Becoming Kareem

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Through basketball, I found my superpower. My power wasn’t in being a great player, but in loving something enough to work hard at being better. I had a passion for playing, and that passion powered me like a generator. I discovered I had some small scraps of power and grace like my hero Mel Triplett. I discovered I could work together with other players to form a bond as a team. I discovered I was eager to learn more about how to improve. I discovered that it didn’t matter whether I was a great ballplayer at that moment because I could become one if I worked hard enough. Who I was and who I would become didn’t depend on my parents or on others who yelled insults at me. It depended on my own determination and discipline.

  With that in mind, I spent the summer before eighth grade practicing my new move, the slam dunk. Because the basketball hoop is ten feet off the ground, most people will never know the exhilarating feeling of leaping above the rim and jamming the ball through with a clang from the rim, cheers from the crowd, and the glare of frustration on the other team’s faces. The slam dunk was relatively new at this time. The seven-foot center and Olympic gold medalist Bob Kurland was dunking in the 1940s and 1950s, but it wasn’t common practice. Teams that got dunked on took it personally, and they would retaliate against the dunker by running into his legs while he was in the air. That would cause the player to crash into the hard floor, sometimes resulting in serious injury that would remove him from the game.

  I was aware of all that, but by eighth grade I was six foot eight, and I was determined to leave my mark on the game.

  I got the chance during one game when my teammate stole the ball at half-court, bounce-passed it to me, and I leaped up high above all the other players and slammed the ball through the hoop as if I’d been doing it all my life. The sixty or so spectators jumped to their feet, screaming and clapping.

  When that ball went through the hoop, it was as if I’d followed it, like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole into a strange new world.

  I felt unstoppable.

  Catholic high schools had started recruiting me before that, while I was still in seventh grade and a mere six foot five. I even had an offer from a private prep school, the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. I would be the first black student attending. But I’d had enough of boarding schools, and I certainly didn’t want the pressure of being the only black student. I could have my pick of any Catholic school in New York City, so why put myself through that kind of emotional pain?

  In seventh grade, an older friend and teammate of mine was being recruited by Power Memorial Academy, a Catholic school in downtown Manhattan. Because the school had also contacted me, I decided to tag along with my friend to check the place out. It had a great academic reputation, so I knew my parents would be pleased. Academics were still important to me, too, but I was starting to get the feeling from all the attention by high school recruiters that this whole basketball thing was going to open a lot more doors for me than my good grades. So, as much as I appreciated its scholastics, it was the school’s gymnasium and basketball coach that most interested me.

  The gym didn’t disappoint. It had a full court with six side baskets. Plus, it was open on Saturdays all winter, so I could practice as long as I wanted.

  I didn’t meet Coach Jack Donahue until eighth grade, when I was closer to having to make my decision. My friend took me to Power to shoot, and Coach Donahue was there. I liked him right away. He knew how to talk to kids my age: straight, as if their opinions mattered, but with humor. He didn’t make exaggerated promises or try to flatter me. We just spoke basketball like two fans who loved the game. He even gave me and my friend passes to Madison Square Garden to watch the Knicks play.

  I already felt alone at St. Jude. The civil rights tensions that were increasing on the streets outside seeped through our school walls, and my black face wasn’t just Lew whom they’d grown up with, it was the face of the Negro Uprising that they overheard their parents fretting about or news commentators warning against. There was nothing aggressive from them, no name-calling as I’d had from Johnny, but the temperature between me and the white students, even my old friends, had cooled considerably. No one knew what to say or do, so we said nothing and did nothing. We still nodded in passing in the hallway, whispered to one another before class, chatted about Twilight Zone and Have Gun—Will Travel episodes, but everything was suddenly very polite and formal.

  That made Power Memorial all the more attractive. A place to start over with a new team and a new coach. A place where they’d gone out of their way to welcome me. A student body that would see me as a sports hero, not just a black face.

  As it turned out, Power Memorial Academy became the place of my greatest triumph—and greatest betrayal.

  PART 2

  High School Confidential:

  New Heights in Basketball and Political Awareness

  “I feel like a man who has been asleep somewhat and under someone else’s control. I feel what I’m thinking and saying is now for myself.”

  MALCOLM X

  8.

  Fresh Start, Fresh Problems

  When I started high school, I was fourteen years old and six foot ten. The scary thing about being so tall when you’re so young is that people automatically treat you as if you’re older. Size implies maturity. Yes, I was the size of an adult (actually, bigger than most!), but I was still just a kid. And acting more like an adult wouldn’t win me any friends. As a card-carrying Good Boy, I wanted to meet adults’ expectations and get their praise, but as a Regular Kid, I wanted to be like my peers and get their friendship.

  Welcome to high school, Lew.

  Power Memorial Academy was a ten-story brick building that had once been a children’s hospital, and it looked like a bleak institution. When I started attending in 1961, the school was already thirty years old, founded by a new community of the Christian Brothers of Ireland who had been invited to New York by Monsignor James W. Power much earlier. The inside was antiseptically clean, as befits the “cleanliness is next to godliness” belief of the Catholic administrators who ran it, but the building itself was already aging poorly.

  As a bright and shiny freshman, though, all I cared about was the gym, and that had already received my stamp of approval. If we’d had Yelp back then, I would have given it an enthusiastic five stars just for the smell alone. That sounds gross to most people, but gym rats around the world know what I’m talking about. When you spend so many hours at a gym practicing, walking into it smells like home, whatever that smell is to each person. To me, it was fresh-baked sourdough bread, the aroma of hard work and camaraderie. The wooden floor gleamed under the shiny coats of varnish applied over the years. The bright overhead lights lit the room up like a stage.

  I walked into school that first day resplendent in my blue blazer and slacks, the school uniform. We all looked like baby-faced accountants in training. I noticed some of my old classmates from St. Jude, the ones who had turned their backs on me, and we continued our policy of actively ignoring one another. I felt the pain of their betrayal, but I forced my face to remain expressionless. I couldn’t let them see that they had hurt me. I shoved the pain deep down into the coldest part of my heart. I was here to study hard at academics and to work hard at basketball under my new coach, Jack Donahue. I was here to excel. Nothing else mattered.

  I did excel. I made the honor roll my first semester, pleasing my parents and teachers. Learning came naturally to me. I loved reading, especially about history and adventure stories like The Three Musketeers. Basketball, however, I had to work at to do well in. But the fierce competitor that had been awakened in me loved challenges.

  There was another awakening happening. Something deep inside that others couldn’t see, but that was changing me as radically as my height.

  During my freshman year at Power Memorial, the civil rights movement was picking up serious momentum. Every day, televisions blared stories of social unrest throughout the country. I would watch them during dinner w
ith my mute parents as my insides filled with rage at the injustices against black people around the country—an injustice I felt only a small portion of by being snubbed by my white former friends. I followed every story the way an explorer follows a treasure map, hoping to discover the source of all my personal problems at school. Why had so many of the friends I grew up with suddenly turned against me? Why did the color of my skin offend—or scare—them so much? I soon learned that my little problems were just a tiny bit of the mountainous upheaval pushing through the streets outside.

  In the southern part of the country, black people were still being forcibly segregated from white ones. That meant that people who were white had access to the best schools, shops, restaurants, and jobs, while those who were black were confined to dumpster diving for scraps. However, as the protest singer Bob Dylan observed, the times, they were a-changin’. In the year or so before I entered high school, black students had staged a sit-in at a “whites only” Woolworth’s lunch counter in North Carolina, the US Supreme Court had outlawed the segregation of bus terminals throughout the country, and the University of Georgia had been ordered by a federal judge to desegregate. A group of white and black people called Freedom Riders traveled through the South to make sure the federal rulings against segregation of buses were being enforced. Although they encountered some violence and arrests elsewhere in the South, it wasn’t until they arrived in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, that they got a taste of how deep racial hatred went.

  On May 14, 1961, not long before the start of my freshman year, two buses containing Freedom Riders were attacked by a mob of Ku Klux Klan members, some of whom had come straight from church. One bus was stopped and firebombed, with Klan members holding the doors closed in an effort to burn the Riders, many young college students, to death. A gunshot or exploding fuel tank sent the Klan scurrying away, and the Riders were able to get out. The mob immediately jumped on the terrified Riders and beat them. As the Klansmen were about to lynch the battered students, highway patrolmen fired warning shots in the air, stopping them. The injured Riders were taken to a local hospital but were refused care.

  When the second bus arrived in Birmingham, it was immediately attacked by the Klan, with the help of the local police. The Riders were beaten with baseball bats, iron pipes, and bicycle chains. The white Freedom Riders received the worst of the beatings because the Klan and the cops considered them to be “race traitors.”

  Events like these were what was going on in the world outside our sheltered brick school. To the white students, it might have seemed like a few troublemakers not acting like patriotic Americans. But I was starting to see that these “troublemakers” were actually the patriotic ones, fighting for the rights everyone was supposed to have under the US Constitution we’d been studying so hard in class.

  “I don’t get what they’re complaining about,” my friend Mario said to me one day at lunch. I’d heard that before from my white classmates.

  “Injustice,” I said. “They want the same rights as white people have. That’s the law.”

  “If it’s already the law, then what’s the big deal?”

  “Not everybody follows the law,” I said. “Or they find ways around it. Like using literacy tests to keep black people from voting.”

  Mario shrugged. “Maybe it’s a good idea to make sure people can read before letting them vote. Otherwise, how can they know about issues?”

  I shook my head in frustration. “Isn’t your family from Italy?” With a last name like D’Angelo, I knew the answer.

  “So?” he said, squaring his shoulders. In some neighborhoods, asking a kid where his family was from was the opening move for a fistfight.

  “So,” I said, “those literacy tests were originally started in the 1890s to keep immigrants from Russia, Italy, and eastern European countries from voting. If they couldn’t read English, why should they have a say?”

  I was right. My logic was sound. Yet I could tell by looking at his face that not only hadn’t I changed his mind, but by angering him I might have hardened his opinion. I realized right then that changing people’s minds wasn’t just a matter of being right or offering evidence. I didn’t know what to do about that, which made me feel helpless and useless.

  Considering everything momentous that was going on outside, high school felt more and more like a protective bubble, and I felt as if I were living in a bubble within that bubble. I was isolated from most of the white kids, partly because of their attitude toward me, but also because of my own cautiousness. I’d been hurt enough times to be wary of people, and that icy wariness could have been as much a barrier as my skin color. I was discovering that racism was like a disease, and one of the side effects was that it made the victims withdraw from anyone who looked like the victimizers. All I knew was that I didn’t want to have another friend like Johnny yelling, “Nigger!” at me ever again.

  As much as I was isolated inside the school, I was also isolated from the world-changing movement marching outside. I talked a big game in school, but what was I doing to change things? When I read the newspaper accounts of these important civil rights events, I couldn’t help but notice how many were the result of student activists. Kids not much older than me were risking their lives to make the world better. They were out in the real world doing real things that made a difference. And I was dribbling a ball, winning games for the glory of a mostly white Christian school. I was too young to go out and do anything important, but my brain was starting to ask a lot of questions about who I was and the world I lived in.

  Where, exactly, did I fit in?

  One question that bothered me was how so many people could claim to be devout Christians, yet still justify the brutality they committed against black people. Not only the physical violence, but the daily harassment, humiliation, and indifference. To me, it seemed that every good Christian should be marching in the streets alongside the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. until everyone was treated equally. Isn’t that what Jesus would do? As far as I knew, the two people who most embodied Jesus’s teachings were Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. King. One was a brown man from India who defeated the British Empire through nonviolent protests, and the other was a black man from America who also led nonviolent protests. I wondered whether the only people who truly followed Jesus were those who were oppressed, the way the Jews, including Rabbi Jesus, were oppressed by the Romans.

  I also couldn’t understand why in history class, which was my favorite, we never read anything about the achievements or accomplishments of anyone black. Yes, there was always a paragraph or two about George Washington Carver and how he invented peanut butter. The problem was that he did so many other wonderful things we never learned about… and he didn’t actually invent peanut butter. The Aztecs had made peanut butter in the 1400s, and the patent for peanut butter in the United States was given to a Canadian pharmacist in 1884, twelve years before Carver began his tenure as head of the agriculture department at Tuskegee Institute. What other black scientists were we not hearing about? What about the black artists, poets, writers, musicians? Why had we never been taught that Alexandre Dumas, the author of my beloved Three Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo, had been part black?

  When I looked around at the white students in class as we learned about the wonderful accomplishments of white people without ever hearing anything about black people, I could understand how these kids might find it difficult to believe that black people were their intellectual equals. That’s what they were being taught. Worse, that’s what I was being taught.

  9.

  Coach Donahue to the Rescue—Sort Of

  My refuge from the explosive turmoil outside, and the implosive turmoil I had started to feel inside, was basketball. The practices were so exhausting that I barely had time to think about anything else. Every school day I crawled out of bed early, went to school, practiced basketball until five o’clock, staggered home, powered through my homework, zoned out in front of the TV, and went
to bed.

  Weekends I hung out with my only close friend left in the projects, Norbert. We would shut ourselves in my room to play chess and talk about our plans for the future. He was determined to become a draftsman, making detailed drawings for engineers who were inventing wonderful new machines. I was going to be an architect and create futuristic buildings like the ones we saw on the TV show The Jetsons.

  Because the civil rights movement was in the news every day, both of us had started to take an interest in finding out more about our ethnic origins.

  “You know, we invented the yo-yo,” Norbert, who was part Filipino, bragged one day in my room.

  “Who’s we?” I joked. “Your family? Cuz all I noticed you guys invented was the stench from cooking oxtails and plantain.” I loved giving my buddy a hard time.

  He ignored my jab. “Pedro Flores came to the United States from the Philippines, went to law school, dropped out, and invented the yo-yo.”

  Then I’d put on the latest jazz album by Sonny Rollins and say, “Yeah, but we invented that.”

  And back and forth we’d go, trying to one-up the other in a cultural heritage version of rock, paper, scissors. This kind of competition required that we do research. We even took the subway to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to find out more about Filipino and African cultures. Most important, I had a friend in whom I could confide any thought or feeling, knowing he would never make fun of me.

  The demands of high school cut into the time I could spend with Norbert. I had the studying part down, but the basketball part was as rocky as ever. As a freshman, my style of play reflected my personality: politely passive. I had some skills, but I didn’t have an aggressive nature. The good players around me knew how to play rough, use their bodies with authority, and power their way to a rebound. I felt like a pinball bouncing off players rather than making them bounce off me. I knew I had to toughen up, and I was committed to getting better, but it wasn’t happening fast enough.