Becoming Kareem

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Despite my size, my age and skill level meant that I practiced with the junior varsity team under Coach Dick Percudani, not Coach Donahue, who was the varsity coach. We played practice games against the varsity squad, which only highlighted my faults. They played with confidence and authority, snapping passes, running smooth plays, taking calculated shots. For me to ever play varsity seemed as far away a possibility as a black person becoming president.

  On the morning our varsity team was scheduled to play a preconference game against Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, Coach Donahue surprised me by taking me into his office. I figured he was going to discuss his disappointment in my progress as a player, maybe even say something about it all being a big mistake. That I didn’t belong here. Instead, he handed me a varsity uniform.

  “You’ll be suiting up against Erasmus today,” he told me.

  I just stood there, the folded uniform in my hand. Was this a joke?

  “Don’t you have a class to go to?” he asked. He pretended to be all business, but I could tell by the slight grin he was enjoying my dumbfounded reaction.

  When I unfolded the jersey, I saw the number 33—the one I had picked in seventh grade to honor the football player Mel Triplett. Even my fear of playing poorly and letting everyone down couldn’t overcome my pride at walking out of his office with that uniform. I had no idea that would be the number I would wear for the rest of my basketball career. I hurried away on a mission to tell anyone who would listen that I would be playing varsity that afternoon. All day, as I sat in classes and walked the hallways and ate lunch, I allowed myself to imagine the game and the parts where I scored impossible shots, made incredible passes, snagged rebounds like a machine. Would the team insist on carrying me out of the gym on their shoulders or just award me the game ball?

  Neither. We got slaughtered. Afterward, I sat in the locker room and cried.

  I wish I could say I learned a great spiritual lesson from that day. Something clever and deep. But I didn’t. I just felt as if I’d let everyone down—the team, my parents, the coach, the school. In the back of my mind, a voice scoffed, “Maybe you aren’t as good as those white players.”

  That same month, we played Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School as another tune-up before our league started. This time, I really tried to be a strong force, using my body and strength to claim my space on the court. But their seven-foot center was bigger and stronger and more experienced. He kept me out of the game to the point that I ended up fouling a lot out of desperation. After our loss, I didn’t cry. I stormed around in frustration until Coach Donahue took me aside and said sternly, “I hope you’re learning what it’s like to really want to win.”

  What did that mean? I had wanted to win. I just didn’t have the skills yet. Or the bulk.

  Or did he mean something else?

  I hadn’t had any experience with a strong coach before. Until then, my coaches were standard-issue, one-size-fits-all men who were either nice guys who pushed sportsmanship more than winning or teachers picking up a few extra bucks to coach. Coach Donahue was different. Every game was personal to him, and he wanted it to be personal to us. Every win was an endorsement of our character, our will, our worth, and every loss revealed our faults, our weaknesses, our lack of commitment.

  One reason Coach Donahue was so effective was that he was only thirty years old, younger than our parents, but old enough that he had that big-brother aura. A demanding big brother whom we all were desperate to please. When you did what he wanted and were successful, he heaped praise and love on you that would burn for days. When you didn’t do what he wanted and failed, he would heap verbal abuse on you that would leave you feeling shriveled and worthless. He was like the US Marine drill sergeant in war movies who would lean into some frightened recruit’s face, call him “Maggot!” and ask if he wanted to go home to Mommy. That coaching style drove us to do everything in our power to get his approval and avoid his insults. Basking in his warmth was much better than shivering in his cold.

  We endured the cold with the heat because Coach Donahue knew how to win. He had been at Power Memorial for only a couple of years but had already posted an impressive win record, and we all wanted to take that record to new heights.

  I especially wanted to win. I wanted to prove something both to myself and to white kids at the school. The racism being fought on the streets was both angering and inspiring. There were laws and politicians and violent mobs trying to make us feel as if we were lesser people. In my own classrooms, a subtler racism was at work, telling us that we had never accomplished anything and that we never would. I was surrounded by teachers and students who believed that. I wasn’t a Freedom Rider or marching with Dr. King or sitting at an all-white lunch counter, but I was competing. This was how I would help the cause.

  But wanting to prove something and actually doing it were two very different things, especially when you’re only fourteen.

  “What are you, a stiff?” Coach Donahue would yell at me when I flubbed another rebound in practice. The rest of the team would stop to watch my embarrassment, grinning because this time it wasn’t them. “Are you alive?” He’d grab my wrist and check his watch as if feeling for a pulse. “What are you, a farmer?” More laughter. “We play basketball here, Lew, not plow fields behind an ox. An ox would be faster than you right now.”

  And so on.

  We were young enough to believe that all that mattered was results. If the coaching method made us winners, we wouldn’t question whether there was a better, more effective way to achieve that goal. Besides, we all knew that his personal jibes weren’t really personal—they came from a place of affection. Deep down, he cared about us. I was certain.

  And because I was certain that he cared, I gave him my best.

  In my first home game of league play, I was the starting center. I was fourteen years old and six foot eleven, but as thin as Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas. Yet there I was, banging against older, heavier, rougher kids. After we won, one of the teachers came up and complimented me on how calm I looked through the whole game. “You drink ice water or something?” he asked. Truth was, my game face of fierce indifference had been developed off the court first. Interacting every day at the boarding school with tough kids looking to fight me, with white ex-friends at Power who blamed me for uppity black people demanding their civil rights, with white teachers ignorant of anything positive about black culture, had carved that stony Mount Rushmore game face. It was the only face I could have and survive.

  Being fourteen was an especially important age to me because I was the same age as Emmett Till, the boy who had been haunting me since I was ten years old. Emmett was fourteen years old in the summer of 1955, when he traveled from his home in Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi. Unaware of the harsh realities of Southern racism, Emmett was within the same vicinity as a twenty-one-year-old white woman who subsequently told her husband little Emmett had been flirting with her. Enraged, the husband and his half brother kidnapped Emmett that night, beat him, shot him, and dumped his body in the river. Both men were acquitted of kidnapping and murder, and because they were now safe from prosecution, they admitted to the crimes in an interview with Look magazine. (In a 2008 interview—made public nearly a decade later—Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman who accused Emmett of making advances to her that sparked his murder, confessed to lying and admitted that Emmett never approached her. In late December 2016, President Obama signed the Emmett Till Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act of 2016, which encourages federal law enforcement agencies such as the FBI to continue to pursue civil rights cold cases.)

  I was eight years old at the time of his murder but didn’t read about it until I was ten. It profoundly affected my sense of security in the world. Once I realized that a person, even a child, could be tortured and murdered just for being black, I no longer felt safe in my skin. Being black meant being a target. And the fact that two white men got away with it, a
nd could brag about that in a national magazine, meant that the country didn’t value our lives the way they valued the lives of white torturers and murderers of children. No one—not my parents, teachers, or friends—could explain how such a thing could happen in America. And now I was Emmett’s age.

  So, yeah, I had an impenetrable game face—to hide my fear on the court and off the court.

  That game face, like the jersey number 33, followed me throughout my basketball career. It was a shield to protect me both on and off the court, and sometimes it got in the way of my getting to know people. I started to understand my father’s hard and crusty exterior. I knew he’d always wanted to play in a symphony orchestra but wasn’t able to because he was black. I now understood how that exterior could sometimes seep inside and fossilize until there’s nothing left but hard and crusty.

  We lost six games in my freshman season, but not for lack of my effort. Colleges were already asking me to visit their campuses. Knowing that I was guaranteed a college education took a load off my shoulders and pleased my parents. That allowed me to concentrate even harder on improving my game. Coach Donahue emphasized working as a team, with no one showing off or trying to prove he was better than everyone else. He wanted a team, not superstars.

  Yet one day during practice, in a moment of spontaneous whimsy, I fired off a turnaround jump shot that banked smoothly through the hoop. I’d seen Wilt Chamberlain do that same shot a hundred times, even at one of the games Coach Donahue took me to at Madison Square Garden, and wanted to try it for myself. But as soon as I hit that shot, Coach blew his whistle and stopped practice. “Look where you are,” he said. “You’re nowhere near the basket and shooting a low-percentage shot.” To make his point of how absurd and selfish my shot was, he told me to shoot the same shot again. I did and it went in. “Shoot again,” he demanded. It went in again. It went in six out of the seven times I shot it. “Yeah, you can make it in practice when no one’s guarding you,” he said with a scowl, “but don’t try it in the game.”

  That got me thinking. He was right, of course, about its being a low-percentage shot in general. Therefore, it wasn’t the best choice to make for the sake of the team. And I was nothing if not a team player.

  But…

  I couldn’t help but also wonder when it was okay for a player to do something innovative, to try to push himself to a new level. Coach was right that there was a difference between how a player performs in the relative ease of practice and the high pressure of an actual game. Plays that were run flawlessly during practice could crumble when facing real opponents with practiced plays of their own. And I’ve seen really good players try to be a one-man team, scoring a lot of points in a losing game because they didn’t involve the rest of the team. I didn’t want to be the kind of player who racked up impressive stats for himself but caused his team to lose.

  But I knew from my history studies that the biggest leaps in civilization are when individuals do something different and we all benefit from it. Galileo said the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system, and they placed him under house arrest for the rest of his life because he wasn’t being a team player with the Roman Catholic Church. Ignaz Semmelweis, a nineteenth-century Hungarian doctor, discovered that washing hands could decrease disease, which was contrary to medical belief at the time. Not only did the hospital board not believe him, it refused to reappoint him to the staff, and he died at forty-seven in a state of deep depression. I didn’t think I was doing anything that would change the world; I just wanted to try new things that would change my game.

  Weren’t the teachers being “team players” by following the tradition of not teaching us about black accomplishments? Didn’t the mob beating the Freedom Riders see themselves as team players for Southern tradition?

  I needed to do some thinking about where team identity ended and individual expression began.

  I was struggling with finding my place as a teammate, as a student, as a son, but especially my place in a black world while living in an overwhelmingly white one.

  This struggle became particularly important during Easter vacation, when my parents sent me to Goldsboro, North Carolina, to visit family friends. From the Greyhound bus, I witnessed the harsh realities of Southern racism. As soon as the bus crossed the Potomac River into Virginia, store signs like Johnson’s White Grocery Store and Corley’s White Luncheonette whizzed by the window. To see racism so boldly out in the open like that shocked me, even though I’d been reading about it for years. Now that I was actually in that world, my stomach clenched in fear. Everyone on the bus was a potential attacker. Would I be hacked to death before the bus even arrived? When I arrived in Raleigh to change buses, I climbed down from the bus as cautiously as an astronaut stepping foot for the first time on Mars. With the brutal slaying of Emmett Till in the back of my mind, I was frightened that I might say or do something that would bring the fiery wrath of white supremacists on me.

  Nothing happened. No one attacked me. But, in a way, I attacked myself.

  The next day, my head suddenly felt as if hot spikes were being pounded through my skull. I grabbed my head to keep it from exploding. It was another one of my migraines. I staggered into the first dark room I could find, closed the door, and sat there for half an hour in perfect stillness, waiting for the deafening ringing in my ears to go away. Finally, it did and I was able to walk around again, even though I was terrified that it would attack me at any moment.

  My worst migraine attacks seemed to come when I was faced with physical threats. First when I lived under constant abuse at Holy Providence Boarding School, and again when I witnessed open racism in the South. Was my brain acting as some sort of Geiger counter overloading on radioactive racism?

  10.

  Meeting Wilt Chamberlain

  The main basketball event before the start of school was the world-famous Rucker Tournament. It was the subject of many articles, books, and documentary movies. It was where wily street hustlers clashed with polished professionals, and the only language spoken fluently was trash talk. I’d gone with my buddy Wesley to see how the game could really be played.

  The Rucker Tournament took place at the basketball courts at 128th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. The tournament was started by a local English teacher and playground director, Holcombe Rucker, in 1947 with the emphasis on education. Rucker had been a real hero of Harlem, responsible for more than seven hundred kids getting basketball scholarships to pay for their education. Most experts agree that summer basketball today, from pickup games to organized leagues, owes its existence to Rucker. The Rucker Tournament featured an energetic, flashy style of play, with spinning slam dunks, crossover dribbling, behind-the-back passing, and pretty much anything else that would get the crowd roaring with delight. Basketball historians have credited the Rucker Tournament with forcing the NBA to change its play to the more exciting style fans enjoyed at the tournament. I couldn’t play because I was just entering tenth grade, but I would learn more about basketball in one game at Rucker than I would playing an entire season at Power Memorial.

  This was basketball as art, with each player eager to display his masterpiece to the crowd. Rather than the predictable, regimented play familiar in team sports, play here was spontaneous, focusing on individual expression coming together in improvised harmony. Each player told his own personal story, but they all discovered how to blend those stories into a common team goal. Among the pros who played here were Julius “Dr. J” Erving, Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, and Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain.

  And there he was: Wilt Chamberlain! Standing on the sidelines with his own team, he towered over the other players the same way I did.

  Wilt was especially famous because a few months earlier he had set a world record by single-handedly scoring 100 points in a 169–147 win by the Philadelphia Warriors over the New York Knicks. No one has ever repeated that extraordinary feat. He set five other league records in that game, including one for f
ree throws. He averaged 50.4 points a game that season, which no one has even come close to matching. There were only two NBA players I could model myself after: Bill Russell (six foot nine) and Wilt (seven foot one). They were big, like me, but they dominated through a balance of power, speed, and agility that made them nearly unstoppable. If I wanted to reach their level of ability, I had to study these men.

  Today, Wilt stood at midcourt in his street clothes as if he’d wandered in here by mistake. Then suddenly he was stripping off his street clothes to reveal his tank top and uniform shorts underneath. Like Superman.

  I just stood there gaping, unable to take a step or talk.

  “Come on, let’s just go meet him,” Wes said.

  “Are you nuts?” I said. “You don’t just go up to Wilt Chamberlain and say, ‘How’s it going, man?’”

  “Why not?” he said with a shrug before he started across the blacktop.

  Somehow, my feet followed.

  Wilt saw us coming. How could he not notice a bony, six-foot-ten, fourteen-year-old kid shuffling toward him in a daze? As we got closer, I realized that even though we shared similar height, he was about twice the size of me in body mass. His arms and legs were thick with muscles. He was twenty-five and in peak physical condition. I felt tiny next to him, and that was not a feeling I was used to.

  Wes broke the silence by introducing himself. Then I managed to choke out, “I’m Lew Alcindor.”