Becoming Kareem
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Cover and title page photo copyright © Norm Levin, Natural Portraits & Events
Cover design by Karina Granda
Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All photographs courtesy of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar unless otherwise indicated.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 1947- author. | Obstfeld, Raymond, 1952– editor.
Title: Becoming Kareem : growing up on and off the court / Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Raymond Obstfeld.
Description: New York : Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017036942| ISBN 9780316555388 (hardback) | ISBN 9780316555333 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316478137 (library edition ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 1947– Juvenile literature. | Basketball players—United States—Biography—Juvenile literature. | Social reformers—United States—Biography—Juvenile literature. | BISAC: JUVENILE NONFICTION / Biography & Autobiography / Sports & Recreation. | JUVENILE NONFICTION / Biography & Autobiography / Social Activists. | JUVENILE NONFICTION / Sports & Recreation / Basketball. | JUVENILE NONFICTION / Biography & Autobiography / Cultural Heritage. | JUVENILE NONFICTION / History / United States / 20th Century. | JUVENILE NONFICTION / Religion / Islam. | JUVENILE NONFICTION / Social Issues / Adolescence. | JUVENILE NONFICTION / Social Issues / Prejudice & Racism.
Classification: LCC GV884.A24 A3 2017 | DDC 796.323092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036942
ISBNs: 978-0-316-55538-8 (hardcover), 978-0-316-55533-3 (ebook)
E3-20171015-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: Every Kid Needs a Coach
Part 1: What My Coaches Through Eighth Grade Taught Me (Even When They Didn’t Mean To) 1. How I Discovered I Was Black
2. First Coaches: Mom and Dad Sang the Same Song
3. Coach Dad’s Quiet Lessons
4. Coach Mom’s Practical Lessons
5. Boarding School: Good Boy in a Bad Place
6. Back in Black: A Brand-New Lew
7. I, Basketball
Part 2: High School Confidential: New Heights in Basketball and Political Awareness 8. Fresh Start, Fresh Problems
9. Coach Donahue to the Rescue—Sort Of
10. Meeting Wilt Chamberlain
11. The Disappointment of Winning
12. Summer in the City
13. Things Fall Apart
14. Final Confrontation with Coach Donahue
15. Meeting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
16. Harlem Explodes!
17. Making Friends with Wilt Chamberlain
18. Girls and Me and Basketball Make Three
19. Senior Year: We Gotta Get Out of This Place
20. Choosing a College
21. California: A Brand-New Me
22. My Reunion with Coach Donahue
Part 3: College Daze: My Years of Living Wondrously 23. Welcome to the Hotel California
24. Life Outside Basketball
25. My First Day with Coach Wooden
26. Meeting Muhammad Ali
27. Oh, Yeah, I Also Played Basketball Freshman Year
28. The Dinner That Changed My Relationship with Coach Wooden
29. Reading Malcolm X: The Book That Changed My Life
30. Sophomore Year: Things Just Got Real
31. The Cleveland Summit Changes the Way the World Sees Me
32. Junior Year: Great Expectations, Great Disappointments
33. Bruce Lee Becomes My Teacher
34. Why I Didn’t Play in the 1968 Olympics
35. Why I Converted to Islam
36. Senior Year: One and Done
37. Good-bye, Yellow Brick Road
38. Becoming Kareem—For Real
And I Lived Happily, Sadly, Magnificently, Boringly, Piously, Crazily Ever After
Photos
About the Author
This is dedicated to all the young people who value
scholarship and the teachers and mentors who sacrifice for them.
I especially want to thank Dr. John Henrik Clarke
because the Harlem Youth Action Project, which he created,
was crucial to me in understanding my path.
—KAJ
This book about the journey to becoming who you want
to be is dedicated to my children, Max and Harper,
whose own journey has been a constant source to me
of wonder, appreciation, and inspiration.
—RO
INTRODUCTION
Every Kid Needs a Coach
The world knows me as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
I’m in the basketball record books under that name. I traveled the world as a US global cultural ambassador under that name. Google lists me about five hundred thousand times under that name. I was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame under that name. I received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama under that name. Part of that name has been passed on to my five children and to my grandchild.
But that wasn’t the name I started life with, or grew up using. When I was a child, my friends and family knew me as Lewis Alcindor. Everyone called me Lew.
When I was twenty-four, I changed that. My team, the Milwaukee Bucks, had just won the National Basketball Association (NBA) championship, and I had been voted the Finals’ Most Valuable Player. Everything was going perfectly. The fans were cheering my name, Lew, and sports journalists were writing about how bright my future would be. I was at the height of the success I had worked so hard my whole life to achieve. Which is why it came as such a shock when the day after winning the national championship, I announced to the world that I was no longer Lew Alcindor, but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which means “noble servant of God.”
The world responded: “Huh?”
Three years earlier, while still a college student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), I had quietly converted to Islam, which I had been studying for several years. People thought it was just a phase I was going through—an impressionable college kid experimenting with alternative ideas and lifestyles, like becoming a vegan or getting an eyebrow piercing. They figured that as soon as I signed a contract for major money with a professional basketball team, I would revert to my familiar former self. But by changing my name in such a high-profile way, I was announcing on a much grander scale that I was no longer Catholic, but Muslim. No longer Lew, but Kareem.
And that I had no intention of going back.
Because of my fame as a professional basketball player, and because so few
Americans knew anything about Islam back in the 1970s, there was a lot of angry backlash. People did not want me messing with their idea of who I was or what I represented to them. To many, by changing my religion and name, I was no longer the typical American kid playing a typical American sport embodying typical American values. I had become something foreign and exotic, like a newly discovered species of tree frog that just might be poisonous.
To me, by changing my religion and name, I was embracing the American ideal of freedom even more than when I was Lew Alcindor. I was becoming the person I chose to be rather than the person everyone was trying to convince me I should be. Lew Alcindor carried the name and religion of the white slaveholder who had exploited, humiliated, and abused my ancestors. How could I allow my successes to honor the name of such a villain? Instead, I decided to adopt the name and religion of many of the Africans who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. Those were the people I should be honoring.
But many who learned of my decision were furious. Reporters wrote nasty things, fans wrote outraged letters, and some people even threatened to kill me. My parents were shocked and hurt by my rejection of their name. My teammates were confused; some felt personally betrayed. Despite all that, I knew I had made the right choice because I was, after all those years, finally who I wanted to be.
The long road to discovering who I wanted to be was not straight or easy. I made mistakes—plenty of them. Fortunately, I didn’t have to travel that road by myself. Sometimes it felt as if I were walking alone, carrying a heavy burden on my shoulders. But then I’d look up and see someone there to help me carry that weight, or to shine a light on the path ahead so I knew where to go and what to avoid. I didn’t always realize they were helping me at the time, nor did I always listen to them. At least the mistakes were mine and the successes were mine because the path was mine.
From grammar school through my twenty years as a professional basketball player, my team coaches have helped guide me. But I have also had other people who helped me along my path even though they weren’t part of any team. I think of them as life coaches. Some were teachers, like my martial arts teacher and an eventual international movie star, Bruce Lee. Some were friends, like the world champion boxer Muhammad Ali. Some were actual coaches, like my UCLA coach John Wooden, whose lessons on and off the court still deeply influence me today. Some were writers, singers, poets, athletes, or activists whom I never met, and who may have even lived hundreds of years ago, but whose lives and works inspired me to see the world differently and helped me see my place in it.
Those who loved me weren’t always the best coaches. Some who thought they were providing guidance were actually negative influences—and I learned from listening to their words and watching how they behaved that I needed to do the opposite. That is one of the hardest lessons to learn. Good intentions don’t always have good results.
We are all told what to do and what to think from the moment we are born. Early lessons are pretty easy: where to poop and pee, how to walk, keeping fingers out of blenders and electrical sockets. After that, things get trickier. Parents, siblings, friends, peers, teachers, governments, employers, political parties, media, and religions are all stuffing heavy bricks of their opinions into our mental backpack. Then they shove us out the door to stagger along the path under all that weight of expectation and pressure, without ever asking us if the path is what we truly want.
My journey from Lew Alcindor to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was my quest to figure out what path I wanted. I often felt like Pinocchio dancing as someone else tugged my strings. But as I grew older, I realized that each choice I made was me cutting another string so I could move freely on my own. Only when I’d cut all the strings could I become the person I truly wanted to be and—more important—needed to be.
PART 1
What My Coaches Through Eighth Grade Taught Me
(Even When They Didn’t Mean To)
“You fail all the time, but you aren’t a failure until you start blaming someone else.”
FOOTBALL COACH BUM PHILLIPS
1.
How I Discovered I Was Black
I didn’t realize I was black until third grade.
Although I was born in the predominantly black community of Harlem in 1947, I was raised in a multiethnic housing project in the Inwood section of Manhattan. Our project consisted of seven buildings, each fourteen stories tall, with twelve apartments on each floor. That totaled 1,176 apartments. Basically, a small, crowded city.
Our neighbors formed a mini United Nations of Russians, Scandinavians, Jews, Irish, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans, along with about 15 percent black residents. My friends and neighbors spoke in a variety of lilting and guttural accents, which thrilled me. To be exposed to so many different cultures and languages—and foods!—was so much more interesting to a curious little boy than everyone looking, talking, and acting the same.
That’s not to say that everybody always got along, especially the kids. We had our share of bullies and mean kids. Because I was taller than almost everyone my age, most neighborhood children didn’t challenge me. But I was a well-mannered, gentle child who regularly attended church in my Sunday suit and tie, with no desire to fight nor skills to win a fight. The hard-core bullies always seemed to know which kids, regardless of their size, didn’t have any fight in them, so they zeroed in on me.
One girl, Cecilia, who was three years older, made me her pet project for beatings. She had no particular reason to dislike me—it was as if she picked on me as a form of exercise. More than once she chased me around the playground near our house. I’d try to outrun her but she was fast and relentless. She always caught me and then gave me a few extra punches for making her run.
Once, she chased me after Little League practice while I had my Louisville slugger in my hand. I still ran, but this time when she cornered me on that same playground, I took a couple of tentative swings with my bat at her legs. If I’d actually hit her, I probably would have burst into tears, but that never happened. She sneered at my sad attempt at self-defense, snatched the bat from my hands, and shoved me to the ground. She straddled me and pressed the bat against my throat with a victorious smile. I flailed like an overturned beetle, afraid she would choke me to death, but eventually she hopped off and strolled away. I figured she didn’t want to hurt me too badly or she wouldn’t be able to chase me the next time.
Despite these typical kid conflicts, I was never picked on because of my race. Because the projects were filled with so many different ethnicities, no one risked casting the first stone. My mom and dad never talked about being black, and I was too young to know about the violent racial tensions going on throughout America at that time. It was the 1950s and the world was changing. As far as I knew, we were all the same.
My wake-up call came in third grade when my classmate Michael brought a Polaroid camera to school. Until the Polaroid, all cameras had a roll of film inside that had to be mailed away or taken to a special store to be developed. Sometimes you would wait weeks between the time you snapped a photo and the time you got to see what it looked like. The Polaroid, to our delight, spit out an “instant” photograph.
Giddy over this cool gadget, we decided to take a class photo. I attended a strict Catholic school, with students wearing traditional uniforms: boys in white shirts, blue ties, and navy blue slacks and girls in jumpers and knee socks. Our teacher arranged us by size in front of the blackboard, snapped the photo, then shooed us back to our seats while she removed the miracle image from the camera. The photo, still moist and smelling of sour chemicals, was passed around from student to student, each marveling at this breakthrough technology that, to us, could only mean that jetpacks and flying cars were merely months away.
But when the photo finally landed on my desk, I didn’t see it as a tiny window into a space-age future. I just saw myself, as if for the first time. There I was, freakishly towering over all the other kids, with skin much darker than everyone else’s.
Tilting the glossy photo in the harsh classroom light didn’t change anything. I was still black.
And my classmates weren’t.
I knew two other kids in my school, but not in my classroom, who were also black, but I hadn’t seen myself as the same as them—yet not different from them, either. I just hadn’t realized how different we looked from the other kids.
I didn’t bring up this startling discovery with my parents. They had never mentioned it. No one at school had mentioned it. Maybe no one else noticed, or maybe it was supposed to be a secret. Maybe I had a secret identity, like Superman. Maybe my superpower just hadn’t kicked in yet.
But the color of my skin wasn’t quite the secret identity I thought it was. As we advanced through the grades, I didn’t gain a superpower to protect me, and my skin made me more of a target. As every kid who has ever been a target in school knows, the best way to survive is to become invisible. To keep your head down, not make eye contact, not call any attention to yourself. It’s not exactly a superpower, but it is a survival skill. However, for me, that was impossible. If my black skin made me a target, then my abnormal height made me a highly visible target, like a giraffe trying to hide among gerbils.
Realizing I was black didn’t affect my life right away. I still had plenty of friends, most of them white. I was still the Lew who played occasional pranks at school, mostly slapstick stuff I saw the Three Stooges do on TV, like pulling out a chair when a kid was about to sit down, then saying, “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.”
My best friend, Johnny, was white. Our mothers were close, so we had lots of opportunities to play together. We celebrated each other’s birthdays together, hung out at school together, and played after school together. We were inseparable. Our specialty was building models of tanks, battleships, and fighter jets. We would sit for hours, gluing each tiny plastic propeller into place with the precision of brain surgeons. A typical conversation was arguing about which football and baseball players were best. Sometimes we sat in silence, concentrating on painting our models, just happy to be in each other’s company.