Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s

by Pearlman, Jeff

  Lew Alcindor was not merely black. He was tall and black and painfully aware of the stares and the glares and the suspicious looks and the inevitable sight of store employees tracking his whereabouts. His first best friend was a white child named John. They were classmates at St. Jude’s parish elementary school who bonded over model airplanes and funny jokes. By seventh grade, however, an unspoken racial tension divided the two. One day, during lunch, John and Lew wound up in the principal’s office after a scuffle. As Alcindor left, he heard someone yelling at him. “Hey, nigger! Hey, jungle bunny! You big jungle nigger!”

  It was John. “Fuck you, you . . . milk bottle,” Alcindor responded.

  “It was the only white thing I could think of,” he later wrote. “It really pissed him off, but he didn’t come anywhere near me. We never spoke again.”

  Because he appeared freakishly tall and thin, Alcindor was routinely presumed to be a dominant basketball star. Yet his athleticism required time to catch up with his stature. In other words, Alcindor’s skills were laughable. “At ten or eleven my father recognized that I was going to be taller than normal,” he once said, “so he refused to allow me to play football.” He was a member of the St. Jude’s basketball team in fifth and sixth grades, but served—in his words—as “comic relief.” He could neither dribble nor shoot, and in practices, smaller, slower kids shoved him aside for rebounds. He finally began to develop in seventh grade—the year he first picked uniform number 33 in honor of his athletic hero, New York Giants fullback Mel Triplett. His first-ever dunk came a year later. “The whole place went crazy,” he wrote. “I was bouncing up and down, ready to go for some more. Give me the ball!”

  Based largely upon his height, high schools started recruiting Alcindor in seventh grade. He was 6-foot-5, with the wingspan of a pterodactyl.* The Alcindors were particularly impressed with Jack Donohue, the head coach at Power Memorial Academy, an all-boys Catholic high school located above midtown on 61st Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The admiration was mutual. “I first saw him in our gym at Power,” Donohue recalled. “I had gone over to watch a CYO game. Somebody had touted me on some other kid. One of the brothers said there was a boy playing out there that was 6-foot-7. He was lanky and awkward and very uncoordinated. He was weak physically. But, then again, how can you compare a 6-foot-7 kid to anyone else? You don’t see too many 6-foot-7 kids in grammar school.”

  Alcindor graduated junior high in the summer of 1961, and found himself growing apart from white friends. “They made it extremely clear . . . that I wasn’t at home in their crowd,” he wrote. He arrived at Power Memorial that fall, uninspired by the heavy-handed Catholic doctrine. Inside his new school, Jesus was white and Pope John XXIII was infallible and masturbation could result in an eternity of blindness alongside the devil. There was one lecture after another, mostly warning the students that they were sinners who needed to repent.

  For a young man who absorbed books (he was addicted to Greek tragedies) and questioned doctrine, it was torturous.

  Until basketball started.

  His first game, a matchup with Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High, was horrible. Charlie Donovan, Erasmus’s All-City guard, repeatedly drove over and around Alcindor, making him appear more fourth grader than high school freshman. Afterward, Alcindor retreated to the locker room and sobbed. The next game, a scrimmage against Lincoln High School and a seven-foot center named Dave Newmark, was equally humiliating. After it ended, Donohue approached his distraught freshman. “I hope you’re learning what it’s all about to really want to win,” he said.

  Before long, Alcindor was passable. Then decent. Then magnificent. “He was fifteen when he matured,” Donohue said. “He seemed to develop overnight into a basketball player. He didn’t work at it that much, either. He was active in all sports. He played a lot of handball, was a very good softball player and did a lot of swimming. He also loved to run. He’d always take an extra lap on the track.”* Alcindor would study games that featured Bill Russell, the Celtics center. He paid special attention to the way he helped on defense and mastered the pinpoint outlet pass. It was also during the Power Memorial era that Alcindor tapped into what would go down as, arguably, the most indomitable shot in basketball history—the skyhook.

  The idea, he wrote in his autobiography, came to him during an elementary school contest years earlier:

  One day I stumbled upon a strange and delightful experience, kind of like that exciting yet amazingly unexpected feeling you get when you know, quite definitely, that you’ve entered puberty. In the first half, I was in the game, which was already unusual, and a rebound fell my way right by the basket. I fumbled with it, trying to conquer the dribble, and it almost got away. Finally, with a guy from the other team at my back, I looked over my shoulder, saw the basket, turned into the lane, and with one hand put up my first hook shot. It missed. Hit the back rim and bounced out. But it felt right, and the next time I got the ball I tried it again. Neither of them went in, but I had found my shot. At halftime my teammates, surprised that I had showed some coordination, encouraged me to practice it, and from then on, whenever I got into play I would shoot it. Nobody showed me how, it came naturally.

  Now, at Power Memorial, the skyhook evolved into far more than a funky experiment. It was unstoppable. That’s neither hyperbole nor gross exaggeration. When Lew Alcindor, 6-foot-10 as a high school junior and 6-foot-11 as a high school senior, planted in the lane, accepted the feed, turned, extended his arm into the air and deftly released the basketball, no one was touching it. Certainly no one with pimples and braces. At age sixteen, Alcindor appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and was featured in Sports Illustrated. As a junior he averaged 26 points per game. As a senior, that jumped to 33 points per game—tops in New York City. “His hand-eye coordination was just amazing,” said Danny Nee, a Power Memorial teammate. “Lew would have been a good baseball player, a good swimmer. Everything looked so smooth and fluid. It was art.”

  With its center leading the way, Power Memorial emerged as New York City’s basketball juggernaut. “We were a pretty good team without him,” said Art Kenney, a teammate, “but a great team with him.” In Alcindor’s four varsity seasons, the Panthers lost but six games—five during his freshman year, and one, to Washington, DC’s DeMatha Catholic High inside the University of Maryland’s field house, when he was a senior. They went 71 straight games without a defeat, which remains a Big Apple record. In short, Power Memorial was one of the most dominant teams in the history of the prep game.

  And yet . . .

  The fame and fanfare lavished upon Alcindor exacted a price. He was now, officially, a freak—a black museum exhibit to be gawked at and, often, ridiculed. “People stare,” he said. “You can walk into a room and people look. They don’t have to say anything. You know what they’re thinking.” In the 1960s, New York City oozed basketball. It was the sport to behold, and whether one was in high school or college or playing inside Madison Square Garden for the Knicks, stardom was accompanied by a blinding light. Wherever Alcindor went, and whatever he did, the masses followed. He was easily identifiable and easily annoyed. A woman once jabbed him with the tip of her umbrella, just to see if he was real. Donohue, his coach, decided the media would be allowed minimal access, a move that heightened Alcindor’s suspicions and paranoia. “You want to see Lew Alcindor?” Donohue told inquisitors. “Well, you have to see me instead.”

  Members of the sports media—exclusively male, exclusively white—revolted. “On the surface,” wrote Gerald Eskenazi in The New York Times, “it appears that Donohue exerts a Svengali-like influence.” Who did this kid think he was? What sort of uppity behavior was this? “Had Alcindor been exposed to those ‘prying’ reporters we kept hearing about . . . Lew Alcindor might have learned a bit of the give-and-take of such sessions that tend to mirror life,” wrote Arnold Hano in an angry Sport magazine profile. “He would have been considered less a freak and more a person,
more a usual person. . . . But he was not permitted, and today he is ill at ease, terribly sober, and a bit pompous himself.”

  What men like Hano failed to grasp was that Lew Alcindor knew the admiration extended to him as a basketball player was exclusively about his skills on the court. Otherwise, he was, to many, a nigger. Shut up, shoot the ball, mind your business.

  This was painfully apparent during his days at Power Memorial. The school employed a single black teacher, and Alcindor became used to the offhanded insults from authority figures. A white religious instructor, Brother D’Adamo, once told him in class that “black people want too much, too soon.” A classmate, Joseph Traum, nicknamed him Schwartz, which Alcindor found puzzling until he realized schwartze (the word actually being used) was the German equivalent of nigger.

  The cruelest cut came during Alcindor’s junior year. Power Memorial was struggling at home against St. Helena’s, a Bronx Catholic school with a mediocre team. Donohue, a coach prone to outbursts, was furious. As the players sat in their locker room for halftime, he looked directly at Alcindor. “And you!” he screamed. “You go out there and you don’t hustle. You don’t move. You don’t do any of the things you’re supposed to do. You’re acting just like a nigger!”

  The word cut through Lew Alcindor. Here was a white man he had trusted and almost loved. Alcindor came to Power Memorial because the coach seemed to be fair and open minded. Through the years, they had engaged in countless discussions on societal transformations and how they often occur at a snail’s pace. Donohue worked hard to shield Alcindor from the spotlight, to protect him. “The toughest job was to treat him the same as all the other kids,” Donohue said. “I couldn’t treat him as if he were special. It wouldn’t have been good for him.”

  And now, Donohue nailed Alcindor with the most disgusting of slurs.

  When the game concluded with yet another Power Memorial triumph, Donohue called Alcindor into his office. The coach recognized he had crossed the uncrossable line. He knew it, his player knew it. And yet—“See, it worked!” he said. “My strategy worked. I knew that if I used that word, it’d shock you into a good second half. And it did.”

  Alcindor never trusted his coach again.

  • • •

  As hundreds upon hundreds of colleges recruited Lew Alcindor out of high school, there was a widespread belief that he would stay in New York and play for St. John’s. Yet Alcindor, now 6-foot-11 and 230 pounds, had no interest in furthering his Catholic education. He also had been urged to check out Holy Cross College, where Donohue was recently named head coach. Alcindor made an obligatory trip, but merely for show. Furthermore, when he spoke with one of Holy Cross’s few black students, a firm warning was issued. “This is the worst place to go to school,” he was told. “You’ll be isolated, like I am. Man, pick someplace else.”

  In the winter of 1965, Alcindor took his visit to UCLA, arriving in Los Angeles via TWA Flight 11 from John F. Kennedy Airport. This was the best high school player in the country connecting with the best college program in the country. Across the nation, the trip was reported with presidential seriousness. According to Joel E. Boxer, a California-based journalist, Alcindor enjoyed an in-flight meal of filet mignon and mashed potatoes. He watched the film Dear Brigitte, starring Brigitte Bardot, and had one conversation—a flight attendant named Karen Therkelsen asked a single question: “Who are you?”

  At 7:13 P.M., Alcindor was greeted at the gate by Jerry Norman, an assistant coach with the Bruins who had been nervously pacing the terminal, hoping the country’s greatest basketball talent was actually on the flight.

  When he woke up the next morning, following a blissful night of sleep in the guest suite of UCLA’s Rieber Hall, the recruit felt renewed and optimistic. He opened the front door to find a large bowl of fruit at his feet, and shortly thereafter, Mike Warren, one of the Bruins stars, offered a campus tour. Sure, to an eighteen-year-old Lew Alcindor, Los Angeles was the land of 80-degree days and movie stars. And sure, the Bruins had just won a second-straight national championship, playing before thirteen thousand screaming fans in the new Pauley Pavilion.

  But, most important, Los Angeles symbolized open-mindedness. It was a place, in his eyes, where ideas were expressed freely and oppression was frowned upon. Alcindor was especially impressed by John Wooden, the Bruins’ well-regarded head coach. When they met for the first time, Wooden spoke some about basketball, but more about academics. “I am impressed by your grades,” he told Alcindor. “You could do very well here as a student, whether you were an athlete or not. We work very hard to have our boys get through and earn their degrees.”

  Alcindor was sold.

  Back in 1965, first-year students could not play on the college varsity. Alcindor, therefore, was placed on UCLA’s freshman team. On one of his first days, he and three fellow freshmen defeated four returning varsity players (all of whom had just won a national title) in three straight full-court games to 15 points. Shortly thereafter, on November 27, 1965, in a matchup witnessed by a packed Pauley crowd, the freshmen played the varsity in a real game—and dominated by 15. Alcindor totaled 31 points and 21 rebounds. “The varsity had no one able to guard me in close,” he wrote, “so they had to sag their defense to prevent me from getting the ball. When they did not get there quickly enough, I scored.”

  “Everyone walked away from that game thinking, ‘What are we going to do with this guy?’” said Bill Bertka, a Laker scout at the time. “He was such a force.”

  Basketball-wise, Alcindor’s freshman year was dull. The baby Bruins won all 21 of their games and never traveled farther than San Diego. And yet, it was a period of great self-discovery and extended contemplation about race and oppression. If Alcindor arrived in Los Angeles with particular misgivings about Caucasians, they were only magnified through increased study. Wooden, as open-minded a white man as Alcindor had ever met, embraced his young future star—but with certain limitations. “There was warm, mutual respect,” Abdul-Jabbar later said. “But because I was black, there was never this father-son thing. He couldn’t put his arm around my waist and introduce me as his boy.”

  Alcindor began forgoing standard collegiate attire for caftans, dashikis and djellabas—Afrocentric garb ordered from Ashanti Fashions, located in the center of Harlem. An article with the headline FIENDISH IN THE VALLEY WITH LEW ALCINDOR AT THE LATTER’S SMALL BUNGALOW IN ENCINO appeared in West Magazine (a Los Angeles Times supplement), and portrayed him as an America-loathing racist bent on separatism. Asked to assess backup center Steve Patterson, Alcindor snapped, “A white boy from Santa Maria. That’s all.”

  Alcindor expressed immediate regret for the piece, and teammates seemed to forgive. This was a young man struggling to understand himself.

  Over the course of the next three years, Alcindor became one of the great players in the history of college basketball. The Bruins went 88-2, completing each March with yet another national championship. He was twice named the NCAA’s Player of the Year and made three straight All-American teams. Following the 1967 season, when UCLA went 30-0, the NCAA banned dunking—a direct nod to the 7-foot-1¾ Alcindor’s unparalleled dominance (“Frankly, this new rule doesn’t affect Alcindor,” John Nucatola, director of the Eastern College Athletic Conference, said with a shockingly straight face). In three years he averaged 26.4 points and 15.5 rebounds. “We tried to front him, hoping his teammates would have to lob him the ball,” Dave Scholz, Illinois’s star guard, said after a blowout loss to the Bruins in 1967. “But you just can’t defense Lew. It’s impossible.”

  As he dominated on the court, Alcindor turned increasingly divisive off of it. This was hardly the case of a man seeking out trouble. But with media scrutiny came exposure. With exposure came truth. With truth came scorn. Alcindor emerged as a symbol—along with the likes of Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Tommie Smith and Juan Carlos—of the black athlete no longer merely willing to go along just to get
along. He would play your sport and dribble your ball and accept your cheers. But he refused to be a pawn. On November 23, 1967, Alcindor was one of 120 attendees (and 65 collegiate athletes) at the Western Black Youth Conference, a meeting held inside the Second Baptist Church on the east side of Los Angeles. The matter at hand: Determine whether black athletes would compete in the upcoming Mexico City Olympic Games.

  White media members tagged the gathering “radical,” and they were correct. Harry Edwards, a twenty-four-year-old professor at San Jose State and the movement’s leader, stood before the room and spoke his mind. “We’ve been put in the position of asking the whites for everything,” he said to an ocean of nodding heads. “We’re not asking anymore, we’re demanding. We’re fanatical about our rights. We’ve been put in the position of taking our case to the criminal. The U.S. government is the criminal.”

  Midway through the session, Alcindor reportedly rose. “I was born in a racist country,” he said. “I laid my life on the line when I was born. I don’t have anything to lose.”

  Alcindor boycotted, as did UCLA teammates Mike Warren and Lucius Allen. When they declined to participate in tryouts for the U.S. Olympic basketball team, J. D. Morgan, UCLA’s athletic director, told Sports Illustrated the decision was based upon academics—a lie. The real reason was Alcindor’s discontentment with the racial situation in America. “Kareem gets along OK with white guys, but you have to be a brother to get next to him,” said Sidney Wicks, a UCLA teammate. “He still resents the white hypocrites more than ever—the people who say one thing to your face and quite another behind your back.”

  It was in August of 1968 that Alcindor made a bold shift, leaving Catholicism (which, to the dismay of his churchgoing parents, he believed to be racist in dogma) and making a confession of faith toward the orthodox Hanafi sect of Islam. He shaved all the hair from his body, took his Shahadah (a declaration of faith—La illaha ila Allah wa Muhammadun rasoolollah—that must be pronounced before a witness for one to be initiated as a Muslim) and, in his mind, began life anew. The move hardly surprised Alcindor’s friends, who knew of his interest in the writings and philosophies of the late Malcolm X. What did surprise them, however, was when he received a new name—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (meaning noble, powerful servant).*