Most great centres are built from the ground up by American youth basketball, starting at eight and specialising at twelve. Hakeem Olajuwon came to the sport as a teenager in Lagos, with a goalkeeper's hands and a footballer's feet, and ended up with the most elegant low-post game anyone has played.
He was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1963, into a large family that ran a cement business. Sport meant football and handball, and he was a goalkeeper - a position that teaches timing, angles and how to read where a body is going before it gets there. He was tall and still growing when a coach suggested he try basketball, and the early results were not encouraging.
Houston
He arrived at the University of Houston knowing very little about the sport and learned at a speed that startled everyone around him. The Houston teams of that era were nicknamed Phi Slama Jama for the way they played above the rim, and Olajuwon became their centrepiece. He also spent his off-hours in local gyms playing against professionals who happened to live in the city, which accelerated everything.
He was the first player chosen in the 1984 draft, ahead of a Chicago guard named Michael Jordan. It is remembered now as a strange decision and it was not: a dominant centre was the most valuable asset in basketball at the time, and Olajuwon was the most complete one available.
The Dream Shake
What separated him was footwork. He would catch the ball with his back to the basket and then move through a sequence of fakes, pivots and spins so fluid that defenders committed to three different moves in two seconds. The sequence picked up a name - the Dream Shake - and he never ran it the same way twice, because the whole point was that it responded to whatever the defender did first.
He was also, unusually for a scorer of his size, an outstanding defender. He protected the rim, stole the ball from guards who dribbled too close, and read passing lanes from the middle of the floor. Very few players have ever been genuinely elite at both ends; he was one of them.
Two championships
The Houston Rockets won the title in 1994 and again in 1995, and Olajuwon was the central figure in both runs. In the first of those seasons he was named the league's most valuable player, the most valuable player of the finals, and its defensive player of the year - a combination almost nobody has managed in a single season.
The second title was the harder one. Houston entered the playoffs seeded low and beat a series of better-placed teams on the road, with Olajuwon outplaying every centre he faced along the way. For a player who had been doubted for most of his career, it was the definitive answer.
Decide nothing until the defender has committed.- The principle behind the Dream Shake
Nigeria, and the United States
He became a United States citizen in 1993 and joined the Olympic team in 1996, winning a gold medal in Atlanta. He remained proud of his Nigerian background throughout, and he was an observant Muslim who fasted during Ramadan even when it fell in the middle of the season - something he said made him lighter and sharper rather than weaker.
Long after retirement he became a teacher. A generation of younger centres travelled to Houston to spend their summers learning footwork from him, and the clips of those sessions circulate online every year. What he is passing on is not a set of moves but a habit of thinking: decide nothing until the defender has committed.
Olajuwon has spent years tutoring younger post players during the off-season, including several who went on to become All-Stars. He rarely charged for it.
The two finals
The 1994 championship series went the full seven games against a New York team built around another great defensive centre. The two of them had played against each other in college, in a national final, and the rematch a decade later was decided by narrow margins, missed shots in the closing seconds and one blocked attempt that is still shown whenever the series is discussed.
A year later Houston faced a much younger Orlando team led by Shaquille O'Neal and won in four straight games. Olajuwon's footwork against a stronger, heavier opponent was the difference, and the series is still used by coaches as a demonstration that technique can beat raw power in the low post.
A quieter kind of star
He was never a natural self-promoter. Houston is not a city that generates national attention for its teams, and Olajuwon's two championships arrived in the only two seasons between 1991 and 1998 that Michael Jordan did not win one - a coincidence that has been used both to diminish and to defend him, usually by people who did not watch the games closely.
Those who did tend to agree on the verdict. For skill, balance and two-way impact, the centre from Lagos who learned the sport at fifteen belongs in any serious conversation about the best to play the position.
A different route to greatness
His career is the strongest argument in basketball against early specialisation. The things that made him unusual - balance, footwork, spatial awareness, patience under pressure - came from another sport entirely, and they transferred completely.
Coaches now say openly that playing more than one sport as a child produces better athletes. Olajuwon got there first, by accident, and his game still looks more modern than that of many players who came after him.
It is worth saying plainly what that means. A teenager who had barely touched a basketball arrived in a country he did not know, learned a position considered the most technical in the sport, and ended up teaching it back to the people who had been playing since childhood. Very few careers in any sport contain that kind of reversal.
