Oba Femi defeats Brock Lesner to Win WrestleMania
From UNILAG to WWE!!
Isaac Odugbesan (now known as OBA FEMI), has had to make huge sacrifices to get to this level – a major challenger in a sport (professional wrestling), many Nigerians grew up watching on Black & White TV.
Interestingly, Oba Femi is not the first Nigerian to make an impact in WWE. There’s been: Commander Azeez, Omos, Apollos Crew… but it looks like Obafemi is the one with the highest ceiling so far.
Growing up in Nigeria, and attending his early college days at the University of Lagos, Oba grinded so hard competing across meets in Nigeria. He would go to the National stadium in Surulere, Lagos, where he occasionally trained; but his big break would come when he gained an American College scholarship.
He was part of a Nigerian group that Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) gave a scholarship. Other notable Nigerian athletes who joined MTSU around that time, include: Alaba Akintola and Esther Isah. The latter, a High Jumper used to train with Oba in Lagos. He later transferred to Alabama University, and even made the final of the NCAA Championships.
You can’t say that Oba was just using the Shot Put to get by, he was actually very good at it, and in the year (2022), that he stopped competing in Athletics, he threw a Personal Best of 20.85m. Even from secondary school, he had shown promise, winning the 2015 Lagos Ibile Games.
Chukwuebuka Enekwechi was the only Nigerian Shot Putter, who threw farther than him (21.25m) that year. At the time, he was 24 years old, and if he is throwing that mark then, he could have actually really rivalled Chuks, if he had pursued Shot Put.
WWE had reached out to him in 2021, and after impressing in a tryout, he joined their Next In Line (NIL) program, and has been climbing the ladder since then.
After finishing college in 2022, he officially started training at the WWE performance center, and has not looked back since then.
Quick successes in 2023: winning the NXT Men’s Breakout Tournament and then 2024 Men’s Iron Survivor Challenge, accelerated his move up the ladder. The newest Nigerian converts to WWE, may not really grasp that he has only been on the main roster for just 6 months, and he has now taken over WWE.
Now kids sing his chants, they do his dance steps; he has brought a new spark into the WWE ring, propelled by the Nigerian spirit of never giving up. Nigerian wrestling fans who gave up on it (wrestling) because of the theatrics, are now gradually returning to it. Because of Oba.
Imagine for a second that he had remained in Nigeria or graduated from UNILAG… how could it have ended for him?
