Nearly a year to the day Maema Njongmeta surfaced at Bengals rookie minicamp undrafted and rode a longshot to a roster spot, he has been drafted to deliver a speech at Saturday morning's commencement when he receives his MBA from the University of Wisconsin School of Business.
As the Bengals rookies gather for the first time at this year's minicamp Thursday and Friday, they would do well to heed Njongmeta's advice to his fellow graduates in Varsity Hall, which he expects "to be packed," with about 1,000 people.
It won't be long. Delaney Egan has made sure of that. Egan, the assistant director of student services running the graduation, has told him the speech has a hard out at eight minutes.
"I don't know," he told her. "I like to talk."
He likes to sing at these things, too. There's YouTube proof a decade old.
As the valedictorian of the graduating eighth-grade class at Aptaksic Junior High School on the outskirts of Chicago in Buffalo Grove, Ill., Njongmeta set up the theme of his speech by serenading his classmates with a few bars from R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly," with the pleasant voice that had a solo earlier in his school career.
He'll probably spare his current classmates a song. But expect him to belt out the same kind of talking points framed by his own experiences, fueled by his parents' dreams, and tailored for a class of grads as well as the next class of undrafteds.
Even with his MBA, he's trailing his parents by a couple of doctorates.
"They've preached excellence my whole life," Njongmeta says. "Like betting on yourself. Going after it, getting it. Going after it. Getting it. Fall seven times, get up, eight. That's my parents."
Which is pretty much what happened in the worst/best play of his rookie year he spent majoring in backup linebacker and special teams. With two minutes left in a 20-20 game at Dallas before a lot more than 1,000 people on Monday Night Football, Njongmeta committed the unthinkable and allowed a punt to be blocked in Bengals' territory.
Just as improbably, Njongmeta got back up and took hustling revenge by impaling himself on the ball at his own 43 for the biggest fumble recovery of their season. Three plays later, the Bengals scored to win the game and begin their five-game winning streak and frenetic playoff push that ended the season.
That's going to help the speech. He tends to sweat when he speaks, so he'll ask his dad for one of his many white handkerchiefs to put in his pocket Saturday. Yet he'll be room temperature inside, thanks to the sport.
"Who knows how many people were watching (the Dallas game)? But you know what?" Njongmeta asks. "I was cool as a cucumber that night. Football helps get you in a zone."
That's where he'll be Saturday after crafting a speech he wants to tackle the past, present and future.
"Becoming, doing, and being," he says.
So the speech starts like he did. With his parents betting on themselves in a new country. Lynda and Leo, who brought him here from Cameroon in West Africa when he was three because his mother received a Fullbright Scholarship to Texas A&M to pursue her Ph.D.
But he'll tell the crowd the journey started long before. Long before him.
In order to get her undergraduate degree, Lynda needed to get to Nigeria from Cameroon, and with virtually no money, she had to go the cheapest way. It was also the most treacherous. A boat through the unpredictable Gulf of Guinea on a route known for keeping its dead if the waters demanded.
He still tells her it sounds insane.
"So basically, the Atlantic Ocean via a wooden raft," Njongmeta says. "When she told her grandmother how she was going, her grandmother fainted."
So, he'll ask his classmates to recall their moms, dads and anyone else who helped get them to the stage.
"We're the product of decisions that were kind of out of our hands," Njongmeta said. "We were dealt hands that we were dealt, and we all played them, and somehow that led us here."
What Delaney Egan likes so much about this speech, and she's one of the few who knows what's coming, is the humility of a man who played his first 17 NFL games and then committed to one of the school's most demanding programs as part of a team managing a $7 million business portfolio.
"If all you ever do is get stuck in your occupation, I think you miss out on something bigger," Njongmeta says. "So I can talk about my occupation, but I'd rather talk about my vocation. To me, that's serve and leadership. I talk about that, and then I kind of finish with a question. Like, hey, you've become what you've become by doing what you need to do. Now the question is, who will you be?"
From what Egan can see, he's going to be a lot more than an NFL linebacker. His application to speak was impeccable and the brief moments she saw him speak before various small groups of students impactful.
"All parts of his story are quite commendable," Egan says. "I thought it was a really interesting thing that he talks about how he is, yes, a football player, but he wants to be known for his impact not only on the field, but who he is as a person. That level of humility and awareness was really great to see. I think that message carries through his speech very strongly."
Leo Njongmeta, a director at the pharmaceutical company Abbvie, and Lynda Njongmeta, an associate director in quality innovation at The Kraft Heinz Company, are for sure taking Saturday off from their examples of excellence to attend the speech. Lynda's raft makes another trip.
"They're proud not because of the outcome, but because I internalized kind of what they were trying to preach to me as a kid," says Maema Njongmeta, who could be talking to a roomful of undrafted NFL rookies. "In this life, you have one shot. Make sure it's your best shot."
