Mahmoud finding place in U.S., U of L's lineup

Anas Mahmoud needs a second to collect his thoughts.

It's been about 14 months since the 19-year-old Egyptian left home to pursue his dream of playing basketball in the United States, and he's thinking of the best way to answer a question about his home country.

Egypt, known in the U.S. for its expansive ancient history and present turmoil, is where his parents, two older sisters and younger brother live. Egypt is where Mahmoud grew up, all the way to 7 feet. Egypt is where he learned basketball, and Egypt's national hoops team is how American college coaches discovered him.

It's hard to quantify all that history, all that emotion, all that pride. But there sat Mahmoud, a 7-foot, 200-pound freshman on the University of Louisville men's basketball team, trying to reflect on being a high-profile teenager growing up in the heart of the Arab Spring chaos that killed one of his cousins and put a friend in the hospital with a bullet wound.

"It's hard because you don't know who's right and who's wrong. You want the future. Whoever has the best future for you, you'll be on his side," Mahmoud starts.

"I don't know how else to say it. It was a tough time, the last couple years, not just for the young guys. The most annoying thing was that nobody knew who wants the country to be better and who doesn't."

These days, Mahmoud faces a different type of tough time. He's not walking home from the gym or school or a friend's house amid the oftentimes violent strife that consumed Cairo's streets. He's not, family friend Ahmed Awadallah said, "just trying to survive the week."

Mahmoud's here now, at U of L, majoring in engineering and trying to crack Louisville coach Rick Pitino's rotation for the upcoming basketball season.

He's a skilled player who developed his game as a 6-4 wing before he shot up eight inches in the last three years.

That talent was on full display in his first public scrimmage with the Cardinals three weeks ago. He tallied 12 points, seven rebounds, three blocks and two steals. He became an instant fan favorite with two open-court steals that he finished with break-away dunks and an emphatic block of Louisville's stalwart guard Terry Rozier.

That performance, Pitino joked, was the best by an Egyptian since Cleopatra. It seemed the coach had been saving the one-liner for a while.

The basketball part Mahmoud gets, or at least it comes naturally to him. But he arrived at U of L weighing about 180 pounds, and Pitino and his staff think he'll be more effective if he's closer to 220.

Mahmoud eats thousands of calories a day, hunting for the elusive 10 more pounds of weight that will, as Pitino says, "just make him look like he's not going to disappear." Every time Awadallah asks what Mahmoud is up to, the first response is "eating."

"For me, adding weight is harder than other people losing weight," said Mahmoud, who explained that he eats everything — everything — except pork, which he avoids because of his Islamic faith.

"(Pitino) was joking last week. He was like, 'If you eat pork, pork will put some weight on you.'"

As he chases another 20 pounds, Mahmoud's learning about American culture at warp speed. Before he left Cairo to attend West Oaks Academy in Orlando, Fla., Mahmoud simply told his friends he was moving to Disney World.

During a campus visit to the University of Minnesota, Mahmoud learned about snow and cold weather. He didn't have a coat.

"He kept saying he couldn't feel his ears and nose the week after that Minnesota visit," said Awadallah.

Awadallah, who works in restaurant operations for Yum! brands, was Mahmoud's American connection. A long-time family friend of the Mahmouds through his and Anas's fathers, Awadallah has bachelor's and master's degrees from U of L and lived in Louisville for three years before Yum! transferred him to Turkey this year.

As Mahmoud grew to 7 feet and jumped from Egypt's under-16 and under-17 teams to Egypt's national team, his dad, Osama, reached out to Awadallah about Anas's future. The Mahmouds wanted their son to try basketball in the United States after a positive experience in the 2013 FIBA Africa Championships.

"It was a dream but I didn't think I could actually come here and play," Mahmoud said.

Awadallah is friends with West Oaks Academy basketball coach Shaun Wiseman, and the duo put in motion Mahmoud's move to the U.S. He arrived in September of last year and spent the school year at West Oaks, taking the ACT and studying the American way of playing hoops.

Awadallah helped Mahmoud with the recruiting process, serving as Mahmoud's pseudo-guardian as Osama monitored Mahmoud from afar.

"Word got out so quickly, we didn't even know how to handle it," Awadallah said.

Mahmoud decided he wanted three things: Good relationships with the players and coaches at the school; high-level, intrasquad competition; and an engineering degree.

He trimmed his list to Cincinnati, Georgia Tech, Louisville and Minnesota, and visited the campuses at each school, but U of L stuck out.

The prospect of learning from Pitino while playing against All-American forward Montrezl Harrell and the other talented big guys in Louisville's 2014 recruiting class excited Mahmoud.

"Before I came here, I really felt like I'd learned enough about basketball, enough for me," Mahmoud said. "Once I came here, I've learned a lot of things. (Pitino has) taught me a lot."

Mahmoud doesn't talk about Egypt much with his teammates, senior captain Wayne Blackshear said, but they know Egypt worked through serious turmoil in recent years. Pitino reminds his players of that quite a bit, too.

Awadallah moved to Turkey before Mahmoud arrived on U of L's campus, but Awadallah's family has served as Mahmoud's relatives away from home during his transition to college life.

He can't find Egyptian food in the Louisville area, much to his dismay, but Mahmoud's found comfort in the Internet, where he connects with his family in Cairo via Skype or FaceTime.

"I couldn't imagine myself here in the 80s or something," he joked. "The mail takes a month to get there."

He is here now, though, a survivor of one of the most tenuous stretches of political strife the world has seen in the past few years. The fighting and conflict rages on in other Arab nations, but in Egypt, things have settled down.

He struggles to explain the feelings he has about his experiences, but he eventually arrives at them.

"People are asking for simple things: Respect and freedom," Mahmoud said. "Now it's better. … That makes it easier for me."

Reach U of L beat writer Jeff Greer at (502) 582-4044 and follow him on Twitter (@jeffgreer_cj).​