 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
Goodbye Schlitz, Hello Smog: Kareem Goes West Again
The oversized Muslim convert from Harlem never felt at home in Milwaukee, so Abdul-Jabbar was happy to leave for a fresh start with the L.A. Lakers.
By Barry Farrell, SPORT, February 1976
KAREEM! LAKERS! in that order, or program notes alleging that Number 33 on our side is "THE FORCE in pro basketball." When the standard hype fails to exaggerate the powers of a loved one -- especially a loved one returning from a cold northern exile to the comforts of a five-year contract worth between 2.5 and 4 million dollars -- the local idea of grandeur requires the boosters' chorus to come up with a new song and dance. That's what I imagined I was hearing last summer, when L.A. began to buzz with a story worthy of daytime TV: Six Milwaukee winters had worked wonders on the Lakers' new dynasty-maker, so that now, besides being the game's greatest player, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was also the world's nicest guy. No news could have been more welcome in Los Angeles, where feelings of unrequited fandom were a plague upon the two great houses of basketball. Wilt Chamberlain had stalked off the Lakers to sack the ABA franchise in San Diego, and was now pursuing a bizarre obsession with volleyball. Jerry West had retired sooner than expected to become a gentleman golfer and unconvincing television shill. Gail Goodrich and the Lakers were then said to be more than $100,000 apart in contract talks. But cheers rang particularly thin in memory for the heroes of Westwood, Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton, whose teams in six championship seasons had won 174 games out of 180 for coach John Wooden and UCLA. The enigmatic Alcindor had left town in what many took to be a huff, only to become the sulky Abdul-Jabbar; the embarrassing Walton, meanwhile, had emerged as a left-wing Mortimer Snerd, a Dresden-doll rookie whose more-organic-than-thou approach to life had him leading the NBA only in sick calls. Kareem's accomplishments were not to be disputed -- he was twice the collegiate Player of the Year, three times the NBA's Most Valuable Player, four times a first-team All-Pro, and the league leader in career scoring average, with 30.4 a game. But the impression lingered that Southern California had failed to charm him, that life in Los Angeles had left him feeling, as he once remarked, like a man "on a raft in the middle of the ocean." So while no one doubted that the Lakers had done well to invest in his talents, the town was in need of consolations not to be found on the court alone, and the press was primed to quiz him on his loyalty to Lotusland when it assembled at the Forum for the grand unveiling. The lights fell dramatically as the master of ceremonies intoned the Arabic words for "Noble and Powerful Servant of Allah," a name that for all its Islamic piety could hardly be better for basketball -- "Kareem!" (the sound of a rebound) "Abdul!" (an elbow in the eye) "Jabbar!" (slam-dunk). A pin spotlight clawed its way up the crack in the curtain until it found the smiling, bearded face. Then, to the scribes' loud applause, the prodigal returned, shambling up to the dais like a stretched-out Jimmy Stewart. Kareem made many assurances that he was pleased to be back in L.A., and his calm and cosmopolitan manner was all it took to convince the grateful city that he was just what the Lakers were claiming -- "a new super center with a new super attitude." Sensing that the demands of folklore had somehow got the best of the principles of psychology, I made arrangements to meet Kareem one afternoon after a Lakers practice. The team had looked ragged winning at the Forum the night before, and coach Bill Sharman was running the players through what seemed to be an intense and spirited scrimmage. Kareem worked hard in the thick of it, wrestling down rebounds, passing smartly, paying special attention to the rookies, laughing and hustling like a man with a new super attitude. The few times he took a shot himself, his teammates whooped it up for him, glad to be a part of Sky Hook Enterprises. Kareem scrimmaged for ten or 15 minutes, then went over to a hoop at the side of the court to practice shooting free throws. He made 42 out of 49 and I was waiting for number 50 when he left the gym, beckoning me to follow. I had to skip to keep up with his antelope stride as we made our way out into bright sunshine. We were on the Loyola Marymount University campus in southwest Los Angeles, a place of palm trees and succulents and hard green lawns, flat and interchangeable. Kareem walked to his car and leaned on the right front fender of the Mercedes. We had hardly exchanged a word, but now I saw that his eyes were flashing an ON THE AIR sign. "Everybody's been saying what a changed man you are," I began. Watching the scrimmage had cast some doubt on my assumption that the story was a hype, and I could hear new uncertainty entering in my voice. "Can this be true? Are you going to have to come up with a bright and sunny disposition to live up to all your clippings?" "No, not really," Kareem said after a moment's silence. "I'm just going to be myself, and in doing that, I think they might realize that the other ideas they've had about me were pretty far off. There's no way you can add me up to some of the things that have been printed." "So your attitude isn't one hundred and eighty degrees different from what it was this time last year." "No, no, there's no way. This is the first time I've been in Southern California when I've been able to speak freely to the press. Also, when I was in L.A. before, I was an adolescent. Now I'm a man. That makes a whole new way of relating." "So you do expect to relate to L.A. better than you could to Milwaukee?" I asked.
The conversation proceeded along these lines, guarded, perhaps, but pleasant and cordial. We discussed matters of mutual interest in a friendly manner. We enjoyed a frank exchange of views. Overhearing us, you might have guessed that he was the Saudi ambassador and I the protocol man from the State Department. I had gleaned a list of adjectives used to describe Jabbar in newspaper articles over the years and, with his indulgence, I tried them out on him one by one. "How about 'reclusive'?" "No, not at all. I'm not hiding from anybody. Definitely not. I spend time alone, but reclusive I'm not. I've got a lot of friends. I spend time with people I like and who I'm pretty sure like me." "'Aloof'?" "I can be aloof. But I think that has to do with meeting people who come at me as if I'm an object. Forgive this example, but I guess I might have a lot in common with a beautiful woman. A beautiful woman has to meet people who don't care anything about her, who just want to see her up close. And for me, I meet a lot of people who want to ask me how tall I am. Actually. That's their first and only remark to me. After a while, you see them coming, and you become what they call aloof." "How about 'skeptical' and 'suspicious'?" "I'm not ... no, maybe I am a little suspicious. That might be true. It is true. I think it comes from growing up in this world. It's a tough world. A little suspicion can put you on a good survival track." "'Quiet'?" "Initially, I am kind of quiet. I lay back at first and watch. That's a New Yorker's way. You do a lot of people-watching in New York, and I think I do that still." "What about 'mentally hyperactive'?" Kareem raised his eyebrows and looked far away. "I'm very curious about a lot of things. You talk about something new and I'll be all ears. But 'mentally hyperactive' sounds like a psychiatrist's term. I know I don't have to make any effort to clear my mind to play, not after doing it so long. It's my living, it's my blood. I suppose if my mind were hyperactive that might be a problem. Last year, when my hand was broken and I wasn't playing, that was the first time since I was in the fourth grade that my basketball season didn't start in the late summer. I had a chance to think about a lot of things. I might have been a little hyperactive then, I guess." He shook his head in a kind of baffled amusement. "Would you say you're 'short-tempered'?" I asked, choosing another description from the list. "No. Definitely not." "Didn't you break your hand by getting so mad you smashed it against the backboard?" "Against the backboard standard, yes. I punched it. The guy who drove me to the hospital told me that one time he was working in his basement shop and he put a drill-bit through his thumb. It made him so mad that he kicked the wall and broke his foot. People do these things. It happens. That was my only consolation." He stood up and jingled his car keys, agreeing to meet at the Forum before the game the following night. Before I could gather my belongings, he was gone. It occurred to me that even though our meeting had been perfectly pleasant, Kareem would have had a hard time picking me out of a police lineup if I had snatched those keys and made off with his Mercedes. The sportswriters of Milwaukee -- authors of most of the words on my list -- did not seem to be mourning Kareem's departure. "Kareem was inaccessible a lot of the time," Rel Bochat, the basketball writer for the Milwaukee Sentinel, told me when I called. "We had confidential home numbers for all the players except him. That's just an example. Then a lot of times if you asked what he thought was a dumb question, he'd just give you the 'look.' Or else he'd say 'Excuse me,' and barge right past, leaving you standing there with your pencil. On the road he was better. We'd go into New York, and those guys could ask all the dumb questions they wanted. They'd ask him about his Islamic faith and all that, and he'd sit there talking to them. "The press here didn't ride him or anything like that. Once about three years back he made an obscene gesture on the floor, raised his finger, and the Journal ran a picture the next afternoon. He got pretty corked off about that. And then once I did a piece in which I mentioned that Lew Alcindor had set some record, and Kareem didn't like that one little bit. I tried to explain that I didn't mean to offend him, that Lew Alcindor was his name at the time he set the record. But he gave me a big lecture about it anyhow. When he left, the town was divided, but as far as I'm concerned he won't be missed. The team's making money, we're getting some full houses, and we're going to win some games. Give my regards to Lew Alcindor." Kareem patted the chair beside him when he saw me enter the Lakers' locker room. He was trying to work some comfort into a new basketball shoe, and he didn't speak or look up while I settled down beside him. I had been forewarned that he didn't enjoy talking about basketball much, feeling that his idea of the game is adequately expressed on the court, but still I began our second talk by asking him if he had any further personal objectives as a player. "No, no," Kareem said, not lifting his eyes from the shoe. "I've accomplished everything anybody could hope to accomplish as a basketball player. I just want to continue to play like I've been playing, and that's enough. It's put me at the top of the profession." He continued to knead the shoe, calm and deliberate in motion as well as word. His matter-of-fact answer left no room for elaboration. I asked him about his attempt to break the NBA gag rule last season, when he said after a game that referee Jerry Loeber "sets a standard for ineptitude that is unequaled," adding that he would, if necessary, ask the American Civil Liberties Union to defend his right to speak his mind. "Oh, that ended up pretty well defused," he said. "They fined me. I refused to pay. My team paid for me. And that was it. I think it might have shook a few people up, but I didn't expect any immediate change to come out of it. The pro basketball official has the roughest job of any sports official. We couldn't play the game if it wasn't for them. There'd be fights out there, one after another. "It's just that the officiating has to be more consistent. If they're going to allow some roughness, they should make it the same for all players all over the court. They allow a lot more roughness under the basket than anywhere else. To the point of bloodshed, literally. The bigger you are, the taller you are, the more they allow people to do to you. They all blow calls, they're human, but the good officials will at least blow the whistle. It's the officials who don't blow the whistle at all, who just watch the game, that make it hard on you. The game just gets out of hand." Kareem's teammates were assembling in the locker room, a roomful of well-paid athletes whose quiet manner produced an atmosphere more like the haughty downtown athletic club than the grab-ass locker rooms common to basketball. Kareem had a nod or a greeting for all of them, but, as in a decorous gentlemen's club, no one came over to intrude on his conversation. Kareem had shown immediate enthusiasm for the team, missing no practices and making no complaints, "as dedicated as a rookie," coach Sharman said. Kareem was glad to be free of the pattern-bound game of Larry Costello, whose Bucks play-book is said to be as thick as the Manhattan Yellow Pages. The Lakers' style is more like a city game, a pickup game, and that's the way Kareem likes to play. As he dressed for the game, Kareem was recalling an important summer in his life, the summer before he graduated from high school. He was putting out a newspaper for a community project in Harlem, and his work took him often to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, on 135th Street in Manhattan. At Power Memorial Academy, where his teams won 71 games in a row, he was not only a superstar but also a seven-foot black at a midtown Catholic school; Jack Donohue, his high-school coach, had said to him, "Lewie, let's face it, you're a minority of one." But at the library, Kareem discovered a larger context for his sense of being a person apart, and that led him to open his eyes to what was going on in Harlem. That summer, he became aware of black nationalist groups, of the Black Muslims, of various Yoruba groups, and of Malcolm X. "My father always knew about our family history," he said, "back to the man who brought us over. We knew that we were Yoruba, that we'd gone from the Yoruba country straight to Trinidad. I really have to credit my father with giving me some knowledge of my roots. All of us are supposed to have roots, but the Afro-American's roots have been just ... crushed out, you know. I wasn't in that position. I knew things about my family history which gave me some pride, and that was a good thing, because I was going to a school with a lot of Irish kids, and they could be sort of unkind. Then that summer came along, and I became aware of many new things." Three months after Malcolm X was assassinated in Harlem on February 21, 1965, Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor appeared at a press conference to announce his decision to attend UCLA; the summer he arrived in Los Angeles was the summer Watts burned. His freshman team beat the UCLA varsity in his first appearance at Westwood, and Lew Alcindor was at once the toast of the town. But Kareem's reaction to Los Angeles was colored by dismay at the bland vanilla grins that greeted him on campus, the idle chatter that went no further than "How ya dune?" He turned inward, kept company with foreign students, read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. "Malcolm X had a big influence on me," Kareem said, now in his uniform and ready to play. "The contrast he made between Islam and Christianity was very concrete to me. Then I read the Fanon books. There were some Algerians at school, and they were telling me things, and one of them was teaching me a little about Islam. So in that atmosphere I absorbed it very deeply. Frantz Fanon -- what struck me most about his thinking was the way he put down any kind of racism. We're dealing with human beings, so humanism is the only answer ...." Sharman moved around behind Kareem and made eyes at the clock, signaling me to scoot. When Kareem saw me looking past him to the coach, he stopped talking at once. "Come on back after the game if you feel like it," he said as I departed. The Lakers looked slewfooted beating the Atlanta Hawks that night. The freelance game was out of whack, and with only one starter back from last year's squad, the team was forced into a patterned offense which no one played with any assurance. Although Kareem has an outlet pass as quick and strong as any in the league except, perhaps, Wes Unseld's, the Lakers weren't giving him much of a chance to use it, with the guards breaking too fast or not at all and the forwards chugging downcourt late on offense. But Kareem's play was superb, marked by what the hometown fans took to be a new exuberance. He dribbled the ball, loped downcourt for lay-ins, raised a power fist after satisfying baskets, and behaved as though he was having a wonderful time. His ideas on how to play the game of basketball were all there to be seen in the way he planted himself and looked toward the action, waving for the ball, passing into thickets of movement for many sharp assists. And when he went up for his patented sky hook, his arm described an arc of supremacy that was his alone, the dimension of his game that makes his presence on the court the most dominant in basketball. His performance seemed part game, part recital, and when it was announced that he had scored 39 points, taken 23 rebounds and blocked ten shots, the crowd reacted with a giant whew!, as though unaware of how much Jabbar had been doing. Outside the locker room, Sharman was like a movie-star's manager, a smiling man with a luxurious problem. "Fellas, like I say, I hate to keep picking him out all the time, but what can I tell you?" he told the crowd of reporters. "He just did it all. He made us win a game we might not have deserved. It's going to take some time for the team to come together, two or three months, maybe longer. The thing about Kareem is that he can help us win some of these subpar games." Sharman had said that he was "a little apprehensive about the guy" before Kareem arrived, but that as soon as practice started his worries vanished. "Some stars, you know, they're a little bit special, but not Kareem. He's not that way. He wanted to play, and that's a great big inspiration for the others, that someone as great as he is will practice with such dedication. And he's a very unselfish player. He's got great vision, he looks to pass before he shoots. He's great for a team with rookies, because he's going to give you the ball if you get open, and he's got such great hands that he can catch a bad pass and make you look good. I just can't say enough about him. He's a serious man, a reader, a good conversationalist, good company, a pleasure to be around. He's just a super player with a super attitude." The first Laker road trips had produced some anecdotes about Kareem -- small stories that made his teammates feel attached to him. He'd said something funny on the bus, told a good story in the locker room, got mad playing against Seattle's Tom Burleson (the only man in the NBA taller than he is) and declared a 12-minute jihad, scoring 15 points in the first quarter. Ted Green, who covers the Lakers for the L.A. Times, said that once you comprehend the ordeal of passing through public places at Kareem's altitude, his reputation as distant and aloof comes into a new focus. "I couldn't believe what happened just going through the L.A. airport," Green said. "I was walking with him, and I counted, and between the ticket counter and the boarding ramp he was stopped seventeen times by people who actually said, 'How's the weather up there?' and 'How tall are you?' And Kareem just kept walking as though he didn't hear. It's sad. He has to run away from the world so much of the time."
Kareem's sense of privacy, his reticence about his home life, his caution, derive in large part from the dangers that attach to speaking out as an orthodox Muslim in America. Threats have come his way, and three years ago seven members of the Hanafi, a division of his Sunnite faith, were murdered by intruders in a house he owned in Washington, D.C. The four persons convicted of the killings were all Black Muslims. There was, Kareem said, "the same mentality" about the killings as in the assassination of Malcolm X -- people trying to quiet down those who expose the lies. "What the so-called Black Muslims believe is not Islam. Heaven and Hell are not on Earth. Any Muslim knows this. So that means these people are lying, or what they believe in is a lie, even if they accept it sincerely. They want to quiet that fact down. I don't see them as a danger, just something to test my faith. I have to live it. There have always been obstacles to test Muslims. There've been other false prophets. These people just aren't Muslims. They use Islamic trappings, but that's all." "How about Muhammad Ali?" "Cassius Clay is not a Muslim. He's just sowing confusion. If you asked the average American in Waukegan about the Muslims, he'd probably think first and foremost of Cassius Clay." "You don't call him by his adopted name?" "He's not a Muslim, so I can't call him by a Muslim name. If he should choose to become a Muslim, I'll call him by whatever name he wishes to use." Kareem, who has studied Arabic at Harvard, said, "I want to become completely bilingual by the time I'm through playing, because there's a great deal of anticipation and speculation as to our dealings with the Arab world and after I'm finished playing I definitely would like to respond to that." The locker room was just about empty, Kareem was dressed, and his car keys were beginning to jingle. He said he still enjoyed the basketball life, didn't mind the road trips, tried not to let his interests be thwarted by the impossibility of being anonymous in public. "I've been this height since I was fourteen or fifteen, you know, so I've learned how to deal with it. I've learned a whole lot about stealth, about how to sneak in and out, to walk fast, to watch people and know when their attention is going to be misdirected so I can go right on by. It can be hard to deal with, but I've always had positive identities about my height. When I've thought about what I am, I've identified with the Empire State Building and redwood trees. Seriously. That's exactly the truth. If you're going to be different, make yourself really different. Make it a mark of excellence."
|
