CINCINNATI — Opportunity intersected with irony Sunday in Tampa when an injury to Bengals starting defensive end Trey Hendrickson created a chance for Joseph Ossai. The second-year defensive end played the most meaningful snaps of his career on the same field where his NFL dream imploded on the launch pad 16 months ago.
Advertisement
On the first series in the first preseason game of his career, Ossai sacked Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, who was playing his first game since winning a seventh Super Bowl ring a few months earlier. It was a heady moment for the rookie third-round pick, and he only continued to flash with promise the rest of the game.
But Ossai walked out of Raymond James Stadium later that night with an injured wrist and, unbeknownst to him, a completely torn meniscus that would cost him his entire rookie season.
And for the second time in his young life, a moment once crackling with hope spiraled into torment and tears. The ensuing weeks were difficult, and they bled into months. Instead of immersing himself in the burgeoning brotherhood of the locker room, Ossai felt like an outsider. And he stiff-armed those who wanted to help him most, his family back home in Conroe, Texas, denying their repeated requests to visit.
“I just wasn’t myself,” he said. “I’m not saying I let myself go, but I gained a little bit of weight. I wasn’t playing football for the first time in a long time. I was a bit too sad. I didn’t want them to see me like that. I didn’t want them to worry and waste their time feeling sorry for me.”
All the insecurities he had felt as a bullied 10-year-old immigrant from Nigeria came rushing back.
But football had saved him once, and he knew it could again.
Ossai remembers he was 10 years old when his mother, Emmanuela, walked into the living room of their home in Ketu Ijanikin, Lagos, Nigeria, and told him and his three siblings to start thanking God. And for the next 90 minutes, the family prayed and sang worship songs, but questions were racing through Joseph’s head the entire time.
Did we win a bunch of money? Did we get a new car? What’s going on?
The family hadn’t won a bunch of money, but it had hit the green card lottery. Its official name is the Diversity Immigrant Visa program, which was created by the Immigration Act of 1990 and each year makes 55,000 immigrant visas available from among millions of applicants. According to government figures, the Ossais were picked from a pool of 9.7 million hopefuls in 2010.
Advertisement
“It was an exciting moment that we knew could change our lives,” Emmanuela said.
“We didn’t know exactly what to expect,” Joseph said. “But we had seen ‘The Terminator’ and ‘Home Alone,’ so we had a rough idea of what America was. We were thrilled.”
Leaving Nigeria never felt like a dire need. The Ossais were happy and owned their land, although Joseph’s father, Vitus, was working abroad in the United Kingdom and sending money home. There were challenges. The electricity was spotty and could go out for hours, even days at a time. The Ossais were among the fortunate ones to own a generator. Before they did, Joseph remembers doing homework by the flame of a gas lamp.
“We weren’t wealthy, but we were doing OK,” he said. “We had our land. If you have your land and can live on it and build on it, you’re fine. While we were living there, we weren’t like, ‘This is a horrible situation.’ It was just the norm. Everybody learns ways to adapt.
“But looking back now, yeah, that was a sh–ty situation to be in. You wish it could be better for the people still there.”
It wasn’t until the family home was burglarized that Emmanuela applied for the visa program, which explains the prolonged period of rejoicing in the family’s living room when the news arrived.
“It was God’s will,” she said.
They understood their new opportunity would be saddled with challenges: finding jobs, finding housing, saving money, building credit and acclimating socially, not to mention dealing with the guilt of leaving behind their culture.
The family of six lived in a Motel 6 until a relative offered to co-sign for them so they could move into a one-bedroom apartment. All of it was expected and accepted.
But the one thing Joseph never counted on being an issue was the language. He had spoken English his entire life. Nearly everyone in Nigeria did.
Advertisement
“The biggest transition of all was our accents,” Joseph said. “They were very thick. People couldn’t understand us. And in school, kids are mean. Anything they don’t understand, they’ll make fun of it. So we got made fun of a lot.”
The Ossais settled in Texas because they had family there who could help them get on their feet. But it was hard on Joseph, who would come home from school crying most days.
He and his siblings, older sister Peace and younger brothers Philip and K.C. — another brother, Emmanuel, was born a year after they arrived — worked hard to mimic the speech of their classmates and teachers to try to assimilate.
But they would slip back into their old diction around the house after school and on the weekends. The bullying continued, along with the struggle to understand and communicate with their teachers, causing them to fall behind in their studies.
So Emmanuela came up with a plan.
“She made up a game where if while you’re home you continue to talk with an American accent and go through the whole day without breaking, you would get candy,” Joseph said. “We loved candy. Our dad has a huge sweet tooth, and we get that from him. Mine was Snickers. Man, I loved Snickers.”
The second love Ossai found in America? Football.
Having known only soccer and rugby growing up, he was drawn to the game his uncle was watching on television during a family gathering around the holidays. The Steelers were on, and Joseph watched the crowd explode after Antonio Brown caught a long touchdown pass.
He knew instantly that’s what he wanted to do — join a football team and play wide receiver.
But playing youth football required money they didn’t have, and the sport wasn’t offered in elementary school. He was told he would have to wait until seventh grade, but until then he could take part in the pickup games the students played at recess.
Advertisement
That’s when he realized the second problem with his plan.
“I was horrible,” Joseph said. “I could go play defense all day, but when it comes to playing offense and passing the ball and being coordinated, you need some kind of training.”
By the time he got to seventh grade, he figured a few years on the playground were enough of a proving ground and tried out to play receiver.
“I looked the part — big, tall, strong. But I couldn’t catch the ball to save my life,” Joseph said. “Couldn’t remember routes. Couldn’t remember any concepts. I made the A team because of my size, but I wasn’t getting any playing time.”
He spent a lot of time sitting on his helmet just watching practice until one day one of the team’s defensive linemen didn’t show up and the coach asked if anyone wanted to jump in and play. Joseph threw on his helmet and said he’d do it — even though he didn’t know what “it” was.
“What do I do?” he asked the coach.
The coach told him to put his hand on the ground, wait for the whistle to blow, beat the guy in front of him and get to where the quarterback was.
Tweet. Juke. Sack. Roars.
“I was like, ‘This is pretty dope.'” Joseph recalled.
The coach put a tackle and guard in front of him. Same thing, except instead of cheers there were “ooohs.”
The offensive linemen were pissed and staring him down. The kid everyone bullied was getting his revenge at their expense. The coach shifted a running back in the formation for reinforcement and blew the whistle. Joseph beat all three, sacked the quarterback, jumped to his feet and screamed as his teammates celebrated with him.
“Remind me to put you there tomorrow,” his coach told him.
“That was it. That’s how I started playing defense,” he said. “From that practice on, my teammates started talking to me, and I started getting noticed in classes. People were inviting me over to sit with them and stuff like that. So that was pretty cool, too. Football not only helped me stop being bullied, it helped a socially awkward kid who didn’t dress the best start making friends.”
Joseph gave receiver another try his freshman year. It went about how you would expect. He never played. Sophomore year, the family moved, and a Texas rule prohibits players from moving within the same district, so he had to sit out the season.
By junior year, he was back on defense and dominating. His first scholarship offer came, ironically enough, from the University of Cincinnati. It wasn’t long before they were arriving from everywhere.
Emmanuela hated the idea of her son playing football, but the scholarship letters changed her mind. Instead of staying home and praying through Joseph’s games, she started attending a few.
“After my first game, he was very angry with me,” she said. “He told me I had been cheering for the wrong team. I didn’t know what I was watching.”
Advertisement
Ossai enrolled at the University of Texas and played in all 14 games with two starts as a true freshman. By his junior season, he was a consensus All-American and semifinalist for the Chuck Bednarik Award, presented to the best defensive player in the country.
His brothers have followed his path. Philip is a defensive lineman who recently finished his junior season at North Alabama, while K.C. is a sophomore linebacker at Louisiana and will face Houston in the Independence Bowl on Friday.
Joseph left Texas after his All-American junior season. The Bengals selected him with the fifth pick in the third round of the 2021 draft, and he had been having an impressive training camp leading into that preseason opener in Tampa when he got hurt.
“Mom’s worst nightmare,” he said. “I remember calling her on the phone. She’s a huge believer in everything happens for a reason. She kept telling me, ‘You’re gonna be OK, everything’s gonna be fine.’ But she was scared, for sure, even though she made sure she was composed while talking to me.”
Ossai was scared, too. And mad, depressed and alone. The lost season wasn’t the only thing bothering him. He also felt as though he had abandoned a piece of himself by moving on from his Nigerian culture and his second, tribal language of Igbo.
But he found comfort in conversations with a pair of teammates with Nigerian roots, cornerback Chidobe Awuzie and offensive lineman Hakeem Adeniji. Awuzie, who was born in America and didn’t visit Nigeria until he was 15, has implored Ossai to go back and visit his roots.
GO DEEPER
Chidobe Awuzie arrives for Bengals wearing his mission across his chest
“I feel like I became a man when I went back,” Awuzie said. “I learned a lot about my history, my family’s history. Seeing the house my grandad built, the graves of my grandparents, meeting cousins I never met before. How they experience each other. No one was on their phones. We were sitting in a circle, present, enjoying each other.
Advertisement
“I think it’s important — not just for Nigerians because we all come from different places and different cultures — to present ourselves as that person because it allows all to learn from one another. We all have our own story. We all have our own experiences. And when we’re each being ourselves, it’s going to bring a different understanding to who your teammate is.”
Through those conversations with Awuzie and his progression in rehab, Ossai worked through the disappointment of missing his rookie season. He stayed engaged by attending all the meetings and being present in the locker room during breaks, when so much camaraderie is formed.
The playoff run to the Super Bowl was both thrilling and gutting, knowing he couldn’t play a part.
“I used to tell him as he was walking out of the meetings or walking into the meetings, I would say, ‘You’re missing all the fun,'” defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo said. “We had that little thing going through the Super Bowl last year. We made sure he was around the building, especially as a rookie. It’s important those guys don’t feel left out.”
Ossai has felt left out before and never wants to go through it again. And he doesn’t want anyone else to, either.
He spent part of his injury downtime formulating an idea for a foundation that will help immigrant children better assimilate with the hope they avoid the type of bullying he had to endure. It’s still in the development stage, but Ossai is planning to team up with his high school friend Jonathan Daviss, who also got past being bullied and achieved success as an actor, starring as Pope in the series “Outer Banks.”
“We have a similar story, and we want to go back to Conroe and let people know you don’t have to be Mr. Popular in high school or middle school to determine that you’re gonna be successful,” Joseph said.
Advertisement
Awuzie, who spoke about Ossai just a few weeks before suffering his own season-ending injury, was eager to express his pride and admiration for his friend and teammate.
“I think it’s really great that Nnamdi is telling his story,” Awuzie said, calling Joseph by his Nigerian middle name. “I’m really proud of how far he’s come along. On the football field and outside of the game, he’s going to have a big impact.”
Going back to Raymond James Stadium on Sunday was in no way on par with a potential return to Nigeria, but there was an element of nostalgia stepping on the field where his rookie dreams were destroyed. And Ossai fought back those emotions with everything he had.
“I didn’t want to think about that,” he said. “If you think about getting injured, it’s like you’re driving and you think about don’t hit the curb, don’t hit the curb, and then you smack the curb. I tried not to think about the injury and just take away that emotional part of it. All I could think about was there were guys who were depending on me to do my job.”
With Hendrickson out with a wrist injury, the dependence on Ossai soared. And he responded with two of the biggest plays of the game — a tipped pass and hit against Brady that resulted in Germaine Pratt’s interception, and the recovery of a Brady fumble following a Logan Wilson sack.
GO DEEPER
'They see how much we care about them': Bengals reserves make their own injury luck
Most of the action Ossai saw prior to the start of December was late in games when the Bengals were ahead by a lot (Jets, Panthers) or hopelessly out of it (Browns). His stat line through the first 12 games consisted of just nine tackles and one quarterback hit.
Since then, he’s recorded the biggest play of his career, the third-down sack of Patrick Mahomes in the AFC Championship Game rematch against the Chiefs, and the first pass defense and first fumble recovery of his career.
Hendrickson is expected to return to the lineup Saturday at New England, but the Bengals will be without their other starting defensive end, Sam Hubbard, who left the Tampa Bay game with a calf injury.
It’s another opportunity for Ossai, and he’s responding to it the same way he did 12 years ago when he was given a chance to come to America.
Advertisement
“We thank God. That’s all I can say,” he said. “It’s been an uphill battle, for sure. We have to go to New England and attack them. And then the game after that, the Bills. And then keep going. Hopefully, we can make the same run and I can get to experience what I missed last year.”
(Top photo: Justin K. Aller / Getty Images)