Two decades before Mahershala Ali won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, he was playing Division I college basketball for Saint Mary’s College of California, about 15 miles outside of Oakland.
Then known as Mahershala Gilmore, the Oscar-winning actor was a 6-foot-3 guard who played for the Gaels for four years, from the 1992-93 season through the 1995-96 season. He finished his basketball career averaging 3.6 points across all four seasons, but he had seven points per game in his final year, shooting 38.9 percent from the field.
Ali is up for another Academy Award in 2019. After winning in 2017 for his performance in Moonlight, Ali was nominated again this year for Best Supporting Actor in Green Book.
And because of that, some highlights from his basketball career resurfaced on Twitter before Sunday’s Academy Awards.
As a senior with St. Mary’s, Ali also averaged 1.8 rebounds and 17.6 minutes, and he started in 14 of 27 games that year. But in a 2016 interview with GQ, he explained how he eventually shifted from a focus on basketball to acting.
“It was about getting a basketball scholarship to a Division I school. Once I got that, I didn’t set a realistic next goal on how to get to the NBA, which is perhaps for the best. I fell into acting. A teacher gave me an opportunity to be in a play and it came a little easy to me. When it got difficult was when I decided to study acting and I went to grad school. I felt like if I got [into NYU] this was what I was supposed to pursue. It just so happened that it worked out.”
He elaborated on this change in his life in a 2017 interview with NPR, saying:
“I could see that I didn’t have the passion to sustain a career in sports. …
At a certain point basketball became the thing I was doing most, but it was really in my periphery. It was really a focus on how to, in some ways, keep moving in this direction towards something that allowed me to express myself in a way that sports didn’t.”
After winning for Moonlight, Ali became both the first Muslim Academy Award winner as well as the first former Division I basketball player to win.
Going into Sunday’s show, USA TODAY predicts Ali will win his second Oscar in three years.
