How a Sudanese man, likely almost 30, ended up playing high school basketball in Windsor

Share

'It's become a circus." That's the first thing you hear when the video link flickers to life.

It isn't clear who's speaking, but they're right. The Windsor office of the Canada Border Services Agency isn't used to holding international media events. But now they have Jonathan Nicola in custody.

Extra chairs are secured for the reporters. It's Tuesday; this is Nicola's second hearing before the Immigration and Refugee Board, and his first since becoming famous everywhere with an Internet connection.

He is the South Sudanese man who spent the past winter impersonating a 17-year-old and playing basketball for a Catholic high school in Windsor, Ont. Nicola is in custody because his age is likely closer to 30.

When everyone is seated – the reporters, the local South Sudanese pastor, the government lawyer, the basketball coach – Nicola enters the room, stooping slightly as he passes through the door.

He is enormous, and still his orange jumpsuit hangs loosely on his body. A row of sutures at the waist suggest that the garment may have been stitched together from two smaller jumpsuits.

It is hard to fathom how anyone took this man for a teenager. His hardened, weary features suggest middle age; so does his hairline.

And yet it's also immediately clear why so many people were willing to believe him – Nicola looks like he would be very good at basketball.

Everything about the man is long. He's 6 feet 9 inches, but his wingspan is reported as 7-foot-4. His legs are stork-like and his wrists are supple. His shoe size is 16. His fingers are the kind that can bend independently in three places.

As he listens to the judge, Nicola perches his chin in those long digits, and it's possible to picture how easily he must manipulate a basketball.

Nicola seems dazed during the short hearing. He answers "yes" (to whether he understands the presiding board member) and "no" (to whether he has anything to say for himself).

His only polysyllabic reply is to a question about whether he has a lawyer.

"Yes, I have. But he can't come today."

With his detention upheld on the grounds that he continues to present a flight risk, Nicola is escorted out of the room. Even stooping as he passes through the door again, he looms over the guard.

Facts are sometimes a bit hazy

There's something prismatic about Nicola. As they pass through him, simple questions – of identity, fact, responsibility, right and wrong – erupt into rainbows of interpretation.

The question of how to characterize his story has been treated, at various times, as a farce, a tragedy, a scandal and a parable.

The matter of what to call him pulls people in all kinds of different directions, too. "Kid" or "man"? Jonny, Jonathan, Mr. Nicola? Or – as in the transcript of his hearing – the "Person Concerned"?

And then you get to the question of how to look at him, morally. Is he a victim of injustice ("Free Jonny" one of his teammates cried); a gentle giant who made a mistake; a surrogate son who's hard to stay mad at (roughly the feeling of his coach); or a compulsive liar who will stop at nothing to enter North America illegally?

Those who have seen him play basketball can't even agree on how good he is: it depends on how old they thought he was, and when they saw him.

The wheels were already in motion

The facts are sometimes a bit hazy in Nicola's story, but it goes something like this:

Last summer, the Catholic Central High School basketball team, a powerhouse program in the city, began boasting to opposing players about a new guy it was getting for the coming season. It said he was 6-foot-9 and African.

"I didn't believe them," said Anthony Zrvnar, the starting centre for St. Anne's, a perennial Catholic Central rival.

Zrvnar didn't have to believe them – the wheels were already in motion.

What ensued was in many ways typical of the new international basketball economy, which has been churning rumour and grainy video and faith into professional hoops contracts for decades, but only recently alighted on Africa as a veritable Athabasca of untapped talent.

Pete Cusumano, the gritty, streetwise, and widely respected coach of Catholic Central, got a call from a man named Deng D'Awol. D'Awol, a former U.S. college player from Sudan, had seen Nicola play back home and came away impressed. He was referred to Cusumano by Greg Dole, a Canadian scout whose bloodhound nose for obscure foreign players had helped bring Brazilians such as Nene and Leandro Barbosa to the NBA.

Catholic Central seemed like a natural destination for the young man.

Fuelled by Cusumano's hard-earned basketball savvy – he had been coaching at the school for nearly 30 years – the program had earned a reputation for sending kids to play their college ball in the States.

Cusumano is also known as a skillful and kindly shepherd of foreign-born players.

Catholic Central has the only ESL program in its school board, so immigrant kids are funnelled its way.

When he went to pick up Nicola at Toronto's Pearson airport on Nov. 23, the coach brought another Sudanese student to make the newcomer feel welcome. He remembers the date, Cusumano says, because it changed his life.

There Nicola stood in the arrivals lounge. The coach was expecting a 16-year-old – perhaps baby-faced, or gawky, or thin. Instead, his first thought on seeing Nicola was how old he looked.

At first, there were ways to rationalize this fact, which in retrospect seems so glaring. For one thing, there was the paperwork. Nicola had a passport, immunization records and a student visa from the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi, all of which seemed legit. (The High Commission did not respond to a request for comment.)

And then there was cultural sensitivity, at giving Nicola the benefit of the doubt, which even now seems hard to fault.

"We were told that it's not uncommon for kids coming out of South Sudan, with the harsh sun and the harsh situation, to look older than their age," Cusumano said.

The coach had arranged for Nicola to stay with him through a program that connects Canadian families with foreign students, and the young man was from the beginning an impeccable house guest, helping with the laundry and evincing a quaint fascination with the comforts of Western life.

The first thing he asked Cusumano was whether he could drink the tap water. His house in South Sudan, Nicola said, was about the size of his host's living room. And the ready supply of electricity was a novelty: in Juba, the South Sudanese capital, only families with a generator and plenty of diesel fuel could turn the lights on when they liked.

And with South Sudan, the poverty is really secondary to the war. With a few brief interruptions, bloody civil conflict has ground on throughout Nicola's life, no matter when it began.

'He was a cool guy'

Despite the horror of what he was fleeing, Nicola seems to have adapted quickly to the life of a Canadian teenager. Patricia Jeppo, whose locker was next to his, remembers Jonathan being on his phone all the time, scanning Instagram. (His handle was apparently half_man_half_amazing31).

"He was a cool guy," said Marcus Pierce, a Grade 12 student. "Never disrespectful. Quiet."

Since his arrest, some have wondered whether Nicola had a girlfriend at the school, a disturbing prospect given his likely age. Cusumano, and several school friends, denied that this was the case.

Basketball soon consumed Nicola's life in Windsor. Within days of arriving in Canada, he was playing in the annual Freeds tournament against some of the country's best high school teams. A scout named Elias Sbiet was on hand and remembers being suspicious about Nicola's age, but impressed by his physique.

"There was a physical ability there, and the physicals checked out for me as a scout," he said.

"I believe he had 10 [points] and 10[rebounds] in one of the games I watched, maybe two blocks. That was off just being plunked in and see what you can do."

If Nicola's game was "raw," his physical advantage over other high school kids was often overwhelming. During a Dec. 3 game against the Massey Mustangs, the footage of which is on YouTube, Nicola takes the opening tipoff with ridiculous ease, leaping above a skinny kid who can't be more than six feet. Then, on the team's first trip down the floor, he sets himself up in the post, towering over his defender and waving his arms manically. When an entry pass finally comes his way, Nicola promptly dribbles the ball off his shin.

On the next defensive stand, however, you can see why Catholic Central was starting him, and why scouts were already writing little exclamatory things about him in their notebooks. The Mustangs have a fast break and look set to score easily. But with a knock-kneed stride, Nicola comes racing back down the court and flails at the guard's layup, not blocking it, but scaring the player into missing badly. Grabbing the rebound, he kicks his legs out and juts his elbows. His body – sinewy, strong, and vast – looks a full generation older than those of the other nine boys on the floor.

His body always held clues

Nicola's body is the only thing about him that doesn't seem to act as a prism – that doesn't refract the light of people's inquiries so much as absorb it. People – scouts, opposing coaches, journalists – have a way of falling into creepily anatomical descriptions of the young man. You hear about his teeth, how their solidity suggests his age; you even hear speculation about his bone density.

But while the colour of his skin can make the historical echoes of this form of assessment shade into the sinister, it is hard to avoid in Nicola's case. The truth is, his body always held clues.

Zrvnar, the rival big man for St. Anne's, remembers having doubts about Nicola's age when he noticed flecks of grey in his beard. Guarding him in the post also offered hints. At 6-foot-7 and well built, Zrvnar is no pipsqueak. But he was shocked by Nicola's strength and aggression, which left bruises on the younger man's arms the first time they played.

"It was man strength," he said.

That adult musculature grew into a powerful force on the court as it increasingly became paired with a sound basketball mind. By the time of the OFSAA tournament in early March, Nicola was playing at another level.

By this point, Ontario Basketball had flagged him as a prospect for the province's Under-17 team. Tariq Sbiet, Elias's brother and fellow scout, had placed Nicola among his top 20 prospects for the 2018 college class, and thought he had the potential to play in an elite NCAA conference such as the Big Ten.

"Everything was checking out when I watched him," said the scout.

A story unravels

But even as Nicola built up his young career bit by bit, and with remarkable speed, its foundations were starting to crumble. In December, just a month after arriving in Canada, Cusumano took his new player to the U.S. consulate in Toronto to secure a travel visa for a team tour through Michigan. As part of his application, Nicola was fingerprinted and gave his birth date as Nov. 25, 1998.

On Jan. 6, Nicola was called back to the consulate for an interview. Officials there told him that his request for a visa had been denied. They also told him that his fingerprints from December matched those of a man with the same name who had applied for refugee status in the United States nine years earlier, using a birth date of Nov. 1, 1986.

It is not clear when Cusumano learned of Nicola's rejection, or the fact that he appeared to be 29 years old. But the new arrival did not accompany his team to Michigan. And according to the transcript of Nicola's first detention hearing earlier this month, the U.S. consulate also sent a rejection letter, which presumably would have arrived at Cusumano's address, where Nicola was staying. Cusumano declined to answer questions on the subject.

In any case, as Nicola played out the rest of the season, the CBSA began investigating. When it asked Windsor police to compare the fingerprints he submitted during his 2007 refugee status application to the prints he gave to the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi last year, there was a match.

On April 15, border officials arranged for Nicola to be called to the principal's office at Catholic Central – a final moment, it now seems, of his life as a North American teen – where he was arrested and discreetly removed from the school. Nicola would spend the night in Windsor's South West Detention Centre.

The discovery that unravelled his scheme came just six weeks after he had arrived. And now he was in jail for his trouble.

Nicola lasted about five months – a full basketball season – living as someone 12 years younger than his biological age, all the while flaunting a grown-man body, in a sleeveless Comets uniform, that gave him away to nearly everyone he crossed paths with.

What happens to him now?

In his detention hearing on April 19, Nicola sounds distraught, almost hysterical. He worries what his mother will think. He asks to be sent back to South Sudan. At one point he even seems to describe suicidal thoughts.

Still, the hearing contained small victories for him, in that it went strangely and, perhaps, frustratingly for the officials who presided over it. In the transcript, their terminology keeps encountering the vagueness of life in an impoverished, war-ravaged, recently invented country, as related in broken English and at a high emotional pitch. Reading the transcript is like watching hands grasping at smoke. Things that are ostensibly stated for the record actually grow vaguer over the course of the hearing: where he was born; his age; his parents' social status; the name of the man who filled out his visa application; and what happens to him now. There are probably others.

Kelly Cutting, the lawyer representing the CBSA, states that Nicola was born in Saudi Arabia, where his father now works – but without a credible birth certificate, and in the general documentary void of this whole situation, you're left wondering.

And then Cutting says that because their children were born in Saudi Arabia, and because the father is a mechanical engineer, Nicola's parents should be "sophisticated" enough to know their son's date of birth, which Nicola says they do not.

But when you ask someone who's Sudanese, such as Rev. Nicholas Mauro-Ika of St. Alphonsus Church in downtown Windsor, what it means to be an "engineer" in South Sudan is "nothing at all."

"In some cases, in Africa an engineer can be anybody else. If you work in petroleum field, or you work in any factory, and you happen to be promoted to be a supervisor, in a literate world they will call you anything – a doctor, an engineer, anything."

So maybe his parents weren't so sophisticated. Certainly Nicola depicts the process of determining his age back home as little more than opportunistic guesswork based on getting enrolled in different schools.

Finally, he says, a doctor assigned him a birth date, a common practice in South Sudan. Cutting, the government lawyer, says that Nicola admitted to her that he was older than 17.

But that doesn't mean 1986 is his real birth date either: when he last used it, in 2007, it would have made him 21. That's the age of an American university junior, which would have been convenient for someone looking to play collegiate hoops and maybe go pro before too long.

'I am not a liar'

Out of this jumble of information, the government has assembled a picture of Nicola as a compulsive liar with no regard for the law and the suggestion of a gnawing, maybe corrupting hoop dream.

This part seems to bother Nicola more than anything else that comes up during the hearing. "To be honest Miss, I am not a liar person, I am religious, I pray to God," he said.

Not a liar. A good guy, by all accounts – despite the kaleidoscopic array of perceptions he has generated, people agree on this. Soft-spoken, generous, kind.

But the question then becomes, what else is he? Not just a good guy, surely. There's more there – more texture to his motivations. And here the consensus gets scuppered.

Some treat him like a fearless refugee who has taken his fate in his hands; others like a victim of the African basketball industrial complex. Some still, like Mauro-Ika, who met Nicola in church a couple of times, describe him both ways in the course of a single conversation.

What's next for him is also still radically uncertain. His admissibility hearing is scheduled for May 11 – it will determine whether he broke Canada's immigration laws. But even then, the government's options for what to do with him become obscure.

Deportation isn't an option: In November, 2014, Canada put South Sudan on a list of countries that migrants can't be returned to. Nicola's lawyer, Frank Miller, says that migrants in cases such as this often end up living in Canada for years, suspended in legal limbo.

For now, Miller and members of the South Sudanese community in Windsor are working on securing the $5,000 bond that would get Nicola temporarily released.

Then Nicola may be faced with the decision of whether to stay. It's not even clear that he wants to. "So please if you let me – send me back home," he told the hearing on April 19. "It would be much more better for me and for my family and for my mental health."

It's an odd thing to hear from someone who has seemed to want a North American life so badly. But then, guessing at what Jonathan Nicola wants, or who he is, hasn't got anyone very far.

It's probably telling that Mauro-Ika – Nicola's priest and his countryman – takes the most deferential view of what his young parishioner might be looking for, and seems to arrive at the wisest conclusion of anyone who has puzzled over his case, so full of deceptions and misconstruals, both blatant and not-so-blatant.

"I don't know if he wants to stay – we want to know that from him," he says. "We want to know that from him."