Despite suffering a nasty injury which could keep him out of basketball for a year, Andy Mannix of the Minneapolis weekly City Pages reports that “Khalid El Amin Won’t Quit” until he can return to European courts to play ball.
Currently, El-Amin is rehabbing in his home state of Minnesota from the season-ending injury which “ripped the quadriceps muscle straight off the bone” suffered against Caja Laboral Baskonia while enjoying quite a nice run of success with Lietuvos Rytas in 2010-11.
The good news for L. Rytas fans is that El-Amin is “confident he’ll be back in Lithuania at the beginning of next season,” though at almost 32 years old, the point guard has been thinking about “life after basketball” and planning for such: He’ll be taking college courses in the summer semester to complete a degree begun at University of Connecticut and is currently expanding the youth sports program El-Amin Basketball.
The ‘Pages piece makes for quite an interesting rundown of El-Amin’s career, including tales of his childhood in a region where basketball isn’t exactly the no. 1 sport – “In the last 30 years, only about a dozen Minneapolis and St. Paul natives have made it to the NBA,” Mannix notes – and about his cup of coffee in the NBA. Oh, plus some dude calling himself “David Landry” of BallinEurope.com was quoted in the piece two or three times.
The whole story may be read here.
And one more time, here’s El-Amin’s awesome game-winner against Baskonia in the Euroleague round of 16 — truly one of the highlights of 2010-11 Euroleague basketball.
