Apollo Crews recently appeared on Chasing Glory with Lilian Garcia. In a sneak peek of the episode, Crews reflected on his experience growing up in Kenya and Uganda.
“I grew up in Atlanta ’til about 6,” Crews revealed. “And when I was about 6, we moved to Kenya, which is a whole career change for me, you know. This is something completely different, and you know, it’s just one day we up and left. [My dad is] from Nigeria, but he got some work with the United Nations at this time … and we moved to Kenya.”
As one can expect, the move was quite the change for a young Crews.
“It is [a culture change]. It’s crazy, but it’s the exact same thing. You know, different worlds, but the exact same, like how you gonna fit in, are you gonna have friends here? … We went to an international school which is, you know people from all over the world went there. So luckily the predominantly spoken language was English. So it was very different, but you know, after a while, we settled in, started making friends and this became our home, ’til about 3 or 4 years later, we moved to the neighboring country, Uganda.”
During the interview, Crews also discussed his father’s work ethic, and how he and his father clashed over the importance of education.
“[My dad] just grew up from nothing, you know, and he always tells us this story, growing up, that he had one [pair of] underwear that he wore to school every day,” Crews reminisced. “And he’d have to wash it every day. He’d walk for miles to school, but the only thing that got him to where he is today is his education and how hard he studied. And that was a little difference between me and him is…I was more into sports, you know, and I felt like that was my way of making something of myself, you know what I mean? And he was all about education, you know, in this world you’re nothing without education.
“I almost felt like the pressure that he put on us, for me personally, kind of pushed me away from that, it was like, no I really wanna see what’s out there for me. I really wanna go do my own thing. You know, like I don’t want anything to do with this. But man, he worked hard, he worked so hard and that’s something that he instilled in all four of us.”
The full video is available here:
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