Just before Christmas “The New York Times ” led its sports section with a story about Ater Majok, a future University of Connecticut baskeball player born in Sudan but educated in Australia and the US, with the headline “A Warrior from Africa,” and this introduction:

‘… One morning in April 2008, Lee Melvin, then Connecticut’s admissions director, welcomed the Sudanese basketball recruit Ater Majok into his office. Before he sat down for an informal interview, Majok, wearing a confident smile, pointed to a framed painting of Shaka Zulu, the African warrior, hanging in a window. “Do you know who that is?” Majok said. Melvin did. The portrait was a gift from a South African student he had admitted, but Majok thought it was planted to impress him. When assured it was not, he began a lecture about the Zulu tribe’s history and detailed the slain general’s deficiencies. Melvin was sold. “I was like, ‘This guy’s getting in,’ ” he said

And I thought “The Air Up There” was a movie.

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