Last week, we told you about some guy named Jonathon Nicola, who got arrested by a high school athletic association in Ontario for being just a little bit too old to hoop it up with the teenagers he was competing against. We’re not talking a few months, either, as it was uncovered that Nicola is actually a 29-year-old man! Turns out having a grown ass dude starring at center against 17- and 18-year-old kids isn’t really fair.
Well, more details have surfaced about this story and, guess what Nicola’s best defense is? He didn’t know that he was 29 years old!
No joke, according to the Toronto Star, that’s what the 6’9″ man is claiming, even saying that his own mom couldn’t tell him his age.
“I aways keep asking what is the specific age that I was born, and she has told me that she could not remember,” he told the April 19 hearing.
“Over (in South Sudan) . . . not every year we study . . . we always keep moving to different schools, and over there, they do not ask your age. They do not ask you nothing,” Nicola said.
After obtaining a student visa in order to participate in high school basketball from his coach, Coach Steyn, Nicola said everything was handled by Steyn, alleging that it was him who filed all the fradulent paperwork, via the Toronto Star:
“I told him, no, I was not born in 1998. I told him that I am too young for 1998. I’m not in 1998. Then he told me, ‘No, you go back ask my mother, ask my mother how old am I.’ And my mother she do not even remember. She told me 1993, 1990,” Nicola said at the earlier hearing.
“So I went back and this guy he just do me the paper . . . he did the whole papers. He did everything.”
Things got sketchy when, traveling to the U.S. a month after he arrived in Canada, Nicola applied for a visa and border control noticed that the fingerprints on the application matched those of a man who unsuccessfully applied as a U.S. student in April of 2015. The previous application was rejected, with Nicola’s birthdate listed as 1986, rather than the 1998 he wrote onto his Canadian visa application.
While he pled his case to a Canadian hearing adjudicator that his reasoning for coming to Canada was to support his mother back in Sudan, the official responded, “I understand your desire to do that,” the adjudicator told Nicola, “but the way you have gone about doing that is frankly, quite illegal.”
Looks like the Canadian Government is the only defense that can shutdown Jonathon Nicola.