Becoming Kareem

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  30.

  Sophomore Year: Things Just Got Real

  In some ways, my freshman year was like basic training, but my sophomore year was like being thrown into hand-to-hand combat. No matter how prepared you think you are, things go wrong.

  The first step in my sophomore plan was to move out of the dorm and get an apartment. Teammate Edgar Lacey and I decided to get a place together. I’d saved up enough money from my $125-a-week summer job working in the New York offices of Columbia Pictures to buy a 1958 Mercedes and pay half the rent. First, we rented a small apartment in Santa Monica, but the rent proved too much of a strain, so we found a cheaper place in Pacific Palisades. Eventually, that also was unmanageable and we moved into the tinier maid’s quarters in a condominium in Westwood.

  We would practice to exhaustion every day, play games in front of thousands of cheering fans twice a week, and sacrifice our social life to balance academics and athletics, yet we never had any money.

  “We should go to some other school,” Edgar suggested as we sat in our tiny apartment.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Anywhere we want, man! After last season, we could write our own ticket. You, me, and Lucius.”

  “The Three Black Musketeers,” I said with a grin.

  He laughed. “That’s right. I’m the handsome one who gets all the girls.”

  “Aramis.”

  “Sure. Whatever.” Then he sighed and shook his head. “I’m just saying, we could write our own ticket.”

  We weren’t really serious about it, just griping as a way of bonding. Transferring to another school would have cost us a year of eligibility, and in reality, we would have faced the same financial restrictions. But none of the players, other than those who came from wealthy parents, were happy with our financial status. We knew the university was making a fortune off our efforts but wasn’t willing to share any of it with us.

  The other part of the sophomore plan was for the varsity team to win a national championship, especially after the disastrous last season. The pressure on Coach Wooden and the entire team was enormous, but the press had heaped a little more on me. The AP and UPI polls had ranked us as the number one team in the country. My face was suddenly on a bunch of national magazines, with Sports Illustrated showing me in a special foldout cover with an intimidating headline: “The New Superstar.” Sure, I liked the attention, and most of the time I was confident that I could deliver on that promise. But sometimes I wanted to hide in the library and just read my books.

  There would be no hiding. Every home game would be a sellout, and the school had scheduled as many home games as possible. When I walked by the Pauley Pavilion ticket office, students were lined up for two days before season tickets even went on sale. At night, they camped out in sleeping bags, and during the day, they did homework and threw Frisbees. UCLA had also made a deal with a local TV station to broadcast the games on tape delay, and Coach Wooden had agreed to do a weekly TV show discussing basketball. This was bigger—and more intimidating—than I could ever have imagined.

  The team’s plan for world dominance hit a snag when my roommate Edgar fractured his kneecap and needed surgery that would keep him off the court. He was an experienced upperclassman, and we needed his on-court expertise. Then Mike Lynn, another upperclassman with experience, pleaded guilty to credit card theft and was suspended for the season. Our starting lineup now included four sophomores and only one junior, Mike Warren. Suddenly, we were probably the least experienced team in the league.

  Our best-laid plans had just been punched in the mouth.

  If Coach Wooden felt the same pressure, he never let on. He showed up every day in his T-shirt, shorts, and athletic socks and shoes, a jacket with the word “Coach” on the back, and a whistle around his neck that seemed somehow louder and more accusatory than any whistle I’d ever heard before.

  The biggest misconception people have about Coach Wooden is thinking that he focused on winning. It’s an easy mistake to make because he was one of the winningest coaches in history. But he didn’t. In fact, he did the opposite.

  “Asking an athlete if he likes winning is like asking a Wall Street broker if he likes money,” Coach told us in my freshman year. “Sure, we want to win. I love winning. But winning isn’t our goal.”

  I didn’t say anything, but clearly this was sports heresy. People have been burned at the stake for less.

  One of the other freshman players raised his hand. “Coach Sanders says, ‘Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.’” He grinned a little, as if he’d just put one over on Coach.

  Coach shook his head. Back in 1949, the UCLA football coach Henry Russell “Red” Sanders had uttered those immortal words after a loss to USC. Immediately, coaches everywhere had used it as a mantra to whip up their players into a winning frenzy.

  “Winning is the by-product of hard work,” Coach explained patiently, “like a pearl is the by-product of that clam fighting off a parasite.”

  “I thought it was a grain of sand,” someone else said.

  Coach ignored him. He didn’t have time to educate us about science facts. “The goal is hard work. The reward is satisfaction that you pushed yourself to the edge physically, emotionally, and mentally. It is my firm belief that when everyone on a team works as hard as possible until they feel that glow of satisfaction in their hearts and peace of mind, that team is prepared for anything and anyone. Then winning is usually inevitable.”

  To a freshman, this was crazy talk. Was Coach having a stroke? Winning translated into attendance at games and alumni donations and television money; losing did not. His job and our scholarships depended on winning—that was a fiscal reality.

  It took me years to fully appreciate this lesson. As a freshman, I admired Coach’s sentiment even if I thought it was too esoteric. To me, you worked hard to beat your opponents. The satisfaction was in walking off the court with the fans screaming for your team, not theirs. But slowly, game by game, season by season, I started to see winning his way. Not just on the court, but off it as well.

  But my sophomore year, my first time playing varsity, with all those magazines expecting great things from me, I wanted to win. I couldn’t imagine the shame and embarrassment I would feel going back home having let my family, friends, and team down.

  Most of our practices were team drills, but sometimes Coach Wooden worked just with me. I liked those private sessions because I knew I was learning something that would make me a better player. The two of us must have looked a little incongruous, with a five-foot-ten man standing on the sidelines next to his seven-foot-two center and demonstrating the fundamentals of rebounding. “Rebounding is positioning, Lewis,” he emphasized. “If you are in the proper position, strength doesn’t make a difference. All that contact around the basket is an effort to get the best position. Being quicker than your opponent to get that position negates his physical advantage.” When he was teaching, he usually held a basketball in his hands and tried to look me in the eyes, or as close to my eyes as he could get. But somehow, when we did work on these things, the authority in his voice made him sound taller.

  After we did our drills, we scrimmaged. During a game, what often appeared to be spontaneous on the court actually was the result of hours of practicing until our responses finally became automatic and instantaneous. We didn’t have any set plays. We had a basic offensive system—you go here, you go there, you go in that corner, stand over there—and then we would run several options off it, depending on how our opponents defended us. Our offense was structured to recognize opportunities as a group and take advantage of them.

  Coach emphasized teamwork over everything else. Teams won games, not individuals. A good team had room for individuals to rise, but their rise had to lift everyone with them. That was the deal.

  That’s why Coach hated to see showboating during practice. He didn’t even permit us to dunk. Practice was a work session; we ran, we drilled, we scrimmaged. We didn’t ex
periment with showy moves. Willie Naulls, who started for UCLA in the mid-1950s and later influenced me to go there, told me how he had to learn to play within the Wooden system. After he made a couple of no-look passes, Wooden told him flatly, “No fancy stuff out there.” His teammate Johnny Moore pulled Willie aside and warned him, “Two hands on the ball will get you some playing time. Don’t do your no-lookers or you’ll be on the bench watching me play.” I took that advice to heart.

  Wooden may not have liked anything fancy, but he was flexible enough to appreciate when an innovation truly worked. A lot of basketball fans don’t know that the lob pass was created at UCLA by Larry Farmer and Greg Lee. I think if they had done it first in practice with Coach Wooden watching, they would not have done it a second time, but it happened spontaneously during a game. Larry Farmer raced down the sideline on a typical UCLA fast break, but this time, as the defense got set, he spun around his defender, and as he cut to the basket, Greg Lee, a world-class volleyball player, lobbed the ball over the top of the defense as if he were setting an outside hitter for a spike. Farmer caught the lob in midair and laid it into the basket. It evolved right out of the basic offense—it wasn’t planned, it just presented itself.

  Coach appreciated my hook shot, not just for its effectiveness in scoring but also for its finesse. We worked on it like two mechanics perfecting an engine. It was that hook that brought us together on the basketball court. Working on it gave us the opportunity to spend extended time in each other’s presence. Both of us spoke fluent basketball, a language free of emotion. He loved that shot and saw in it possibilities I hadn’t imagined. “It’s an almost unstoppable shot,” he told me. “If you can perfect it, it will enable you to dominate.” Whatever furthered the artistry and aesthetic of basketball while increasing scoring potential, he liked.

  Which is why he hated the slam dunk. He considered it nothing more than an arrogant display of brute force. The player leaps up and jams the ball through the hoop with enough force to rattle the whole backboard. To him, it was as primitive as urinating to mark one’s territory. But to me, the dunk kicked up the adrenaline a notch, giving me an extra boost. After a dunk, I ran down the court with a little more energy.

  We finished every practice by shooting free throws. We had to complete two in a row in order to leave. You had to stand on the line shooting until you made them. And then, just before we left, he would say, “Just remember, everything we’ve worked so hard to get done today can be destroyed if you make a bad choice between now and our next practice.”

  We understood what he meant by bad choices. No drugs or alcohol, no protesting in the streets. He wanted to protect his boys, but he was out of touch with how rapidly the culture was changing. The Beatles had arrived. Civil rights marches continued. Antiwar protests had begun. Women demanded rights most people didn’t realize they had been denied. Rebellion was in the air. Nothing could stop it, even a well-meaning coach.

  Our season opener was against our biggest rival, USC. Coach pulled me aside during practice to discuss his strategy.

  “Lewis, this first game is very important to the rest of our season,” he told me.

  “Right, Coach,” I said.

  “So how should we handle this?”

  Was he asking me? I just work here, I wanted to say. But he waited for me to answer. His patience was unnerving.

  “Wellll,” I said, stretching the word as I thought. “I would go at them as hard as possible, score as many points as possible, and let them and everyone else in the league know we mean business.” I’d said it all in one breath.

  Coach Wooden smiled up at me. “Then let’s do that.”

  And that’s exactly what we did. We beat them 105–90. I scored fifty-six points, a new school record by fourteen points. “At times, he frightens me,” Coach told the press after the game. “When he gets it all together, he’s going to be something.”

  That game did indeed announce to the world who we were and what we could do. We finished the season 30–0, reclaiming the NCAA National Basketball Championship for Coach Wooden and UCLA.

  31.

  The Cleveland Summit Changes the Way the World Sees Me

  After our tremendous sophomore season, I was even more famous. The articles about me were no longer about my great potential, but about how that potential had been realized. The coach of the New York Knicks was saying, “Alcindor could play for any pro team right now.” Coach Wooden tried to downplay the press coverage to relieve the pressure it put on me. “Lew has improved,” he told reporters, “but he still has a long way to go to attain the maturity and experience he needs.” He was right, and I was grateful to him for telling them so.

  Coach had tried to warn me about the relentless press that evening at the Bat Rack, before we’d gotten sidetracked by the little old lady at the front door calling me a nigger. There was a lot of praise for my play, yes, but articles had started to speculate about me personally. Why didn’t I smile more? What personal problems was I hiding? The truth was pretty boring: I was just shy. Having my photo taken made me uncomfortable; talking about myself all the time to endless reporters embarrassed me. I loved playing, but afterward I just wanted to read a book or sit quietly in a jazz club with a couple of friends.

  I felt disconcerted about my fame because I didn’t yet know what to do with it. I had a lot of political opinions, and now I had a national platform. But I didn’t want to just ramble on about injustice; I wouldn’t be taken seriously. I would be dismissed as just another whining college kid.

  That changed in May when football great Jim Brown, who had become a Hollywood actor, invited me to join a group of black athletes and activists in Cleveland to discuss Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be drafted. At twenty, I would be the youngest person at what would become known as the Cleveland Summit. The meeting was to determine whether we would publicly support Ali in his refusal to be drafted. This was by no means a rubber-stamp committee. Several of the participants had been in the military. Brown himself had belonged to the army ROTC and graduated from Syracuse University as a second lieutenant. Carl Stokes, an attorney who in a few months would become the mayor of Cleveland, making him the first black mayor of a major US city, had served in World War II, just like Coach Wooden.

  The summit was not even supposed to happen. It had started as a simple phone call to Brown from Ali’s manager, Herbert Muhammad. Muhammad wanted Brown to help persuade Ali to drop his refusal to be drafted, to avoid the severe loss of income that could financially wipe Ali out, not to mention the public outcry. Muhammad was torn between his religious convictions, which were the same as Ali’s, and his desire to protect his friend from ruin. Ali was only twenty-five, so two years in the army wouldn’t drastically affect his boxing career. To Muhammad, Brown seemed like a good choice to convince Ali because he had been an outspoken activist for years, so Ali would listen. But Brown also was a partner in the company that promoted Ali’s fights, so he had a financial stake in having Ali keep fighting.

  Brown took his role seriously. He invited me and the rest of the summit members to sit as a jury in assessing Ali’s sincerity and commitment. Every athlete responded by immediately agreeing to come at his own expense. I was excited to finally be part of the political movement in a more direct and active way. I also wanted to help Ali if I could because he made me feel proud to be African American.

  On June 4, 1967, we gathered in the offices of the Negro Industrial and Economic Union, which soon became the Black Economic Union. Despite our admiration for Ali, we grilled him for hours. Many on the group had come with their minds already made up to persuade Ali to accept his military service. The discussions became pretty heated as questions and answers were fired back and forth. Pretty soon, though, we all realized Ali was not going to change his mind. For two hours, he lectured us on Islam and black pride and his religious conviction that the Vietnam War was wrong.

  We were all well aware that in the early days of the Vietnam War, kids who could afford
to go to college were exempted from the draft, which left poor kids, many of them black, forced to go fight. Ali argued that it was a war against people of color fought by people of color for a country that denied them their basic civil rights.

  In the end, he convinced us and we decided to support him. Bill Russell summed it up for all of us by saying, “I envy Muhammad Ali.… He has something I have never been able to attain, and something very few people possess: He has absolute and sincere faith. I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. He is better equipped than anyone I know to withstand the trials in store for him. What I’m worried about is the rest of us.”

  We did our best at that Cleveland Summit to support Ali’s legal fight and to publicize the injustice of the draft, but we knew how powerless we were against those promoting the war. Nevertheless, I was thrilled that I was finally doing something important rather than just complaining.

  Being at that summit and hearing Ali’s articulate defense of his moral beliefs and his willingness to suffer for them reinvigorated my own commitment to become even more politically involved.

  Coach Wooden, however, was not a fan of Muhammad Ali.

  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, John Wooden left his wife, son, and daughter, and his career as a high school English teacher, coach, and professional basketball player, to join the US Navy. He served as a physical education instructor for four years during World War II. When a sudden attack of appendicitis prevented Lieutenant Wooden from shipping out with his buddies for the South Pacific on the USS Franklin, he was quickly replaced by a friend and fraternity brother, Purdue quarterback Freddie Stalcup. The Franklin was soon attacked by a Japanese kamikaze plane that crashed into the ship, killing Stalcup. The loss of his friend, as well as the knowledge that it could have been he who died, made Coach cherish the sacrifices of soldiers. It also made him less tolerant of those who shirked their military duty.