Cal men’s basketball player seen threatening fan in stands after loss

A Cal men’s basketball player went into the stands after a game on Monday to confront and threaten a fan.

A video shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, shows Cal forward Fardaws Aimaq climbing up the bleachers and getting face-to-face with a man. At one point, Aimaq points his finger directly in the man’s face and threatens him.

“You want to talk some s—t? I’ll slap the f—k out of you, bitch,” Aimaq says. Aimaq then walks back down toward the bench and away from the man he threatened as other fans in the stands tell Aimaq to “Grow up.”

Cal athletics did not immediately respond to SFGATE’s request for comment about the video or Aimaq’s status for Wednesday’s game against Tulane.

It is unclear what was said that led Aimaq to go into the stands after Cal lost 75-72 to UTEP on a buzzer-beating 3-pointer on Monday night at the SoCal Challenge, a tournament being held on the campus of Junipero Serra (JSerra) High School in San Juan Capistrano.

According to the box score, 529 fans were in attendance at the 2,000-seat gym, and the Cal-UTEP game was the last of the four games played at JSerra on Monday. Aimaq was Cal’s leading scorer on the night, with 18 points on 9-of-13 shooting, and was also Cal’s leading rebounder, grabbing 11 boards. But he was also a team-high minus-15 and battled foul trouble, ultimately fouling out of the game in just 27 minutes played.

Aimaq is a sixth-year player who transferred to Cal from Texas Tech. Prior to playing at Texas Tech, Aimaq played for first-year Cal head coach Mark Madsen at Utah Valley, where he was the Western Athletic Conference’s Player of the Year once and Defensive Player of the Year twice.

Madsen’s transfer-heavy roster was expected to help Cal start a quick turnaround after the program went 3-29 last season and 38-87 during fired head coach Mark Fox’s four years in Berkeley. But the Bears have limped out of the gates to a 2-3 record to open the season, losing at home to Pacific and Montana State before the buzzer-beating loss against UTEP on Monday.

Cal will face Tulane at 9:45 p.m. PT on Wednesday in the same JSerra gym as Monday’s game.