The anchor of the Colorado Buffaloes offensive line almost gave up on football as an underclassman.
“There was a time I thought about quitting,” admitted, senior right tackle, Stephane Nembot to BSN Denver. “If it wasn’t for my dad telling me, ‘we don’t quit,’ I would have been gone a long time ago.”
“He always told me, ‘we don’t quit, we are indomitable lions,'” he added. “Cameroon’s (national soccer team) is known as the Indomitable Lions. We conquer, we don’t get conquered.”
For a man with so much pride, from a family with so much pride, and a country with so much pride, inside a continent with so much pride, failure was not easy to deal with. As the pressure, the penalties, and the sacks started to add up when he was thrown into the fire as a red-shirt freshman, Nembot began to question his decision to play football collegiately.
“High school is definitely different from college, I had to learn it the hard way,” he explained. “When you get in college, everybody is as big and strong, they are technicians. It’s a different level, the competition just rises up a little bit more. Not only do you have to worry about your guy, but you have to worry about the standing of the game overall, who is where and everything. It became way more complicated, the playbook is like a bible, way more confusion. So yeah, there were times where I just thought, ‘wow, what the hell am I doing?'”
“But that’s why you shouldn’t quit on anything that you do,” Nembot added with a proud grin. “If you decide to do something, you should go all the way, so I decided to see where this was going to lead, and I guess there was a light at the end of the tunnel.”
The advice to stick with his commitment was just a small piece of what the Cameroon native takes from his father every week,.
“I talk with my parents every sunday… after I’m done talking with my mom who has a soft side, my dad gets on the phone and says, ‘alright listen to me!,'” he laughed. “I just nod my head ‘yes, yes, yes’ and then I just go apply it.”
Colorado fans and coaches should be sending thank you notes to Richard Nembot in Cameroon, because that player who nearly quit just a few years ago is now a leader of the team, a face of the program, and a great ambassador for the University.
“There’s a lot of stories on campus,’ said head coach Mike MacIntyre. “But this year I would say he’s one of the top stories of the entire student body. What all he’s overcome and what he’s done, how he can take advantage of it, and how he can articulate it, he’s special in that way.”
“I took him [to Pac-12 media days, in Los Angeles] because he’s a great player,” added MacIntyre. “But I also took him there because I knew he’s an unbelievable story, and I wanted to get his story out.”
Nembot was extremely grateful for the opportunity.
“That was probably one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had,” he said definitively. “It was pretty cool meeting guys from all the teams, going there, representing the school and everything. I thought it was a pretty good, great experience.”
His favorite part of the trip? Bonding with his coach.
“It was nice taking pictures, me and [Mike MacIntyre] were tweeting about it, making fun of each other, he was laughing, I was laughing, it was fun,” told Nembot.
So is he embracing this new role as a face of the program?
“Do I have a choice?,” he joked. “It’s a great thing to represent the University of Colorado. One thing that I’m always get impressed about is the fact that I am coming from Africa. I never had an idea of what american football is, and here I am talking about it like [I’ve been playing my whole life] or something. It is pretty interesting, so I embrace it, I embrace representing this school everywhere I go.”
And he represents his home everywhere he goes as well.
“You never forget where you came from, man, if you know Cameroon, we are the 2-3-7 area code,” he explained. “Everybody that is outside of Cameroon always represents the 2-3-7. Whenever we are going somewhere we like to go on top, yeah you stumble here and there, but it is a good thing to go on top.”
He is also embracing his role as a leader
“I had the great chance of having people like Daniel Munyer, Kaiwi Crabb, Jack Harris, those are the people that kind of embraced me, took me in, and made me one of them,” told Nembot. “When we came off the field, they would take me on the side and teach me. Coach has a lot of players to teach, so sometimes you can’t rely on him for everything, that’s why you have to go to some other guys. When you have great guys that can teach you, it’s a good thing.”
“Now, as a senior, I feel like it is also my job to give back what I have received,” he continued. “Whether you are on defense or on offense, I don’t care because we are all trying to get better… So when I see freshman out there I say ‘here, this is what coach wants you to do,’ because coach can’t be everywhere at once, so I kind of help them my way.”
When it comes to this season, the 6-foot-7 giant just has one goal.
“I want to win a bowl game, man,” he said without hesitation. “Come on, since I’ve been here, come on man, I want to win a bowl game. That’s not even a question, I want to go to a bowl game, I want to win and get out on top.”
There is a nice little opening for a “Bowl Game” chapter in the Stephane Nembot story, it comes right after “Senior Captain” and right before “NFL Draft Pick,” but this story doesn’t need any more chapters to be great, regardless of where it goes from here, the story of Prince Stephane will be told from Colorado to Cameroon for a long, long time.
