Presented by Nationwide Insurance Agent Jeff Vukovich
Luol Deng’s Olympics story is remarkable.
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In advance of South Sudan’s pool play matchup against USA Basketball at the Paris Olympics on Wednesday, just think about what the longtime Chicago Bulls forward and two-time All-Star has done.
South Sudan became a country in 2011. A year later, Deng served as the face of Great Britain basketball at the London Olympics, proudly repaying a debt he was happy to own after that country granted his family political asylum from war-torn Sudan when Deng was a kid.
And now, as the president of the South Sudan Basketball Federation and assistant coach on the team that improbably qualified for the Paris Olympics, Deng is drawing praise from every corner for his selflessness and relentless vision.
“I had to figure out how we make this happen. I can’t say it’s been easy. But it’s been a lot of fun,” Deng said. “Growing up, I always wanted to see a South Sudan national team. I wanted to see somebody reaching out to players and encouraging them. I wanted that connection.
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“It was an honor for me to represent Great Britain. But I always had that hunger for South Sudan. It’s all amazing.”
Deng said those words during an April 2021 appearance on the Bulls Talk Podcast, shortly after South Sudan improbably advanced from the AfroBasket tournament with Deng serving as a coach. This was before Deng hired longtime friend Royal Ivey, the current national team coach for whom Deng serves as an assistant.
This was when Deng was personally bankrolling the entire national program, including the womens and under-18 teams. He paid for gym usage, hotel stays, plane tickets, you name it.
All for the love and pride for the world’s youngest country, which is appearing in the Olympics for the first time.
“As a kid, watching the Olympics or the World Cup or AfroBasket, EuroBasket, I always felt there’s something within you---you could call it pride---that changes you as a person, your love for your country when you see your flag, the ceremony, the induction. For some countries, like the U.S., people don’t think about it because it’s guaranteed,” Deng said on the Bulls Talk Podcast. “Think about it as you’re from a country where you had civil war and when anything in sports was represented, you didn’t represent that flag. You felt some type of a way because of the unrest.”
Not many athletes get to be the face of two separate countries’ Olympic efforts. And Deng’s connection to Great Britain basketball was palpable at those 2012 London Olympics.
After waiting in Egypt for five years for some country to grant his family political asylum from the civil war in his native Sudan, Deng arrived in the Brixton neighborhood of South London with aspirations to play soccer, called, obviously, football there.
But he quickly took to basketball in a country where resources for that sport were extremely limited. Deng never missed a national team commitment, often paying for his own insurance to protect his NBA contract while he played for the Bulls.
“I looked at basketball in the UK as a challenge that I could make better,” Deng said.
That’s Deng’s second home. His first is South Sudan.
Deng joked that he turned into both Scott Skiles and Tom Thibodeau when he first took over coaching. But now he has happily slipped into an assistant coaching role under Ivey, who guided South Sudan to a one-point loss to the U.S. in last week’s exhibition in London.
That was another full-circle moment for Deng, who played in that same O2 Arena for the Bulls in an exhibition game and for Great Britain at those 2012 London Olympics.
South Sudan opened its Paris Olympics journey with a historic victory over Puerto Rico.
“We couldn’t get players in the beginning to commit, to see the bigger picture,” Deng said back in 2021 on the Bulls Talk Podcast. “But we kept pushing.”
And now look where Deng is.