I found myself again turning to the radio in the car this morning. It just had to be a sports station.
For peace of mind and sanity. Commentary around sports, as I have found on this station the few times I have listened, is relatively safe from the acrimony and toxicity that chokes the air these days in the name of public affairs commentary.
This was Sports Radio Brilla FM. Listening this morning, my mind went back to the early days of what I have taken the liberty to call the dawn of the Izamoje brand of sportscasting, which has since become the dominant style on the Nigerian airwaves.
Everywhere you turn – Radio and TV, you find Sports Presenters adopting the pacy, radio commentary style that Larry Izamoje brought on and popularised. I wonder if the Sportscasters realise that this style, which I think, they have assumed as the default one has not always been the standard and might have even been seen as an aberration in the books of ‘traditional’ broadcasters at the time. I wonder how many of them even know the man – Larry Izamoje or Larry Echejiele, as he was originally known, his story, impact and influence.
In different ways, Larry is a legend in Nigerian sportscasting, possibly being the one person who pulled the art from the fringe of broadcasting to a place where it can stand on its own. And that is instructive and inspiring.
I don’t know the full story, but I wonder if Broadcasting was Larry Izamoje’s first choice. I also how the Ogas in Broadcasting at the time might have responded to his bid at sports presentation, given the rather conservative cloak around the practice back then.
My first encounter with the then Larry Echejiele was on the pages of Concord Newspapers, where I read his features and reports back then. He would leave as Deputy Sports Editor for Mail, before making the foray into entrepreneurship. The story of the early days and the struggles is one I heard him share many years back.
The journey to what would eventually change his story and make Larry Izamoje an icon in the industry and even beyond started in 1993 with the daily 15-minute Sports programme on radio he created and presented on OGBC 2 FM, Abeokuta. The station, at the time, was the most popular in the Lagos region at the time. That meant Larry Izamoje had to travel from Lagos to Abeokuta every morning, and early too, to present a programme for 15 minutes and make a return to Lagos once done. I suspect that part of what gave birth to the pacy style that Izamoje adopted was the pressure of packing so much into the limited time he had.
It is difficult for those born post-GSM to appreciate what that entailed. There was no internet then. But that programme became so popular, benefiting from the frenzy and heightened commercial interest in sports sponsorship that came with Nigeria’s maiden qualification for the World Cup in 1994.
I think the transmission of the programme would later be extended to Raypower FM, syndicated on other stations, running for many years eventually leading to the birth of Sports Radio Brilla FM in 2002, said to be the first sports radio in Africa. The station would expand into 3 other cities, including Abuja from which I listened this morning.
For those of us caught up at the time in the stifling air in government-owned broadcasting stations, which practically killed dreams, ideas and creativity seeing Larry Izamoje run with his dream, making a resounding statement was great and inspiring.
It is a testimony to the power of Larry Izamoje’s dream and his industry that he ran with the idea of a 15-minute independently produced sports programme on radio at a time when broadcasting was under the firm grips of government, with only little room allowed for independent productions.
The audacity to dream and the tenacity to stay with the dream would not only positively change the course of Mr Larry Izamoje’s life, it would become the foundation upon which he would go on to build a media business group that has been around for over 2 decades.
When he set out, Larry Izamoje massively disrupted the sports reporting space in broadcasting in Nigeria. He would make of it an industry, triggering the advent of an army of independent sports reporters who have now gone on to become icons in the profession. In following through with his dream, that would eventually serve as a pivot for the realisation of the dreams of many others, both directly and indirectly.
Such is the impact that Larry Izamoje has made that there is a thriving industry around sportscasting, with many of the practitioners sounding like the man who pioneered it, even if some of them might not even fully know the man or his story.
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