Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is one of the greatest basketball players in history, a successful writer, civil rights activist, actor, and historian.
But he never liked being in the limelight.
“I am not a charlatan,” commented the elusive star.
After decades of hiding a bit, however, Abdul-Jabbar is preparing to start a national tour with performances in which he will talk about his life, the people who helped him and answer questions from the public. They promise to be captivating encounters with someone who rubbed shoulders with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, and Wilt Chamberlain, and was a lifelong disciple and friend of legendary basketball coach John Wooden.
The tour was inspired by his 2017 best-selling book “Becoming Kareem,” about his life from infancy to age 24.
Emotional, funny, at times heartbreaking, it tells the story of a brilliant and hard-working boy, enormously introverted, who was always the tallest in his class.
And also the only black, which made him the target of expressions of racism that left deep wounds that took decades to heal.
“I wrote the book because I thought that the process I went through could be useful to the youth of today,” Abdul-Jabbar told the Associated Press at the offices of the Skyhook Foundation, a non-profit charitable organization that he created several years ago to offer educational opportunities for young people.
After it was posted, he was told by his friend Roy Firestone that he should tell his stories before live audiences, which would give him a chance to inspire young people and clear up some misconceptions that come from his gamer days. The terse, cutting responses that he gave after games, for example, sometimes gave the impression that he was a manifestation of arrogance and surly, not shyness.
“It was unfortunate,” he says now. “I think it stopped me from running teams and advertising because people wanted to think the worst” of you.
It’s not that he didn’t have a full life before and after basketball.
He was a six-time NBA champion, assistant coach in two other titles. He took home the MVP award six times and is the top scorer in NBA history with 38,387 points, a record no one has come close to since retiring 29 years ago.
He wrote more than a dozen books ranging from children’s adventures to stories of prominent African Americans and crime novels that included Sherlock’s older brother Mycroft Holmes.
“I really enjoyed Sherlock Holmes as a kid,” he says, admitting that until high school he thought the detective was a real-life character.
His office is full of objects alluding to his years as a player and also to his African roots and his work in defense of civil rights. Jazz music is playing. His father was a NYPD and a talented jazz musician.
Abdul-Jabbar may not be as shy as he used to be, but he is very careful when he speaks. And it can be fun.
It confirms that the story is true that President Donald Trump sent him a note telling him everything because he had criticized him, and that he made a ball of paper and threw it into a basket, with a basketball move.
Despite the fact that he suffered from leukemia that is in remission and underwent a quadruple bypass three years ago, he looks like he did in his playing days, in jeans and a T-shirt.
“I had no other choice,” he says when it is mentioned that he turned 70 last year. “I’m not very convinced that ‘life begins at 40’. What happened at 40 is starting to get old. Something’s not working with that, ”he says with a laugh. AP
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar announces tour to promote her book
