May 25, 2026
By Paul Okoku
There are football legends everyone knows. And then there are the Henry Nwosus only a few of us were privileged to know long before the world discovered them.. Today, I speak not just as a former teammate…Not just as a fellow Nigerian international…But as a childhood opponent…A ball boy brother…A street football companion…A humanitarian partner…And a friend.
Before the Legend… There Was Henry.
My earliest memory of Henry goes back to the early 1970s, in the aftermath of the Nigerian civil war. Like many families of Igbo origin during that painful chapter in our nation’s history, both our families had temporarily left Lagos because of the war. Henry’s family returned from the East, while mine returned from the then Midwestern State. That shared history of displacement, survival, and rebuilding was something we had in common long before football brought us even closer.
