DEL.ICIO.USACC Basketball
Aminu brothers collide during Tech’s upset of Wake
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saturday, January 31, 2009
In the beginning, nobody watched. It was just Alade — the older brother by three years — and Al-Farouq and a basketball rim that would beg for mercy if it could.
By porch light they played late into the night outside their Stone Mountain home. Big brother never failed to hammer away at the little one, asserting the ages-old sibling chain of command.
JOHNNY CRAWFORD/jcrawford@ajc.com
One happy, hoopin’ family. Georgia Tech’s Alade Aminu (left), mother Anjirlic Aminu and Wake Forest freshman Al-Farouq Aminu.
Special
Al-Farouq Aminu, 3, (left) and Alade Aminu, 6, have been balling since they were youngsters.
Johnny Crawford/jcrawford@ajc.com
The Aminu’s were matched up against each other in Saturday’s game.
“We had that goal and that driveway,” Alade Aminu said. “Go to 10. I was so much better than him at the time, I could just let him score [the first] 9 points, then rack it up and get my 10. It just crushed him. He’d go, ‘Let’s play one more, one more.’ You couldn’t get us off that court.”
“Always a blowout,” Al-Farouq remembered. “It helped my competitive side. We’d play 10 games and he’d win 10. I learned it didn’t matter if I got mad or if I pouted.”
Saturday, the brothers faced each other once again, before a paying crowd and a regional television audience this time. In a howling game decided on the final shot, big bro still was playing kick-the-can with little bro’s heart.
No matter that they came
from opposite poles of the ACC, Alade’s Georgia Tech got its first conference win of the season at the expense of Al-Farouq’s sixth-ranked Wake Forest, 76-74.
They went at it Aminu-a-Aminu for much of the afternoon, matched up together constantly.
The sum was something a little more memorable than the only other time brothers have opposed each other in the ACC (in 1969, Wake’s Jerry Montgomery outscored Maryland’s Roger 6-4). Alade, the 21-year-old Tech senior, finished with 10 points, 13 rebounds and six blocks. Wake Forest freshman Al-Farouq had 17 points, 11 rebounds and five steals. Among these brothers, there is no Fredo. Or, in this case, no Al-Fredo.
The stats may have been fairly comparable, but with the Yellow Jackets’ victory, the natural order of family succession was upheld.
While the brothers said little to each other in the handshake line after the game, Alade declared, “I’m gonna blow up his phone. He’s gonna get it.”
“On one hand, I feel real good we won. On another, I feel bad he lost — but I don’t feel that bad,” he said.
Two of a kind
Both brothers are long, sinewy forwards who can jump and touch the moon. Where they borrowed their height and athletic ability from is something of a mystery. Neither parent is over 6 feet tall. Father Abou played a little soccer growing up in Nigeria, but nothing serious. Mother Anjirlic was raised in an American Muslim household — she and her sons are not strict followers now — where the girls could not wear shorts and did not take part in organized sports.
On moments like Saturday, their first time facing each other in a game that really counts, you don’t ask how it happened. You simply enjoy the happening.
“I’m going to whisper in each of their ears, ‘I’m rooting for you,’ ” said Anjirlic beforehand, loosing another of her signature Richter-scale laughs.
Waving her “Go Aminu” homemade sign, Anjirlic sat behind the Georgia Tech bench Saturday. She’ll move to the Wake side Feb. 18 when the two teams meet for a rematch in Winston-Salem. “They both played well. It was a no-lose situation for me,” she said afterward.
Saturday represented one of those chapters in a family history that read like a climax, a culmination. In the best rendering of a childhood dream, it was supposed to come to this.
But never on the vision boards their mother designed — on which the brothers would regularly update their goals as they grew — did they imagine such a meeting. Here they are highly regarded players in the haughtiest college conference. And along comes a game that is a family heirloom.
“I don’t know,” Alade answered when asked how Saturday’s scene came to be. “Our parents put us in basketball at a young age. They just put us in basketball to have fun, run all that energy out. Slowly, sure enough, we started to really get into the game, started to fall in love with the game, kept playing. Basketball became second nature.”
It was Alade’s role to clear the path for his brother. He was the one who had to establish the basketball family tradition. Countless were the times the two of them stood back to back, Al-Farouq literally measuring himself against his big brother (he still comes up a little short of the 6-10 Alade). And how often did Al-Farouq take more subjective measurements?
“Growing up, I watched him play, I didn’t watch basketball on TV. Anything I learned [at a young age], he showed me,” Al-Farouq said.
By the time he was a junior in high school, Al-Farouq was putting up a lot more fight in those driveway games. “But I tell him I think the record is about 10,000 to 20 right now,” Alade said.
As Al-Farouq began coming into his own as a player, he was impatient to complete the process. Going away to Wake Forest rather than staying home to play with his brother at Tech was an obvious way to build a distinct identity.
“I’d tease him, tell him, ‘You don’t have a name, you’re Alade’s little brother.’ He was like, ‘Hey, I have a name — my name’s Al-Farouq Aminu,” Alade said.
Al-Farouq “wanted to write his own story,” said Norris “Bo” Bell, the Georgia Stars AAU coach who schooled both Aminus.
Competitive streak
In personality, the brothers are quite distinct. Alade is the gregarious one, taking after his mother, a former educator who speaks and teaches as a “life coach” for a business called A Wellness Association. Al-Farouq is the quiet one, a trait of his father’s.
In talent, while their statistics are practically identical, Al-Farouq had the advantage of Alade’s model, of beginning his serious basketball training at a younger age than his brother.
“He may be the more complete player,” Bell said of Al-Farouq. “He can take the ball anywhere on the court and make a play. And he’s a beast on the boards. He wants every rebound.”
In any band of brothers, no one wants to be the Tito Jackson. Every family has its competitive component.
Now, the Aminu brothers get to show theirs to the world, but not before reaching a point in their lives where they can digest it emotionally. Both say that as they got older they got closer. When their parents divorced in 2005, the brothers found themselves holding onto each other even tighter.
“People are always caught up asking, ‘You better than him? Is he better than you?’ ” Alade said. “For the most part, we’re just happy for each other. Although we do compete, you want to see your brother be successful. There’s no macho thing. It’s all about love. We’re happy to see the success of one another rather than to see who can out-muscle the other.”
Besides, they say, there’s another player you really should be paying more attention to.
“Hands like catcher’s mitts,” Bell said.
“Knows a lot more about basketball than we did at that age,” Alade said.
That would be 10-year-old Al-Wajid, the last Aminu brother.
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