After the most frustrating season of his career finished with a thud in the playoffs, Ezekiel Ansah took some time to himself.
Then, he gave a month of his offseason to his people back home.
The Detroit Lions defensive end spent the month of March back in his native country of Ghana. He goes back to visit friends and family, and he’s treated like a celebrity there, with kids literally staring up at all 6 feet 5 inches of their lone attachment to American football.
He decided this year to turn their lore of the game into something they could feel and experience themselves. He launched the Ezekiel Ansah Foundation, which plans to start teaching the game of football to the children through video tutorials on the pros and cons of the game and eventually a football camp — the first that he knows of to take place there.
“Coming here into America to study and to be educated, I never grew up going to a football camp or a soccer camp or at least looking up to somebody for the kids to follow,” Ansah said. “Here in America, there’s always football camps or soccer camps. These kids are starting at a young age, and I’m just trying to do the same for my people.”
He wants to connect them to the game that brought him here, to America, where he played at Brigham Young University, became the fifth overall pick in the draft and became a Pro Bowler. By the end of this season, he will have made more than $31 million playing the sport.
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Growing up in Ghana, he became aware of the sport while playing others such as basketball and soccer on the fields provided by NFL Hall of Famer Steve Young’s foundation. Young starred at BYU, which became the place Ansah started to turn his raw talent into something the NFL coveted.
Now, with the help of resources from a children’s hospital, he’ll try to teach the game to the Ghanaian children so they can learn it far earlier than he got to.
This is one of the ways Ansah has moved on from a season that didn’t go the way anyone planned after his 14.5-sack Pro Bowl campaign in 2015. Ansah missed three games last season with an ankle injury that stuck with him all season. He didn’t find a single sack until the 11th contest, and his four in the final three regular-season games plus the playoff loss weren’t enough to salvage the year in his mind.
“It wasn’t easy dealing with what I was dealing with, but I know there’s always a time in life that you go through an obstacle that teaches a person how to be a man, how you’re going to deal with it,” said Ansah, who will play this season on the fifth-year option. “I’m just glad 2016 is over.”
Source:mlive.com
