Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  Which accounts for my presence in Los Angeles. I see Jabbar as my representative on the court, the visible presence of the experiences of my youth, and I want to know what I should make of this change. I want to know if it is a good thing.

  The next day, I drive up Sunset Boulevard, to Jabbar’s home in Bel Air, hardly a mansion by anybody’s standards. Jabbar opens his own front door wearing a Dodgers T-shirt. He asks me to remove my shoes in deference to the umpety-ump thousand dollars’ worth of Oriental rugs that cover the floors and lie piled beside the well-used fireplace. Jabbar sits down on the couch, his knees bending to an amazingly acute angle. On one of them he balances his nineteen-month-old son, Amir. It occurs to me that Jabbar is using Amir as a shield.

  Jabbar knows where I went to school and asks if I ever ran into the young woman I admired as a freshman. The only thing he can think of that his early involvement with basketball cost him was the opportunity for “dealing with the ladies while I was in high school.” It is something he has said before. But when I shift the subject to something he has spoken of so often he should have gone to sleep, the glory of the dynasty and whether it could ever happen again, at UCLA or elsewhere, he adds a new element to the answer: “It could happen. There’s a lot of pressure for it not to. When I was a senior in high school, I just took the whole southeastern part of the country and cut that off the map. And good black athletes from that part of the country either had to go to a black school or they’d leave, they’d go to the Big Ten, they’d come out here. The athletic programs in the Big Ten and out here benefited from Jim Crow a lot. Once that was over, you had those guys staying at home, and the basketball teams in that area of the country have improved.”

  He says it very coolly, as if it were an analysis of ancient history, rather than a force that shaped his life. I ask him about his “white hating” period, which, ironically, was at its apex years before he was branded a militant. Again he speaks of it coolly, citing as a cause the events of the civil rights movement: “Watching all those freedom rides and stuff on television, I’ll never forget the people on the Pettus Bridge [outside Selma, Alabama]. I watched that. And then when they blew up that church in Birmingham, that really freaked me out.” He resists the idea that there was anything more personal, even though, back in 1969, he spoke of racist slights that caused him to tell his light-skinned mother that he hated every drop of white blood in her, and in himself. Now, two decades after that incident, he dismisses the slights as minor and speaks of a bus trip he took. “When I was in high school my mother sent me down to Goldsboro, North Carolina, to be my family’s representative at a graduation. And I saw it all. Black water fountains. So-and-so’s white grocery. The whole thing with Jim Crow was right there for me to see, as soon as we got past Washington, D.C.”

  He mentions that trip not to explain his own feelings, but as part of a demonstration of his belief that things have changed. “Now,” he says, “I play with a guy named Norman Nixon. He’s from as far down south as you can get, as far as I’m concerned. He didn’t really have to deal with that type of discrimination. So I know things have changed.” Now he says that the change in his name, which seemed so crucial to everyone back in 1969, was not that big a deal, that he could have kept body and soul together as Lew Alcindor. “It wouldn’t have been any problem. But at that time I really wanted to assert my own identity, not one that was dropped on me by the slave trader Alcindor.” Now, although “certain aspects of American racism are very intractable,” he says, “my frustration comes from dealing with black people, who could, at this point, do a lot for themselves and still don’t . . . the whole idea of economic cooperation and political activism that can definitely make the system work for black people and black people don’t seem to be taking advantage of it. I think survival has been the only issue; once they know they’re going to survive, they slack off. That depresses me a lot.” That statement, I say, could get him into trouble. He snorts disdainfully. “With who?” With almost everybody, I tell him. “It’s true,” he says. For him, that ends the matter.

  There are similar limits on his involvement in the political and social implications of the statement. “I have a responsibility to my family,” he says flatly. “The greater responsibility to the quote, black community, unquote, sometimes I don’t see it. That is what all black people should shoulder.”

  Jabbar is shouldering other things: he is working on a book about Oriental rugs; he wants to write portions of his autobiography himself, even though he gets along well with his co-author, Peter Knobler, with whom he shares a philosophy: “Pete said we could do it well or we could do it quick. So we’re going to try and do it well.”

  That, I realize, is a key to Jabbar; he is searching always for a kindred spirit, someone with a philosophy based on self-control, discipline, patience. It explains why, on the court, he often seems like a man doing business. He does think that part of it is business. “As soon as you come to write about it, or CBS puts it on the tube, it becomes a business.” It has been so for him for a long time: “Basketball started paying bills for me early on. I got my high school tuition because I got a basketball scholarship, and that’s when you really become a professional.” But as far as he’s concerned, “the guys that play in the Y leagues, that’s the real essence of the sport.”

  His philosophy also explains why he was able to play for John Wooden at UCLA, despite his belief, expressed in 1969, that “whenever Coach Wooden had to deal with somebody a little different from the norm, he blew the case.”

  “Coach Wooden,” Jabbar says now, “wasn’t focused on getting us all crazy. . . . He could control the emotion and use it. . . .” The appreciation for such a disciplined approach no doubt originated in Jabbar’s childhood—his father was a hardworking transit policeman who spent his free time reading and studying music—but he draws his guidance “from a lot of different sources,” one of which is the seventeenth-century samurai warrior Miyamoto Musashi, author of the philosophical classic A Book of Five Rings: A Guide to Strategy. “In strategy,” wrote Musashi, “your spiritual bearing must not be any different from normal. Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. . . . Be neither insufficiently spirited nor over-spirited. . . . Do not let the enemy see your spirit.”

  But Jabbar, a child of the eclectic Sixties, does not limit himself to one source of wisdom. He had learned from not only Musashi and, of course, the prophet Muhammad, but Hammurabi and George Patton. “I admire him a lot,” Jabbar says of Patton. “He was all the way, totally committed. In order to do well at anything you have to be really committed or else have a tremendous gift that compensates for a lack of commitment. But I think he had both.” That his admiration for Patton, among other things, puts him at odds with the image of him many hold is a thought he relishes: “I’ve messed up a lot of people’s concept of image,” he says happily. “It’s nice being underestimated in one area and then being able to show off.”

  It is, I realize, a game he plays with the business about aging. He speaks of the end of his career in words so stock they seem rehearsed, albeit sincere: “I just want to finish with some dignity and try to live up to the standards I’ve set for myself. I’ve kept body and soul together and I think I can do it for another year or two. I’m testing myself to see how long I can do it as well.” He grins. “I’m not losing enough to make my opponents happy.”

  But as I look at him I see what no grin can conceal: Jabbar is achingly tired. Tired from a long season, a long career. In 1969 he said, “I was nine years old and five feet four inches tall—the pattern of my life was set. I operated on a cycle, and the cycle was based on the basketball season. . . . All life revolves around it, like a biological clock.” It has been that way, I estimate, for twenty-five or twenty-six years. “Twenty-seven,” he corrects. When I suggest that he will not be playing in ten more, he says, “Let’s hope not.” And when he is finished with basketball he intends to get far, far away: “I’ve had too much of
this. I’ve already lost enough years off my life.”

  MID-NOVEMBER 1982. The Lakers are world champions. Last spring they romped over all opponents, spinning out a string of play-off victories that betters the five-game streak of the 1970–1971 Milwaukee Bucks—who had a point guard named Oscar Robertson and a center named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—and equals the longest in NBA history.

  A decade after his first championship Jabbar is a dragon rampant on a hardwood field. His statistics in the play-offs put him fourth on the team in assists; third in offensive rebounds; second in defensive rebounds; first in shots blocked, with forty-five; first in scoring, with an average of 20.4 points per game. He is still, as Peter Axthelm puts it, “the lord of the sky,” still, as The New York Times headlines it, GRAND MASTER OF THE PLAYOFFS, and still the best way to guard him, as former coach John Kerr says, is to “get real close and breathe on his goggles.”

  But there are things breathing down his neck, too. In the championship series migraines hampered his performance in two games. In game five he scored fewer than 10 points for the first time in 379 games. His overall scoring average was nearly 9 points below his career play-off average.

  Now, in the infancy of the 1982–1983 season, that is cause for thought. The Lakers are a young team, so loaded with talent they add only one player, the number-one draft choice, James Worthy. You might speculate that they could get along without a center who is only a year or so younger than the NBA itself. In Los Angeles they are so speculating. One writer, Doug Ives, of the Long Beach Press-Telegram, has even found a way to blame Jabbar if the Lakers lose while he has a good game: Jabbar shoots too much. “Of all the Lakers,” Ives wrote, “Kareem shows the most disappointment when he makes a move to get the ball and then it isn’t passed to him.” The criticism is so naive and illogical as to be insignificant. What may be significant is that it is reprinted in a Laker game program, making me wonder if perhaps the “we’d be better off without Jabbar” notion (which is nothing new) is not something the management would just as soon have floating in the backs of fans’ minds.

  For at the beginning of this, the final year before Jabbar becomes a free agent, the Lakers have not signed him to a new contract. That is probably shrewd business—under NBA rules, the Lakers can retain Jabbar simply by matching the best offer he gets elsewhere—but it seems a bit disrespectful. He has helped the Lakers to two championships in three years. All he wants, rumor has it, is the two-million-plus a year that Moses Malone, who has never helped anybody to a championship, is already getting. I am worried that the grueling season, the uncertainty, and the criticisms may wear him down.

  And so, when the season is still young, before the showdown with the rebuilt Sixers, I go again to Los Angeles, to take Jabbar to dinner and see how he is.

  He is tired. The night before I see him, after a road game, he had a shot of rum to help him sleep. He is not a drinker, and the unfamiliar alcohol propelled him to the altitude of the cheap seats and kept him in orbit there all night. Now he sits yawning in the shambles of his living room, amid a slow avalanche of leaking helium-filled balloons. Amir has had a party for his second birthday, a patented Bel Air affair complete with clowns and ponies and a choice of regular hot dogs and chicken franks, for those toddlers into modified vegetarianism.

  But Jabbar’s tired is a different kind than that which I detected at the end of the previous season. He is enthusiastic about the Lakers’ chance to repeat as champions, something that hasn’t been done in all the years he has been in the league. He is excited about his new teammate, James Worthy, and his old teammates—he is quick to point out that Worthy’s is the only face that is new. He is not depressed or worried about the migraine problem; he thinks he has it cured. “Allergies,” he says firmly. “I just eliminated certain things from my diet and the doctor gave me an acupuncture treatment and I haven’t had any problem.” Now he speculates that he could be in the game five years from now, if he still needs the challenge, citing as an example Muhammad Ali: “If Ali had stayed in shape . . . if he’d kept involved in it and fought once or twice a year, or whatever, he’d still be the best.”

  It is clear the off-season has invigorated him, with days of rest in Hawaii and the stimulation of a trip to China. There Jabbar found a society of a style and a philosophy close to his own. “I liked seeing how, just through sheer force of will and discipline and application, these people went from a feudal society to a twentieth-century society in like thirty-five years,” he says. “The Chinese are a very self-sufficient people, and if they are going to proclaim communism—they stressed this to everybody, especially the Soviets—it’s going to have to make sense to them and not to be ironclad bound to traditions. . . .”

  Suddenly I hear him talking not about China but about himself. What was always important was that the thing make sense, not to anybody else, but to him, at the time. Once it made sense to change his name. And once it made sense to deal with the world as he once said he dealt with problems at UCLA: “Ever since my childhood I had this ability to draw into myself and be perfectly contented. I had to. I had always been such a minority of one. Very tall. Black. Catholic. I had made an adjustment to being a minority of one and now I said to myself I was going back to that.”

  And now it makes sense to open up even with regard to something as personal as an autobiography. For although Jabbar insists that it was important that his co-writer be black, he accepted Knobler, who is, as one of his editors put it, “the only white guy Kareem would work with.” Once there would not have been one.

  “I’ve changed my approach to people and to situations,” Jabbar says. “It’s time. I think I was overprotective of something . . . of my privacy, the absolute conviction that I would be misunderstood. But that’s inevitable. Maybe I’ve acquired some wisdom and learned to be pragmatic as I’ve matured. My convictions are the same. But we have to learn how to deal in the world, this world, the real world.”

  Later I meet up with one of the reasons “it was time”: Cheryl Pistono, Amir’s mother and Jabbar’s companion for the last few years. Cheryl, at first glance, seems to exhibit the worst qualities of the “sports wife”—pushiness, nosiness, overprotectiveness, bossiness. But a second glance reveals she’s not trying to control, she is trying to take care, albeit of everything and everybody in sight. She has organized Amir’s party like the Normandy invasion. (“Cheryl,” Jabbar says gently, “I think we may be spoiling Amir.”)

  As I watch the two of them, five-foot-four-inch Cheryl playing terrier to Jabbar’s greyhound, I wonder which came first, really, Cheryl or his change. It is certain that she accelerated it; she is not a woman to tolerate an excess of moody silence and she can ask questions that would make Barbara Walters envious. I do not wonder, however, at the apparent oddities in their pairing—the contrast in their sizes, and the fact that Cheryl is white, a Buddhist, nearly a decade younger, and so far removed from the world of basketball that when she met Jabbar she did not recognize him, even by name. All those things are part of her charm. Cheryl can understand Jabbar as few can, for she, too, has left Catholicism for a non-Western religion. Her youth gives her a kind of innocence; she cannot see him in light of history mostly because she doesn’t remember it; with her, Jabbar can truly put it all behind. And he can know that she is not drawn to him simply by his fame or basketball abilities. She is a bridge to the “more normal things” he alluded to a dozen years ago and has never himself experienced.

  In any case, she is obviously good for him. In her presence he relaxes, his voice deepens and loses some of its tension. He grins boyishly. Acts shy. Even shows his hurt that the Lakers have allowed him to go into this season unsigned. He shows his spirit, as Musashi would say.

  As we leave the restaurant I reach out to shake Cheryl’s hand. “I hug,” she informs me, and so, of course, we do. Then she says, “Kareem hugs, too.” And so Jabbar and I engage in a weird embrace, with my nose somewhere in the region of his belly button, while Cheryl beams at us lik
e an approving parent.

  NOVEMBER 1983. The beginning of another basketball season. It will be, most likely, the year Jabbar sets the NBA record for points scored. It will be his twenty-eighth season as a player, his fifteenth as a professional. I am worried that it may be his last.

  The 1982–1983 season was difficult for him, both off and on the court. In January his home burned to the ground, taking with it rugs and trophies and the mementos of a career, a lifetime. In January, too, the migraines returned, forcing him to sit out the second of two regular season games against Philadelphia. The first one, back in December, proved sufficiently prophetic; in June the 76ers humiliated the Lakers, defeating them in four straight games. And through most of the months of the off-season, Jabbar remained unsigned, by the Lakers, by anyone. Philadelphia had Moses Malone, who was being touted as the league’s premier center; Houston had replaced Malone with Ralph Sampson, touted as the center of the future. Jabbar floated in limbo.

  Now, although the Lakers have finally re-signed him, I wonder if he can play with the same concentration, with the same desire. “Basketball,” he said, “is definitely a means of personal expression.” And, speaking of the immortal Robertson: “Oscar would have played a couple of more years. But whatever it was, he didn’t feel he could make that commitment, and he stepped away from it.” Maybe, I think, Jabbar will tell all these people playing patty-cake with his means of self-expression to go to hell, and just step away.

  In any case, those thoughts have made me realize that Jabbar will step away eventually. “My days,” he had said, “are numbered.” And I think that the inevitability of his retirement holds more dread for me than for him. He has always thought beyond his career. “The world is bigger than all this,” he had said of his sport, and, of course, he was right.