Becoming Kareem Read online

  I first learned about prejudice against skin color by being on the receiving end—not from white people, but from the other black kids at my school. Their hatred of me, I soon realized, was more than the typical anger at a teacher’s pet or Nerdy McGeekerson. Although we were all black, I didn’t act or speak like the black kids they hung out with, but more like the white kids I grew up with. To them, I was an Oreo: a black kid who acted too white—black on the outside, white on the inside. Their resentment of more privileged white people, as well as of black people who tried to fit into white society by acting like them, focused on me.

  Quickly, their hatred took on a physical expression.

  The school bully was a burly kid named Sylvester, who was three years older than me in age, but centuries ahead in street smarts. He decided one day that it would be fun to toss his marbles out the dorm window and have his underlings chase after them. Between his loud cackling laughter and the cracking sound of marbles smacking cement, the teachers soon demanded an explanation. Ever the Good Boy who could not tell a lie and always honored authority, I told them the truth. They punished Sylvester, but he punished me much worse. The beating was savage, not just for having told on him, but for being the kind of kid who believed it was the right thing to do. For being a smart, straight-A student who would have the kind of opportunities he had no chance at. For being an Oreo.

  The bruises healed, but I didn’t. Something deep inside me had broken. It’s an odd feeling to be among your own people for the first time and be afraid of them. It made me feel completely alone. I had been abandoned by my parents and rejected by the one group that I thought would welcome me because we at least looked the same. But we weren’t the same at all. If I didn’t belong with them, where did I belong? I didn’t just feel lonely and isolated because I was at that school; I felt that way because I was afraid I didn’t fit in anywhere outside the school, either.

  But I adapted. I continued to excel at school, but I was less vocal now. I kept to myself, avoiding contact with the other boys because I never knew what I might say or do to set them off. Instead of making myself bigger to scare away predators, I adopted another animal kingdom tactic: invisibility. Silence was my camouflage.

  Eventually, I found sanctuary. A place where I could hide out in safety.

  The basketball court.

  Basketball had never been my game. I was slow and clumsy, and my brutal experience with my father on the court did nothing to make me like it any better. But there wasn’t much else to do at school, and the court was a place where I could be by myself.

  I would have been happy just practicing free throws by myself for the whole year. The school, however, had other plans. Despite my ineptitude, I was still the second-tallest kid, which automatically put me on the school’s basketball team.

  I wish what happened next would have been like the movies I used to see with my mom on Saturday afternoons: The moment I joined the team and stepped on the court, I showed the whole school what a great player I was, and the bullies came after the game to apologize and announce to everyone else that from now on no one had better mess with me.

  That didn’t happen.

  The games we played against other Catholic elementary schools were barely organized. It was like throwing a chew toy and watching a pack of puppies scramble after it. There was a lot of running up and down the court, hurling the ball in the general vicinity of the basket. I ran, too, but in a loping shuffle. Flailing spastically was my go-to move. When it came to shooting, I had a better chance sitting on the ball and hatching a unicorn than making the ball swish through the hoop.

  Although I was taller than almost everyone else, I hadn’t yet developed much control of my body. Most kids grow gradually, which allows them enough time to adjust. I grew in sudden spurts that didn’t give me much time to feel comfortable.

  One day, all that changed. I was in the middle of a game, shocked that I wasn’t on the bench, where I could do the most good for the team. I was struggling with the dribble, which looked simple but suddenly felt as if I were juggling chainsaws. I knew I was near our basket, so all I had to do was get rid of the ball and let someone else screw up. But I couldn’t find anyone open. I had my back to the basket, and a kid from the other team was riding me so close I thought he was going to throw a saddle on my back. With no one to pass to, and lacking the skills to drive to the hoop, I looked over my shoulder at the basket, which didn’t seem as tiny and far away as usual. Then I did something I had never done before: With one hand, I looped the ball over both my shoulder and the defender. The ball arced high over everyone and curved toward the basket. My heart thumped with anticipation. Sweet glory was only two seconds away.

  The ball banged off the rim and bounced away.

  Rather than slink away in defeat and humiliation, I took the very same shot the next time I got the ball. With the very same results. No basket. But I didn’t care. At nine years old, I had found the shot that made me feel like an athlete, that made me feel I was in control of this gangly body that so far had done nothing but isolate me from others. Now, for the first time, my body was not an enemy but an ally.

  Unfortunately, that confidence didn’t transfer to my daily life among the other students. I focused only on academics and keeping to myself, but even so I left myself open to attack.

  And attack they did. Two weeks before the end of the term, I was jumped by two guys who proceeded to pummel me in the face and body.

  “Not so tough, Alcindor,” one of them taunted, punching me in the back.

  “Think you’re so smart,” another grumbled, kicking me in the ribs.

  “Don’t give a crap how tall you are.”

  Bullies seem to have the same lines of dialogue no matter what their race or where they’re from.

  Finally, they ran off laughing, leaving me balled up in pain and humiliation. It was a fitting farewell from Holy Providence, which had been more like Hellish Providence. The school’s mission was to teach us the ways of Christian fellowship, but instead it had taught me the ways of violence and pettiness. A small seed of doubt had been planted inside me: about the Christian teachings, about my parents’ affection, about my place as an African American. I was confused by it all—and angry.

  When my parents picked me up from school, they immediately commented on how I had changed. I was sullen, didn’t smile, didn’t talk. They were right, and I blamed them for the change. They were my parents, my life coaches, and they had yanked me out of my safe and happy home and thrown me into a lion’s den without any explanation or skills to survive. Why would I ever trust them again?

  But if not them, then who?

  6.

  Back in Black: A Brand-New Lew

  If before serving hard time at Holy Providence, I was defined by my friendliness, my goofy sense of humor, and my love of learning, afterward I was defined mainly by two things: height and race.

  I still had my love of learning—maybe even more than before, because after my experience with the kids at Holy Providence, I was very aware of what a life without educational opportunities might be like. But I’d also learned that being black had a whole set of additional challenges. That even if I hadn’t seen myself as black before, that was how other people saw me. And I needed to figure out how to cope with that on a daily basis.

  Before Holy Providence, my height had been a novelty: something to joke about, but not to take seriously. “How’s the weather up there, Lew?” “Hey, we found Bigfoot!” If somebody couldn’t reach a book off the top shelf, he’d send for me. But suddenly I was aware that my height could be a tool to distinguish me. I wasn’t a good basketball player, but I could be. And if I became good enough, I’d earn the respect of others—even the ones who thought I was an Oreo.

  I had to work this philosophy out on my own because I no longer had any coaches. Although my parents continued to push my education, I thought of them more as drill instructors than coaches. I knew they loved me, but they didn’t understand me.
I had come back from boarding school with a lot of anger toward them for abandoning me, rather than protecting me. Even though I had joyfully reconnected with my neighborhood friends, I couldn’t reconnect with my parents.

  Years later, I would read a poem called “This Be the Verse” by the British poet Philip Larkin about how parents sometimes mess up their kids:

  They may not mean to, but they do.

  They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

  That’s how it was for me and my parents. A quiet coexistence in which they kept their eyes on my distant future without ever seeing what was going on in the here and now.

  I received a crash course in race when I returned to New York. Anxious to get back to a normal life with my school buddies, I quickly joined the Little League again. To get to the playing field, I had to bicycle through Good Shepherd Parish, which was all Irish. They were Catholics, just like me, but they were white. So when they saw me biking through their neighborhood in uniform with my baseball glove, they would chase after me hollering, “Nigger! Nigger!” To keep them at a distance, I would swing my bike chain like a lasso as I speed-pedaled through. Every day was like a Mad Max run. Black kids from my projects would go to the fields in a group, which made us too many to take on.

  I couldn’t help but wonder how they could worship at a Catholic church and receive the same Christian lessons on loving your neighbor that I got, yet be filled with such rage and hatred when they saw me. What was the point of attending church if you weren’t going to follow the teachings? Wasn’t Jesus the main coach for all of us? There seemed to be something broken in the church if this was how its followers behaved. I buried that heresy deep inside because good boys didn’t question the church, but the seed was planted, and it kept growing bigger as I did the same.

  My next bout with racism hit closer to home.

  My best friend, Johnny, and I hadn’t communicated during my year away. There were no cell phones, texting, or e-mails then, so all communication had to be through letters. At nine years old, dutifully writing to my parents was all that I could handle. But when I returned, Johnny and I picked up our friendship again pretty much the same as before I’d left. After a year without any close friends, I was relieved to see his smiling face and feel his hearty slap on my back followed by, “So, where’ve ya been, Lew?”

  “Hunting big game in Africa. What about you?”

  “You know, keeping the neighborhood from falling apart without you.”

  We settled back into our routine of games, models, and arguing about sports.

  Johnny and I still played sandlot football with other neighborhood kids and rode our bikes together. When the boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson drove through our neighborhood on the way to his mother’s house in Riverdale, Johnny and I would run along the sidewalk waving and shouting, “Hey, Sugar Ray!”

  We were still best friends.

  That summer, we went to St. Jude’s day camp together. As a special treat, the camp counselors took us to George Washington High School, which had a swimming pool. Johnny’s little sister was there, but we ignored her while concentrating on splashing each other in the pool. Then I noticed that she had disappeared. I was ten, but I was tall enough to see her quietly drowning at the bottom of the pool, surrounded by laughing and splashing kids. I quickly waded over to her, snatched her up by the arms, and dragged her to the side of the pool. She coughed up some pool water, but otherwise she was okay. “Jeez, Lew, you saved her life,” Johnny said, his eyes brimming with tears. “I guess,” I said. I didn’t want to make a big deal of it. We were best friends, and best friends looked out for each other. But Johnny continued to pat me on the back and thank me. He was so grateful that I was sure our friendship had been cemented for life.

  Then, in sixth grade, Johnny and I started to drift apart. I didn’t see him as often after school. We didn’t hang out in my room. We didn’t build models or discuss sports. After a while, we barely nodded to each other in the hallway. He’d taken to hanging out with his white friends, without inviting me to join them. At first, I didn’t know what was happening. I tried talking to him, but he was brusque and dismissive, assuring me nothing was wrong, but always having to hurry off to be somewhere else. Somewhere I wasn’t. The pre–Holy Providence Lew Alcindor would probably have pestered him for some sort of explanation, maybe even asked his sister or parents, but the post–Holy Providence Lew was made of tougher stuff. If he didn’t want to be my friend, then fine.

  Around this time, St. Jude added two more black kids to the school population, and the three of us gravitated to one another, which was only natural given the undercurrent of racial hostility that was evident to us, even when it wasn’t evident to the white kids. The three of us trudged through the halls of school every day with that burden saddled on our backs.

  One day in seventh grade, Johnny started a fight with me. We were in the lunchroom, and I was kidding around with a pal of mine who was sitting next to Johnny.

  “Hey, man,” I said, “you watch Twilight Zone last night?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “the one with the alien who looks like you?”

  I laughed. “The aliens looked like humans, which leaves you out.”

  Brilliant twelve-year-old humor.

  “Leave me, earthling,” he said, giving me a playful shove.

  “Not until I destroy all alien invaders!” I gave him a little shove to the shoulder.

  The shove knocked him into Johnny, who had been ignoring us. A couple of years earlier, he and I would have had this same kind of conversation about a favorite show. Not anymore.

  Johnny jumped up and spun around. “Quit shoving, Alcindor!” And he swung at my head.

  He must have been remembering the skinny, weak Lew he knew before Holy Providence. But this Lew was more than six feet tall and wasn’t afraid of being punched. The fight ended with his getting a bloody nose and both of us being sent to the principal’s office. My dad was called in, but when he arrived and was told what had happened, he was just annoyed at having his time wasted. This was a perfect coachable moment for his son, but he was too busy to express moral outrage or seek social justice or even just comfort his son. Instead, he left while Johnny and I sat in the principal’s office until the end of the school day. When I walked out of school, Johnny and his pals were waiting for me. They taunted me with the usual insults: “Hey, jungle bunny! You big jungle nigger!”

  The words hurt worse than the fight. We could always get over a physical fight and be friends again, but words opened up a bottomless pit that could never be crossed. Seeing the same boy I used to laugh with in my room, celebrate birthdays with, swap models with, now standing there, his face contorted in hate while screaming at me, ignited a fire inside me that burned away our friendship forever.

  Those were the last words I ever heard from my former best friend. We never spoke again, and his family moved away the following year.

  I had lost more than my best friend. I lost my default trust in white people. I still had white friends at school, and would continue to have many close white friends throughout my life, but that day made me warier, more suspicious, when a white person offered friendship. I had to ask myself each time whether that same person laughing and joking with me now would one day stand in front of me shouting “Nigger!” in my face.

  7.

  I, Basketball

  The coaching I wasn’t getting at home I finally started getting at school. Coach Farrell Hopkins, the athletics director, was a kind man who made sure I knew that no matter how I played, I was a valuable member of the basketball team—and a valuable human being. Coach Hopkins didn’t single me out for special treatment; he was that supportive of all the boys. To see someone that caring in an atmosphere where most teachers seemed to be dispassionately doing their jobs was inspirational to me. I tried harder to be worthy of his confidence.

  I spent much of fifth and sixth grade riding the bench. Even so, Coac
h Hopkins saw something in me and asked George Hejduk, a college boy from the neighborhood who occasionally assisted Coach Hopkins, to help me. George started teaching me the Mikan Drill, which involved shooting the ball with the right hand off the backboard, catching it with both hands, and then shooting with the left hand, catching it with both hands, and repeating back and forth.

  That shot, the hook shot, was not new to me; I first used it at Holy Providence. One of the greatest practitioners of the hook shot was the NBA Hall of Famer George Mikan (whose drill I was being taught), who used it to crush team after team while playing for DePaul University in the mid-1940s. Later, in high school and college and as a professional player, my hook shot stood out because I did it from farther away, and with a much higher arc, which made it difficult to block. The radio broadcaster Eddie Doucette described the arc as “so high that it was coming out of the sky.” That’s how my shot became famous as “the Skyhook.”

  Thanks to the shot I stumbled into that day in fourth grade, as a professional basketball player I was able to set the NBA record for the most career points scored: 38,387, an average of 24.6 points per game. That total-points record still stands, though I’m sure there’s some spunky nine-year-old somewhere right now practicing a new shot who will beat my record. I hope so. Because a coaching lesson that I would want to pass on to him or her is that records are merely steps on a ladder to help the next person move higher. All I did was hammer a new step on that ladder, setting a goal to inspire the next player.

  As a result, by seventh grade, I was a pretty decent player. I was no longer an XXL benchwarmer, I was a force in the game. That year, we received new uniforms and I was allowed to choose my own number. I picked 33 because my favorite sports hero then, the New York Giants fullback Mel Triplett, also wore 33. He’d scored the opening touchdown in the 1956 championship game that the Giants won against the Chicago Bears, and I couldn’t help but feel a surge of pride that he was black. He moved with power and grace and had the serious look of a man you didn’t want to mess with. That was the kind of man I wanted to be, so 33 became my number from seventh grade until I retired from the NBA thirty years later.