

The former Arsenal striker
on how his heart problem inspired him to set up a foundation and why clubs
should do more to monitor their players’ health
Nwankwo Kanu remembers the
shouting, the confusion and the overriding sense of desperation. A woman had
brought her gravely ill daughter to him, feeling she had nowhere else to turn,
and now she was begging him to save the child’s life.
Then the little girl
collapsed. “We had to pick her up and
run to the hospital,” Kanu says. “Thank
God she didn’t die.”
It was the year 2000 and
Kanu had just set up his eponymous heart foundation, having undergone a life‑or-death
scare himself in 1996. The girl’s mother had read the publicity and tracked the
footballer to the Nigeria team hotel, where the squad were preparing for an
Africa Cup of Nations game.
“The mum wanted to show me
the girl for me to help,” Kanu says.
“When she saw me at the hotel, she was shouting and suddenly the girl
fainted. Later on at the hospital I promised the mum that the first kid we were
going to operate on would be her daughter.”
The girl’s name was Eniton
and she was among the first children that the Kanu Heart Foundation took from
Nigeria to London for surgery at Great Ormond Street hospital.
“For a little girl of that
age – not playing, no energy in her, not moving around; she doesn’t smile, the
eyes are blue. They are really suffering, in a really bad situation, and you
ask yourself: ‘If nobody comes in to help and they die …’
“But after all of the
children had their operations, I went to visit them and they were full of
smiles, jumping and playing with me, rolling around with me and when you looked
at the mums, you saw the happiness. From that day, I said: ‘This is something
that we have to do more and do more.’”
Nwankwo Kanu celebrates
scoring against Aston Villa in 1999 in his Arsenal heyday. Photograph: Toby
Melville/PA
There is a beautiful update
to Eniton’s story – she is about to graduate from Lagos State university, where
Kanu has helped to pay her fees. But the foundation has saved the lives of many
more children from underprivileged backgrounds in Africa and Kanu is proud to
reveal the precise figure.
“We have saved 542,” he
says. “But we keep doing it. This week
four patients went to Sudan and we’re hearing that the operations were
successful and another six are about to leave as well.
“We have partnered with
hospitals, we do check-ups, we talk to the parents, we educate them and at the
same time we take the kids to other countries for operations. The goal of the
foundation is to build our own cardiac hospitals in Africa, starting in
Nigeria. It would make it all much easier. As a footballer you win trophies and
it’s good. But this is so much more.”
Kanu has always been a guy
to stand out and he does not go unnoticed in Hertfordshire, where he lives with
his wife and three children. He jokes that he intended to kick back and relax
on his retirement as a player in 2012 –“I thought: ‘OK, it’s holiday time,’” he
says – but he is too philanthropic, too driven to make a difference, for that.
Kanu played for Nigeria at
three World Cups. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
The 42-year-old is an
ambassador for the Nigeria Football Federation and he also works for Fifa as an
ambassador. “I am called a legend and
people see me as one but because of that I don’t think I should have to hide at
home and only go on holidays, drink champagne and watch TV,” Kanu says. “I am somebody that wants to impact on to
people’s lives.”
Kanu’s labour of love
remains his foundation and with more time on his hands, he has been able to
give more of himself to the raising of funds and awareness. His latest
initiative is a charity match to be played at Barnet’s Hive stadium on Saturday
30 September between African and Premier League players. A host of big-name
ex-professionals have signed up, including Jay-Jay Okocha, Sol Campbell, Teddy
Sheringham and Robert Pires.
Kanu was shaped by his
tough upbringing in Imo state, where money was tight and barefoot street
football the norm. He does not forget his roots and after he joined Ajax from
Iwuanyanwu Nationale, he says his “first
priority was to help those back home that didn’t have anything”.
He adds: “I am a sportsman so what do you do? You try
to advise other young ones that are coming through. You take boots and jerseys
back home. You create an academy. You help them with their school fees.”
Kanu’s outlook would only
harden during a hellish month that followed his move from Ajax to
Internazionale and, when he retells the tale, it is heavy on remarkable detail.
For some reason he had played in two pre-season friendlies for the Italian club
before he took his medical but when he did, he was immediately stood down from
the next one. No one told him why and he was in the dark until the following
morning. That was when he switched on the TV.
“What they reported was
that I had an issue with my heart and couldn’t play football any more,” Kanu
says. “It was in the national papers in
Italy as well. That’s how I found out – through the news. Later on, Inter came
to tell me that, yeah, this was the situation. I said: ‘I have already heard
about it.’ It was a big one – and for it to be revealed in such a manner. It
should not have been like that. At that moment, everything was upside down for
me.”
Kanu was lucky that the
problem with the aortic valve showed up at the medical and he owed the
continuation of his career to a specialist in Cleveland, Ohio. He had been
advised by doctors in the United Kingdom and Netherlands that he ought not to
play on but the one in Cleveland was able to perform an operation to correct
the damage and allow him to do so.
Nwankwo Kanu receives the
African player of the year award for 1999. Photograph: Olivier Morin/EPA
Kanu had won three
Eredivisie titles at Ajax, together with the Champions League, and he helped
Nigeria to Olympic gold in the summer of 1996. He would win the Uefa Cup at
Inter before his move to Arsenal, where he won two Premier Leagues and two FA
Cups. He would win another FA Cup at Portsmouth in 2008, scoring the only goal
in the final. Capped 86 times by Nigeria, he played for them at three World
Cups and was twice named African player of the year.
“What I went through after
my transfer to Inter made me stronger,” Kanu says. “There is no bigger test than when you are in
between life and death so, if you can come up from there, you can handle
anything. It gave me that push to go out and do whatever I had to do.
“It also changed how I saw
the world. For example, if you haven’t been in a hospital, you don’t really
understand what is going on in there. I realised there was more to life than
only to be comfortable on your own. You can open up to help others. I know the
pain that I went through as an adult, so imagine how it is for kids. It’s
difficult for them to take that pain.”
Kanu needed a second operation
in 2014 to re-repair the same valve and it left him feeling extremely weak. But
it is impossible to keep him down for too long and he is more determined than
ever to shine a light on the issues that relate to heart health, including
those within professional football.
“We’ve had people like Marc
Vivien-Foé die while playing,” Kanu says.
“There have been too many others, including Cheick Tioté. The clubs and
the federations have to be serious about giving check-ups to the players. What
is to stop them doing them every three months? It is something I have been
pushing and preaching because who knows, I might have been one of those who
played football and died if my issue had not been found during my medical at
Inter.”
God is with you
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