It took a while for people to realize the greatness in Chris Ohiri--in some cases almost three weeks.

Varsity soccer coach Jim Munro got some idea when he watched the freshman team play M.I.T. in 1960 and saw the African center forward sprain both the goalie's wrists with one shot.

It became a little more evident when Ohiri started his Varsity soccer career with five goals in the first game of the season against Tufts, a new Harvard single game scoring record.

But it was painfully obvious when the very next week, Ohiri repeated his five-goal feat in his Ivy debut against Cornell.

Chris Ohiri did things that just couldn't be done. Something could be impossible only until he tried it, and then it seemed so natural.

The Harvard Athletic Department thought it could best sum up his career with a prediction: "For a young man with an established success formula there isn't much doubt about his future."

Unfortunately, Harvard could not foresee the future very well. Chris Ohiri died in the fall of 1966 at the age of 26. Death too had seemed impossible for Harvard's greatest soccer hero. But Chris was suddenly struck down on the Business School tennis courts one afternoon by an incurable cancer.

Ohiri came to Harvard as an already established athlete. He had been Nigerian decathlon champion, inter-collegiate boxing champion, and leader of the National Soccer Team and 1960 Nigerian Olympic Team.

His first year here, he captained the freshman soccer team to an undefeated season while he himself collected 36 goals in nine games, twice scoring eight goals in a single game.

Ohiri's play was tremendous to watch. He dribbled, passed, and most important, shot like the Olympian that he was. Coach Munro says it was like a man playing with boys. No one could touch him.

In his freshman year alone, he knocked four goalies out of the game with injuries and one completely unconscious. In his first varsity game, one of his 20-yard shots sent the goalie to the hospital for wrist X-rays.

During the three years that Ohiri led the soccer team he broke every record that Harvard soccer had. While still a junior, he broke the Harvard all-time career scoring record and was named to the All-American team. He led the Ivy League scoring all three years, in each case with season totals higher then the previous Harvard season record.

The things that Ohiri could do were amazing. He once told a sports writer, "I think I've scored as many goals with my left foot as with my right. In the first few minutes of a game I test the goalkeeper by kicking a few easy ones. If he dives well to his right, I'll use my left foot. If he dives well to his left--which is rare--I'll use my right foot."

Ohiri is as much a hero in track as in soccer. In the few meets that he wasn't injured, he managed to set a Harvard and IC4A record in the triple jump.

As the only freshman on the 1960 combined Harvard-Yale track team against Oxford and Cambridge, he out-jumped the former Harvard track captain who was leading the British, in what he later described as the greatest thrill of his Harvard career. After his first two games Ohiri was never in full form again. Munro says in retrospect, "The thing that I always think about is that after those initial two games, I never saw him healthy."

In the third game of his sophomore season, against Amherst, Ohiri scored four goals before he pulled a thigh muscle and sat out the rest of the game. Harvard won, 4-2, but Ohiri was lost for the majority of the season.

Real Potential

During his junior and senior seasons, he continued to play with various leg injuries. He so far outshone anyone else, despite these physical handicaps, that his coaches and followers have always wondered what his real potential was.

After a brief period of hospitalization in the U.S. in 1966, Ohiri was released so that he could return to Nigeria to live out the rest of his life with his family. On the plane back he tried to write a collection of memoirs that he had been planning, but his once athletic hands could not even grip the pencil.

Chris Ohiri, class of 1964, arrived in Nigeria only to face military confinement as a threat to the present government. He died in police custody 100 miles away from his home.