Category: Politics

Excerpted from Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA by Theresa Runstedtler. Copyright © 2024. Available from Bold Type Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. You can buy the book HERE.

Black Players Flood the Leagues People have a feeling that I’m a nasty n*****, you know. See, now I don’t mind that. . . . That, to me, is a compliment.

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, on Black Journal (WNET), 1972

“How it is for a 22-year-old rookie thrust into a pressure-cooker; how it is to be rich and talented and black and troubled.” That is how Roger Kahn of Sport magazine had summed up “Lew Alcindor’s Life as a Pro” back in February 1970. The Milwaukee Bucks’ seven-foot-two center seemed emblematic of the growing power of Black pro athletes, chafing against the rigid expectations of the white basketball establishment, the white sports media, and white fans. Kahn had interviewed Alcindor in a dingy room at the Quality Courts Motel in St. Louis on November 25, 1969. It was 4:00 p.m., just hours before the Bucks were to play a game against the Atlanta Hawks to benefit a local charity and honor some of the retired Hawks stars from the franchise’s days in St. Louis. Alcindor was lying under a brown blanket trying to clear his “hyperactive” mind of all the noise and clutter. The drapes were drawn, the only light emanating from a reading lamp on the night table.

It had been difficult for Kahn to get an appointment with the NBA’s newest superstar. Not wanting to antagonize its franchise player, the Milwaukee Bucks’ front office did little to help the writer connect with Alcindor. Kahn, not surprisingly, had come to the meeting chock-full of nerves and with very low expectations. Even before his difficulties in reaching the enigmatic Black center, he had already had a bad impression of Alcindor thanks to the sports pages. Alcindor was reportedly “mercenary, rude, possibly anti-white,” and “he had an unnerving recent record of aggressiveness toward opponents: one broken jaw, one knockout and one foiled attack in a few months.” As Kahn joked, “You go into this kind of interview carefully, preparing all the questions, gauging your subject, wondering about your own jaw.” Despite his fears, what he discovered instead in that dreary motel room was “a bright, sensitive, and esthetic young man.” It made Kahn wonder. What did this misunderstanding say about the status of Alcindor and other Black people in America? What did it say about US society— “the society that had made him both millionaire and n*****”?

Admittedly, it was hard for Kahn to describe Alcindor for readers. His was not a simple Reader’s Digest story: “The Alcindor phenomenon is a mix of rough edges, and incompleteness and immaturity and wisdom and misinterpretations and rages and regrets.” Yet, love him or hate him, there was no denying the big man’s talent. How white sportswriters and fans wrestled with Alcindor’s dominance on the court and surliness off the court was a microcosm of their reaction to the rising tide of Black professional ballplayers throughout the 1970s.

In the wake of the civil rights victories of the sixties and in the midst of surging Black Power activism and a deepening “urban crisis,” which disproportionately affected African Americans, the racial politics that greeted Alcindor and his generation of Black ballplayers were complicated. “How do you see your role in the black movement?” Kahn asked. Emotionless, Alcindor simply blinked.

Born on April 16, 1947, one day after Jackie Robinson officially desegregated Major League Baseball, Alcindor understood that what was expected of him as a Black athlete was much different than what had been expected of Robinson and other pioneering African American pros. All Robinson had to do was make base hits “because white people thought he wasn’t good enough to do it,” Alcindor noted. But that was not enough anymore. “It’s fragmented, man,” Alcindor said of the wider Black movement. “Some go to church. Some go to school. Some do nothing. Some want revolt.” Although some members of a budding Black middle class had begun to make strides, the Black poor and working class found themselves largely left behind in a changing economy. For the young Alcindor, figuring out where he fit into this complex picture was no easy task, especially because his own ideas about Black activism were still evolving. “Try to get change as quickly and painlessly as possibly,” Alcindor said of his political vision. “Try to stand for something positive. Be something positive.”

For many white sportswriters and fans, Alcindor seemed to be anything but positive. He and the new wave of Black players inundating the pro ranks appeared threatening, even violent. On Halloween night in 1969, the Bucks had played against the 76ers in Philadelphia. Alcindor was matched up against veteran white center Darrall Imhoff , who shoved and elbowed the rookie under the basket. Early in the second quarter, as they both scrambled for a loose ball, Alcindor’s frustration reached a boiling point. He swung his right elbow full force into the back of Imhoff ’s head. “Imhoff fell on all fours, the way fighters sometimes do, and stayed there on knees and elbows too dazed to move,” Kahn recalled. The Philly crowd hooted. Alcindor walked to mid-court and stood with his hands on his hips, watching calmly. When Imhoff came to, he took a run at Alcindor, but 76ers forward Jim Washington and one of the referees stopped him and ushered him off court. He was so out of it that he did not return until the second half. When Alcindor later fouled out, the fans booed him. Alcindor gave the peace sign, but the boos continued, so he clenched his fist and held it high in a Black Power salute. After the game, journalists swarmed him with questions, but he said, “I have no comment.”

There was no love lost between Alcindor and white sportswriters. He had antagonized Evans Kirby, a local reporter charged with interviewing him for a magazine feature in the Milwaukee Journal. To Kirby, the rookie was supposedly “aloof in speech and habit.” He was not only late but brusque, and at the end of the interview he left without even saying good-bye. Perhaps Alcindor’s abruptness stemmed, in part, from the fact that he had already sold the exclusive rights to his life story to Sports Illustrated for a reported $20,000. Nevertheless, he had managed to alienate the local media, for he often declined to answer questions or replied with grunts and one-word answers. Alcindor refused to play by the typical rules of etiquette that white reporters and fans alike expected of African American athletes: be humble, be grateful, be cheerful, be accessible, and, above all, be apolitical. Instead, the quiet, brooding rookie kept white sportswriters and fans off balance.

Shy and introverted, Alcindor desperately wanted to maintain his privacy, but this was proving hard in a small market like Milwaukee. A seven-foot-two Black man in a majority-white Midwestern city, Alcindor could not help but stand out. Bucks fans mobbed him, and reporters wanted a piece of him at all times.

“You better get used to it,” Kahn warned him.

Alcindor looked off into the distance.

“You’re going to play for a while, maybe 15 years,” Kahn continued. “Well, you better be ready for 15 years of interviewing. That’s part of what all the money is for.”

“I don’t have to give up my privacy,” Alcindor replied. “I’m not peddling that.”

Although he worked hard on the court, he felt in no way compelled to go out of his way to please or placate the NBA’s majority-white fan base. At a game against the Seattle SuperSonics in late November 1969, Alcindor fouled out in the final seconds of the fourth quarter after lunging at Black center Bob Rule. As the capacity crowd of 13,000 in the Seattle Center Coliseum jeered at him, Alcindor responded by spitting on the court. The game ended with a narrow 117‒115 victory for the Bucks. As the teams walked to the locker rooms, a white teenager ran toward Alcindor and yelled, “You big bum!” With one swing of his long arm, Alcindor knocked the teen to the floor. “It gets me,” he told Kahn, “the way people say now you’ve got the money, you’ve got contentment. The money makes for a stability, but there are pressures, man. Out there you’re a vector for all the hostility in the stands. It all comes and they’re shouting that I’m not hustling and that I stink and I’m a bum.”

Unlike some African American athletes from previous generations who sought crossover acceptance from white fans, Alcindor was unapologetically Black. His family background and his experiences growing up in New York City likely colored his approach to the game. Although his parents had met in North Carolina, when his father, Ferdinand L. Alcindor Sr., was stationed at Fort Bragg during World War II, they later settled in Harlem. His family took great pride in their Black diasporic roots. Alcindor’s paternal grandfather had migrated from Trinidad to New York and spoke the West African language of Yoruba.

“Around my house, there was no speaking shamefully about our ancestors,” Alcindor recalled.

When Alcindor’s father graduated from the prestigious Julliard School of Music in 1952, symphony orchestras were still racially segregated. With no prospects for a career in classical music, he held on to his job as a bill collector for a furniture company and then took a post in the Transit Authority Police Department. Part of a rising African American middle class, the Alcindors left Harlem, moving further north to the racially mixed Dyckman housing project in the neighborhood of Inwood. “He carries all that heritage within him, a sense of black aristocracy and black dignity and how the Moors were warriors and how his uprooted family was supposedly free in a society which condemned a Julliard man to work in subways,” Kahn observed. Alcindor carried a heavy chip on his shoulder, carved from generations of injustices.

Back in spring 1969, he had brought that sense of pride into his initial contract negotiations with the pros. Accompanied by his father and two UCLA alumni acting as his pro bono financial advisers, Alcindor had met with representatives from the NBA’s Bucks and the ABA’s Nets in his home city of New York. To avoid a nasty and protracted bidding war, his negotiating team had asked Milwaukee and New Jersey to submit their best and final offers. Alcindor had wanted to return to the New York area to play professionally, but the Bucks made the strongest offer. He and his advisers were shocked: they had expected the ABA to offer more money in place of stability and prestige. Despite Alcindor’s misgivings about moving to the Midwest, he signed with Milwaukee for around $1.4 million over five years, reportedly the highest contract ever paid to any athlete. “I had wanted to sign with the Nets,” he later explained, “but I was offended to be taken so lightly. If they hadn’t taken me seriously when I was calling the shots, how would they treat me once I was under contract?” From the very start, Alcindor wanted to exercise his power and gain control over his career.

Kahn’s time with the Bucks’ star rookie had revealed as much about the racial tenor of the times as it had about the man. “The pressure is enormous,” Kahn explained.

“He is potentially the black athlete of his era, as Jackie Robinson was the black athlete of another. His role is not more difficult than Robinson’s—after all, the Klan is not threatening to shoot Alcindor. . . . But it is more complex. The black movement has become more complex.”

Alcindor, in many respects, embodied the intricacy of African American politics in the post‒civil rights era. His favorite book was the Autobiography of Malcolm X. He listened to the jazz music of Miles Davis, converted to Islam, and studied African languages. Although he called out white racism, he was not a militant in the same vein as the Black Panthers or Kwame Ture. He simply endeavored to be his own man, to explore and define his evolving sense of Blackness on his own terms.

In June 1971 Alcindor stood in front of the US State Department, thanked by teammate Oscar Robertson and Coach Larry Costello, for a press conference announcing their upcoming government-sponsored tour of the African continent. The trio were to spend three weeks abroad, visiting Algeria, Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Tanzania, and the Somali Republic. At each stop along the way they would conduct basketball clinics, give exhibitions, and meet with the respective national teams. Basketball and Black American athletes had long been tools of US soft power in the region, deployed to court the favor of African people and their politicians during the Cold War.19 For Alcindor, however, this was an opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream. “For me this is a return to the fountainhead,” he told reporters. He had studied African history at UCLA and now looked forward to visiting the original home of his forebears.

Alcindor then introduced Habiba, his wife of just a few weeks, who would also accompany them on the trip. And he insisted that reporters call him by his new name, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “I first used the name in 1969,” he said, “but now that I am going overseas to represent my country, I would appreciate that courtesy.” He explained that Kareem translated to “noble or generous,” Abdul meant “servant of Allah,” and Jabbar meant “powerful.” As his faith had deepened, it no longer felt authentic to keep it hidden from public view. “I had lived two lives too long,” he recalled. “I knew I was going to take some heat for it, but Muhammad Ali had established a precedent and borne some of the brunt of the attack.” To dispel any confusion between his religion and that of the controversial heavyweight boxer, however, Jabbar clarified that he was not a member of the Nation of Islam. He practiced Sunni Islam under the mentorship of Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, the leader of a Black American sect known as the Hanafi Muslims.

Stunned, reporters asked about the logistics of using his new name. Jabbar said that he did not expect the Bucks to immediately change his name in their programs or advertising because the fans knew him as Alcindor. But, he insisted, “I do expect people to use my Islamic name when they’re talking to me.” Anytime that reporters addressed him as “Lew” or “Mr. Alcindor,” he respectfully but resolutely replied “My name is Kareem” or “My name is Jabbar” before answering their questions. Later on, he signed autographs as “Kareem.”

Though exceptional in size and talent, Jabbar was by no means singular in his desire to push back against white Americans’ rigid expectations of Black athletes. As African American ballplayers gained strength in numbers and greater financial clout in the early 1970s, they were no longer content to abide by the rules and customs of the white basketball establishment, whether on or off the court. Some even refused to be bound by Black leaders’ ideas of what it meant to be respectable role models for Black youths. Diverse expressions of Black identity and Black Power from political and cultural currents outside sport seemed to be seeping into professional basketball.

Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA by Theresa Runstedtler. Bold Type Books. Copyright © 2024. You can buy the book HERE.