Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

b. 1947 Tier II

A Harlem transit cop's son who was 6-foot-8 by eighth grade

Portrait of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — Yahoo from Sunnyvale, California, USA — 2014 — CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Alcindor was born in Harlem to a transit police officer who also played jazz trombone and a mother who checked prices at a department store, and by eighth grade he already stood six foot eight, taller than most of his teachers. Power Memorial Academy built its whole program around him and lost only once in his last two years, and by the time college coaches came calling he had his pick of the country. He chose UCLA, sat out his freshman year under the rules of the day, then won three straight national championships under John Wooden between 1967 and 1969. During his junior year he converted to Sunni Islam in a quiet ceremony he kept out of the newspapers, three years before he told the public any of it.

Milwaukee took him first overall in 1969, and he won a championship there in 1971 with Oscar Robertson before the Bucks traded him to the Lakers in 1975 at his own request. He spent his final 14 seasons in Los Angeles, winning five more titles as the pivot of the Showtime Lakers alongside Magic Johnson, and shooting a hook shot so far from his body and so high over defenders that opponents rarely got a hand on it across 20 years of trying. He passed Wilt Chamberlain to become the NBA's career scoring leader in April 1984 and finished with 38,387 points and a record six MVP awards when he retired in 1989 at 42. LeBron James did not pass his scoring total until February 2023, and Abdul-Jabbar was in the arena to hand him the ball that broke it.

His conversion carried real cost. He had bought and donated a 78,000-dollar house in Washington, D.C., to serve as headquarters for his religious mentor, Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, and in January 1973 gunmen tied to a rival Black Muslim faction stormed it, killing seven people inside, four of them children under the age of ten, and drowning some of the victims in a bathtub. Abdul-Jabbar was not in the house that day, but he served as a pallbearer at the children's funeral. He also spent his best playing years absorbing hate mail over the name change and the religion, at a moment when much of the sports press still ran his birth name in headlines years after he had asked them to stop.

He became one of the more prolific former athletes in print, writing histories, memoirs and mysteries and a long-running column on politics and culture. A 2008 diagnosis of chronic myeloid leukemia, caught early and controlled for years with the drug Gleevec, turned him into an advocate for cancer research funding and for closing the racial gap in cancer care. Barack Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. He has since had heart surgery and a broken hip, the ordinary wear of age catching up with a body that spent two decades absorbing NBA contact, and continues to write and speak into his late seventies.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

Notable works

Giant Steps book
His first memoir, written with Peter Knobler 1983
Brothers in Arms book
A history of the all-Black 761st Tank Battalion in World War Two 2004
On the Shoulders of Giants book
A history of the Harlem Renaissance and its basketball teams 2007
Skyhook Foundation company
His nonprofit funding STEM education for underserved children 2001
Becoming Kareem book
A memoir for young readers about growing up on and off the court 2017

Life in brief

with age at each point

June 1969 aged 22 Drafted first overall by the Milwaukee Bucks
1971 aged ~24 Wins an NBA championship with the Bucks and Oscar Robertson
May 1971 aged 24 Publicly announces his conversion and new name He had converted to Sunni Islam privately three years earlier.
January 18, 1973 aged 25 The Hanafi massacre kills seven people in the house he donated
1975 aged ~28 Traded to the Los Angeles Lakers
April 5, 1984 aged 36 Passes Wilt Chamberlain as the NBA's all-time leading scorer
1989 aged ~42 Retires after 20 NBA seasons
2008 aged ~61 Diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia
February 7, 2023 aged 75 LeBron James breaks his career scoring record