Kufena College has a very strong sports back ground. In 1958, the school won the Davis Cup, for the best secondary school in soccer in the whole of Northern Region. Captain of that squad was Chukwuma Igweonu whose remains are in the morgue now in Anambra State, awaiting burial on September 18.
Igweonu did so well after leaving Kufena College that he made the first Green Eagles team to the African Nations Cup, Ghana ’63. He won the Challenge Cup with Port Harcourt Red Devils, 1963 and the Amachree Cup with Enugu Rangers in 1971.
By winning the Davis Cup in 1958, no one could have imagined that 30 years later, another great sportsman from Kufena would represent Nigeria in an international tennis competition known as the Davis Cup. That was exactly what Abdullahi did.
Before he mounted the rostrum, there had bee the first generation of players that included Herbert Oranye and Walter Obianwu. Those ones came after Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe.
The next generation of Thompson Onibokun, Lawrence Awopegba, Yemisi Allan, Patrick Obi, Gabriel Odudu, Elizabeth Ekong and Edward Agori looked beyond Nigeria. At the Lagos ’73 Second All Africa Games, Onibokun won silver in the Men’s singles after losing to Daudi of Egypt. 6-3, 6-2,6-2.
The pair of Awopegba and Allan also got a silver medal in the Men’s doubles. The gold went to the Egyptian duo of Daudi and Bassam with a 6-4,6-3, 6-2 victory.
The best of Nigerian tennis came in 1983 when Nduka Odizor, ‘The Duke’, got to the quarter finals of Wimbledon. He climbed to No.52 in the world on June 11, 1984. Abdullahi was ranked 262 on October 14, 1985.
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He became the Rangers International of Nigerian tennis reigning as national champion three times consecutively in 1986, 1987 and 1988. Abdullahi made his Olympic appearance at the Seoul ’88 Games.
Although he lost in the first round to Javier Sanchez of Spain, the man relishes knocking the ball with legendary Steffi Graff. That was 12 years after he had interacted with another legend, Arthur Ashe in Lagos.
Losing to Sanchez was no humiliation. The victor was world’s number one Junior in 1986 and won US Open singles and doubles same year. He also emerged from a family of tennis greats that included Emilio and Arantxa Sanchez Vicario.
Abdullahi has fond memories of popular Nigerian tournaments in the past like Ogbe Hard Courts, Dala Clay Courts, Okada Tennis and Lord Rumens. His favourite remains the Benin tourney.
” Ogbe Hard Courts was my favourite because I played there severally and the tournament was well organised”, he told me from his US base.
Abdullahi thinks tennis everyday and looks forward to a new chapter in the development of the game in Nigeria. “I am very much impressed with Sports minister Sunday Dare’s performance in his first year in office. I rate his performance at 90 per cent or A.”
His children are more into basketball. ” I have four biological children,Rasheeda,Fatima, Sadiq jnr. and Malik. I met my wife, Madam Claudine in graduate school at Florida International University,” Abdullahi added.
