His 'Irish Hulk' origin story complete, Igiehon comes home to make next incredible leap
BLUE SKY DUNKING: Dublin Lions’ Aidan Igiehon at the National Basketball Arena for National League launch ahead of the 2024/25 Men's Division One season, which starts on October 5th. Pic: INPHO/James Crombie
Aidan Igiehon’s college basketball career concluded three days before St Patrick’s Day in the Orleans Arena, Las Vegas. Caesar’s Palace, the Bellagio and the rest of Sin City’s flashiest wares, sat in full view just five minutes away the other side of Frank Sinatra Drive. The game went out live on ESPN.
Abilene Christian Wildcats fell three points short of Stephen F. Austin in the opening round of the Western Athletic Conference Tournament and that was that: over a decade of Igiehon’s life in America was all but done having first arrived in Brooklyn as a 13-year old kid with just nine months of basketball under his belt.
On Saturday the 6’ 10” forward will pick up where he left off in March, but in very different surrounds. St Mary’s Hall in Portlaoise can’t hold near a tenth of the 7,000 people catered for at the Orleans Arena. Home to the Portlaoise Panthers, it is a storied but dilapidated piece of brick and mortar in dire need of updating, or bulldozing.
Igiehon will take to the floor with the Dublin Lions in the opening round of the Men’s Division One. That’s second-tier domestic Irish basketball. About as far removed, literally and metaphorically, as you could imagine from his days playing NCAA Division One and eying a ticket to the NBA.
“It’s going to be fun,” he smiles. “All the cheering and the booing. I can’t wait.”
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Still only 24, it would be trite to say that the kid Mick White spotted playing football in a Dublin park and asked to attend a basketball trial next door, has come full circle just because he is back home. Igiehon has packed a lifetime of experiences into his American chapter and fully intends to use them to move forward. The NBA won’t be part of that.
The buzz was that he was on course to become the first Irishman to play in the big league since Pat Burke. Nicknamed the ‘Irish Hulk’, he stood close to seven feet and weighed over 230 lbs. ESPN ranked him 50th in their top 100 High School prospects towards the end of his five years at Lawrence Woodmere Academy in New York.
Offers from Virginia, Villanova, Oregon, USC, Florida, Indiana and no less than 45 others were spurned in favour of the Louisville Cardinals where fans wooed him with a sea of Irish tricolours at an annual pre-season event. Coach Chris Mack hired a private jet to fly to Ireland and sit down with his mum.
His two years in Kentucky were spoiled by injuries and illness and hampered by a rawness that was apparent to Mack when he tried to stem the hype by observing that his big recruit was still coming to terms with the speed of the game at that level and “how to become a college basketball player”. Injury continued to muscle in, even after a transfer to the Grand Canyon Antelopes.
By the time he was making his Ireland debut in 2022, Igiehon was coming off another lengthy layoff and remarking that he was experiencing an injury-free summer for the first time since 2019.
Senior year with Abilene stuck to the same tired path, injury and illness part of the reason why he averaged 10 minutes per game in Texas.
He looks back now and laughs incredulously as he describes the move to Brooklyn, where he stayed with an aunt and an uncle. The “scariest and best thing” that ever happened to him. And how the five years at Woodmere laid foundations for everything that followed, and everything still to come.
“I became best player in New York and one of the best players in the country so my development skyrocketed. I played at Louisville for two years. I got injured and had to transfer out. I played at Grand Canyon and I finished up my final year where I got my Masters in business in Abilene Christian.
“That’s my ten years explained very quick but it was filled with hurdles that I had to overcome. Now I see that the hard things I had to do, and couldn’t make sense of at the time, are things that have made me the person I am right now. It gave me the knowledge to help other people.”
This, and a desire to spend more time with his family, is the reason for him coming home for a year. There were options to go play in France, Spain and in Tokyo, offers he says he can still pursue, but the onus for now is on helping the Lions make the Super League, and helping more Irish kids get to the States.
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The idea of being a businessman struck in his teens. He wasn’t sure what that entailed or even meant at the time, but it was a worm that dug in deep. A luxury fashion brand is in the offing now and there is his eponymous basketball academy that has branched out from Dublin to Cork, Kerry and Belfast.
He was already training up to 60 kids by the hour on summer trips home so it seemed only natural to formalize that into something that could survive and prosper while he was busy the far side of The Pond. Leading basketball figures, including Ger Noonan and Jordan Blount, have been involved.
Over 50 kids from the Igiehon Academy flew over to America last summer to play games in New York and New Jersey. Of the 34 scouted, four were offered and accepted full scholarships that can cost anything up to $50,000 per year apiece. These are players Igiehon reckons would have had a “slim-to-none” chance of being spotted at home.
“An academy was something I always wanted to do, even when I was 14. As soon as I left I realized, wow, I had left a lot of my friends behind. In my head they were very good players. Some were better than me when I left. I just thought that, man, if we could find some way to build a bridge between the States and here to give kids the opportunity to go play there it would be brilliant.”
This is where his decade living and playing across the US will continue to pay off. Hundreds of phone numbers were saved into his phone over the years. His status as a former Division One player gives him added credit. Another big step will be taken this Christmas when he brings coaches over to Gormanston College in Meath to run the rule over another batch of talent.
One of those kids picked up a few months back, Terry Okodogbe, will attend his own alma mater of Lawrence Woodmere Academy. Dieudonné Kabundi, a refugee from South Africa who was calling Cork home, made the journey over just last month. Igiehon saw him off personally at Dublin Aiport.
“He came to me about 12 months ago and he told me that his only option is to try and make it out at a high level so he could help out his family. I said ‘listen, if you can stay focused, if you listen to what I am telling you and be obsessed about the game, I can make something happen for you’.
“I was in contact with a billion coaches, we sent out his film, he worked tirelessly all year. We’ve been able to get something done so he was the fourth and final kid [sent over] for this year. He’s heading to St Peter’s, the number three team in New Jersey, which is really good. I mean, they have good players and the number one centre in the country.”
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It’s no small thing to choose Division One basketball in Ireland as his next on-court chapter, but Igiehon talks excitedly of the challenge. He reckons he can make “another leap” as a player, see the game from another angle. As a centre with his CV, there will be more pressure on him and to make those around him better players.
And it just had to be the Lions.
Mick Lyons lives in Spain these dats but they still see each other now and again in Dublin. If most of that generation of coaches have moved on then Mick’s son Rob is the main mover with the club now, someone who runs the whole programme, and Igiehon chats to him almost every day. It would just be weird, he explains, to wear a different jersey.
“So I just try to see the positive parts of it. One day the ball is going to stop bouncing and you got to ask yourself, ‘okay, what did you do to impact where you came from?’ And nobody really thinks about that. Sometimes you got to focus on things that are bigger than you.”
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