In 9th grade, it all began with a magazine. No, not that magazine. I had just picked up my first copy of Condé Nast Traveler and as I thumbed through its glossy pages (mostly looking at the pictures), I landed on a story about a college intern who was sent to Spain with a round-trip ticket and with just $28 in his pocket.

It was one of the first times — but definitely not the last — that I wondered, Why should white people get to have all the fun?

I didn’t have the language for it then, but that question wasn’t really about a romantic trip to Spain, trading and bartering for a weekend full of survival and adventure. It was about access. About imagination. About who gets to see the world, and who gets to feel at home in it.

That curiosity sent me down a series of non-linear paths, but before travel gave me language for that feeling, sports gave me reason to belong. In high school, sports had become more than something I played. It was identity. It was access. It was a passport before I even knew why I would need one.

In tenth grade, I went to Russia — yes Russia Russia — to play basketball. Then Romania. Then Hungary.

My curiousty for the world began to blossom, as I decide in college to major in ethonography. I ended up doing a semester overseas at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Istanbul was the first place that truly unsettled me. I fell in love once… okay fine… I fell in love twice. It challenged what I thought I knew about faith and showed me how much of life opens up when you choose to just let go. While I was there, I was offered a job to work for the Turkish national basketball team, and not taking that offer might be the biggest regret of my life.

After college, I moved to Chicago, worked for a national nonprofit, and somehow also found time to do stand-up comedy. I eventually moved to Los Angeles where I wrote for network television, booked on-camera work, and developed a deep appreciation for those sweet residual checks (IYKYK). It felt, briefly, like arrival, but then the world reminded us how fragile that idea is.

OutKast’s Aquemini (1998) put it plainly: “Nothing is for sure. Nothing is for certain. Nothing lasts forever.” The 2019 Covid pandemic — followed by the writers’ and actors’ strikes — heard that and said, “Put it on a T-shirt.”

So I chose to pivot and returned to home to Atlanta to work as an editor at EBONY, where I’d write sports, travel and human-interest stories. I don’t really consider myself a traditional journalist or reporter. I’m an observer. I’m interested less in conclusions than in moments that go unnoticed. Less in mastery than in what happens when you stay long enough to be changed by what you’re paying attention to.

The Game Was Never Just the Game

Eventually, I realized the same thing was true of sports.

Sports are rarely just about who won, and travel is rarely just about the destination. Both are about movement. Belonging. Ritual. Identity. The strange and beautiful ways people find each other.

They’re about neighborhood legends. Away games that turn into pilgrimages across state lines and borders. Pickup courts. Boxing gyms. Ski slopes. Tailgates. Locker rooms. Barbershops. Dive bars. Family cookouts where the house is divided, but everybody still eats.

That is what makes sports matter — why the final outcome can mean so much more than the final score.

Because the game is never just the game.

It is identity. Memory. Migration. Style. Grief. Joy. The thing your uncle won’t shut up about. The reason a whole city walks differently into work on Monday morning. The way people explain who they are without having to say it out loud.

This is the thread I want to follow: the lesser-known, unexpected, and deeply human side of sports around the world. Not by chasing highlights, but by chasing the people, places, and cultures that give the game meaning.

That’s where the story starts.