The Full Biography
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Center. Six-time champion. The tallest man in the building who made a single unguardable shot into a twenty-year argument, then spent the decades after the jersey as a writer.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a skyhook: the ball leaving a hand no defender could reach, the goggles, the Laker gold, the Forum already on its feet. The years were 1975 to 1989 in Los Angeles, and before that Milwaukee. What the still cannot show is Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. of Harlem, a Catholic-school center so complete that college basketball banned the dunk while he was using it, a man who declined an Olympic team on principle, and a public writer who has outlived his own scoring record without pretending the record was the point.
He was born on April 16, 1947, in Harlem, New York City. His father, Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Sr., was a transit police officer and a jazz trombonist. His mother, Cora, worked in a department store. The boy grew past the furniture. Power Memorial Academy, a Catholic high school on West 61st Street, made him a city legend before he could vote. The winning streak there ran to seventy-one games. Recruiters came as if the gym were a port. He chose John Wooden and UCLA.
Freshmen were not allowed on the varsity then. In 1966 the freshman Bruins beat the varsity in an exhibition that Los Angeles still talks about. Then the real work: NCAA titles in 1967, 1968, and 1969. Three seasons. Three championships. Wooden’s system met a seven-foot-two instrument that could pass, rebound, and finish. The dunk was so much his that the NCAA banned it from 1967 to 1976 — the Alcindor Rule, a piece of legislation aimed at one undergraduate. He answered by perfecting the skyhook. A hook released at the top of an arm nobody could reach, if he had position, could not be blocked. The ban expired. The shot did not.
In the summer of 1968 he declined the United States Olympic basketball team. Mexico City went on without him. He has been careful, in print, not to call that refusal a formal boycott of the Games. He would not try out. He would not take a gold medal from a country he was not prepared, that year, to represent without conditions. Avery Brundage ran the Olympic machinery. Alcindor would not work for it. The decision cost him the easy patriotism a champion is supposed to perform. It did not cost him sleep he had not already spent.
The Milwaukee Bucks took him first in the 1969 draft. Rookie of the Year followed as if it had been typed in advance. Oscar Robertson arrived the next season. In 1971 they won the NBA Finals, four games to none, over the Baltimore Bullets. Alcindor was Finals MVP. That same year he began using, in public, the name he had taken in Islam: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — noble, servant of the mighty. He had converted in 1968. The newspapers had to learn a new lead. The skyhook did not need a new name. It already had one.
I try to do the right thing at the right time. They may just be little things, but usually they make the difference between winning and losing.Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers the hook, not a legal name. 1971 is the year the private conversion and the professional coronation arrived together. He was no longer the college phenomenon on loan to Wisconsin. He was the man the league would have to solve for two decades, and he would not let the box score be the only sentence.
Power Memorial’s seventy-one-game streak was a New York civic fact before UCLA had him. Jack Donohue was the high-school coach. The boy already had the hook as a hedge. At Westwood the Bruins did not lose a tournament game in his three varsity seasons. Houston beat them in the Astrodome in January 1968 — the Game of the Century, Elvin Hayes, a regular-season night the country watched — and UCLA paid it back in the NCAA semifinal. Wooden’s system met a center who could pass out of a double team. The 1969 draft was a formality. Milwaukee owned the first pick and used it. The 1983 Finals were a sweep the other way: Moses Malone and the Philadelphia 76ers took four straight. Abdul-Jabbar was thirty-six. A lot of big men would have become a banquet. He came back, won in 1985, and kept the hook current until 1989. All-Defensive teams sat beside the scoring titles. The goggles, which he began wearing after an eye injury in Milwaukee in 1975, became the Halloween costume. The defense was the part the costume skipped.
Milwaukee was not only 1971. In 1970 he led the league in scoring as a second-year center. In 1971 and 1972 he led it again. Oscar Robertson, already a Cincinnati monument, became the passer who made the hook a first option instead of a last one. The 1974 Finals against the Boston Celtics went seven games at the Garden and at the Milwaukee Arena. Milwaukee lost. Robertson retired. The city that had taken a title in four straight could not keep the man who had made it possible. The 1975 trade to Los Angeles was a divorce the Bucks never quite recovered from. He had asked to leave. The skyhook went west with the name.
Showtime is remembered as Magic Johnson’s break. The still point was a man already in his thirties who set the post, took the double team, and threw the outlet that started the night. In May 1980, in Philadelphia, he sprained an ankle and sat Game 6 of the Finals. Magic started at center, scored forty-two, and the Lakers were champions. The newspapers wrote the rookie. The veterans in the room knew the season had been built on the hook. In 1982 they beat Philadelphia again. In 1985, at thirty-eight, he was Finals MVP when Los Angeles finally beat Boston in a series the city had been waiting on since the 1960s. 1987 and 1988 made it back-to-back, the last of them against Detroit. Six titles. Six regular-season Most Valuable Player awards — 1971, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1980 — a record that still stands. Nineteen All-Star games. He wore 33 at Power Memorial, at UCLA, in Milwaukee, and in Los Angeles, a number the Lakers retired and the city still treats as a street name.
On April 5, 1984, in Las Vegas, he passed Wilt Chamberlain to become the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. He finished with 38,387 points. The mark held until February 7, 2023, when LeBron James passed it in Los Angeles. Say that honestly. The record moved. The skyhook did not. Nobody has made it a civic weapon again. Wooden’s Bruins had not lost an NCAA tournament game with him in the lineup. The freshman exhibition in 1966, when the kids beat the varsity, is still the story Los Angeles uses to explain what arrived on campus. The Alcindor Rule lasted until 1976. By then he was already a professional whose best move did not need a dunk.
He also took work the box score could not hold. In 1978 he played Hakim, the towering villain, in Bruce Lee’s unfinished Game of Death, a part that still startles people who only know the Forum. In 1980 he played a copilot in Airplane! who is also himself, and then, when the cockpit asks why he is not flying, answers as if the joke had been waiting for a seven-foot-two man with goggles. Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) used the same dry instrument. He wrote Giant Steps while he was still playing. The desk was already the second shop.
He retired in 1989 after twenty seasons, a professional length that would have been a career and a half for anyone else. The last home game at the Forum was a civic good-bye, not a fade. The Basketball Hall of Fame took him in Springfield in 1995. The jersey nights were not the second life. The desk was.
Six things most people never knew
- The dunk ban was, in part, a law against one undergraduate. The Alcindor Rule, 1967 to 1976. He answered with a hook the rulebook could not reach.
- He declined the 1968 Olympic team. Not a press-conference stunt. A refusal to collect gold for a country he would not, that summer, applaud without terms.
- The Muslim name came before the public used it. Conversion in 1968. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the marquee in 1971, the same season as the first title.
- He is funny on purpose. Airplane! (1980), as a co-pilot who is also himself. Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). The stills underfile the humor.
- The second career is ink. Giant Steps. Coach Wooden and Me. Mystery novels. Columns on race and history. He writes as a job, not a retirement hobby.
- The leukemia is public and managed. Chronic myeloid leukemia, diagnosed in 2008, announced in 2009. He has kept the desk. He has not made the disease a brand.
He married Janice Brown in 1971. They had three children. The marriage ended in 1978. Other households followed; the private life was not a second box score. Friends and teammates describe a man who read on planes, who did not perform locker-room noise, and who could be distant in a way that was not contempt so much as conservation. Wooden remained the teacher. Magic remained the little brother who made the fast break a language. The writers who wanted only the hook got the hook. The ones who stayed got the bookshelf.
The later years
Home, after 1989, was Los Angeles and a calendar that looked like a writer’s, not a retiree’s. The Hall of Fame night in Springfield in 1995 was a civic object. The Lakers hung 33. He tried coaching as a special assistant under Phil Jackson from 2005 to 2011, teaching post play to men who had grown up on highlight dunks and had never been asked to own a hook. The job was real. The skyhook still did not transfer. He has said, in print, that the shot requires footwork a generation was not taught. He kept saying it anyway, in gyms that smelled like the ones in Harlem and Westwood, to big men who nodded and then went back to the three-point line.
The books are the long job. Giant Steps (1983) was the first autobiography, written while the jersey was still wet. Kareem followed. Black Profiles in Courage. On the Shoulders of Giants (2007), a history of the Harlem Renaissance that is also a letter to the neighborhood that made him. Brothers in Arms. Coach Wooden and Me (2017), a white coach and a Black center who learned each other in public and did not pretend the learning was simple. The Mycroft Holmes novels, beginning in 2015, are a pleasure he did not owe the league. Columns for newspapers and magazines on race, history, and what a country owes the people who score for it kept the byline current. In 2015 HBO’s Kareem: Minority of One let the camera stay on the man after the points. He treated a deadline the way he had treated a tip-off: show up, do the work, leave the room cleaner.
In 2008 doctors found chronic myeloid leukemia. He announced it in 2009. He has treated it as a condition to manage with medicine, not a plot to tour. In 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named him a United States global cultural ambassador. In 2016 President Barack Obama put the Presidential Medal of Freedom on him in the East Room. On February 7, 2023, he sat in Los Angeles and watched LeBron James pass 38,387. He stood. He did not pretend the record had been a personality. He is living. He is seventy-nine. He still appears when a sentence needs a man who was in Wooden’s gym, on the 1971 parade route, in the 1968 refusal, and at the desk after the jersey. He does not tour as a mascot of his own points. The house is not a museum. The next column is the next tip-off.
After the spotlight moved
It has not fully moved. Every big man who cannot find a post move is still paying tax to a hook he will not practice. Every scoring list now has James at the top and Abdul-Jabbar as the climate that list used to be. The goggles are a Halloween costume. The books are the file that will last after the costume is put away.
He came out of Harlem and Power Memorial, took three titles from Wooden, declined an Olympic gold he could have had, won six professional championships, held the scoring record until 2023, and then kept writing. If you only remember the skyhook, you have the still. If you remember the Alcindor Rule, the name he chose, the 1968 refusal, and the desk after the jersey, you have him.
Portrait: Steve Lipofsky (Basketballphoto.com) · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons