Duquesne player has a goal to play again

Shooting baskets with friends and watching his Duquesne teammates practice is enough now for Sam Ashaolu. Two months ago, he lay near death with two bullets in his brain.

But soon he wants to play for the Dukes in a game that counts, not pickup ball with friends or rehab specialists.

“I hope to get 100% soon and get back on the court real soon,” Ashaolu said at a news conference Monday. He did not take questions from reporters.

Ashaolu, the most seriously injured of the five Duquesne players shot Sept. 17 after an on-campus party, appeared in public for the first time since what university President Charles J. Dougherty called an “unpredictable and unprecedented” attack that shook the downtown Pittsburgh school’s normally peaceful campus.

Ashaolu, a 23-year-old junior college transfer, talks with a slight hesitation and needs long months of additional rehabilitation to regain anything approximating a normal life. One bullet was removed, but the other splintered into the cerebellum, which controls balance and movement, and the parietal lobe, which controls spatial orientation and speech.

Asked if it is possible Ashaolu might play competitive basketball again, Mercy Hospital medical director Gary Goldberg said, “I’m hopefully optimistic. It’s only been seven weeks.... Nothing has been ruled out here.”

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High school senior O.J. Mayo acknowledged to his hometown newspaper that he had given a commitment to USC earlier this year but said he planned to visit five schools before making a decision in the spring.

“I made a verbal commitment early to USC, but I’m going to take my ACT for the first time at the end of the month and visit my top five schools I have the most interest in,” Mayo told the Huntington (W.Va.) Herald-Dispatch.

The 6-foot-5 point guard, considered one of the top prospects in his class, listed Florida, Kansas State, Connecticut, Kentucky and Louisville in addition to USC.

“It’s the distance, and I also don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket,” Mayo said of USC. -- Ben Bolch

California center Jordan Wilkes will sit out the season because of a knee injury. Wilkes, a 7-foot sophomore slated to be the Bears’ sixth man, tore the patella tendon in his left knee during practice last week. He probably will have surgery this week, and his recovery is expected to take about three months, Coach Ben Braun said.