I grew up in the U.S. in the golden era of storytelling, when it came at you through film, sport and advertising all at once. I had a poster of Ali on my wall telling the world Impossible Is Nothing. I trained every day with the Rocky soundtrack in my Walkman, and stayed up watching Kobe make magic happen.
Sport taught me to fight, to play for the team, and to leave it all on the field. Film taught me to feel with my eyes, my ears and my heart. Advertising taught me the power of words and pictures.
A few years later I walked into TBWA, the network behind Impossible Is Nothing, with one dream to chase. Not greatness, not glory, not awards, not fame. Just one piece of work that inspires. A piece of work that would make a kid like me… believe. Seventeen years later, I am still chasing it.
Five global networks, four markets, seventeen years.
TBWA\Egypt
Kairo for Ideas
FP7 Cairo
JWT / Wunderman Thompson
Horizon FCB
VML
The Bold Group
Footballco MENA
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23 players I’ve shot with. Tap a film to watch it.
Before the briefs, between them, and long after the office lights go off. I brought American football home to Egypt.
I was a teenager in Hilliard, Ohio, when football got hold of me. I played for the Hilliard Davidson Wildcats, number 77, and Friday nights taught me everything that mattered: how to fight, how to play for the man next to me, and how to leave it all on the field.
Then I came home to Egypt, where almost nobody had ever seen the game played.
I used to joke with my friends that if I ever moved back, I would start an Egyptian football league. In early 2007 I stopped joking. I sent one email asking if anyone aged 16 to 24 wanted to learn the game. Forty people showed up to the first practice on 9 March.
That May we played our first game at the German University in Cairo, with no helmets and no pads. We called ourselves the Gridiron Club. By 2009 we had more than 120 players and ran the country's first tournament, eight teams strong.
Wadi Degla gave us a home: three fully equipped teams and a full season on the club's TV channel. More than 300 players came through before the 2011 revolution shut the programme down. Most of them never stopped playing.
In 2012 I founded EGFA, the Egyptian Gridiron Football Association, our first try at a national league, and helped build the Cairo Wolves. I captained the East at Egypt's first Pro Bowl in 2015. On 5 February 2016 I lined up for the Wolves in the first international club game ever played in Egypt. We beat Jordan's Amman Barracudas 40–20, and I was named defensive MVP.
In 2016 Ossama Thabet and I started Cairo Thunder, later the Gezira Thunder, with a men's team and a women's team, and I became technical director. Our first season we went 0–5. The next, 1–4. In 2020 we were 2–2 when COVID ended the season. Every win was earned.
Then ZED asked me to build Egypt's first American football academy for players under 17. From it came the ZED Jaguars, who joined the national league in 2022.
Football was always about the team. Sixteen years of building it, from one email to a national league, and somewhere along the way I stopped asking what I was capable of alone.
So I went looking for the heaviest things I could find. Atlas stones. Logs. Yokes. In strongman there is no playbook and nobody to cover for you. Just you, the weight and the clock. In 2021 I stepped onto the El Fit Strongman platform and finished fourth. By 2023 I had handed football to the people I trained and walked away for good.
In 2024 I took third at the Egypt Strongman qualifier. Now I train in Riyadh and put every lift on record at @thategyptianstrongman. The kid from those Friday nights never stopped competing. He just found something heavier to carry.
