Alfred Aboya is at the political center
UCLA BASKETBALL
He wants to replace Kevin Love this year and someday become president of Cameroon.
Alfred Aboya, a UCLA senior, walks into a conference room carrying a backpack loaded with books on statistics, economics and multi-party political systems.
It's 2:15 on a Friday afternoon and he's tired. Not a physical weariness, but the mental fatigue that comes from stretching his imagination.
If there is a reality to the quaint way the NCAA refers to competitors during tournament play as "student-athletes" -- as in, "Please identify yourselves before asking the student-athlete a question" -- Aboya is that reality.
In three years at UCLA, Aboya earned an undergraduate degree. Now attending graduate school, he has grand ambitions.
He wants to be UCLA's starting center this season.
And sometime soon after that, to be president of his country, Cameroon, an impoverished Western Africa nation that, Aboya says, has a desire for democracy but hasn't yet learned how to make the sacrifices citizens must make to be a democracy.
Aboya has watched the current American political campaign with an educated eye. About the vice presidential debate, Aboya says, "Sarah Palin did a good job. Why did the Republicans keep her hidden away? They should just let her out to be herself and see what happens."
Beyond that, though, he turns diplomat. Asked which presidential candidate he favors, Aboya says, "I'm not a citizen. I can't vote."
But he doesn't duck a chance to analyze John McCain and Barack Obama.
"McCain, he shows by what he says that he has the experience to deal with the world," Aboya says. "That experience is important. Obama, he has the intellect, you can tell by how he talks. He's a smart man, but he doesn't have all the experience. If you could put McCain's experience and Obama's intellect together, it would be a really good candidate."
Aboya's goal from the time he came to UCLA with fellow Cameroonian star Luc Richard Mbah a Moute was to return to his country and be a leader.
When Mbah a Moute left school last summer after his junior year to become a second-round pick of the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks, Aboya dabbled with the idea of not playing basketball this season and concentrating only on graduate school. But as Aboya spent some time in Cameroon trying to help his national team qualify for the Olympics, he came to realize he wasn't ready to leave a life of setting picks and taking charges for one involved solely around academics.
