Becoming Kareem

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  While I was at UCLA, Coach and I never had an extended conversation about Ali, but he would drop comments critical of the boxer now and then. He knew that Ali and I were friends, so his remarks were always in passing. “First he’s Cassius Clay, then he’s Muhammad Ali. Hmph.” “It’s a privilege, not an obligation, to fight for your country.” “Can’t he see he’s hurting the country?”

  I ignored these comments. I felt like the child of divorced parents who had to listen to one beloved parent complain about the other beloved parent. I respected and admired both of them, and I wanted to maintain my relationship with both. Despite my growing political activism, I still loved basketball. It was an island of refuge for me. I knew the rules, I had the skills, and the outcome was always clean and pure. With politics, there never seemed to be a resolution, just more obstacles.

  Ali was an irritant between us, but not a relationship breaker. I respected Coach’s position as a veteran, but I knew Ali was on the right path, a path that Coach couldn’t understand. He was too loyal to old ideas. To me, he was like the US Constitution: The original had some flaws (like not providing rights for women and permitting slavery), but it also had provisions to evolve with the times, to grow in order to fulfill the spirit of equality that defined the document—this defined Coach’s personal philosophy. Coach was never static in his beliefs, but rather he evolved over the years as he read and observed more. By 2009, he told an interviewer that he would describe himself politically as a liberal Democrat who had voted for some Republican presidential candidates.

  He even came to respect Muhammad Ali. In 2007, when Coach was ninety-seven years old, he visited the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky. When he returned to Los Angeles, we got together for breakfast at his favorite restaurant, VIP’s, and he pummeled me with questions about Ali. What is he like? How bad was his Parkinson’s? Did I see him at all? Ali used to come to some of my games when I was with the Lakers, and I would go to some of his boxing matches. We still stayed in touch, but his health kept him from traveling much. I could see the respect for Ali in Coach’s face.

  The Cleveland Summit had catapulted me from grumbling college sophomore to a national spokesperson for political and social issues involving African Americans. It was what I had wanted, but the pressure was even greater than it was playing basketball because the stakes were so much higher. Winning a basketball game wasn’t the same as trying to secure voting rights, educational opportunities, and jobs for the disenfranchised. Failing to score on a hook shot meant missing a couple of points. Failing to articulate a position clearly and convincingly could affect people’s lives.

  It was scary, but I felt ready. As Malcolm X had said, “If you want something, you had better make some noise.”

  32.

  Junior Year: Great Expectations, Great Disappointments

  I spent that summer working for the New York City Housing Authority, giving basketball clinics around the city to young black kids. I was excited to teach them basketball skills, but I was just as excited to instill in them a sense of black pride. It is difficult for young people today to understand that in the 1960s, black pride was an important issue because black kids didn’t see themselves as being as valuable as white kids. How could they when they saw segregation being tolerated, even though it was against federal laws? And they knew they would have to work twice as hard to get into schools white kids would be easily accepted into. I was happy to be doing more than talking about injustice, but actually making a difference with young black kids.

  I returned to UCLA ready to play basketball, but one important thing had changed: The NCAA had outlawed the dunk, declaring it was “not a skillful shot.” That ruling, which most people referred to as the Lew Alcindor Rule, came as no surprise to Coach Wooden. In fact, initially he was concerned the NCAA actually was going to take more extreme steps to curtail UCLA’s dominance of the game. And by UCLA, he meant Lew Alcindor. Although I didn’t know this at the time, he was fearful the NCAA might raise the height of the basket or, in a more extreme action, ban me from the game.

  At the time of the ruling, I was pretty upset. It felt as if the entire NCAA had gotten together just to punish me for scoring too many points. It was hard not to take that personally. Coach Wooden said publicly that it had been adopted after Houston players bent the rim dunking during pregame warm-ups in the 1967 NCAA Tournament, but no one believed that. Whatever the explanation, the reality was that dunking was no longer a part of my arsenal.

  As usual, Coach Wooden took the most optimistic approach, telling me, “It doesn’t make any difference whether you are the reason or not. It’s going to make you a better basketball player. You’re just going to have to further develop the rest of your game.”

  “Like what?” I asked angrily.

  “Like your flat hook. There’s room for improvement there, Lewis.”

  “Sure, but what will keep them from banning that, too?”

  Coach sighed. “You have an obstacle, Lewis. What you do about that obstacle defines who you are.”

  So we worked on my hook. His persistence in the face of my petulance built a closer relationship between us. I came to the realization that he wouldn’t give up on me. I knew he wanted me to perfect the hook so I could be more effective in the games, but there was something in his attitude, a patient understanding, that made me feel he was more interested in teaching me how to adapt to disappointment. To push through. To endure.

  Coach taught me the techniques to hone the hook into my iconic shot that carried me through championships in college and the pros. But his real lesson about perseverance and adaption has carried me through life beyond the basketball court.

  The NCAA removed the dunking ban in 1976, but by then I had been playing pro ball for several years. Twelve years after the dunk was reinstated, toward the end of my professional career, Coach Wooden admitted to me that he had been among those who had voted to ban the dunk.

  I knew Coach’s integrity too well by then to feel even a hint of betrayal. Even so, I couldn’t help but ask him about it.

  “Coach, why would you vote to ban the dunk?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “I thought it was for the good of the game.”

  “Whose game? It hurt UCLA more than any other team.”

  He hesitated, then sighed. “It’s an ugly shot, Kareem. Nothing but brute force.”

  That stung a little. I wasn’t known for my brute force.

  “The game is about teamwork,” he added. “The dunk is about embarrassing your opponent.”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “But sometimes it’s about timing and grace. Two skills you taught me.”

  “Flattery won’t work,” he said, grinning.

  We never did agree on that issue. But by then, Coach and I had been friends for many years, and we knew that friends don’t have to agree in order to respect each other’s opinions. Coach had earned my respect long ago, not just for his coaching ability in leading us to win, but for his poise when we lost. It’s easy to be gracious and magnanimous when you’re winning, but he taught us that it takes character to be those things when you lose. Especially when the game is an important one. And they didn’t come any more important than our January 20, 1968, game against the University of Houston Cougars—a matchup that everyone called “the Game of the Century.”

  It was the first NCAA regular season game to be shown nationwide on prime-time television. We had played the Cougars the previous season in the semifinals of the NCAA Tournament and crushed them 73–58, going on to win the tournament. After the game, Elvin Hayes, the Cougars’ best player, had challenged me in the press by saying I hadn’t played tough defense, hadn’t been aggressive rebounding, and wasn’t as good a player as I was hyped to be.

  “Oh, man,” my roommate, Edgar, said after I read it aloud. “Hayes let you have it good.”

  “You were a little lazy on defense,” Lucius teased.

  Edgar nodded. “And you could’ve snagged a few more rebounds. Ju
st saying.”

  I laughed. “I appreciate the support.”

  I may have laughed it off with my teammates, but I really wanted to take Houston down again, especially in front of the first nationwide TV audience.

  Because of our forty-seven-game winning streak, we were heavily favored, but a week before the game, the cornea of my left eye was scratched in a game, which left me in a hospital bed for three days with a patch over my eye. I missed two games, which my teammates won handily without me. However, during my recovery, I was not allowed to move, which meant no practicing or conditioning before the Houston game. Plus, my eyesight was severely restricted.

  This was an obstacle, but as Coach had said when they banned dunking, “What you do about that obstacle defines who you are.”

  We walked down the ramp of the Houston Astrodome to fifty-three thousand cheering fans, twice the previous record of people to watch a live basketball game. The excitement from the crowd was overwhelming.

  Unfortunately, being emotionally moved didn’t fix my eye or my lack of conditioning. I played the worst game of my UCLA career. My teammates picked up the slack and kept the game competitive. The crowd was yelling so loudly that we couldn’t hear the ball when we dribbled. We were tied right up until the final seconds, when a foul sent Elvin Hayes to the foul line. He sank both shots. We lost 71–69.

  I scored only fifteen points and shot less than 50 percent. Worse, it looked to everyone else as if Elvin Hayes was right about me. The team was devastated. We were humiliated on TV in front of millions of fans. But Coach sauntered into the locker room, shrugged, and said, “Tonight they were the better team.”

  No excuses, no blame. No running down the other team.

  I felt a mixture of resentfulness and envy for him. My stomach was churning inside as if I’d swallowed a barracuda and it was gnawing everything in sight. Coach looked fresh and chipper and ready to go another round. I wished I felt that way. He was going home and would undoubtedly fall into a restful sleep. I would lie in bed staring at the ceiling, reliving every play, every point, every missed shot.

  Fortunately, we had another shot at redemption. Neither the Cougars nor our team lost another game the rest of the season, which led us to a rematch in the NCAA Men’s Division I Tournament semifinals. Despite Coach Wooden’s Zen approach to our loss to Houston, I was still a college kid with a drive to win. After beating us, Elvin Hayes had continued to berate me in the press. That same week, Sports Illustrated’s cover featured a photo of Elvin scoring over me. I tore the cover off and pasted it on my locker to remind me to practice harder, longer, and with more intensity.

  This time we destroyed them, 101–69. We were jubilant in the locker room, celebrating our revenge. After the game, I did something I had never done before: I put on a bright red, orange, and yellow African robe called a dashiki, which I referred to as my “dignity robe.” My joy that night was more powerful than my reticence. It wasn’t meant to be a challenge to anyone; it simply was my statement that I was finding my roots. And I wasn’t ashamed to express them.

  Coach Wooden, who had been talking with a reporter, turned at the sound of my dashiki swishing and saw me in all my brightly colored finery. He hesitated while he took it all in, then smiled broadly like a father watching his son in a school play.

  Then he gathered us together, his expression the same as it had been when we’d lost. He congratulated us for a game well played. He made sure we acknowledged Coach Norman, whose diamond-and-one defense helped us contain the Cougars’ top scorer, Elvin Hayes, who had been averaging 37.7 points a game but that night scored only 10.

  Coach walked out of the room, and I knew he was going home to his wife and another restful sleep. I would be up celebrating in my bright African robe—and later lying in bed, reliving every play, every point, every missed shot.

  We finished the season winning another NCAA National Championship. But it was that single loss, and our ability to come back from it even stronger, that most defined us.

  33.

  Bruce Lee Becomes My Teacher

  I met Bruce Lee in 1967, the fall semester of my junior year at UCLA. He was not yet the international superstar he would soon become. He was just a struggling actor teaching martial arts to pay the rent and support his wife and baby boy.

  I’d been training in aikido during the summer back home in New York City. I got the idea of taking up martial arts the previous year when I saw one of the Zatoichi samurai movies at the Kokusai Theater on Crenshaw Boulevard near campus. After watching the balletic movements of Zatoichi as he gracefully evaded violent gangs of opponents and left them all helpless, I figured learning that kind of body control could only help me in games when I was being double- and triple-teamed. Instead of brute force, I would slide and roll and slip by them without fouling. After only a couple of months, I quickly found my senses were sharper and my reflexes quicker.

  When I returned to UCLA for the fall semester, I knew I wanted to continue my training so I asked a friend of mine who ran Black Belt magazine where I should go in Los Angeles. He told me about this young guy out in Culver City, the west side of Los Angeles, who had played the martial arts sidekick Kato on the single season of the TV series The Green Hornet. I was a little skeptical of training with a television actor, but my friend assured me that this man was the real deal. He had already built a reputation as something of a maverick in the martial arts community, with his own unorthodox ideas of combat, but his skills were widely acclaimed to be remarkable. He was known for demonstrating the one-inch punch—a punch from only one inch away from the target that generated enough force to break boards or knock an opponent to the floor.

  Bruce was the kind of person who could win you over within twenty seconds of meeting him. Most martial arts instructors I had met before were very stiff and formal, constantly demanding overt demonstrations of respect. Not Bruce. He greeted me with a broad smile and friendly demeanor, and right away I knew this was not a scowling teacher from Japanese films demanding bowing obedience. We talked UCLA basketball for a while and then got down to business.

  Bruce asked his wife, Linda, to assist him in a demonstration. He told me to brace myself behind the heavy punching bag that hung by a chain from the ceiling. The bag was as thick and heavy as a body. “Hold it as tight as you can,” he instructed me.

  Bruce told Linda to kick the bag.

  “Bruce, I don’t think this will work,” I said. “I’m two feet taller and a hundred pounds heavier than Linda.”

  Bruce smiled but said nothing.

  “Just hold the bag tight, Lew,” Linda said.

  I squatted behind the bag and hugged it tightly. I was confident that even a truck wouldn’t be able to budge it.

  “Ready?” Bruce said.

  “Ready,” I said, a little smugly.

  Bruce nodded at Linda.

  Suddenly Linda fired off a kick straight into the bag. The impact rocked me backward a few feet, readjusted my spine, and possibly rearranged the order of my teeth.

  They stood there smiling at the shocked expression on my face.

  “Okay,” I said, rubbing my chest. “Teach me that.”

  Bruce’s approach was similar to that of Coach Wooden. They both emphasized practicing fundamentals over and over. Bruce used to say, “I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.” For me, my hook shot was the one kick practiced ten thousand times.

  Both also emphasized preparation. The winning athlete prepared for competition by training the body and the mind to anticipate all contingencies. While Coach Wooden told us, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail,” Bruce would say, “Preparation for tomorrow is hard work today.” The seventeenth-century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, author of The Book of Five Rings, which Bruce and I often discussed at great length, wrote, “You can only fight the way you practice.” The message from all three coaches was the same, and I took it to heart. I dedica
ted myself to preparation by maintaining complete focus during basketball practice and my training with Bruce. As a result, I became stronger, faster, and a much more intense player.

  Bruce’s most significant teaching was that when it came to martial arts, there was no single technique or philosophy that was the correct way. This was very different from other teachers who each seemed to belong to a single school of teaching. This was how Bruce developed his Jeet Kune Do (Way of the Intercepting Fist) method: Each fighter is unique, as is each fight. Therefore, the fighter must constantly adapt, using multiple techniques and approaches. This was also a belief Coach Wooden had. Both wanted their pupils to reach a level where they could teach themselves how to continue to improve.

  Bruce was—to me, to his friends, and to himself—first and foremost a philosopher. Although it was his almost supernatural physical abilities that attracted his students, including movie stars, it was his equally remarkable intellectual abilities that kept us coming back. He had taken philosophy and psychology classes in college and was eager to discuss the principles he’d learned. Bruce and I spent as much time talking about books as we did sparring on the mat.

  Bruce and I had something else in common: We both had experienced brutal discrimination. Bruce came from an acting family and had been performing onstage and in Chinese films since he was a child. When he came to the United States from Hong Kong as a teenager, he briefly abandoned acting to teach martial arts. Eventually, he did return to acting, and he was driven to share his philosophy of martial arts with the world through his acting. But Hollywood saw him only as an Asian, and the only acting parts for Asians were villains or servants. His frustration with Hollywood prompted him to return to Hong Kong to make movies.

  In Hong Kong, he started making martial arts films like Fist of Fury and The Big Boss, which became huge international hits. Finally, he had the fame and success that had been denied him in America. And kids all around the world were flocking to martial arts studios to learn Bruce’s Jeet Kune Do.