Becoming Kareem

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  I nodded, not sure what to say.

  He strummed the guitar once briskly and smiled. “But look at us now, brother.”

  We grinned at each other, acknowledging our good fortune.

  After that evening, Muhammad took on a big-brother role in my life. His influence extended way beyond our connection as athletes. While I admired the athlete of action, it was the man of principle that was truly my role model. He taught me that personal success without community involvement was hollow and meaningless. Championship trophies and plaques and rings were merely building materials to construct a platform to rally people to fix social problems. “When you saw me in the boxing ring fighting, it wasn’t just so I could beat my opponent,” he explained. “My fighting had a purpose. I had to be successful in order to get people to listen to the things I had to say.”

  Muhammad Ali was the greatest boxer of his time—some say of all time—but it was his words that carried the most lasting punch. Mostly, he spoke about equality. About raising up people of color to their rightful place. About religious freedom. About ending unjust wars, an unjust draft, an unjust legal system. These were things my friends and I discussed passionately at night in our dorm rooms. But Ali was out there in the real world doing something about it, at great personal cost.

  Sometimes he used both his fists and words to make his point. In 1967, when the black fighter Ernie Terrell refused to call Ali by his Muslim name, Ali pummeled Terrell in the eighth round of their fight, shouting, “What’s my name? What’s my name?” That was the moment when I truly understood the significance of his name change. Of course, I understood it intellectually. I had started my own studies into Islam, but to see Ali’s face at that moment was to understand what he was really saying: “I named myself. This is the man I choose to be, not the man the world expects me to be.”

  I’d had plenty of coaches teaching me how to win. Muhammad Ali was the first to teach me what to do with winning.

  27.

  Oh, Yeah, I Also Played Basketball Freshman Year

  Although Coach Wooden wasn’t technically the coach of the freshman team, he worked closely with Coach Cunningham in preparing me for the three years I would play varsity. Clearly, they were depending on me to continue making the varsity team national champions. They even brought in a special instructor just for me. Former Oregon State player and coach Jay Carty was supposed to increase my mental and physical conditioning. In other words, being big wasn’t enough, I had to learn how to play big. Carty was six foot eight, 230 pounds, and described himself as a “slow white guy who couldn’t jump,” but while playing center as a senior at Oregon State, he had continually faced his seven-foot sophomore teammate Mel Counts and learned some moves he wanted to teach me. It was not unusual for teams to hire special coaches for specific players, and the rest of the team was supportive in doing whatever it took for us to win.

  Most of the moves involved physically roughing me up on the court so I would be prepared for what I would be facing from meatier, more aggressive players trying to neutralize my height. Jay pummeled me with his knees, elbows, shoulders, and hips until I learned how to counter the abuse with a roll or pivot or some force of my own. We worked on what had become my favorite shot, the elegant hook. Coach Wooden called it the “flat hook” because of the low trajectory. Still, it was effective. But as I added more arc, it became nearly unstoppable.

  Coach Wooden’s Golden Rule of Basketball—and Life—was one short sentence: “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.” He borrowed that from Ben Franklin, but he made it his own by applying it relentlessly to everything we did. Sometimes he said it loudly and sometimes softly, but he said it often. “Talent comes first,” he said. “No one wins without outstanding talent—but not everyone wins with it, either!”

  Talent got you to the door; preparedness took you through.

  One way he implemented this philosophy was through conditioning. Having just played on a national championship high school team, and being only eighteen, I thought I was already in great shape. He proved me wrong.

  “Generally, the team that’s in the best shape wins,” he would tell us. “You want to know why so many games are won or lost in the last fifteen minutes? Because one team is out of gas and the other team isn’t. We’re always going to be that other team. Tired players miss more shots, defend less aggressively, snag fewer rebounds. That will never be our players.”

  From the first day of my freshman year until the last practice of my senior year, we ran until we couldn’t run anymore. And then we ran some more. There were no shortcuts in John Wooden’s basketball program. You did it until you did it right, and then you did it again. That basic philosophy that I learned on those long afternoons enabled me to extend my professional career to twenty years, longer than any other player at that time. I always felt the conditioning regimen I was put through at UCLA was a primary reason I was able to play at a high level in the NBA far longer than players like Wilt Chamberlain. Wilt was dedicated to being stronger than anybody else, but he wasn’t able to run the court and he wasn’t flexible. As he got older, things that required quickness and agility grew further and further beyond his reach.

  Practices usually were scheduled in the afternoon from two thirty to four thirty. After practice I was so exhausted that I would have to go back to my room, collapse onto the bed, and take a nap until nine. Then I’d wake up, do my homework until midnight, and go back to sleep. Not exactly the glamorous lifestyle that fans imagined.

  But the hard work paid off. Not just in our victory against the varsity squad, but throughout our entire season. In fact, the varsity team struggled that year with a record of 18–8, the worst in Coach Wooden’s last twelve years. Some people blamed their poor season on our demoralizing victory over them, but Coach Wooden emphatically denied that.

  Our freshman team did not struggle. We breezed through the season with a 21–0 record, beating other teams by an average of 57 points a game. We beat one college by 103 points, and we won our closest game by 28 points. By the end of the season, we started to see fans waving signs that swapped the UC Los Angeles for “UC Lew Alcindor.”

  28.

  The Dinner That Changed My Relationship with Coach Wooden

  To celebrate our undefeated season, Coach invited me to dinner for some one-on-one time. We both knew that the fans and the press had a lot of expectations for both of us in the next three years. He had kept me away from the press all year, just as Coach Donahue had, to protect me from being distracted. But that was about to end, and he wanted to make sure I would be able to handle the inevitable criticism that came with the praise.

  “The press has made you a hero,” he said to me as we pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. “And that feels pretty darn good, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I guess.” Oh, man, did it ever. Seeing my photo in the newspapers and sports magazines, reading all the great stuff they said about me, that was a dream come true.

  “Well, they can make you a villain just as quickly. They don’t like something you said, or didn’t say. They think you snubbed them or dodged a question.…” He shook his head. “They can turn on you.”

  Coach had faced some criticism and questioning of his own this past season when his team failed to make the NCAA Tournament. Our fortunes were now bound together, and together we would rise or fall over the next three years.

  “The thing to remember is that people get tired of reading the same thing about someone. How good they are. How generous. How humble. They want something new.” He looked over at me. “Don’t give them something new.”

  “Okay,” I said. I wasn’t worried. As long as I played my best, what could they say about me?

  Coach and I were both huge baseball fans, so he took me to a steak house called the Bat Rack. The owner, Johnny Sproatt, had decorated the place with baseball bats signed by major league players. We ordered and settled in for some light conversation. Even though the country outside this resta
urant was in racial upheaval with riots, murders, and marches, Coach Wooden and I didn’t talk race, we talked baseball and basketball. He had carefully constructed a cocoon around his players designed to keep the raging storm outside.

  I hadn’t made up my mind yet about where Coach stood in all this social upheaval. I liked him. I admired him. And until he did something like Coach Donahue, I would listen to him and do what he advised. And I would eat the steak he was paying for.

  After dinner, we stopped in the parking lot to say hello to Johnny Sproatt, who was a major UCLA booster. While we were standing there talking, an elderly white woman came out of the restaurant and just stood there, staring up at me. I was used to people gaping at my height, so I just smiled at her politely.

  Finally, she asked Coach Wooden, “How tall is that boy?”

  “Seven foot two inches, ma’am,” he said.

  She considered that for a few seconds, then shook her head and said, “I’ve never seen a nigger that tall.”

  I didn’t react. I looked down into her wrinkled grandmotherly face and could tell that she had no idea that she was insulting me. To her, “nigger” was the same as saying “Negro,” or “Afro-American,” the polite term that was used back then. Confronting her would have been a waste of time.

  But Coach Wooden did react. His whole body stiffened, his cheeks reddened. He looked at the old woman incredulously. He didn’t know what to do, or how to respond. This was not his world. We had stepped out of his cocoon.

  Mr. Sproatt was waving to another customer just arriving. He had not heard the woman, or pretended not to have heard her. Coach looked up at me, clearly hoping I hadn’t heard, either. But when he looked into my eyes, he knew I had.

  Over the years, I often thought back to that moment and tried to see it from Coach’s perspective. Did he wonder if I expected him to say something, to come to my defense as my coach, as an adult, as a white man? He had to be having a crisis of conscience: Go against his Midwestern morals by shouting at an old lady who wouldn’t really understand his anger? Go against his Christian values by not standing up for a young boy who had been deeply insulted? Go against his patriotic values and not condemn her un-American racism?

  In the end, he said nothing to her and she just walked away, never aware of the emotional chaos she had left in her doddering wake.

  On the drive back to campus we both stared straight ahead at the road, unwilling to look each other in the eyes. Finally, he broke the uncomfortable silence: “You know, Lewis, sometimes you take people by surprise. Someone your size, it startles them.”

  “Uh-huh,” I muttered, not sure where he was going with this.

  More silence. He was carefully choosing each word. “Sometimes people will say things they don’t mean or don’t really understand. Please don’t think all people are like that woman. Don’t let ignorant people prompt an ignorant response from you. I know it’s difficult, but let’s not condemn everyone for the actions of a few.”

  Was he talking about her or himself? About what she said, or what he didn’t say?

  “Sure, Coach,” I said. I didn’t really want to talk about it. What was the point? There was nothing he could say that I hadn’t heard before, mostly from well-meaning white people. I was used to it, so it was no big deal, but I could see it was eating him up. I didn’t want that. I could see that he was a good man and that this incident was tearing him up inside.

  We didn’t talk about it again, but Coach never forgot that night. Interestingly, in describing that night when speaking publicly, he remembered it differently than I did. In his memory, the woman said, “Will you just look at that big black freak?” The word “nigger” was too painful even to store in his memory, and maybe it lessened his guilty feelings a little.

  When he told a close friend, the great LSU coach Dale Brown, about this encounter, Coach Wooden said reflectively, “That really opened my eyes to things. I tried to become a lot more sensitive to stuff like that. My heart went out to Lewis. I thought, this is what he has to live with every day, and yes, my heart went out to him.”

  Nothing seemed to change between us after that night. He coached, I played. We didn’t discuss race, he didn’t ask me how I felt about what was happening, but there was a difference. We had gone to the restaurant to bond over steak and basketball and our intertwined futures, but we ended up being inexorably connected by what had happened in the parking lot. We had glimpsed into each other’s hearts, and that had moved us beyond the coach-player relationship.

  29.

  Reading Malcolm X: The Book That Changed My Life

  In the spring of 1966, I was almost nineteen and basking in being on an undefeated basketball team while maintaining a high grade point average. When basketball season was over, I was excited to have more time for reading. I had always been an avid reader, but now I was reading more intellectually challenging material. Most of what I read were assigned literary classics and textbooks, but I had also begun to read more political books on my own: Michael Harrington’s The Other America, about poverty in the United States; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, about environmental destruction from pesticides. But there was one book, published just a few months earlier, that I was especially compelled to read: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm X, a fiery civil rights orator who had spoken aggressively against racism, had been assassinated a year earlier by three men from the Nation of Islam. They shot him twenty-one times.

  I started the book with intellectual curiosity but soon began seeing the parallels between his life and mine. Our families were both from the Caribbean: His mother had come from Grenada, while my people came from nearby Trinidad. His father had been a follower of the black nationalist Marcus Garvey; my grandparents had been sympathetic to his ideas. His description of racism in his hometown of Lansing, Michigan, matched my experiences in New York and North Carolina. He pointed out that schoolroom textbooks ignored the role of black people, despite the fact that the first American martyr of the American Revolution was a black man named Crispus Attucks. My research at the Schomburg had revealed the same truths. Within a few pages, I was passionately engrossed, reading frantically yet not wanting the book to end.

  In the popular young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, John Green writes, “Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” That’s how I felt when I finished the last page of Malcolm X and Alex Haley’s book. I knew my life was changed forever, and I had to tell everyone I knew to read this book now! One passage particularly impressed me: “One day, I remember, a dirty glass of water was on a counter and Mr. Muhammad put a clean glass of water beside it. ‘You want to know how to spread my teachings?’ he said, and he pointed to the glasses of water. ‘Don’t condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water,’ he said, ‘just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won’t have to say that yours is better.’” I was only nineteen years old, but I knew I’d been drinking from that dirty glass most of my life.

  This was a time when most black Americans were holding their glasses of water up to the light and saying they were tired of waiting for white America to share the clean water.

  I was riveted by Malcolm’s intimate story of how he came to realize he’d been the victim of institutional racism, which had imprisoned him long before he’d landed in an actual prison. That’s how I felt: imprisoned by an image of who I was supposed to be. The first thing Malcolm did was push aside the Baptist religion his parents had brought him up in and study Islam instead. To him, Christianity was a foundation of the white culture responsible for enslaving black people and a support for the racism that permeated society. His family had been attacked by the Christianity-spouting Ku Klux Klan and his home burned by a KKK splinter group, the Black Legion.

  The Autobiography of Malcolm X starts as a political awakening, with M
alcolm’s angry polemic against white devils and a call to end racism “by any means necessary.” His youthful anger and despair matched my own, and I found myself cheering him on as he helped spread the message of the Nation of Islam. But toward the end of the book, Malcolm begins to reject the hatred and violence that defined the Nation of Islam and embrace orthodox Sunni Islam. He traveled to Africa, made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and returned to preach about a world in which black and white people could come together.

  Malcolm X’s transformation from petty criminal to political leader to spiritual leader inspired me to look more closely at my own upbringing and forced me to think more deeply about my own identity. His explanation of how Islam helped him find his true self, and gave him the strength not only to face hostile reactions from both black and white critics but also to fight for social justice, led me to study the Quran. I knew that between 15 and 30 percent of African slaves had been Muslim, so exploring Islam was a way for me to connect with my African roots, which felt much more comfortable and authentic than Christianity, a religion that had historically devalued my ancestors.

  The book was my own journey of political and spiritual awakening, and I emerged from it determined to find my political voice and spiritual calling. What’s remarkable about The Autobiography of Malcolm X isn’t how much it influenced me, but how many other people, black and white, experienced the same awakening as I did. Suburban white kids and urban black kids were all reading it.

  The book didn’t just shake my world—it shook the world.

  In 1965, killers silenced the man, but not his voice. His words still live on today, as loud, as truthful, as hopeful as when he stood at a podium and addressed thousands. They certainly lived in me that day when I closed the last page of his book and started down a new path of religious exploration and political commitment.