By Yoshi Yoshida, Japanese High School Baseball Digest Weekly
Tuesday, May 22, 2012

As a 16-year-old football star in South Africa, the last thing Nimulodi Chekhemani wanted to do was leave the familiar banks of the Vaal River on the eve of quite possibly the biggest event in his country’s short history.

“My Dad came home one day and basically said, `Pack up, we’re moving,’ remembers Chekhemani.  “I thought he meant we were moving to the other side of the river.  Or maybe Johannesburg, which for me would have been a little hard to deal with since all my friends and football teammates were in Vanderbijlpark.”

Actually, Chekhemani would find out later that evening his family was moving much further than to the capital of South Africa.  They were moving across the globe, to Japan.

“I cried when my Dad told me.  I couldn’t believe it.  All I wanted was to see the World Cup.  I’d been waiting for the World Cup since I was, like, 10.  I lived and breathed the World Cup.  It was coming to my country.  Every football game I played in was with the World Cup in South Africa in mind,” he said, “and then just like that… gone.  To a country I knew nothing about.  Nothing.”

As the story goes, Chekhemani’s Dad worked for Mittal Steel of South Africa, which merged into ArcelorMittal in 2006 and became the largest steel company in the world.  In 2009 Chekhemani’s father, a quality control supervisor, was transferred… thousands of miles away.

Chekhemani had planned to play football for Tennoji High School, but while doing drills in tryouts, he was spotted by team recruiter Mitsuharu Samurakami, who at the time was an assistant hitting coach.

“I saw him running and all I could think was, ‘That kid needs to be playing baseball,’” said Samurakami.  “He was a blur.  He was everywhere on the field at once.  He played offense, defense.  He never got tired.  I watched him for about 30 minutes and went and talked to the coach.”

“I’d heard of baseball but I grew up around people playing cricket… and I didn’t like it,” said Chekhemani.  “I always thought it was boring.  Just hit the ball and run.  Then wait at the base.  To be honest, the only reason I was open to joining the baseball team was because I heard Japanese girls idolized baseball players more than football players.”

And so it went.  Chekhemani not only joined the baseball team but, because of his speed, won a starting job in the outfield.  Football and the 2010 South African World Cup – which would be won by the Americans in one of the great “must see” upsets in football history – was simply a blur in Chekhemani’s rearview mirror.  As a freshman, he finished second in stolen bases and posted an impressive .353 batting average.  In 2011, he added power to his arsenal, slugging over .600.

This year, Chekhemani is simply one of the best players in Japanese high school baseball, period.  He’s leading the league in hitting by a wide margin and is third in home runs.  He ran up a 21-game hitting streak that was stopped in early May, but responded by going 5-for-6 in a game later in the month.

Experts are wondering if Chekhemani might become a first round selection in the upcoming LRS draft.  If he is, he would be only the second foreign-born player selected in the first round – the first being Jung-ha Mun, the Korean who was picked 10^th overall by the then Yamamoto Battleships (now the Kawaguchi Transmitters) in 2008.

“It’s been a strange journey, for sure,” says Chekhemani, “but sometimes when you just try to stay positive and open to change, good things can happen.  So I’m just trying to stay open.  We’ll see what happens.”