Becoming Kareem

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  I never discussed my unhappiness with Coach Wooden. We hadn’t yet developed that type of relationship. I was on my own, shedding at least part of the identity that my parents had worked so hard to instill. And I hadn’t yet figured out what to replace it with.

  So I turned to basketball. I always knew exactly who I was and what was expected of me on the court.

  25.

  My First Day with Coach Wooden

  John Wooden stood in front of the greatest freshman team in the history of basketball. We sat on the UCLA bench awaiting the first words of wisdom from the world-famous coach we had come from all parts of the country to follow. Some, like me, had turned down full scholarships at other schools just to learn at the feet of the great John Wooden.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Coach Wooden began dryly.

  “Good morning, Coach,” we chorused.

  He looked at us all pleasantly and cleared his throat in preparation to speak.

  We leaned forward, ready to tattoo his wisdom on our brains for eternity.

  “Today, we are going to learn how to put on our socks and sneakers correctly.”

  Although we didn’t dare snicker, we did look at one another and wonder what the punch line to the joke was.

  He bent down and took off his shoes and socks. His pale pink feet looked as if they’d never been exposed to light before. “We are going to talk about tug and snug,” he said. “Tug. And. Snug.”

  The 1965–66 freshman basketball team sitting on that bench included five high school All-Americans. I had graduated from Power Memorial in New York as the most highly recruited player in the country. My college roommate, Lucius, was already considered the best young player to come out of Kansas. Lynn Shackelford from Burbank, California, was an extraordinary shooter, and Kenny Heitz, from Santa Maria, California, was a confident, polished forward. Our fifth starter was Kent Taylor, a walk-on from Texas who later transferred to Houston. We had come to UCLA because it was the best college basketball program in the country—the perfect place for us to fully develop our talent before graduating to professional basketball. The Bruins had won two consecutive national championships during my junior and senior years in high school and were the preseason favorite to win a third during my freshman season, although they would have to do it without me, Shack, and Kenny, as NCAA rules forbade freshmen from playing varsity basketball. We knew how much raw basketball talent and potential was sitting on this bench, eager to be molded by the great John Wooden.

  But was this really the great John Wooden?

  Snug-and-Tug Wooden?

  We knew what he had accomplished, we knew that his program had produced great basketball players, and we were excited to learn from him. But these were the first minutes of the first day of our four-year college career. We were anxious to begin learning the techniques that had turned UCLA into a championship program.

  Was snug and tug the secret to UCLA’s success?

  He grinned at our puzzled faces. “As Benjamin Franklin said, ‘For want of a nail,’” he said, which only made us more puzzled. He sighed and recited:

  For want of a nail the shoe was lost,

  For want of a shoe the horse was lost,

  For want of a horse the rider was lost,

  For want of a rider the battle was lost,

  For want of a battle the kingdom was lost,

  And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

  He shrugged. “You want to learn about basketball, read Benjamin Franklin.”

  The greatest team in the history of basketball just stared.

  “If you do not pull your socks on tightly,” he said firmly, “you’re likely to get wrinkles in them. Wrinkles cause blisters. Blisters force players to sit on the sideline. And players sitting on the sideline lose games. So we are not just going to tug. We are going to also make it snug.”

  He demonstrated. We copied what he did.

  When we were done, he smiled.

  We had entered the gym confident bordering on cocky and just gotten our first lesson in humility from Coach Wooden. We knew that lots of teams started strong in a season, only to succumb to player injuries and drop out of the running. Any injury that kept you from playing hurt the whole team. It was that kind of attention to detail that helped make John Wooden the greatest coach in college basketball history.

  None of us ever missed a practice or a game because of a blister.

  “I don’t drink and I don’t smoke,” he began again, “and the only reason you have to be up beyond nine or ten o’clock at night is if you’re studying.” His Hoosier accent gave his words a nasal tone, but the intensity of his look gave the words biblical importance. “Number one in your life is your family. Number two is the religion of your choice. Number three is your studies; you’re here to get an education. Number four is to never forget that you represent this great university wherever you are, whatever you are doing. And number five, if we have some time left over, we’ll play some basketball.” He raised his eyebrows. “Questions?”

  There were none.

  That first meeting made me ask myself, What exactly did I hope to learn from Coach Wooden? I wanted him to somehow translate my relentless desire to be a great player, and my hope to surpass even my own expectations, into practical skills. Ball handling, shooting, setting picks, moving without the ball, teamwork. Check, check, and check. But there was something more that I wanted, something I couldn’t articulate. I wanted the game to make sense to my life in a way that was beyond just having a skill set. I wouldn’t expect him to understand what I meant. He was old, an ancient fifty-five. He couldn’t possibly get what was going on inside a young eighteen-year-old guy like me.

  He wouldn’t get the chance because my freshman team was coached by Gary Cunningham, so Coach Wooden, who focused on the varsity team, didn’t have too much to do with us. But we practiced each afternoon at the same time that the varsity did, with the gym separated by a large curtain.

  “Why the curtain?” my roommate asked me one day as we ran warm-up laps.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he doesn’t want them to see us and pick up bad habits.”

  “You mean like your turtle speed?” And he burst ahead of me. I ran after him. I was pretty fast for my size, but no one was as fast as Lucius.

  At times, I would look and see Coach Wooden peeking around that curtain, just standing there watching us. Some of the guys would pick up their game when they knew he was watching, in an effort to impress him. I didn’t change my play because I always played as hard as I could. My parents had instilled in me a disciplined work ethic that dictated I always try to work harder than anyone else in the room. I’d look over and see him studying us as if he were waiting for eggs to hatch, but it didn’t make me nervous as it did some of the others. I was confident. Things were already going the way I wanted them to go.

  Besides, I was studying him as hard as he was studying us. I respected his reputation, but this was four years of my life we were talking about, and whatever professional career I hoped to have afterward. I had to make sure that he wasn’t a million dollars of promise worth ten cents on delivery. It wasn’t arrogance but self-preservation, survival. This was the only shot I would get at proving myself to the pros, and I had to make it count.

  Sometimes Coach Wooden would call over Coach Cunningham, give him some names, and a few of us would be sent over to work out with the varsity team. In part, he was helping us develop our skills, but he was also giving us a taste of what we could expect if we stuck it out. We would be playing on an elite team that already moved with balletic precision but struck with SWAT-like force.

  Practices were highly structured, scheduled to the minute, to the second, to the nanosecond. We knew that he spent two hours every morning just working out the schedule for that day’s two-hour practice. He wrote everything down on three-by-five-inch index cards and kept a loose-leaf notebook with detailed notes of every practice session. Most other coaches would simply have pulled
out their familiar list of drills that they used every year with every team, but Coach’s philosophy was that teams were much more fluid. Other coaches saw their teams as a deck of cards: If one card drops off, you just grabbed another card from the deck. The cards were interchangeable because they only looked at the backs of the cards. Coach Wooden looked at the face values. No two cards were alike just as no two players were alike. He even realized that a player was not the same one day as he was the next. Each time one player progressed or faltered, the whole team’s ability was affected.

  Sometimes he would climb to the very top level of the Pauley Pavilion and watch us play from up there, where we must have looked like a bunch of beetles scurrying around. Other times he would be courtside, walking along with the players like a shadow.

  I had never seen a coach think like that before. I had heard coaches talk about seeing the Big Picture before, but Coach Wooden saw the game in 70 mm Panavision. Yet he saw it on a microscopic level, too.

  Every morning he scribbled on those note cards, with drills for the team and customized drills for individuals. I had never met anyone with such an eye for detail and such commitment to his players as names rather than numbers.

  Sometimes my teammates and I would laugh a little about how focused he always seemed to be. Secretly, we also felt relief that he took our playing that seriously and wasn’t willing to settle for anything less than our best. He saw his job as helping us find out how far we had to go to reach our best. Turned out it was farther away than any of us imagined. And a lot harder to get to.

  Yes, he was driven to be the best coach possible, but he had no inclination to be our fatherly friend. He was our coach, and that meant he had a responsibility to each of us—a responsibility that was more a calling than a job. He dressed like a barnstorming Midwestern evangelical preacher, and he had the fervor for making us not just good players but good men. You can’t shepherd impressionable boys for four years without changing them.

  But as a freshman, all I cared about at first was that game we would play against the varsity team to inaugurate the new thirteen-thousand-seat Pauley Pavilion. Coach Cunningham had planted the seed in my mind during my visit to UCLA, and I was eager to see how we would do against the team that had just won two national championships and was favored to win again this year.

  On November 27, 1965, game day finally arrived.

  I’d played in front of large crowds before, but this was different. I had been brought here to help win national championships for the three years I could play varsity. There was definitely a “let’s see what the kid can do” vibe in the air. I was expected to prove myself, to convince them that they hadn’t made a mistake. We were expected to lose, so there would be no shame in that, but if we lost big, I thought I would be blamed. I had to keep reminding myself to breathe.

  “Let’s go, Turtle,” Lucius said, brushing by me as we took the court. “Try to keep up.”

  “Look for me, Rabbit,” I said. “I’ll be the one above the rim.”

  We both grinned, but we could each see the nervousness in the other’s face. The only one on our team who looked confident was Coach Cunningham.

  In front of a full house of screaming fans, and thousands more watching it live on TV, I took my first shot in Pauley Pavilion… and completely missed the entire basket.

  I swallowed something the size of a basketball—my pride, I think—and just pressed on. I didn’t miss much after that, piling up thirty-one points. We easily defeated the national champs, 75–60. We could have beaten them by a larger margin, but Coach Cunningham took out our starting team with more than four minutes left. At the party after the game, Coach Wooden was nothing but gracious and congratulatory to the freshman team. He later commented on the game, “It was instantly obvious what Lewis could do and how he could dominate a game.”

  Although it was an evening of triumph for the team—and vindication for me—I came away with something more. Watching Coach Cunningham’s show of respect for Coach Wooden, and seeing Coach Wooden’s genial response, planted the seed in me that there truly were more important things than winning: relationships.

  26.

  Meeting Muhammad Ali

  One advantage to living in Los Angeles and being a well-known athlete was that I got to meet famous people I admired. The athlete I most admired at that time was the boxing legend Muhammad Ali. He was only five years older but had already made his mark on the world as the youngest person to defeat a heavyweight champion for the title—though he had been stripped of his title for not submitting to being drafted into the army, because, as he explained, “I ain’t got nothing against no Viet Cong; no Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” Half the world was chanting his name in praise; the other half was sharpening pitchforks and lighting torches to go after the “upstart Negro.” To me, he epitomized the athlete with moral integrity and personal courage. The kind of man I hoped one day to become.

  When I first met Muhammad Ali, he was performing magic tricks on Hollywood Boulevard. I was a freshman walking down the street with two of my buddies when we saw him strolling along with a small entourage, doing sleight-of-hand illusions for fans who would come up to him. Despite his legal problems with the government and his tumultuous professional career, here he was, casually sauntering down the street as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Ali’s magic wasn’t just the simple tricks he performed, but his ability to draw everyone’s attention to him, whether he was in a crowded room or on a busy boulevard. And once he had their attention, he never disappointed them. No matter how many people were around, he was the only one you looked at. He exuded confidence, a sense of purpose, and an undeniable joy.

  I shyly approached him to say hello.

  “Ah, another big fan of magic,” he responded when I greeted him. “And I do mean big.”

  Everyone laughed, including me.

  He was friendly and polite and charming…and then he was gone, moving down the street like a lazy breeze, a steady stream. A force of nature: gentle but unstoppable.

  My buddies and I walked away, jabbering giddily about how cool it was to meet the champ, but to me that meeting was much more than running into another celebrity in LA—I’d admired Muhammad Ali since I was thirteen, before he changed his name from Cassius Clay, when he and Rafer Johnson won gold medals in the 1960 Olympics. At that time, the NBA had allowed black players just ten years earlier, and Jackie Robinson had integrated baseball just three years before that. In 1946, the Los Angeles Rams integrated the NFL. So while all eyes were on black athletes to see if they could measure up to white ones, black kids in 1960 didn’t yet dare dream of a professional sports career because it was so rare. However, when I watched Rafer and Cassius, I did dream. They were the epitome of the skill, power, and grace of the black athlete, and they inspired me to push myself harder to be such an athlete.

  Muhammad Ali’s influence on me in those six formative years from when I was thirteen to when I met him on Hollywood Boulevard wasn’t just in athletics. Not only had he conquered the boxing world through his undeniable dominance in the ring, but he had mastered the art of self-promotion unlike anyone else. By cannily playing the obnoxious court jester for TV cameras, Muhammad’s brash, outrageous antics ensured that Something Would Happen. He bragged relentlessly and shamelessly—and in verse! He riled up white folks so much that they would pay anything to see this uppity young black boy put back in his place. That place, for black people of that time, was wherever they were told to be. Sure, famous athletes and entertainers were invited to sit at the adult table of celebrity, but for everyone else of color, the struggle was still in its infancy. For black people accepted at the adult table, opportunities were limitless. If you were smart and wanted to maintain a successful career, you kept your dark head down and your mouth shut, and occasionally you rhapsodized about how grateful and blessed you felt to be an American.

  Not Muhammad Ali.

  He was a fighter, whether in or out of the ring. In the ring, h
e was as much businessman as athlete. Out of the ring, he was a champion of justice. His refusal to submit to the draft during the Vietnam War on the grounds that “my conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people” caused him to be sentenced to five years in prison, fined $10,000, and banned from boxing for three years. He didn’t fight for three years during his physical prime, when he could have earned millions of dollars, because he stood up for a principle. In 1971, his conviction was overturned by the US Supreme Court in an 8–0 decision, but the damage had already been done.

  The next time Muhammad and I met was a few months after our street encounter, at a lavish Los Angeles party mostly attended by college and professional athletes. Members of various UCLA and University of Southern California (USC) teams were there, as were some of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I saw Muhammad floating like a butterfly through the party, flirting with all the women and charming all the men.

  Like a typical gawky and insecure freshman, I drifted off on my own to check out the musical instruments the band had abandoned when they took a break. I started quietly hitting the drums, working up a nice beat, when suddenly Muhammad Ali was next to me strumming a guitar. Muhammad’s personal photographer, Howard Bingham, immediately swooped in, posed us, and snapped a photograph of us jamming that appeared in Jet magazine. When he left, Ali and I sat there alone.

  “You sounded pretty good,” Ali said to me, nodding at the drumsticks. “You play?”

  “Nah, I was just fooling around. My dad’s the musician in the family.”

  “Yeah? Professional?”

  “No. He’s a cop.”

  “My dad painted signs.” He looked into my eyes. “When I was little, I asked my dad, ‘Why can’t I be rich?’ So he points to my arm, you know, meaning my black skin, and says, ‘That’s why.’”