Farouq’s Second Verse Same as First
Al-Farouq Aminu, just this afternoon, told someone who knows him far better than I do that there’s nothing to the swirling rumor about him leaving Wake Forest for the NBA this spring. He said he’s not going anywhere, at least not before next season. He left no wiggle room. And he has been in classes, and study hall. He has begun arranging a room assignment for next fall. He has been consistent throughout. He told Coach Dino Gaudio he wasn’t even going to test the waters, and that’s what he told me Saturday.
Despite all that, even his mom was calling to ask him what was going on after a blog titled draftexpress.com, attributed multiple unnamed sources to a report that Farouq was entering the draft, for good. I don’t know Jonathan Givony, the president of the blogsite who apparently wrote the piece. So I certainly don’t know who his sources are. My suspicions are they are agents, possibly from the same operation that Givony is saying will represent Alade Aminu, Farouq’s big brother who just finished his senior season at Georgia Tech. Maybe they wanted to float the balloon and see where it would land. I don’t know.
And I can’t say for sure that Aminu will be at Wake Forest next season. We’re swimming in murky waters when analyzing the decisions of young men trying to decide their immediate futures. You can see only so far, and no one ever knows everything about anything. Farouq told me back in February that he had two good reasons for wanting to return next season. One was to become a better basketball player. The other was to get closer to earning a degree. Both of his parents are educators. The value of education is highly prized in his family. He’s a good student with more than a modicum of intellectual curiosity. He said the only reason he would even entertain the notion of leaving would be for the financial well-being of his single-parent family, which includes Alade and Al-Wajid, his 10-year-old brother. But he said with Alade graduating and getting a job, possibly even in professional basketball, then he didn’t think money would be the deciding issue.
Things can, and do, change all the time. Just because something is true today doesn’t mean it will be tomorrow. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen with Farouq or Jeff Teague before the April 26 deadline to declare. But I can tell you that as of 5 o’clock this afternoon, Farouq was adamant that he was staying at Wake Forest.