The Chuck Gallery – My pilgrimage to Mecca.

When I landed in the UK the first place I went to was Peckham Rye.[1]

I didn’t know a lot about Peckham other than John Boyega grew up there.  As far as I was concerned, if Peckham raised that beautiful Nigerian boy then it was good enough for me.

I went to Peckham because I wanted to see us.  To be around, to feel, smell and touch us.  It wasn’t a case of never having been around us, you’re hard pressed to not find Nigerians any where in the world.  As much as it was about being around us, it was also about being away from that gaze.

In Peckham I was back in Old Papatoetoe and Otahuhu – those familiar working class and diverse streets of New Zealand.  There I saw the same hair stores as Aunty Grace’s and sister Joy’s, however they were on every corner!

The streets were littered with Ankara and Kente cloths, with Yoruba and Twi the most valuable currency.  There was an ease and familiarity about Peckham that a Nigerian growing up in New Zealand would seldom experience.  A perfect blend of the beautiful struggle but with us as the subject and the predicate.  Us as the writer, director and producer.

While in the UK I had sought out blackness (aside from living in Chorley) in events, museums, plays and even barbershops, but nowhere brought that same ease and revolutionary joie de vivre as Peckham.

Until I found Mecca.

In Her Own Right (a portrait of Caroline Mosunmola Ikujuni, my grandmother) Jessica Omitola Charcoal and acrylic paint

Mecca, tucked in-between Rusholme and Longsight, in the middle of a quiet and unassuming street, away from the chicken joints, barbershops and markets, and steps away from where anti-slavery protesters had gathered, is a modest gallery that could easily be missed if one was absent minded.

Mecca has four rooms, named after dynamic contributors in Black art and isn’t hidden in the basement of the Museum of London, where it’s diminished by poor lighting and the fingerprints of the colonisers.  Mecca isn’t misquoted, brushed over or simply omitted like the true cost of cotton at the Museum of Science and Industry. Mecca boasts contemporary African art and the artists as the jollof and soya, not the veggies.

Mecca, a symphony of joy, pride, reverence, sorrow, pain and excellence.  You know how the Last Poets describe “the corner” on Common’s song of the same name? As“OUR rock of Gibraltar, OUR Stonehenge.” They might have well have been talking about Mecca.  

I heard about Mecca but I didn’t believe it existed and needed more clarification than the website provided me.  I sent an email simply asking if Mecca would be open on Saturday.  What I got in response was a phone call by the curator (the founder and owner).  Two minutes into that phone call and I was convinced that a pilgrimage was on the cards.

“Hi Kelechi?  This is Chukwudi Onwudiwe from the Chuck gallery.”
– N’nam ke kwanu? Thank you so much for giving me a call.
“I got your email and thought it would be better to call and tell you about the gallery.”

What proceed was a conversation that left me energised for the pilgrimage.  We spoke about the importance of the space, I told him at my disappointment with certain museums and galleries and how a concept like the Chuck Gallery was even rarer for myself not just because I was part of the diaspora but because I was of the antipodes.  He told me that the gallery was built for people like me – he wasn’t wrong.

The colours, the smell, the serenity, the knowledge, my gawd! The feeling that Mecca was uniquely ours while simultaneously universal… it all left me feeling like Andy Dufrense at the top of the roof!

Oneness Bolaji Ogunwo 47 x 47 inches Acrylic on canvas

The art work was a joy to behold and fully expressive of what it meant to be us – unique and common. Simple and complex. African and Western.  The picture of the bustling market place screamed Lagos, Accra, Mogadishu or even Oxford Street.  “The Chase” was the Melbourne Cup as much as Egyptian riders jostling for position. The girl with the glasses and the afro could be found in Bradford, Auckland, Cape Town or hell even Minnesota!

As touching as it is to notice the universal nature of blackness and the Black experience there is also something to be said about seeing yourself in works of art. The Mona Lisa for example, just doesn’t resonate with me, and in all honesty I don’t understand why shes’s a big deal (…yeah I said it…fight me!) While Mona fails to conjure up a heartbeat in the soul or mind, examining the “Joyous Celebration” leaves you heart fluttering at the sight of Nkechi or Bisola dancing at a wedding.

What really set Mecca apart was Chukwudi Onwudiwe.  As fantastic as the hospitality was (and it was fantastic) it was topped by the knowledge, the questions and the conversations that took place as Chukwudi became the pied piper lulling you from one painting, thought, question and feeling to another.  He did this skilfully, like an art teacher providing you with more than enough paint and canvas to convey your thoughts on what the artist intended, what you saw, how you felt and gently nudging you into abstract introspection.

From the abstract there is nothing special about Mecca.  That is to say it is nothing “unique.”  Be it el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazza’s Mecca, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Howard or the Chuck Gallery.  When stripped down Mecca is a place where ordinary things happen.  Muslims pay homage, Black people go to college and Black artist share their work.

Joyous Celebration Ufuoma Evuarherhe 62 x 39 inches Oil on canvas

Away from the abstract and back to reality, my reality, it is this simplicity that makes each revolutionary.

For the first time in my life, and I know how narcissistic this might sound, I felt connected to almost every piece on the wall; looking up the elongated necks of a Jessica Omitola piece, I see a grandmother I never met, and it is ordinary.  Examining the strokes of Bolaji Ogunwo as he combines vivid reds, blues, and yellows to show the complexity of the Black skin tone becomes ordinary, the conversation I had with the curator about Black spaces, the diaspora, economics and Igbo language becomes the most normal and natural thing in the world.

I suppose this is why the I say I’ve been to Mecca.

You can find details of the Chuck Gallery right here

[1] South side of that river!

In her Own Right

“In Her Own Right” shows the importance of women in the family unit, how nurture is needed. The painting depicts a strong message of inner strength and resilience by an elder female. Traditional cloth attire and designs are a myriad, full of meaning and history.

Charcoal and acrylic paint on canvas, yellow patterned cloth, add depth and drama, providing a more intimate look at family heritage and deep reserves of will.

Oneness

The elegance of ceremonial procession continues to find a way into Ogunwo’s works. It leaves open the prospects of archiving narrative milieu where eulogising social status becomes the centre of tradition.

This is eminent in this work, as riders arranged in an entourage march on as though making a grand entry into the Emir’s palace. The cascading gown almost obscuring the horse also hides the form of the frontal figure so that the impression of loose apparels align to all the riders; with proximity in space enhancing this mesmerising view topped off by white headgears arranged

Joyous Celebration

Young females in a traditional Nigerian ensemble with a modern twist are captured by Ufuoma. Their outfits are crowned with ‘geles’, a headgear sometimes made from aso-oke fabric native to Yoruba culture.

 

Keep Getting Dem Cheques HOF – The Coaches

Please note that numbers will fluctuate between the Euro, Great British Pounds and United States Dollars…if you were expecting me to convert currencies into one that would be easier for you to follow…you have come to the wrong place.

In 2000 Chelsea Football Club would sign former Champions League winner and Dutch International Winston Bogarde to a four year £40,000 a week contract (essentially an £10m contract over four years).  Within a matter of week of being signed, Gianluca Vialli , the manager who brought Bogarde to the club, was sacked and Bogarde would find himself on the bench as he was deemed surplus to requirements. Chelsea would try to get him off their books but no one wanted a 30-year-old defender on £2.5m a year.

Well the homie Bogarde, shocked at the amount of money he was receiving in the first place,  refused to move to a lesser club and take a pay cut in the process, so he could play regular football. Instead, like a champion, he turned up to every team meeting, every training and compulsory team function and would eventually make 12 appearances in his four years at the club – 10 of which were made in his first year!

Bogarde is certainly not the first over-paid individual to refrain from “earning their money” but he was the first to openly come out and basically say “brah I’m here for the bread!”

 “This world is about money, so when you are offered those millions you take them,’ he is quoted as saying. ‘Few people will ever earn so many. I am one of the few fortunate who do. I may be one of the worst buys in the history of the Premiership but I don’t care.’

The homie didn’t know it then but he would become a true trailblazer and a Keep Getting Dem Cheques founding father.

With cheques slowly *cough* -already outdated- *cough* becoming a thing of the past there has never been a better time to pay homage to the best getters of dem cheques that professional sport has ever seen and to pay homage to Bogarde, cos the only “Winston we regard is Bogarde!”

To break this down, an individual is a KGDC hall of famer if they excel in the following three categories better than anyone else in the world.

1. They are drastically over paid for the work they do in comparison to their own personal history or in comparison to other individuals in the market.

The distinction of comparison to their previous work and other individuals in a similar market is very important – otherwise anyone earning more money than Serena Williams would be in contention.

2. When faced with the option of winning and playing at the highest level or receiving as much money as possible they opted to get dem cheques.
3. Stumbled on a pot of gold through dumb luck
   Like Boagard this individual picked up pocket aces one time, played it perfectly and has been living off that result, and playing hands like he did then, ever since – and by the time people realise that they only have an offset 2 and 7 its too late.

Without further adieu please enjoy, marvel and aspire to be like many of these individuals because I’m sure we’d all like to be overpaid and underworked.

Sven Goran Erikson

Sven – Via the Daily Mail

If he wasn’t coaching, or cheating with his wife or girlfriend or his mistress and if he wasn’t “allegedly” at the strip clubs, he was getting dem cheques. After managing England (with whom he said he would leave to manage Aston Villa after hearing a “wealthy Arab” would buy the club) Sven signed a 3 year £6m contract with Man City (before the wealthy Arabs took over) and cut his contract short with 2 years to go.  After messing up with Mexican national team, Erikson showed just how much he loved coaching when he took over as Director of Football at Notts County (who had just been taken over by wealthy Arabs!).  Erikson got a £2m a year contract and large shares in the club but found himself bamboozled again when I turned out that the club weren’t going to make good on their promise of taking the oldest club in football through to the Premier League. Since then he’s managed the Ivory Coast national team, Leicester City and he’s managed in China…not once, not twice but 3 freaking times! Dude hasn’t finished a full contract since managing England – and he’s still getting £3-4 mill a year contracts! Dem Cheques.

Charlie Weis

Chuck via The Spun

Every now and then people rush into things after an amazing start.  We’ve all been there or know someone who has, be it that friend who claims to have met the love of their life after the first two dates or a player that we gave up on after a couple poor performances.  These things happen and most of the time it’s not a big deal.  Unless you’re Notre Dame.

Charlie Weis had just signed a 6 year £12m deal to coach the fighting Irish who believed that the ex-NFL coach would give their team a schematic advantage and it did.  Half way through his first season and with the record at 5-2 Notre Dame decided to extend Weis’ contract by four years.  Legend has it that Weis quoted Senator Clay Davis when he signed the extension “shit I’ll take any mother******’s money if they giving it away.” Weis finished the first year 9-2 and 10-2 in the second but after a 3-9 and two 6-6 season Notre Dame decided it best terminate his contract.  He was only 5 years into his 10 year contract and Notre Dame would pay him $2m a year for the next five years…even while he was coaching Kansas!

Andres Villas Boas.

The margin for success at the top end of sports is very small and teams do whatever they can for an edge.  Be it pumping fake noise into their stadiums, painting opposition locker rooms pink messing with dimensions of the field or you know, just signing the best players or coach or to get the best players or coaches.  Sometimes it’s hard to sign the best and when that’s not an option teams go for the next best thing, you know, the “he’s the new” insert name here guy. For Andres Villas Boas (a name best said with a Sean Connery accent) he was supposed to be the new Jose Mourinho – he had been part of Mourinho’s staff at Chelsea, had coached Porto to a major European Trophy and was the youngest manager to ever win a league and European trophy double.  Chelsea paid Porto £13m to buy out Villas Boas’ contract before signing him to a £13m three year deal.

Villas Boas would only last Eight months before getting the sack.  A year after being sacked he wound up at Tottenham Hotspurs and had them have their highest every points total.  Sadly for Villas Boas he would also find himself fired the next season.  You think the spells in England would have led to him taking a bit of a pay cut and sharpening his game with a lesser team or a lower league but you would be wrong. Villas Boas became a legend at the bank when he signed a two year deal to take him to cold ass Russia on a 16m Euro deal.  While at Russia he won the league and cup double his first season and the cup in his second.  The spell in Russia did AVB some good and managed to stabilise his reputation – from there he capitalised on this newly found good will by singing an £11m a year deal to coach in China.  Put it this way, in 2017 there were only 4 coaches who were better paid than him coaches so good a first name will suffice.  Marcello on £18m a year (he’s only won the Champions League and the World Cup, along with bucket loads of Sieria A titles), Carlo, Jose and Pep and all they’ve won were Champions Leagues and buckets of international league trophies from legitimate countries not like France or Russia…yeah I said it! The best part is that after acquiring close to £40 in the last 4 years of coaching AVB walked out one day to fulfil his child hood dream of becoming a rally driver… I hope he is taking notes off the person who’s number one on this list as they showed how to make a small fortune from not coaching

Phil Jackson

Via Bleacher Report

It’s hard to call a head coach with 11 championships a KGDC Hall of Famer but Jackson just wasn’t content with being a champion in Basketball, he wanted to be a champion at the bank.

After months of negotiations Phil took the job as President of Operations for the New York Knicks.  Legend had it that Phil never wanted the job and instead wanted to be in the frame with his beloved LA Lakers with his then fiancé Gene Buss. However, when Jim Dolan kept throwing money at Phil it turned out that the old saying of everyone having a price was true.  For Phil that price was $12m a year for 5 years! While in charge of basketball operations at the Knicks, Jackson broke two records, for most losses in a row and most losses in a season as his team ended with an 17-65 record.  The best thing that Phil did for the Knicks was draft Kristaps Porzingis and leave two years early with the Knicks forced to pay him $24m to leave…Some say that he tried to manufacture his firing by falling asleep in draft meetings, trying to trade away Porzingis after he skipped an exit interview and gave out some of the worst contracts and trades in the history of the New York Knicks and that is saying something! His overall record in his three seasons was 80-166…dem cheques Phil, dem Cheques.

Jon Gruden

The greatest of all time! Via USA Today

In sports there are two individuals who are made more popular when they are not playing.  1.  The back up QB and 2.  The 6/7 out of 10 induvial who has been hurt for a while.  The back up QS is playing with house money and as long as they are not TERRIBLE you’ll find people often clamour for them to start permanently after a few games, the bar is so low that they could throw interceptions but if they win all you hear is “hey this Tebow guy is pretty good…all he does is win”

The 6/7 out of 10 guy who many don’t think about becomes a 8/9 out of 10 player once they’ve been injured for a few weeks. Everyone forgets their flaws, everyone forgets the little mistakes they make and why they are a 6/7 out of 10 and people only remember them for the good things they did – sheeee-it if their replacement is playing terribly then all of a sudden Nathaniel Clyne becomes Cafu.

This is the only way to explain how and why someone has given Jon Gruden a 10 year $100m contract despite the fact that he last coached in the 2008-2009 NFL season, and won his last play-off game in 2002.[1] Put it this way, I Kelechi Osunwa, sitting on my arse right now in an airport in Mallorca as I type out this sentence, have won as many National Football League matches as a Head Coach as Jon Gruden since 2009, and you, the reader, reading one of the longest sentences you’ve ever read in whatever state of mind and country you are currently situated in, sitting in your fat pants blissfully unware of who Jon Gruden is, only reading this article because you’ve heard or seen me talk about “Keep Getting dem Cheques”, yes you, have won as many play-off games as Jon Gruden since 2002, but no one is gonna offer us a hundred… a hundred….shit let me put it in italics just so you understand the amount…a hundred million dollars.

What makes Gruden the Jerry Rice of Getting Dem Cheques is how he managed to leverage the interest from college and NFL teams into securing new contracts for himself.

Check this, Gruden starts a new job with ESPN as a colour analyst for Monday Night football in 2009 along with having his own draft show and covering some college games. In 2012 Gruden’s name came up on a list of coaching vacancies – with the Tennessee Volunteers job and the Oakland Raiders leading contenders.  What did Gruden do with all this interest? The man and his agent flipped that interest into a 5-year contract extension!

Two years later the Huston Texans, the Volunteers and the Raiders (again) all test the water to see if Gruden would be keen on coaching – Gruden even does a few interviews saying that he’s only focused on doing his job until the end of 2014 and even says that coaching Tennessee is a dream job. What does he do at the end of 2014 with all the NFL teams coming after him?[2] Son’s and daughters, the man flips that into another contract extension to keep him in the broadcasting booth until 2021. In 2017 Gruden was “allegedly” getting paid $6.5m a year to not coach.  Only 4 NFL coaches were getting more than him and 3 of them were Super Bowl Champions[3].

Ladies and gentlemen there is nothing else we can do here but just appreciate the finesse game that Gruden has had since 2009 playing a long con that Clay Davis would have been proud of.  I didn’t mention this earlier while I was writing out a hundred million dollars in italics but it’s believed that Gruden also negotiated a small percentage of Raiders shares into his one hundred million dollar contract. People talk about hero’s we don’t deserve but man, Jon Gruden is the hero we do not deserve.

 

 

[1]The year he won the Super Bowl on the back of one of the greatest defences in the history of the NFL (a defence built by Tony Dungy whom Gruden thanked while picking up the super bowl trophy!).

[2] Remember – the guy had just signed a 5 year extension 2 years earlier!

[3] The other was Jeff Fisher who in hindsight should be on this list! Bomani Jones used to call him fiddy fiddy but after his last few seasons started calling him seven nine.

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton