Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

• 1. Introduction

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  On the road against Utah on the 5th of April 1984, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar caught a pass from Magic Johnson and rose into his skyhook from 15 feet. The ball arced over Mark Eaton, a 7 foot 4 inch shot-blocking specialist, and dropped through the net. With that shot, Abdul-Jabbar broke Wilt Chamberlain's record for the most career points in the NBA. He would hold the scoring crown for nearly 39 years, the longest span in league history. He was an American basketball player who spent 20 seasons in the NBA with the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers. Along the way he won a record six Most Valuable Player awards and was a member of six championship teams. But the figure who scored more points than anyone before him began life as Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr., a child born in Harlem who weighed 12 pounds 11 ounces at birth. How did a depressed, towering teenager become the most decorated center the sport has known? Why did he change his name at the height of his fame? And what made a single shot, one he himself called unsexy, the most feared weapon in basketball?

• 2. The Tower From Power

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  Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. was born in Harlem on the 16th of April 1947, the only child of Cora Lillian, a department store price checker, and Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Sr., a transit police officer and jazz musician. Cora had come to Harlem from North Carolina as part of the Great Migration. His father was the child of immigrants from Trinidad, and his great-uncle was Dr. John Alcindor, a Black activist and medical pioneer.

  At the age of 3 in 1950, the boy moved to the Dyckman Street projects in the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. He was always very tall for his age, and he was often depressed as a teenager because of the stares and comments his height drew. By the eighth grade he could already dunk a basketball.

  At Power Memorial Academy, a private all-boys Catholic high school, Alcindor was one of the few Black students. He wore jersey number 33 in tribute to his favorite player, New York Giants fullback Mel Triplett, and he kept that number for the rest of his life. Under coach Jack Donohue he led the team to three straight New York City Catholic championships, a 71-game winning streak, and a 79-2 overall record. His 2,067 total points set a New York City high school record, and the press named him "The Tower from Power."

  The relationship with Donohue soured in his final year after the coach called him a racial slur. Alcindor wrote for the Harlem Youth Action Project newspaper, and the Harlem riot of 1964, prompted by the fatal police shooting of 15-year-old James Powell, sharpened his interest in racial politics. "Right then and there, I knew who I was, who I had to be," he said. "I was going to be black rage personified, Black Power in the flesh."

• 3. The Alcindor Rule

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  Sports Illustrated called him "The New Superstar" after he scored 56 points in his first varsity game at UCLA, a figure that remains an NCAA record for a player in their debut. Recruited by hundreds of schools, Alcindor was the most sought-after prospect since Wilt Chamberlain. Baseball Hall of Famer and UCLA alumnus Jackie Robinson wrote to encourage him to attend, and he chose the Bruins after being recruited by assistant coach Jerry Norman.

  On the 27th of November 1965, Alcindor made his first public appearance in UCLA's varsity-freshman exhibition game before 12,051 fans in the inaugural game at Pauley Pavilion. The varsity were the two-time defending national champions and the preseason top-ranked team. The freshmen won 75-60 behind Alcindor's 31 points and 21 rebounds, the first time a freshman squad had beaten the UCLA varsity. Afterward UPI wrote that the Bruins were "only the second best team on campus."

  After his first varsity season ended in an undefeated 30-0 record and a national title, the dunk was banned in college basketball in an effort to curtail his dominance. Critics dubbed it the "Alcindor Rule," and it stood until the 1976-77 season. Over three years the team went 88-2, losing only to Houston in a game where Alcindor had an eye injury, and to crosstown rival USC, who held the ball in a stall game with no shot clock and limited him to four shots and 10 points.

  He was a three-time national player of the year, a three-time NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player, and the first-ever Naismith College Player of the Year in 1969. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in history that year, having completed his studies because the NBA did not allow college underclassmen to declare early.

• 4. Game Of The Century

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  On the 20th of January 1968, the Bruins faced Guy Lewis's Houston Cougars in the first-ever nationally televised regular-season college basketball game, with 52,693 in attendance at the Astrodome. The contest was billed as the "Game of the Century." Cougar forward Elvin Hayes scored 39 points and grabbed 15 rebounds. Alcindor, suffering from a scratched cornea he had taken eight days earlier against California, was held to 15 points. Houston won 71-69, ending UCLA's 47-game winning streak.

  The two met again in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament. With a healthy Alcindor, UCLA crushed Houston 101-69 and held Hayes, who had been averaging 37.7 points per game, to just ten. Coach John Wooden credited assistant Jerry Norman with devising the diamond-and-one defense that contained Hayes. Sports Illustrated ran a cover story under the headline "Lew's Revenge: The Rout of Houston."

  Wooden also shaped the weapon that would define him. To keep the hook shot from being blocked from behind, Wooden advised Alcindor to abandon the typical sweeping motion and shoot with a straighter motion, keeping the ball close to his body. Alcindor had first learned the move in fifth grade after practicing the ambidextrous Mikan Drill, valuing it because it was "the only shot I could use that didn't get smashed back in my face." In his final college years he often released the ball several feet above the rim.

• 5. A New Name

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  During the summer of 1968, Alcindor took the shahada twice and converted to Sunni Islam from Catholicism. He adopted the Arabic name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, meaning "noble one, servant of the Almighty," though he did not use it publicly until 1971. He was named by Hamaas Abdul Khaalis of the Hanafi Movement, which had split from the Nation of Islam.

  That same year he boycotted the 1968 Summer Olympics, declining to try out for the U.S. team that went on to win gold. He was protesting the unequal treatment of African Americans, saying he was "trying to point out to the world the futility of winning the gold medal for this country and then coming back to live under oppression."

  The name reached back into his family history. "My family was brought to America by a French planter named Alcindor, who came here from Trinidad in the 18th century," he explained. "My people were Yoruba, and their culture survived slavery." He was heavily influenced by Malcolm X, who invited him to join the Nation of Islam, an invitation he declined. In 1973 he made a pilgrimage to Libya and Saudi Arabia to learn enough Arabic for self-study of the Quran, emerging with his faith renewed.

  His convictions were public early. In 1967 he was the only college athlete to attend the Cleveland Summit, a gathering of prominent Black athletes who convened in support of Muhammad Ali's refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. His name change further eroded his public image in the United States, mostly in white areas.

• 6. Skyhook And Showtime

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  The Harlem Globetrotters offered Alcindor $1 million, but he declined and was picked first overall in the 1969 NBA draft by the Milwaukee Bucks, then in only their second season. After he chose Milwaukee's offer of $1.4 million, the rival New York Nets countered with a guaranteed $3.25 million. He turned it down, saying he would have degraded the representatives of both leagues if he had waited for more money.

  His presence lifted the Bucks from 27-55 to 56-26, and he was named Rookie of the Year. The next season Milwaukee added Oscar Robertson, won a then-record 20 straight games, and swept the Baltimore Bullets in the 1971 NBA Finals when he was 24. He took his first MVP award and his first Finals MVP. It was after that title, at a State Department press conference on the 3rd of June 1971, that he announced he wished to be called Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

  In 1975 the Lakers acquired him from the Bucks for a package that included Elmore Smith, Brian Winters, Dave Meyers, and Junior Bridgeman. He played his final 14 seasons in Los Angeles. In 1975-76 his 1,111 defensive rebounds set a single-season NBA record that still stands. His record sixth MVP came in 1979-80, the season the Lakers drafted Magic Johnson first overall and began their Showtime dynasty. The team reached the finals eight times in the 1980s and won five championships.

  The skyhook was the engine of it all. He could shoot it from up to 16 feet, releasing the ball so high that defenders risked a goaltending violation trying to block it. It fed a .559 career field goal percentage, and he shot above 50 percent in every season but his last. In 1985, at 38 years and 54 days old, he became the oldest player to win the Finals MVP, leading the Lakers past the Celtics after a Game 1 loss the press dubbed the "Memorial Day Massacre."

• 7. The Reluctant Captain

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  Magic Johnson once recalled being brushed off as a kid after asking Abdul-Jabbar for an autograph. During his playing years he had a reputation for being introverted and sullen, often unfriendly with the media. He might freeze out a reporter who touched him, and he once refused to stop reading the newspaper during an interview. "I was way too suspicious and I paid a price for it," he later admitted.

  That guardedness, alongside attempts to break into coaching near the age of fifty, hurt his chances of leading a team. He worked as an assistant for the Los Angeles Clippers and the Seattle SuperSonics, mentoring young centers Michael Olowokandi and Jerome James. He coached the Oklahoma Storm of the United States Basketball League to a championship in 2002, then returned to the Lakers as a special assistant to Phil Jackson from 2005 to 2011, where he mentored Andrew Bynum. In 1998 he served as a volunteer coach at Alchesay High School on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Whiteriver, Arizona.

  To teammates he was "Cap," or "Captain." A strict fitness regime made him one of the most durable players ever. He began a year-round conditioning program at age 26, took up yoga in 1976, and credited it directly: "There is no way I could have played as long as I did without yoga." Coach Pat Riley conserved his energy in later years, keeping him off inbound duty and parking him at the far end of the court on free throws. Answering critics in 1981, he said playing 42 to 45 minutes a night was "like mowing a huge estate lawn," and rushing around furiously would leave him worn out "just at the point when you're most needed."

• 8. Beyond The Court

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  In Bruce Lee's 1972 film Game of Death, Abdul-Jabbar appeared after training in Jeet Kune Do under Lee, who he credited with teaching him "the discipline and spirituality of martial arts." Eight years later he played co-pilot Roger Murdock in Airplane!, a character a young passenger keeps insisting is really Abdul-Jabbar. When the boy relays his father's complaint that he does not work hard enough on defense, the character snaps: "The hell I don't!"

  He became a best-selling author as well. His 1983 autobiography Giant Steps, written with Peter Knobler, took its title from John Coltrane's album. He wrote Brothers in Arms, a history of the 761st Tank Battalion, the first Black armored unit to fight in World War II, and in 2015 made his adult fiction debut with the Victorian mystery novel Mycroft Holmes, followed by two sequels. He has written a regular column for Time, and in 2014 published an essay in Jacobin calling for an end to "the indentured servitude of college athletes."

  His public service drew official recognition. In January 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named him a U.S. cultural ambassador, a role that took him to Brazil. "I remember when Louis Armstrong first did it back for President Kennedy, one of my heroes," he said. "So it's nice to be following in his footsteps." In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

  The scoring record he set in 1984 finally fell on the 7th of February 2023, when LeBron James surpassed it with the Lakers in Los Angeles. Abdul-Jabbar attended the game and passed the game ball to James during the in-game ceremony, handing on a mark he had held for almost four decades.