John Amaechi

John Amaechi OBE is a psychologist, broadcaster, bestselling author, performance coach and former NBA basketball player. He is the only British player ever to earn a place in the US Basketball Hall of Fame. He now works as a Senior Fellow at the centre for Emotional Literacy and Personal Development, University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN).
 

From Stockport to Houston, Texas

John started playing basketball in Stockport at 17, moving to a high school in Ohio a year later to improve his playing standard to scholarship level. He won a sporting scholarship to Penn State University in Pennsylvania in the early 1990s, and that launched his extraordinary career.

‘I was in the Midwest and it took me a good six weeks to decipher the accent. When I first arrived, I was met at the airport by my coach and I just nodded and smiled and when he smiled I smiled... My understanding of America when I left the UK was essentially informed by The A-Team and Knight Rider so you can imagine how broadening it was to go and find myself living first in Swanton Ohio – which is tiny!’

From there John moved to Toledo, then Nashville, Tennessee, and on to Pennsylvania. After that he found himself moving on to San Diego, Los Angeles, New York, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Houston, Texas. ‘You don’t realise until you live in another country how everyday interactions are governed by an expectation of a shared understanding of your pop-culture past. Whether it be music, TV shows or whatever else, it’s remarkable how many references there are there.
 

A steep learning curve

‘When you send a young person to France or Germany they’re aware that there’s going to be a steep learning curve… they understand it’s going to be very different. That kind of mental preparation is sometimes absent from people who go to North America because they think that the language and the culture is the same and it’s not. It’s markedly different… It’s many different worlds.

‘I think I became far more British when I went to America. There are certain subjects you have to avoid as a secular British person going to America. Even if you’re a person of faith, the way religion is done in America can be quite shocking. It’s the same thing when you’re talking about guns.

‘America was the first time I experienced taking only multiple choice tests. My first test I did badly on. I got 76%, which in England is good but in America is terrible because you’re supposed to get 96% because it’s multiple choice. I suddenly realised … I needed to know was what was clearly wrong and then be able to make an educated guess between the two that could be right. If you work on that system all of a sudden you end up with 90% whatever happens, so I did very well in school.
 

Getting the priorities right

‘I was playing basketball and I was studying [to be a psychologist] because I knew that the average career for a professional basketball player is three years. I knew it would end and I knew when it ended I wouldn’t be old and I wouldn’t want to do my back-up job for the next 40 years. I would want to do my primary job.

‘At Vanderbilt, the academics were very good, but it was all on you and I found it a bit overwhelming to try and organise my schedule and understand the system. Then I went to Penn State and all of a sudden I had this two-hour consultation with my academic support advisor, who’s still a friend of mine to this day. This was the first time I’d ever been given any advice on this. It was outstanding. Once we’d done that, I ended up getting a year’s worth of my master’s while I was still an undergraduate.

‘I didn’t have a lot of time for socialising. I stayed in the dorms all four years and I found that that way I had a more normal experience because I wasn’t just around athletes. I found myself making friends with regular students and that was a more normal peer group to have that treated you just as a friend rather than as some kind of celebrity on campus, which can happen.

‘I think the perspective that travel gives you is remarkable if you take full advantage of it. It’s not a question of simply becoming assimilated. I’ve made a practice of being very good at not quite fitting in wherever I go. I find the perspective that that gives you is better than one where you just buy into whatever the local culture is. That’s as true as I sit here in Manchester as it would be if I was in America.’ As told to Ann Morgan