Chibi Emejue

Chibi Emejue runs the 400 meter hurdles at Belmont University and spends most of the rest of his time giving things away.

He arrived at college with a large social following and no idea what NIL was, so he asked a teammate, Sabrina, who pointed him at One Sport Media. He messaged Ricky Cruz about five minutes later. He messaged other agencies too, and One Sport was the only one that wrote back. Three or four weeks after their first call Ricky had a deal, and inside a month it was SALTYmf. The two of them came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast together.

Track was an accident. He was a freshman basketball player who loved the game and was terrible at it, and around 2020 his older sister told him to tag along to a friend's track workout. He found out he was fast. He started a clothing brand at 16, modeled on his mother, who is a serial entrepreneur, and spent school nights designing until three in the morning until his father put a restriction on him. The Great Give Back grew out of a late night call with his business partner. It has a board and an LLC now, and alongside the giveaways it does media production, social media marketing, and teaching people how to set up a 401k and file their taxes.

The first Give Back Day rained. He had spent months collecting thousands of donations, clothes, food, toys, canned goods, essentials for men and women, Bibles, sports equipment, then rented a park and laid it all out on tables so anyone from the community could walk up, take what they wanted and leave. About a hundred people came through in the rain, and most of them were his own friends, there to support him. He stayed positive all day and was heartbroken anyway, because the people he had done it for were not the ones who showed. A teammate's friend's father named Matt heard about it and called him in the middle of the night. The second event drew five or six hundred people, with a basketball tournament, a live band and an ice cream truck. Chibi broke down crying.

He was born in Africa, came to America at two, and grew up in Prince George's County until his mother bought a house in Frederick when he was around eleven, because she wanted a better future for them. Three months into Nashville, knowing almost nobody, he spent about 250 dollars of his own money and fed roughly 110 people in Centennial Park on Halloween night. He says the people he meets on the street carry more wisdom than most of the people walking past them, because they watch everybody all day.