Texas track and field athlete Osawese Agbonkonkon has a variety of interests away from the sport, including writing science-fiction novels and becoming an entrepreneur.
Courtesy Osawese Agbonkonkon
AUSTIN — Osawese Agbonkonkon was stumped.
When a prying reporter asked him what he does in his spare time, the 21-year-old from Frisco had to give it some thought.
Not because he doesn’t have a wide variety of interests. He does. Oh, does he ever.
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It’s just the concept of free time that he struggles with.
Pressed on the subject, this full-time Texas Longhorns track and field athlete who is also a part-time science-fiction novelist/business entrepreneur/movie buff/aspiring lawyer and economics major offered a leisure moment. But it’d be wrong to say he dabbles in those other ventures because any one of them could be worthy of a total commitment.
He wants to do it all and in no particular order. Just quickly.
“He’s very driven,” his father, Nosa, said in a classic understatement. “He’s very smart and very knowledgeable about a lot of things. He’s just in a hurry.”
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Osawese (pronounced Osa-way-say) did admit he enjoys a pickup basketball game or two at a nearby park with a core of about two dozen friends.
“I model my game as a shooting guard,” said Osawese (which means “God has blessed me” in his native Nigerian language) Agbonkonkon. “I’m pretty explosive, and I can get to the rim on anybody. I can dunk, but I try to avoid it.”
Greg Harrell can vouch for that. He was Agbonkonkon’s Wakeland High School track coach and convinced him to try high jumping after seeing him in a basketball warmup drill as a freshman.
“He’s got athleticism through the roof,” Harrell said. “But he’s very much a technician. I could ask him to watch a video for an hour about how to make his approach better, and he’d do it.”
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“Big O,” as Agbonkonkon was known then, was extremely raw, but shortened the learning curve and improved his jumps by 7 inches from February to May of his junior year. He hit a personal-best 7 feet at an area meet and finished fourth at the 5A state meet.
“He wanted to run sprints, too,” Harrell said. “He probably could have been a good 400 runner.”
Even before switching to basketball, Agbonkonkon used to play soccer as a youth and for a long time regretted not seeing that blossom. He refused to even watch pro matches until recently being captivated by the World Cup action.
“I’ve gotten over it, but I was not engaged for a long time,” he said. “But I was really good at it and felt I could go pro.”
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“I’m not saying I was THAT good,” he said. “But I could play at a very high level. I have to say I think Argentina’s going to win. They’ve got some magical powers to behold, the way they’ve come back to win.”
Texas high jumper Osawese Agbonkonkon is coming off back-to-back appearances at the NCAA championships.
Courtesy Osawese Agbonkonkon
He’s all about magical powers and wrote about such in his first sci-fi novel that took six years to write. He could use some himself because he’s had his share of patella tendinitis in his right knee the past two seasons, not exactly an ideal condition for a high jumper who has a personal best of 7-1 ½ and is coming off back-to-back appearances at the NCAA championships with a 16th-place finish in June.
Not that anyone dare suggest he slow down. Not that it would do any good.
This Texas senior-to-be doesn’t has no desire to taper off and hasn’t since he began writing that first novel as an eighth-grader. Yeah, eighth grade when others were struggling with surviving puberty and having the courage to invite a girl to the middle school dance.
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He’s been full speed ahead ever since. Some may think he’s going too fast in too many directions, and he concedes that he’s very goal-oriented.
This bespectacled, 6-foot-3, 183-pound athlete with locs and a slight gap-toothed smile on loan from Michael Strahan knows only one pace.
“I want to be a well-known, sci-fi author,” he ticked off his goals without at all sounding arrogant. “I want to be an executive producer. I want to win an NCAA championship. I want to go pro in track. I want to get two more graduate degrees. I want to go to law school. Once I get healthy, I feel I can take my sport by storm. And I think all of this is very achievable.”
And why wouldn’t he think that? This is a kid who went on his own to the family’s local bank to apply for a credit card in high school. He’s off to a good start.
As for his writing career, he’s been a huge sci-fi fan since he first watched the trailer to the “Dune” movie series. His favorite television show was and still is Richard K. Morgan’s “Altered Carbon,” a Netflix story set 360 years into the future about consciousness traveling across different bodies that “blew my mind.” In fact, he made changes to his own book after watching it a second time.
Agbonkonkon was always naturally curious as a young boy and accepted the role of independence and self-reliance early on.
“I remember one time he bought a book about neuroscience,” his dad said. “I asked him why, and he said he just wanted to learn more about it.”
He went through another phase later and took to reading books about cooking, prompting his father to ask, “Are you going to be a chef?”
Why not? Add it to the list?
Heck, he became entranced with investments and was trading stocks while he was still in high school.
“He’s into everything,” his dad said. “And he’s so attentive to details.”
Osawese Agbonkonkon hopes to finish the second and third books of his “Psychic Suit” novel series by year’s end.
Courtesy Osawese Agbonkonkon
His fascination with sci-fi grew when he was in elementary school and became smitten with sci-fi guru Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series about the fall of a space empire.
Further motivated by a fifth-grade teacher who had also written a sci-fi book, Agbonkonkon took to writing at a feverish pace early on. Starting in 2018, he cranked out a first draft of 40,000 words on his personal laptop although he actually began writing out the narrative of “Psychic Suit” long-hand because, as he explained, he’s more of tactile person and adores the feel of pen to paper.
He’s the only son of Nigerian parents, a father who is a chemist and a mother who is a financial advisor, and a brother to four high-achieving sisters. He’s close to his family — one reason he left Oregon after one season and transferred to Texas — but he also routinely escaped into other worlds as a voracious reader as a youth.
He’d become so familiar to his high school librarians that they’d allowed him to skirt the rules of no more than three books at a time and check out up to 10 books simultaneously.
He even jokes that he basically stalked a female classmate who had checked out the third book in a series called “Five Kingdoms” and confesses to “pestering her” to finish it before the upcoming, long Thanksgiving weekend.
So it was only natural that he turned quickly to writing himself.
“I can tell a story,” he said.
He completed that first book in six years, a work that has attracted national attention with articles in The Athletic and Ebony magazine and a live interview with Fox television. “We’re in talks with ‘Good Morning America,’ ” he said.
“A strength of his is prioritizing his time,” Harrell said. “He came into high school acting like a professional. He has so much going on and is such an intellectual, but he’s flexing different muscles that are not competing with one another.”
It’s very clear he’s establishing his brand without sacrificing his devotion to his grades and his jumps. He’s done interview with 40 different media outlets in six states.
“He’s really disciplined and smart,” said his agent Ishmael Lawrence, who also represents former Longhorn linebacker Malik Jefferson for In Real Life Talent. “He still excels in every space at a high level. Nothing seems to be negatively impacted. Sometimes I go, ‘Man, you’re a machine.’ He’s quite impressive.”
When Agbonkonkon’s not pursuing his track career, crafting his second and third books in his “Psychic Suit” series about characters with mystical powers trying to thwart villains trying to steal the family’s business of precious alien metals or playing hoops occasionally, he’s got other things in the works.
For instance, he’s written about 97,000 words of a TV Bible, a retelling of the major events in the condensed Christian book that he’s shopping to Hollywood studios. He’d like to wrap up his second and third books of “Psychic Suit” by the end of the year. The University of Texas helped him publish the first one, which sold a couple thousand copies.
Who knows what Agbonkonkon’s future has in store?
He’s also an unabashed fan of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and movies and particularly loved “Skyfall.” While not exactly in the sci-fi genre, Bond did employ a number of futuristic gadgets, and Agbonkonkon recognizes that every actor in that leading role from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig almost seemed to have their own magical powers at times.
There’s no question Agbonkonkon has a license to write.
Heck, could he ever envision himself as a writer to continue the Bond series?
“Oh, that’d be a great experience,” he said with a hearty laugh. “I just hope it’d remain faithful to Fleming’s vision and is treated with respect.”
Wherever his path takes him, it seems more than reasonable that he’ll be a big success. After all, he doesn’t accept failure. He’s got a 3.8 GPA and a book to his credit as evidence.
In this age of NIL and commercial endorsements, Agbonkonkon continues to create his own future and build his intellectual property with his own fertile imagination of worlds beyond his own.
“His story truly resonates because it challenges the stereotypes,” Lawrence said. “He definitely proves that athletes can be elite in competition and the classroom. He’s a living example of that. This is only the beginning for him.”