Playing The Odds

Ike Diogu is sitting at the draft table with a pretty strong handbut he's still deciding if he wants to go all in

Ike Diogu can't just sit there and watch a good life go to waste. So even though his boy Ron Hudson has told him not to butt in, Diogu leans forward on the threadbare couch, eyes bugging as if the Grim Reaper itself were standing before him in his Tempe dorm room, and shouts an emphatic warning: "Turn around, someone's coming! Grab him!"

Too late. Ron is dead—gunned down unmercifully by the goons of PlayStation 2 The Punisher. "That was a stupid place to die," Diogu says.

If only he saw all the angles of his own life so clearly.

He's doing the best he can. The Arizona State star majors in studio art with a specialization in computer animation, so he can one day make some money designing video games, even as he has honed a back-to-the-basket repertoire that has made him an All-America, not to mention a pro prospect. But after going for 22.6 ppg and 9.8 rpg last season (numbers that were eerily similar to those of a year earlier: 22.8 and 8.9), Diogu doesn't quite see what's coming next. Should he bolt like Josh Childress and Luke Ridnour did before him, after they were named Pac-10 Players of the Year?

Or should he come back one more time to a program utterly dependent on his talents? Maybe the decision would be easier if he had a first-round guarantee, but so far that hasn't happened. So he declared for the draft without signing with an agent and is spending the spring hitting as many workouts as he can.

"For the past three years, I've been chilling with my friends and teammates," Diogu says in a deep, metered voice. "The prospect of doing something on my own is the toughest part." After all, the 21-year-old has just started to explore Scottsdale's night scene. "They know me at the clubs as quite the dancer," he says. "I can't lie about that one." And he is well aware that making the jump would likely keep ASU NIT-bound and put coach Rob Evans on the hot seat. But there is another more relevant and nagging issue: Ike Diogu, generously listed in your program at 6'8", may not be big enough for the big time.

And that's why Diogu gets off the couch shortly after the PS2 massacre on this early-May afternoon to head to the first of a set of private workouts with Will Perdue. Diogu impresses Perdue with his range from 18 feet and out. "His midrange game is better than people think," says the former Bulls center.

As Diogu regularly banks shots off the screenand-roll, superagent Arn Tellem walks into the gym to take a peek. Diogu offers up a series of explosive reverse dunks. "Are his parents still worried about protecting his eligibility?" Tellem asks Diogu's former AAU coach, Earl Flaggs, who has accompanied Ike to the workout.

A week later, Diogu is in California, jousting with Kentucky big man Randolph Morris and Final Four Most Outstanding Player Sean May. Meanwhile, in his hometown of Garland, Texas, Diogu's parents—Edward is a middle school teacher of French and ESL, while Jane teaches fifth-grade social studies—are tackling the draft process as another academic exercise. They scour websites, interview NBA players about their agents and survey front offices for clues to their son's prospects. "They won't be snowed. They research everything," says Evans. He should know; Jane insisted on meeting his wife, his staff and the athletic department's academic advisers before she let her son commit to ASU in 2001.

Edward likes what they are hearing. "Nobody has told us anything different than the first round," he says. "NBA people are not going to commit themselves, but they all say between 15 and 25." The parents periodically relay their intelligence to their son, but it never changes his plans. "I just go out and play hard, and the rest will take care of itself," he says.

A year ago, Evans discouraged his big man from auditioning at Chicago's predraft camp. But now he has okayed the jump, saying the extra year has served Diogu well. "He's extended his range, he's gotten better at defending on the perimeter and he's learned how to pass out of double-teams."

That stamp of approval and the Diogus' own research are enough to justify their financing of Ike's trips to the workouts scheduled by their two other sons, Eddie, 27, and Eric, 26. The tour will continue right until the draft, and Diogu will not be sorry when it's over. He forgoes his iPod on flights, mostly to pray. A devout Christian, he asks God to point him toward the right decision. It's his only respite in a cycle he can't get used to. "I spend all day in the airport, get to the hotel, go to sleep, wake up, work out, take a shower, go to the airport, new city … " Hoop, rinse, repeat.

His nerves are starting to fray. Diogu hasn't been jittery about hoops since the 10th grade, but now he admits to uttering a prayer whenever a coach puts a pencil jot on the wall to mark the top of his head. In Denver in late May, the wall said 6'7¤". Golden State then notched 6'7"; Houston, 6'6". Even getting an extra inch of boost from his sneakers, Diogu barely meets the NBA's benchmark for big men. "They want to see how tall you are, to see if you can play?" he says. "The whole draft process is weird." Maybe so, but it doesn't always conspire against him. All three teams measured Diogu's wingspan at around 7'4", and that has added a lovely piece of draftese to his scouting report: "Plays long." And his workouts don't lie. "He's strong enough and handles the ball well enough to play the 4," says one scout. "But it's his length that is going to make the difference."

The latest rumor: the Suns have promised they'll take Diogu at 21. Meanwhile, a Rockets scout thinks he'll be gone by the time his team picks at 24. First-round assurances or not, the growing buzz is a compass pointing out of Tempe. Dad said as much to a local paper in early June, but that just caused his son to reiterate his intention to wait until the early-entry deadline of June 21 to decide. If you believe Ike two weeks before the draft, he still doesn't know what he will do.

He does know this, though. "It comes down to me," Diogu says. "If you do something because somebody else wants you to, you're the one who's going to be miserable.

"I'll do what my heart tells me is right."

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