This story appears in SLAM 235.
As a young boy growing up in Senegal, Amadou Gallo Fall remembers first hearing the game of basketball being played over the airwaves coming from his radio at home. He didn’t have to see the game to visualize its beauty, and the dominance with which the Senegal Women’s National Basketball team played.
“I mean, there was a generation of players that were incredible,” Fall says of the female players of his era. “They won everything in Africa year after year.”
The Senegal team won the FIBA African Championship for Women (now known as the Afrobasket) from 1974-1993, a streak of sheer dominance not perpetuated by any single country in the continent since. Yet it wouldn’t be until the age of 17 that Fall, then 6-8, was truly introduced to the game. It wouldn’t be until he got to the States that basketball took its full effect on him and shifted his life’s work toward further expanding the infrastructure the game had within the continent.
Back in May of 2019, Fall was named President of the Basketball Africa League, a brand new partnership between FIBA and the NBA that featured 12 clubs from across Africa. Many of us in the States were tuning in to see our SLAM 232 cover athlete, J. Cole, get his first crack at the professional stage with the Rwandan Patriots.
However, the league’s successful launch this past May marks the beginning of a journey Gallo Fall, the NBA and FIBA have been working towards for decades.
“We launched Basketball Without Borders in 2003. And you see, appetite growing, and also obvious reasons why we should be more involved, because there was tremendous potential to grow the sport beyond just the individual players that were coming into NCAA schools, or even the NBA every year,” Fall tells SLAM.
Jared ebanks 