“Muhammad Ali has been my role model ever since I discovered him at a young age,” Striker says. “I like Ali, the way he does his thing. He could go to the Philippines and everybody loved him. He could go to England. Everybody loved him. You know what I mean? They loved him everywhere. He was like the man of the world.”
Striker resembles Ali in this vein as well.
“I don’t care if you were black or white or smart or dumb, Striker was going to make you feel comfortable,” says Sean Callahan, Striker’s head football coach at Armwood High School in Seffner, Florida.
“He didn’t just hang out with the football players. He hung out with kids that played in the band or the thespians,” says Dr. Nicole Gallucci, an assistant principal at Armwood while Striker was there. “He was friends with everyone.”
Striker makes the same effort at OU. He chatted up incoming students at Camp Crimson last summer. He dropped by a media flag football game during the Sooners’ bye week, grabbed a microphone and flipped the script on reporters by interviewing them.
