Ujiri inspires at UOIT speech

By Joel Wittnebel/The Oshawa Express

The theatre was dark, but the message was bright.

Masai Ujiri, the celebrated current general manager of the Toronto Raptors, was at Regent Theatre as part of UOIT’s Distinguished Speaker series to chat with students about his life, career and success in the NBA.

Ujiri, 45, was born in Zaria, Nigeria, and after a fairly benign career of professional basketball that started at Bismark State College in North Dakota and culminated in 2002 after six years of playing for teams across Europe, Ujiri moved into the administrative side of the game.

And it’s easy to see he found his calling.

Starting as an unpaid scout with the Orlando Magic, Ujiri worked his way up to international scout with the Denver Nuggets, and after a few years in Toronto as the director of global scouting, he was hired back to Denver to be the team’s general manager in 2010. The position earned him the title of the first African-born general manager of a North American major-league sports team.

But only three short years later, Ujiri would be called back to Toronto.

“It was a tough decision for me to leave Denver. We had changed things around and I was really close, I was close to the city, but I felt a calling, something here that was calling me that I was really, really intrigued about and maybe there was something here I needed to come and do,” he says.

In 2013, Ujiri was named the NBA’s Executive of the Year, the first non-American to be given the honour. Shortly after, he signed a five-year, $15-million contract to be the Raptors’ general manager.

However, his keys to success were not the topic of his talk, but rather what one should do with it.

“If a person like me has the position that I have, has been blessed to have a journey like that, if nothing else I have an obligation to go back and give to the next person. It’s important, I have to,” Ujiri says. “There have to be people from all over the world that follow after me, so that when you are the first, there are people that come after you. If I become the one and only one who does it, that means I didn’t do a good job at all and I didn’t create a path for anybody else.”

Along with his work in Toronto, Ujiri is a director with Basketball Without Borders. The program is a global outreach program by the NBA that looks to promote education, sportsmanship and healthy living across the globe.

But Ujiri says he doesn’t see his charitable efforts as “giving back” per se; he says it’s an obligation to his belief that everyone should have to help others. Ujiri says the vast majority of the world’s people are good people, and they have a responsibility.

“The 90 per cent of people should be better at making the 10 per cent better. If we just made an effort to make the next person better, or make the next person feel good, or to make the next person think about it in a different way, we would be so much better,” he says.

And while answering student questions on everything from the Raptors widely successful “We the North” marketing campaign to hip-hop artist Drake’s involvement with the team, Ujiri left the students with a message.

“I think it’s very important, as you guys start your lives, careers, be yourself, don’t try to be somebody else, don’t try to fake. It really, really helped me to keep striving and keep trying to achieve and keep focused.”