Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr.; April 16, 1947) is an American former professional basketball player. He played as a center for 20 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA) with the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers. He played college basketball for the UCLA Bruins. A member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Abdul-Jabbar won a record six NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards. He was a 19-time NBA All-Star, a 15-time All-NBA Team member, and an 11-time NBA All-Defensive Team selection. He was a member of six NBA championship teams as a player and two more as an assistant coach, and was twice voted the NBA Finals MVP. He was named to three NBA anniversary teams (35th, 50th, and 75th). Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, Abdul-Jabbar broke the NBA's career scoring record in 1984, and held it until 2023.
Abdul-Jabbar was known as Lew Alcindor when he played at Power Memorial, a private Catholic high school in New York City, where he led their team to 71 consecutive wins. He played college basketball for the UCLA Bruins, winning three consecutive national championships. Abdul-Jabbar was a record three-time most outstanding player of the NCAA tournament. Drafted with the first overall pick by the one-season-old Milwaukee Bucks franchise in the 1969 NBA draft, he spent six seasons with the team. After leading the Bucks to their first NBA championship at age 24 in 1971, he took the Muslim name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Using his trademark skyhook shot, he established himself as one of the league's top scorers. In 1975, he was traded to the Lakers, with whom he played the final 14 seasons of his career, during which time the team won five NBA championships. Abdul-Jabbar's contributions were a key component in the Showtime era of Lakers basketball. Over his 20-year NBA career, his teams reached the playoffs 18 times and reached the NBA Finals ten times.
At the time of his retirement at age 42 in 1989, Abdul-Jabbar was the NBA's regular season career leader in points (38,387), games played (1,560), minutes (57,446), field goals made (15,837), field goal attempts (28,307), blocked shots (3,189), defensive rebounds (9,394), and personal fouls (4,657). He ranks second in career points, minutes played and field goal attempts, and is third all-time in both total rebounds (17,440) and blocked shots. ESPN named him the greatest center of all time in 2007, the greatest player in college basketball history in 2008, and the second best player in NBA history (behind Michael Jordan) in 2016. Abdul-Jabbar has also been an actor, a basketball coach, a best-selling author, and a martial artist, having trained in Jeet Kune Do under Bruce Lee and appeared in his film Game of Death (1972). He also appeared in Airplane! as Roger Murdock, a pilot who is repeatedly mistaken for Abdul-Jabbar. In 2012, Abdul-Jabbar was selected by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be a U.S. global cultural ambassador. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Early life Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. in Harlem, New York City, the only child of Cora Lillian, a department store price checker, and Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Sr., a transit police officer and jazz musician. Cora was born in North Carolina but came to Harlem as part of the Great Migration. Ferdinand Sr. was the child of immigrants from Trinidad; his uncle was the Black activist and medical pioneer Dr. John Alcindor.Jamie Greene (27 December 2017), "The Great Big Beautiful Podcast, Episode 162: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar", Geek Dad. Abdul-Jabbar grew up in the Dyckman Street projects in the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, which he moved to at the age of 3 in 1950. At birth, Abdul-Jabbar weighed and was long. Always very tall for his age, he was already by the age of nine. Abdul-Jabbar was often depressed as a teenager because of the stares and comments about his height. By the eighth grade (age 13–14), he had grown to and could already dunk a basketball.
Abdul-Jabbar attended Power Memorial Academy, a private all-boys Catholic high school, where he was one of the few Black students. He wore the jersey number 33, which he chose in tribute to his favorite player, New York Giants fullback Mel Triplett. He would continue wearing this number throughout his college and professional career. He led coach Jack Donohue's teams to three straight New York City Catholic championships, a 71–game winning streak, and a 79–2 overall record. This earned him "The Tower from Power" nickname. His 2,067 total points were a New York City high school record. The team won the national high school boys basketball championship when Abdul-Jabbar was in 10th and 11th grade and was runner-up his senior year. He had a strained relationship in his final year with Donohue after the coach called him a nigger.
Abdul-Jabbar wrote for the Harlem Youth Action Project newspaper. The Harlem riot of 1964, which was prompted by the fatal shooting of 15-year old black boy James Powell by a New York police officer, triggered Abdul-Jabbar's interest in racial politics. "Right then and there, I knew who I was, who I had to be. I was going to be black rage personified, Black Power in the flesh", he said.
College career
Abdul-Jabbar was not able to play professionally in the NBA out of high school. At the time, the league only accepted players beginning with the year that they could have hypothetically graduated from college. His other options to play basketball professionally would have been to join the Harlem Globetrotters or play overseas. However, Abdul-Jabbar's goal was to attend college. Recruited by hundreds of schools, he was the most sought-after prospect since Wilt Chamberlain. Southern teams that were segregated were willing to break the color line to acquire Abdul-Jabbar. He chose to attend the University of California, Los Angeles, after being recruited by Bruins assistant coach Jerry Norman. Baseball Hall of Famer and UCLA alumnus Jackie Robinson also wrote to Abdul-Jabbar, encouraging him to attend the college.
By now tall, Abdul-Jabbar was relegated to the freshman team in his first year with the Bruins, as freshmen were ineligible to play varsity until 1972. The freshman squad included Lucius Allen, Kenny Heitz, and Lynn Shackelford, who were fellow high-school All-Americans. On November 27, 1965, Abdul-Jabbar made his first public performance in UCLA's annual varsity–freshman exhibition game, attended by 12,051 fans in the inaugural game at the Bruins' new Pauley Pavilion. The 1965–66 varsity team was the two-time defending national champions and the top-ranked team in preseason polls. The freshman team won 75–60 behind Abdul-Jabbar's 31 points and 21 rebounds. It was the first time a freshman team had beaten the UCLA varsity squad. The varsity had lost Gail Goodrich and Keith Erickson from the championship squad to graduation, and starting guard Freddie Goss was out sick. After the game, UPI wrote: "UCLA's Bruins open defense of their national basketball title this week, but right now they're only the second best team on campus." The freshman team was 21–0 that year, dominating against junior college and other freshman teams, as Abdul-Jabbar averaged 33 points and 21 rebounds per game.
Abdul-Jabbar made his varsity debut as a sophomore in 1966 and received national coverage. Sports Illustrated described him as "The New Superstar" after he scored 56 points in his first game, which is still an NCAA record for a player in their debut. He scored 61 later in the season. Averaging 29 points and 15.5 rebounds per game, he led UCLA to an undefeated 30–0 record and a national championship, their third title in four years and first of seven consecutive. After the season, the dunk was banned in college basketball in an attempt to curtail his dominance; critics dubbed it the "Alcindor Rule". It was not rescinded until the 1976–77 season. Abdul-Jabbar was the main contributor to the team's three-year record of 88 wins and only two losses: one to the University of Houston in which Abdul-Jabbar had an eye injury, and the other to crosstown rival USC who played a "stall game"; there was no shot clock in that era, allowing the Trojans to hold the ball as long as it wanted before attempting to score. They limited Abdul-Jabbar to only four shots and 10 points.
During his college career, Abdul-Jabbar was a three-time national player of the year (1967–1969), a three-time unanimous first-team All-American (1967–1969), played on three NCAA basketball champion teams (1967, 1968, and 1969), was honored as the Most Outstanding Player in the NCAA Tournament three times, and became the first-ever Naismith College Player of the Year in 1969. He was the only player to win the Helms Foundation Player of the Year award three times. He had considered transferring to Michigan because of unfulfilled recruiting promises. UCLA player Willie Naulls introduced Abdul-Jabbar and teammate Lucius Allen to athletic booster Sam Gilbert, who convinced the pair to remain at UCLA.
During his junior year, Abdul-Jabbar suffered a scratched left cornea on January 12, 1968, in a game against California (UC Berkeley) when he was struck by Tom Henderson in a rebound battle. He missed the next two games against Stanford and Portland. His cornea would again be scratched during his pro career, which subsequently caused him to wear goggles for eye protection. On January 20, the Bruins faced coach Guy Lewis's Houston Cougars in the first-ever nationally televised regular-season college basketball game, with 52,693 in attendance at the Astrodome. In a contest billed as the "Game of the Century", Cougar forward Elvin Hayes scored 39 points and had 15 rebounds, while Abdul-Jabbar, suffering from his eye injury, was held to just 15 points as Houston won 71–69, ending UCLA's 47-game winning streak. Hayes and Abdul-Jabbar had a rematch in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament, where UCLA, with a healthy Abdul-Jabbar, defeated Houston 101–69 en route to the national championship. UCLA limited Hayes, who was averaging 37.7 points per game, to only ten points. Wooden credited his assistant Norman for devising the diamond-and-one defense that contained Hayes. Sports Illustrated ran a cover story on the game and used the headline: "Lew's Revenge: The Rout of Houston." As a senior in 1968–69, Abdul-Jabbar led the Bruins to their third consecutive national title.
During the summer of 1968, Abdul-Jabbar converted to Sunni Islam from Catholicism. He adopted the Arabic name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, though he did not begin using it publicly until 1971. He boycotted the 1968 Summer Olympics, deciding not to try out for the U.S. Olympic basketball team, who went on to win the gold medal. Abdul-Jabbar was protesting the unequal treatment of African Americans in the United States, stating that he was "trying to point out to the world the futility of winning the gold medal for this country and then coming back to live under oppression".
As the NBA did not allow college underclassmen to make an early NBA draft declaration, Abdul-Jabbar completed his studies and earned a Bachelor of Arts with a major in history in 1969. In his free time, he practiced martial arts. He studied aikido in New York between his sophomore and junior year before learning Jeet Kune Do under Bruce Lee in Los Angeles.
School records As of the 2019–20 UCLA Bruins men's basketball team season, he still holds or shares a number of individual records at UCLA: Highest career scoring average: 26.4 Most career field goals: 943 — tied with Don MacLean Most points in a season: 870 (1967) Highest season scoring average: 29.0 (1967) Most field goals in a season: 346 (1967) — also the second most at 303 (1969) and the third most at 294 (1968) Most free throw attempts in a season: 274 (1967) Most points in a single game: 61