Abdul-Jabbar scores in ‘odd-couple’ tale
Athletes rarely write books about their coaches. That relationship is often fraught and adversarial. Rare, also, is the college athlete who devotes time to becoming a writer. It helps mightily, of course, to have a story, and Kareem AbdulJabbar has plenty to tell.
Abdul-Jabbar was one of the greatest basketball players of all time and remains the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. He has since gone on to carve out an eclectic career as a commentator and author.
His new book is “Coach Wooden and Me: Our 50-Year Friendship On and Off the Court.”
John Wooden, his college coach at UCLA and a legendary figure in his own right, couldn’t have been more different from Abdul-Jabbar. ■
Abdul-Jabbar (born Lew Alcindor) was raised in the Harlem section of New York. As a teen, he found himself caught in the infamous Harlem riot of 1964. A white police officer had shot a black kid dead. (Yes, that story again.) AbdulJabbar already was more than 7 feet tall. The Harlem scene, all four days of it, was horrific. “Even crouching,” Abdul-Jabbar writes, “I still hovered over everyone else. I had never been so scared in my life as that night. But I’d also never been so angry at the police, who dismissed the protesters by shouting, ‘Go home!’ Holding up photos of the young victim, protesters hollered back, ‘We are home!’ ”
Abdul-Jabbar entered UCLA in the fall of 1965. “I was all about fast subways, hot jazz, and civil rights politics,” he writes: “He was John Wooden, a fifty-fiveyear-old five-foot-ten-inch white man from a hick town in Indiana. He was all about, what? Tractors, big bands, and Christian morals? We were an odd-couple sitcom waiting to happen.”
The reign of national championships began. Abdul-Jabbar perfected his “sky hook” with Wooden’s help. The NCAA nincompoops, however, outlawed the dunk.
The ’60s, the movement and black power were erupting right alongside the sky hook. For all his decency, Wooden wasn’t really moved by the suffering of the black athlete. Abdul-Jabbar touches on this, but far too delicately. The scenes of fans spearing him with the n-word after games — with Wooden standing by in shameful silence — are stomach-churning.
“When it came to racism, I thought Coach Wooden had a good heart, but he was on the sidelines in this game,” Abdul-Jabbar says.
Even if there is some hagiography in this chronicle, there is much to admire. A host of lovely revelations show player and coach staying in touch, time and time again, sitting in the coach’s home watching old Westerns, talking about aging and life — and sometimes history as it relates to black Americans.