Becoming Kareem

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  “Oh yeah, I heard of you,” Wilt said with a grin. “You’re the young boy that plays for the Catholic school. Supposed to be getting good.”

  Wilt Chamberlain had heard of me! I couldn’t believe it. I rummaged through my mind for something clever to say, but all I could come up with was “I really admire the way you play the game.”

  As we shook hands, he eyed me up and down. He nodded approvingly. “You’ve got good legs.”

  I looked down at my legs and tried to see what he saw. But they just looked like broom-handle legs, nothing special.

  “I wish I had legs like that,” he said.

  What? Wilt Chamberlain wished he had something I had? Impossible!

  With nothing left to say and the games about to begin, I said, “Nice to meet you,” and hurried away, completely unaware of how much, in just a few years, he would come to influence my life.

  11.

  The Disappointment of Winning

  At the start of my sophomore year, while I was walking into my barely integrated school, my mind filled with basketball dreams, something amazing happened. The nightly news I watched on TV with my parents was filled with stories about US Air Force veteran James Meredith, the first black student to attend the segregated University of Mississippi. The night before Meredith was scheduled to enroll, more than twenty-five hundred angry white supremacists gathered in a violent protest that left two men dead. The following day, Meredith, accompanied by federal marshals, marched right into that school and enrolled for classes.

  To me, James Meredith was like those Western heroes I loved, defying the shouting lynch mob, walking right past them all as if they didn’t exist, head high. High Noon in Mississippi. I knew right then that he was the kind of brave and committed man I wanted to become. In the meantime, I had high school.

  The team went undefeated my sophomore year. We also took the city championship, which Power Memorial hadn’t won since 1939. When that final buzzer echoed through the gym and we were officially the best of the best, I expected to feel something like elation, or completion, or even the satisfaction of rubbing it in the noses of classmates and teachers who thought black people weren’t their equals.

  Mostly I felt relief that the season was over.

  Why didn’t I feel better about such a record-breaking season? The team was hugely popular at school. Teachers and students alike treated us with respect and pride. After all, we had elevated the name of the school to national prominence. But with the victories piling up and the whole school swelling with pride, chanting our names at every game, I felt the heavy responsibility of making sure we didn’t lose. Winning became less of my focus than not letting down the team, the school, and especially Coach Donahue. Even though Coach drilled into us that it was a team sport, I was sure that if we lost, all the blame would be aimed my way.

  Basketball was no longer fun, but more like a tedious job scrubbing toilets that I had no choice but to keep doing. I realized that elation and completion wouldn’t be found on the basketball court, no matter how much I won. They would be found by discovering who I was as a black American. And I still hadn’t found a coach to teach me that.

  Brother Watson was the only black teacher at Power, and I had hoped he would be able to coach me through the internal turmoil I was suffering. He taught French, which seemed a little removed from black culture, but I’d heard he was an amateur drummer, so I thought we might connect through our love of music. One day, I brought in an album by the famous jazz drummer Art Blakey, whose band was called the Jazz Messengers. Art was also known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina, after becoming a Muslim following his travels to West Africa. That seemed a little weird to me, to change religions like that, especially to one so foreign to American culture. I didn’t even know you could change your name, which seemed a pretty rude thing to do to one’s parents. I didn’t know anything about what Muslims believed, and I didn’t really care. The only name I cared about was the nickname he’d gotten from his aggressive drumming style: “Thunder.”

  I showed Brother Watson the album: Blue Note 4003. The whole cover was a photo of Art’s serious face sticking up out of a suit, white shirt, and bow tie. He looked as if he were scowling at someone who was trying to pick up his girlfriend. “What do you think of ‘Moanin’’?” I asked Brother Watson, since that was the album’s most famous song.

  He took the album in his hands, examined the front and back, and handed it back to me without a glimmer of recognition or even curiosity. “Never heard of him,” he said.

  “What about Buddy Rich, Elvin Jones, Philly Joe Jones?” I asked.

  Blank stare. “Jazz isn’t my thing,” he said dismissively.

  He might as well have poked me in the eye. To me, that was like saying music isn’t my thing. Or reading. Or breathing! Listening to jazz was like walking down the street and hearing all the sounds of the city: the traffic, the conversations, the pigeons, the street vendors selling T-shirts or hot dogs. At first, it seems like harsh noise, but when you really focus on how all those sounds come together and harmonize, you realize you’re listening to the soundtrack for real life. To me, jazz was a celebration of the spirit. No matter how down and out I felt, jazz could either lift my spirits or take me deeper into my blues until I battled and defeated it.

  Herbie Hancock, one of my all-time favorite jazz musicians, offered one of the best descriptions of jazz: “In jazz we share, we listen to each other, we respect each other, we are creating in the moment. At our best, we’re non-judgmental.” That’s how I wanted to see the world, as a team, like my basketball team, in which we all brought our individual strengths and worked together toward some greater good that we couldn’t accomplish alone. I also liked the idea that most of the best jazz musicians were black because jazz had its roots in African culture and was developed in America by black musicians in New Orleans. The way that mariachi music came from Mexico and opera originated in Italy.

  I didn’t know what kind of drumming Brother Watson practiced, but if he didn’t know jazz, he clearly wasn’t the coach for me in appreciating black culture. I left his classroom that day feeling even more alone. I hadn’t been able to connect with the school’s one black teacher.

  Meanwhile, my religion teacher, Brother D’Adamo, announced in class that “black people want too much too soon.” Other students dutifully wrote his words down, but I openly disagreed. What he didn’t know was that Brother Harrington, who was in charge of the debate team, had noticed my enthusiasm for talking in class and asked me to join the debate team. Basketball prevented me from joining, but I did accept his invitation to practice oration with the team once a week after school and before basketball. I practiced logic and argumentation with the same intensity that I practiced lay-up drills and wind sprints. I knew how to present an articulate and reasoned opinion, using facts and statistics. That’s exactly what I did to Brother D’Adamo and the rest of the class, who clearly agreed with him.

  “It seems to me,” I explained, “that wanting freedom from oppression a hundred years after the Civil War isn’t really ‘too soon.’ Wanting the same opportunities and justice that whites have, and that are guaranteed to everyone in the Constitution, isn’t ‘too much.’”

  Students shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Challenging a teacher was not usual in a Catholic school.

  Brother D’Adamo stiffened. “What I meant was that Negroes must work for their equality.”

  “How much harder do we have to work than we already are to deserve it?” I said, my heart thumping with a combination of anger and fear. “Why do you, an immigrant from Ireland, deserve it more than blacks who were dragged here two hundred years ago?”

  In a movie, the bell would have rung and I would have marched out triumphantly. But it was real life and Brother D’Adamo simply moved us to another topic, and I sat there feeling both proud and foolish.

  That was when I first became He Who Speaks for All Black People. To many white people, we were all one dark entity with a si
ngle hive mind. No person can speak for an entire group, but I didn’t mind my role because at least I was speaking my own mind. Unfortunately, school tests were based on what the teachers taught us inside the school, and I was determined to keep getting good grades. More often than not, I was forced to regurgitate their words back to them, no matter how wrong I thought they were.

  The teachers at Power tried to control my thinking, while Coach Donahue controlled my body. He quarantined me from the press to keep me from getting too full of myself and ruining his endless lessons on teamwork. He was protecting me, but he was also protecting his job. A winning team made him a more valuable commodity for other coaching jobs. But despite his insistence that I not talk to the press, newspapers were writing about me. When the first article appeared, my father showed a rare moment of pride by buying fifteen copies and sending them to relatives.

  As our winning season continued, Coach began spending more time with me. He drove me to school a couple of times a week, and we chatted casually about sports and school. He was cheerful and clearly had my best interests at heart, but there was still something missing. We were friendly without being friends. Still, when we did speak about race issues, he was sympathetic to our plight.

  “I saw some bad stuff in the army,” he told me. “I was stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Not exactly a state known for racial enlightenment.”

  I didn’t know how to talk about race with an adult, especially a white adult. Especially my coach. I just nodded.

  “It’s all gonna change someday, Lew,” he said as we drove.

  “When?” I asked. That was the only thing I cared about.

  He sighed. “It’ll take generations. Racism won’t die out until all the hard-core racists die out. Then each new generation will be a little less racist, until all that hatred is diluted out of existence.”

  “Generations? That’s going to take a long time.”

  He looked over at me sympathetically. He could see I was not happy with that answer. “All good people can do is wait for justice.”

  Wait, huh? That way of thinking frustrated me. It was the same speech I’d been hearing my whole life, from teachers to politicians. Why did we have to be the ones to wait? Racism would die out, I thought, when all reasonable people refused to let it exist. Surely there were enough reasonable white and black people to stomp out racism right now!

  That spring, in the middle of our basketball season, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was thrown in jail after protesting segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. During his incarceration, he wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he encouraged people to disobey immoral laws like segregation. A month later, the television and newspapers were filled with images of a civil rights protest in Birmingham where the authorities attacked protesters with fire hoses and police dogs. Giving the orders was the commissioner of public safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, who warned that the city “ain’t gonna segregate no niggers and whites together.” How could we be asked to wait when this was going on? Dr. King expressed my frustration in his letter:

  I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the white Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

  In history class, we had studied something similar from the eighteenth-century Irish politician Edmund Burke, who is credited with saying, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” And that’s what “wait” meant: good people doing nothing. Dr. King had said something about that, too, in his letter: “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

  Unfortunately, waiting is mostly what teenagers do, no matter what race. Adults make it seem like an evil wizard’s curse: “Wait until you have children!” “Wait until you’re in the real world!” “Wait until you’re our age!” What choice did we have but wait while adults ran the world and preached to us how we would one day inherit their mess because we were “the hope of the future.” Waiting was our weight.

  I was tired of waiting for others to do the right thing. But I was only sixteen. What else could I do?

  12.

  Summer in the City

  After school was out for the year, my parents signed me up to attend Coach Donahue’s Friendship Farm basketball camp for eight weeks, just as I had the summer before. But this summer I was more excited to hang out with my friends than to play basketball. Life on the streets was varied and surprising. We never knew what was going to happen when we got together. Basketball camp was the same old routines. I knew everything we would do and exactly what Coach would say.

  I tried to make the most of the four weeks I had before camp started. I still played basketball, but a whole different kind from what I played on the polished wooden floors of Catholic schools. This was streetball, played on rough asphalt, where every bump and shove could cost you in skin and blood. I traveled all over the city in search of good games, from the Bronx to Long Island to Greenwich Village. Sometimes I would travel an hour or more by subway to get to a choice court.

  One of my favorite courts stood on the corner of West Third Street and Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village and was caged in by a high metal fence. The players were mostly black, with an occasional appearance by an Italian from nearby Little Italy. The games were so intense that spectators often stood three deep against the fence, shouting and jeering during each game. Most of the audience had their favorite players, and sometimes I’d even hear a few chanting, “Lew! Lew! Lew!”

  We had no referees, so fouls and other violations were called by the players. Because winners kept the court and losers sat, not all the players were particularly honest in their calls. This led to many heated arguments that sometimes escalated beyond name-calling to physical violence.

  Part of the toughness I developed that summer wasn’t just from playing streetball or from my newly awakened political awareness, but from the edgy friends I hung out with. Harold was the boldest thief we knew. He didn’t break into people’s homes or snatch purses off women’s shoulders. To him, that didn’t show courage or skill. He focused on Woolworth’s stores. He would watch the clerks until they walked away from the register. Then he would waltz right up to the cash register, open it, grab all the cash, and run off before anyone saw him.

  I didn’t approve of what he did, but he was my friend and I didn’t think I should judge him. And, I had to admit, there was something thrilling about hanging out with a real thief.

  Another friend, Julio, loved basketball as much as I did. We hit plenty of blacktop courts together. Despite Julio’s clear intelligence and basketball skills, he’d made up his mind he wanted to be a mobster, as in old movies about Al Capone. He was always looking for an opportunity to cross over into being a full-fledged gangster. One Saturday, after a tough bunch of basketball games at the Greenwich Village court, he grabbed me by the arm and nodded at the man selling ice cream out of his pushcart.

  “There’s the Good Humor Man,” Julio said, nudging me.

  “Yeah, so?” I responded.

  “So?” He looked at me as if I had spit on his shoes. “So, he must have three, four hundred d
ollars on him.”

  At ten cents an ice cream bar, I was suspicious of Julio’s math. “So?” I repeated.

  Julio sighed. “So, we follow him to where he stores his cart. Then we rob him!”

  I looked over at the man handing a chocolate-covered ice cream bar to a woman in a sun hat. He was short and old and overweight. I thought about him going home to his family after a hard day’s work in the hot sun with no money to show for it.

  I told him I wanted nothing to do with it and took the next train home. Later that summer, while I was away at Friendship Farm, I heard that Julio got arrested. I didn’t see him again for ten years.

  The rest of the summer was spent swimming and playing basketball with twenty-four other kids at Coach Donahue’s Friendship Farm in rural upstate New York. Gone were the vibrant, exciting streets of New York City, where people bustled here and there twenty-four hours a day. Gone were streets altogether. The “farm” part of Friendship Farm wasn’t an exaggeration. We slept in a building that had been completed in the 1780s and swam in the Hudson River. At least this year, the court had been paved, and we were no longer playing on just hard dirt. I got along with everyone, so there was no drama, but I didn’t have any close friends, either. We were like coworkers at a boring job. Every day was routine, with predictable basketball drills and lackluster games that weren’t very challenging or interesting. The difference between the street basketball I’d been playing all over New York City and Friendship Farm basketball was the difference between jazz and elevator music.

  The rest of my summer vacation slowly leaked away until I was back in school.

  13.

  Things Fall Apart

  My junior year didn’t start with happy thoughts about another championship season, college recruiters, or fans yelling my name.