This story appears in SLAM 251. Buy here.
South Sudan, the world’s youngest country as I write this, is the proud home of a national basketball team competing in the Paris Olympics, a formidable achievement for a embattled nation that has only existed since 2011.
Even if this program was run by people no one at SLAM had ever heard of, the achievement is so great that it gets our attention. Alas, it is run by two of our favorite people in the sport, the gentlemen who have been bringing smiles to us and everyone who has loved the game for almost as long as SLAM has been around: Luol Deng and Royal Ivy.
Dan, who most of you should know from his long NBA career, if not the many remarkable steps he’s taken in his life before or since, is the focus of this story. I learned about Luol around 2000 when his older brother Aju was a highly touted recruit at UConn and agents started whispering about a younger brother they called “Louie” who would be better than Aju. In late 2002, I arrived at Blair Academy for a film about then-Blair senior Luwell and his teammate, Queens legend and future NBA player Charlie Villanueva. Luol was certainly one of the most impressionable teenagers I’ve ever spoken to (as if writing about high schoolers for SLAM wasn’t enough, now I have a teenager of my own), and he came up with an amazing story.
Born in southern Sudan when it was still a country at risk of civil war, Luol and his mother and siblings fled the country for a safer life in Egypt in 1990 and were reunited with his politician father in 1994. with , Aldo, in London. Luol spent some formative years in Brixton, South London, developing a proper love for Arsenal and football, but also constantly on the move. And growing. Luwall followed in Aju’s footsteps, coming to America at prep school, just as we found him in Blair. And he wasn’t just a pretty kid who played ball while getting a quality education to earn a college scholarship; he was the second best player in his high school class. Literally, almost every 2003 high school ranking system or the All-Star Game had No. 1 and No. 2 players. Luwall was 2nd, LeBron James was 1st.
Deng went to Duke for one season, leading the Blue Devils to the Final Four (where they lost by 1 point to Villanueva’s UConn team, ironically). Deng was the seventh pick in the ’04 Draft and began a 10-year run with the Bulls that featured two All-Star appearances, two seasons leading the NBA in minutes per game and multiple playoff appearances. This was basically the Thibs-Derrick Rose Bulls, and Deng was the engine that got them going. He played five more seasons after Chicago to secure a tidy 15-year career where he was absolutely loved by his coaches and team-mates and was always fun to chat to in the dressing room (especially if I was leading Arsenal checks).
However, Deng wasn’t content to just be a star on the court. Beyond that, he created the Luol Dan Foundation and regularly returned to London and Africa to participate in various charity events and basketball events designed to promote the game. In 2021 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, which is one of those very British things that, in the UK at least, means he should be introduced as Luol Deng OBE; Becoming “Sir Luol Deng” may happen in the future. At the same time that he was making his mark with charity work in his adopted home of England, Deng was rekindling his relationship with his real home in South Sudan. He was appointed president of the South Sudan Basketball Federation in 2019 and began spending more time there. “Imagine your family fleeing one country and going to find a life somewhere else,” Deng said of the Olympic qualifying team in a mini-documentary shared with SLAM. “And instead of you being in that other country and forgetting about South Sudan and enjoying your professional basketball career, you’re actually committing to go back and play in the same country that you fled because of the war, and you’re one. now bringing all this positivity to it.”
Beautifully said, Luol. Unsurprisingly, for a country of less than 13 million, only 13 years old and plagued by internal strife and development challenges throughout, building a basketball program was not a priority. But there’s a legacy of the sport there and in the people who came from there, starting with famous NBA shot-blocker Manute Bol (who initially inspired Deng and his brothers) and continuing with Deng’s former Syracuse star Kuet Duani, Manute’s son (and SLAM fave) Bol Bol and toward future young stars like Khaman Maluach, a 17-year-old freshman at Duke who is projected to be a top-five pick in the 2025 NBA draft.
Since being appointed president of the SSBF, Deng has instilled a structure around the team and has sought to get the best players from the South Sudanese diaspora to suit the country of their roots. Things came together last summer when South Sudan, making their first ever FIBA World Cup appearance, qualified for the Olympics by finishing as Africa’s top-ranked team.
If Deng was the SSBF’s Jerry West, a retired legend now building a roster with guile and conviction, Royal Ivy was their Pat Riley, a retired player turned motivational mastermind as a head coach.
Ivey, currently an assistant coach with the Houston Rockets, has been on my radar since 1999 when he was at the helm of what was once #SLAMfam’s favorite high school, Queens (NY) Cardozo (shout out to Ronnie Z and Coach Naclerio). to the NYC PSAL title, earning MVP honors in a 57-47 win at Madison Square Garden that gave Naclerio, now the winningest coach in New York State public school history, his first title.
After graduating from Cardozo with that title on his CV in ’99, Ivey spent a post-college year at Blair, where he played alongside… a young Luol Deng. “Luwal is like my little brother since I met him freshman year at Blair,” Ivy says on Zoom from Kigali, Rwanda, where the South Sudanese team is in pre-Olympic training. “I was older and wanted to protect him, but he was also a motivation for me. I was 17 and he was 13, he woke me up at 6am to go to the gym. Then we were in the same draft class and we hung out in Chicago and kept in touch. Later I worked at his camps in London.’
Ivey was a 6-3 2 guard who couldn’t shoot that well, but he always played tough, especially on defense, and he was a great teammate. He played four years at the University of Texas, reaching the ’03 Final Four, and made such a mark with his intangibles that he was the 37th overall pick in the ’04 NBA draft despite four-year college averages of 8 points, 3 rebounds and 2 : assists per game.
Ivey’s numbers were even lower in the pros, but he stayed in the league for a decade, and then, after his final game with the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2014, OKC GM Sam Preist asked if Ivey would serve as an assistant with their G League team. the blue one. Ivy has been coaching ever since.
“How I got this job was crazy,” Ivy shares today. “I was watching coach Luol (South Sudan) on Instagram. I train in New York. (Then Knicks head coach David) Fizdale gets fired. I was looking for a new opportunity and I was interested in helping Luol move forward. I told him I would love to be part of the crew. You don’t have to be a part of Lul told me. I want you to lead this business.»
And with that, the two, friends through two wild decades in the basketball business, were off and running, riding out the epidemic with a fast-paced style of play and bringing in more and more good players. South Sudan has a lot of work to do as a nation, but when the basketball team, nicknamed the Bright Stars, plays and wins, there is a national pride that is not usually shown. “We’re here to put South Sudan on the map,” says Ivy. “We are here to be treated. Bringing a country together through sport is a life-changing thing. I’ve been there and touched the ground and touched people.”
Deng adds in the mini-doc. “I want these guys to understand what sport brings to the country. Sports will be a means of unity.”
Obviously, a feature film should be made here. I know I will.
Photos via Getty Images.
