Becoming Kareem

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  For the next hour, I strained to listen through the walls to what they were saying. My ear was rubbed raw from being pressed against the rough wall. Finally, my mom hollered, “Lewis, come say good-bye.”

  I stepped out of my room into the living room. Everyone was smiling so I felt encouraged. “Thank you for coming,” I said to the coaches and shook their hands.

  When they were gone, I turned anxiously to my parents. I was determined to go, with or without their blessing. But with would be much easier.

  “That Coach Wooden,” my father said.

  Holding my breath, I waited for him to go on.

  “He’s very dignified.”

  “A gentleman,” my mom agreed. “Not the kind of man who’d take advantage of you.” She was worried that a school might try to exploit me. Coach Wooden had assured them he would look out for me, and they believed him.

  My parents must have made an impression on him, too. When I announced my decision to attend UCLA at a press conference about a week after his visit, Coach Wooden told the media, “This boy is not only a fine student and a great college basketball prospect, but he is also a refreshingly modest young man who shows the results of excellent parental and high school training.

  “After meeting Mr. and Mrs. Alcindor, I could easily understand the fine impression Lew made on all of us when he visited our campus. Their guidance has enabled him to handle the fame and adulation that has come his way in a most gracious and unaffected manner.”

  When my parents heard that, they were ready to adopt him into the family.

  From that day on, my heart was lighter with the knowledge that I was just a few short months from freedom. From Coach Donahue. From my parents. From everything and everyone I knew. I knew I should be a little scared, but I wasn’t. I was California dreamin’.

  22.

  My Reunion with Coach Donahue

  It was thirty-five years after the terrible incident with Couch Donahue, the one that had destroyed our close relationship. I had retired from professional basketball and was visiting Coach Wooden at his home. We were watching a baseball game in his cluttered den, which was filled with trophies, photographs of each of his national championship teams, many books, and hand-painted plates signed by his grandchildren.

  For no reason I could fathom, Coach Wooden suddenly brought up Coach Donahue. He knew the story, knew how much it had affected me. But that was so long ago that I didn’t think he even remembered it. “I don’t think I ever told you this story, Kareem,” he said. “But I met Jack Donahue back in 1965, before you came to UCLA for your visit. It was right after UCLA had won its first national championship. I was on some local TV show promoting a coaching clinic I was doing in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Right after the show, I got a phone call from Jack, and he said he’d like to come down and talk to me about his player, Lew Alcindor.”

  “Really?” This was news to me.

  “Well,” Coach said, “he came down and told me that UCLA was one of the four schools you wanted to visit. That was the first contact that we had with you. Did you know that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Long drive,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Two and a half hours,” he said.

  “Has anyone ever accused you of being too subtle?”

  He laughed. “Quite the opposite. I’m accused of cranking out neat little sayings that are T-shirt ready.”

  I laughed, but I was thinking about Jack Donahue leaving his family on a day off to drive five hours for a surly kid who barely talked to him. What kind of man does that, yet never tries to win back the kid’s favor by telling him?

  “Have you ever made a mistake, Kareem?” he asked me quietly.

  Too many to count, I thought.

  “I know how easy it is to make a mistake in the heat of competition,” he said, “and how hard it is to recover from that mistake.”

  I looked at Coach Wooden’s kind face and thought how, but for that one spontaneous outburst long ago, I might still be visiting Coach Donahue, watching TV with him.

  A few years after that conversation, I was again sitting in Coach Wooden’s den, this time watching women’s basketball, when the phone rang. It was Jack Donahue. He was in Los Angeles and wanted to visit Coach Wooden.

  Knowing that Coach Donahue was on the other end of the phone didn’t bother me. Since my last conversation with Coach Wooden, I had lost any animosity I’d once had.

  “I’ve got someone here I’d like you to talk to,” Coach Wooden said and handed me the phone.

  I took it. “Hey, Coach,” I said cheerfully. “How are you?”

  “Fine, Kareem, fine.” I could hear the relief in his voice and I was glad.

  We chatted briefly, made arrangements to meet in a couple of hours, and hung up. I turned to Coach Wooden. “That was some coincidence, him calling you while I was here.”

  He shrugged, not even bothering to deny he’d arranged the call. “I’m still your coach,” he said. “Always will be.”

  I met Coach Donahue at my home. He apologized again, as he had done to me and in the press when the story came out. Since then, he’d gone on to a distinguished career, including coaching four Canadian Olympic men’s basketball teams. It touched me that despite all he had accomplished, he still was bothered by how he’d hurt a seventeen-year-old kid almost forty years earlier.

  I told him that I forgave him and that I knew he hadn’t been a racist, just unknowingly insensitive. I thanked him for all he had done for me, which he looked grateful to hear.

  We parted with a handshake and good feelings toward each other. Eighteen months later, he died of prostate cancer. I attended his memorial, happy that we’d been able to resolve what had happened so long ago. I was also grateful to Coach Wooden, not just for bringing me and Jack Donahue together, but for helping me become the kind of man who could let go of animosity and forgive past hurts.

  PART 3

  College Daze:

  My Years of Living Wondrously

  “The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”

  JAMES BALDWIN

  23.

  Welcome to the Hotel California

  My first day in sunny California didn’t turn out as sunny as I’d expected.

  Maybe I’d expected too much. After all, to everyone growing up on the East Coast in the 1960s, Southern California was a utopia of sun, beaches, movie stars, and a laid-back lifestyle. Beach Blanket Bingo, the fifth in a series of beach party movies, had just hit theaters. The Beach Boys’ “California Girls” had just been released and seemed to playing nonstop on every radio station. And there was Disneyland, which was the only one in the world at that time! We assumed that the “happiest place on Earth” beamed out all the overflow happiness to the surrounding areas. The rest of the country might have been burning up from civil unrest, but California heat was for toasting on a quiet beach. The perfect place for me to take a deep breath and discover how I fit into the world—as an athlete, as a student, as a man, as an African American.

  All summer after committing to UCLA, I acted as if I were a rock star on my farewell tour. I hung out with my buddies, went to jazz clubs, played basketball, even played in the Rucker Tournament for the first time. In my mind, I was already unpacking my suitcase in my UCLA dorm. I tried not to act too excited around my friends because I knew a lot of them were jealous. I could see in their eyes what they were thinking: California, man… anything is possible out there. Harlem? Not so much.

  Tension between my parents and me had gone to DEFCON 1. I had taken to staying out later and later until one night I’d come home so late that to escape their yelling I barricaded myself in my room. I dragged my dresser in front of my door while they banged against it and hollered at me about responsibility. I shut them out of my room and my life, imagining myself on a silvery jet plane to Los Angeles. In California, I woul
d finally find out who I was away from the restrictions of parents, Catholic schools, the church, Harlem, and even my friends. All my favorite movies were not about people who start the movie heroic and stay that way—they were about people who started frightened and became brave, started selfish and became generous, started weak and became strong.

  Then my perfect snow globe version of California cracked.

  From August 11 to 16, 1965, a couple of weeks before I arrived, major rioting broke out in the mostly black Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Watts exploded into burning, looting, and killings that spread out over a forty-six-square-mile war zone. It all started after a black driver was arrested for drunk driving. A crowd gathered, the arrested man’s family interjected, and a fight broke out. The incident itself wasn’t the issue—the community’s reaction was incited by what they saw as decades of institutional racism and police brutality. The result was that four thousand members of the California National Guard were inserted into the area to stop the rioting. When it finally ended, there were thirty-four dead and more than $40 million in property damage.

  I now realized that there was no place for me to take a step back from what was going on. It was happening everywhere. Watts was only thirty miles from UCLA. Wherever I went, I would have to confront the racial issues flaring up all over the country. But I was only eighteen. I wanted to study, play basketball, meet girls, act a little crazy, and figure out who I was and what I wanted to do with my life, just like all the white kids got the chance to do. But I had to drag along the additional baggage of race. I thought I’d be able to leave that behind in New York, just for a little while. Watts changed that. Even here under the cheerful sun, I realized I would still be a symbol of all black people, a spokesperson for the black causes, an information kiosk for the curious, and a target for vitriol and violence from the ignorant.

  I walked into my dormitory that first day a little disheartened. As I strolled down the hall to my dorm room, ducking through doorways, students openly stopped and stared at me. I was used to that reaction by now, but I had expected college students in California to be cooler, with less gawking.

  To be fair, the school newspaper had made a big deal of my attending, and plenty of students who saw me that first day offered friendly greetings of “Welcome to LA, man” and “Go Bruins!” But being the guy they were heaping team victory expectations on was isolating. I just wanted to be accepted as a regular student.

  That first day, I decided I’d had enough of being stared at and whispered about, so I marched straight to my dorm room, turned out the light, and went to sleep. My first Saturday night in California wasn’t exactly the giddy celebration I had envisioned all summer.

  The next morning, I was awakened by a ringing phone. I answered with a groggy hello.

  “Mr. Alcindor?” the voice prompted.

  “Uh-huh.” I yawned, still dazed from jet lag.

  “I was told to give you directions to the Newman Center.”

  “The Newman Center?” I yawned again.

  “That’s where they have Catholic Mass. If you hurry, you can still make it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’re Catholic, right?”

  “Newman Center. Mass. Got it. Thanks a lot.” I hung up and pulled the covers back over my head.

  That was the first Sunday in my life that I deliberately skipped Mass. I never went again. The California Lew Alcindor chose his own beliefs. He wasn’t sure yet what they were, but he knew what they weren’t.

  I felt a little guilty for my mother’s sake. She would be disappointed, and I hated to disappoint people. New York Lew Alcindor was nothing if not a people pleaser, a Good Boy who any young woman would be proud to take home to Mama.

  Was that who California Lew Alcindor was, too? I’d have to wait and see.

  Official basketball practice hadn’t started yet, but I wanted to stay sharp, so I walked over to the gym with my roommate, Lucius Allen, a high school All-American guard from Kansas City. We’d chatted in our room about typical subjects: girls, basketball, girls, school, girls. We hadn’t yet seen each other play, so today was going to be an audition for both of us.

  When we arrived, a couple of other freshmen were already there, along with four varsity players. We quickly divided into two teams, freshmen versus varsity. Since they were part of the reigning national championship team, the varsity players probably thought this would be a good opportunity to establish the team pecking order.

  We beat them three games in a row.

  I left feeling pretty good about our freshman team.

  24.

  Life Outside Basketball

  On the basketball court, I felt confident in my skills and I trusted the coaches, so I did everything they told me to do. That part of my life was smooth and predictable. It was the rest of campus life that gave me problems. I was still shy and socially awkward when it came to interacting with other students.

  One place I felt the same confidence as on the basketball court was in the classroom. At first, teachers treated me like the typical dumb jock, not expecting me to participate much in classroom discussions or to raise my hand to answer tough questions. I surprised them all by taking my schoolwork as seriously as I did my sports.

  It was in my English Composition class that I discovered a love that rivaled my devotion to basketball. Professor Lindstrom assigned us to write a descriptive essay about anything. “Anything at all,” he’d encouraged. “But hopefully something that matters to you in some way.” I sat in my dorm room that night nervously gnawing the end of my pen as I struggled to think of a topic. What mattered to me? Basketball? I was sick of talking about that with anyone except guys on the team. School? I’m sure half the class would be writing about how hard it was adjusting to college life. Civil rights? Important, but too broad and preachy. I wanted something about me. As I dug through every corner of my brain for a good topic, I realized I had the John Coltrane album My Favorite Things playing in the background.

  I started writing.

  I wrote about the Village Vanguard, my favorite jazz club in New York. I described the descent into the basement where the walls were checkerboarded with photos of jazz greats who had played there, like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Sonny Rollins. At the end of the tunnel-like room was the spotlighted stage, backed by a red curtain, where the owners, Max and Lorraine Gordon, would introduce Stan Getz, Anita O’Day, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and many other jazz performers, known and unknown. That was the physical place, but what I wanted to convey was how it felt to sit at one of the small round tables on a stiff wooden chair and have the jazz notes burrow inside your brain and chest until you forgot time, despite a parental curfew. And how you’re willing to face the wrath of angry parents just to hear one more song.

  I turned in my essay, worried that the ramblings of a black kid about jazz in a dark New York City basement club might seem too foreign under the harsh sun of California. But Professor Lindstrom selected my essay to be read and analyzed by the entire class. I felt so excited, not just because he had praised my writing style, but because the subject matter of my life and my observations seemed worthwhile to others. I had the same reaction as the day the four of us freshmen beat the varsity players in our informal scrimmage.

  Like I knew what I was doing. Like I belonged here.

  That feeling of belonging was reinforced by my many friends on the basketball team. We worked hard every day for hours, traveled together, and shared the adrenaline rush of competition. It was harder for me to make friends off the team, but one friend I did make became my closest.

  Jimmy Johnson was an upperclassman from South Central Los Angeles, the heart of the black ghetto. He was a straight-A student with a passion for poetry, jazz, and the kind of in-depth political debates that I had come to college for. We discussed the civil rights movement, what being black meant to us personally, how much we had to teach ourselves about our own culture because we hadn’t been brough
t up learning about it. We knew all about the new black pride movement, which advocated for black people taking pride in their natural looks, African heritage, and fellowship with other black cultures. I’d even let my hair grow out into a short Afro.

  My hair symbolized the two very different lives I was leading. In basketball, I followed a very strict regimen of practice and games, practice and games. As a student, I was constantly reaching out to discover new ideas, to figure out what it meant to me. Basketball was all structure, but learning who I was and what I was meant to do was anything but structured.

  My freshman year at UCLA was difficult, just as Coach Wooden had warned. Back in New York, I’d had my own room, which had made me the envy of most of my friends. At UCLA, I suddenly was living in a dorm filled with strangers and sharing a tiny room with my teammate Lucius Allen, a bouncy kid with a “golly gee whiz” Midwestern attitude about everything Californian. Definitely not like my boys from uptown back in New York. But, truth be told, there was something endearing about him. His unselfconscious enthusiasm was contagious. We became good friends and eventually played together for both the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers.

  I quickly discovered that athletes were treated like movie stars at UCLA. But there was a hollowness to that fame, because most of us were broke. My scholarship entitled me to tuition and room and board, but it barely covered living expenses. Edgar Lacey, Lucius Allen, and I had come to UCLA with big reputations, but nothing much in our pockets. We’d chosen UCLA for our futures, but that didn’t make the present any easier. We were all cash-poor almost all the time. Worse, we were surrounded by students who were flush, children of wealthy celebrities and business moguls who drove BMWs to their parents’ Malibu homes. We barely could afford to go out on a date. We were part of a program that was earning millions of dollars for the university, yet I was literally wearing pants with holes in the pockets.