How a sports agent and a lawyer stumbled into the “craziest shared experience that we never expected.”
When Adam Sloan W’95 and Matthew Ingber C’95 met the first week of their freshman year at Penn, they clicked right away.
Ingber, who came from a small Catskills town, and Sloan, a charismatic Long Islander, were both extroverts who dove headfirst into the campus social scene. Their friendship soon sprouted lasting roots.
Twenty-six years later, the pair met for dinner. They caught up as usual, swapping stories old and new—and that night in 2021, Sloan had a captivating one to share.
As a sports agent at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), he had recently helped a young chess prodigy named Tanitoluwa “Tani” Adewumi land a book and movie deal. The eight-year-old boy’s family fled a dangerous situation in Nigeria and had been living in a homeless shelter while seeking asylum in the US. At the same time, Tani had become a New York state chess champion.
That night at dinner, Sloan wasn’t asking for Ingber’s input as a trial attorney. “I was telling the story because I was so impressed by the family and what they have done, and it had so moved me,” Sloan says. But Ingber saw his own chance to jump in and assist. “Let me have a few conversations back at my firm,” he told Sloan. “I feel like I could be helpful here.”
Soon the longtime friends were working together, each with their own expertise and high-powered employers behind them. The result has been life-changing for Tani and his family—and Sloan and Ingber, too.
“In these United States, nobody has done what these two guys have done for us,” says Kayode Adewumi, Tani’s father. “They are wonderful people. Extremely wonderful.”
For Sloan, it all started in early 2019, when the New York Times published an article about Tani. Sloan’s son is a two-time national chess champion, so he knows that world well. The director of Tani’s school chess program, whom Sloan had known for a decade, called and asked for his help. You’re the only person I know who is an agent and understands chess, Sloan remembers Russ Makofsky saying. Can we talk about this opportunity?
They met up while Makofsky fielded calls from TV shows, news outlets, and celebrities who all wanted to get involved. “I was immediately taken by the story,” Sloan says now. He called CAA’s publishing and motion pictures teams on a Sunday, and they all agreed to meet with Kayode the next day.
“He came in beautifully dressed in a navy-blue pinstripe suit,” Sloan remembers. “And he said, ‘I don’t have a story about chess. I have a story about life.’”
Kayode described how the militant Islamic group Boko Haram had tracked and threatened the Adewumis, who are Christians, for years, forcing them to flee to the US seeking safety. After a challenging stay with some relatives in Dallas, the family moved to New York City and took refuge in a homeless shelter. Kayode worked as a dishwasher and Uber driver; his wife cleaned buildings. They clung to a hope for something better—and celebrated watching their young son learn chess and amass “seven trophies by his bed in the homeless shelter,” according to the Times’s March 2019 article, which noted that Tani had “outwitted children from elite private schools with private chess tutors” to go undefeated at a state tournament for kindergarten through third grade players that month.
After the Times article was published, a generous donor supplied a free apartment until they got back on their feet, and a GoFundMe campaign raised more than $250,000 for the family. Rather than spending it, they launched a foundation to help other refugees. “On the spot, we decided we had to tell this story,” Sloan says. “It’s our responsibility to tell this story.”
“Ever since that time,” notes Kayode, “Mr. Adam has been very supportive and very good to our family.”
CAA’s team helped the Adewumis land a three-book deal with HarperCollins and a motion picture rights deal, with Trevor Noah as a producer with Paramount. The book, My Name Is Tani…and I Believe in Miracles: The Amazing True Story of One Boy’s Journey from Refugee to Chess Champion,came out in April 2020.
Meanwhile, Tani continued to conquer the chess world, winning his way to a national master title. But legally, the family was still adrift. They didn’t have asylum, which meant no refugee status, no green cards, and no guarantee of staying in the US. It also meant Tani couldn’t travel out of the country to compete in chess tournaments—crucial if he wanted to become an international master.
“I was heartbroken that he couldn’t do that—that he didn’t have the same opportunity that other kids had, despite all his hard work and everything he was doing,” Sloan says.
That’s where Ingber picks up the story. A partner at Mayer Brown, he contacted his law firm’s pro bono practice right after his dinner with Sloan in 2021. “When Adam told me this story, I was thinking, wow, this family needs more support than they’re getting at the moment on the legal side,” he says.
After meeting the Adewumis and getting a green light from Mayer Brown, Ingber assembled a legal team. They urged the federal government to “stipulate to asylum”—meaning no trial would be necessary—and it worked. By the end of 2022, the Adewumi family officially gained asylum. Today they all have green cards, enabling them to remain in the US and also travel outside of it—a profound change and major relief for the whole family. “Every time I see Kayode,” Sloan says, “he always says, ‘Make sure to say hello to Matthew—he changed my life.’”
“I tell my colleagues here—especially young lawyers—that there is something powerful about having a law degree,” Ingber says. “What we were able to do for this family with our law degree was extraordinary. This is Exhibit A that I use now when I talk to other people at the firm about how fulfilling this work can be.”
Sloan has continued to work as Tani’s agent, helping him land a Chess.com partnership and a campaign with Target. (His other clients include Formula 1, Chelsea Football Club, The US Open, and Riot Games.) “Investing my time and energy in something so meaningful gives me more energy in return, and it’s been incredible to have CAA’s support along the way,” he says.
In January 2023, Sloan and Ingber had dinner again—but this time their table held about a dozen people, all there to celebrate the Adewumi family’s grant of asylum. “It was an unforgettable night,” Ingber says. “The most beautiful thing,” adds Sloan.
It’s now tucked into their well of shared memories, right alongside their time as Zeta Beta Tau fraternity brothers, the backpacking trip through Europe they did post-graduation, their weddings, becoming dads at roughly the same time. “It’s been something else to connect over,” Sloan says. “For the rest of our lives, we’re going to share this amazing story.”
“Adam and I work in different worlds,” Ingber says. “I never thought those worlds would collide where we could team up to help a family.”
“This is one of the most motivational things we’ve ever done,” Sloan adds, “and doing it together as friends is the craziest shared experience that we never expected. We didn’t look for this. It found us.”
—Molly Petrilla C’06
