Wiggins: Basketball's best amateur?
Eric Prisbell, USA TODAY
October 24. 2012 - HUNTINGTON, W.Va. ? Inside a cramped, dilapidated community center hidden at the end of a dark parking lot, Andrew Wiggins starts bouncing a basketball. Children scramble, and uninterested adults chatter about the night's presidential debate and how one-time phenom O.J. Mayo built his rep here.
They don't know that North Carolina Coach Roy Williams is a day away from boarding a private plane just to meet with Wiggins.
Wiggins starts attacking the well-worn basket. And he starts shooting, swishing one half-court shot after another. Conversations stop. Heads turn. Eyebrows raise. One slack-jawed man, Joseph Jones, sprints out of the gym to fetch a $20 bill. He rushes back, interrupts Wiggins mid-dribble and implores the 17-year-old to sign it.
"Just remember me in the NBA!" Jones hollers as Wiggins autographs it. "All I want is a beat-up Honda!"
Wiggins doesn't crack a smile. Basketball comes easy for the Huntington Prep junior, a Canadian-born-and-raised small forward widely considered the world's best amateur. Decisions ? ones that could determine the narrative of the 2013-14 college basketball season ? are the hard part.
Wiggins' pending decision about whether to reclassify as a high school senior, which would enable Wiggins to play college basketball next season and presumably enter the 2014 NBA draft, is among the most intriguing questions of the college basketball season and is weighing on the shoulders of the 6-foot-8 (and still growing), cherub-faced teenager.
He is being recruited by Kentucky and Florida State, his parents' alma mater, North Carolina visited Tuesday, and Ohio State and Kansas are scheduled to visit this week as well.
"It is a lot on him," his girlfriend, Mychal Johnson, told USA TODAY Sports. "We talk about it sometimes, but he doesn't like talking about it. That's how bad it stresses him out. Sometimes he doesn't know what to do."
The son of Mitchell Wiggins, who played NBA and overseas, and Marita Payne-Wiggins, who won two Olympic track-and-field silver medals for Canada in 1984, Andrew Wiggins knows he hit the genetic jackpot. He also knows he is caught between two different worlds, striving for professional greatness while cherishing fleeting moments of whatever normalcy his life still maintains.
Wiggins and a teammate live with a host family ? Scott and Lesley Thomas and sons Luke, 13, and Clayton, 10 ? in a five-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot home in the quiet neighborhood of Proctorville, Ohio, located just across the Ohio River.
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