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Q&A with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Posted: Thursday March 06, 2003 3:00 PM
Abdul-Jabbar: Today's players are a lot less fundamentally sound than they were 15 years ago. The fact is that in years past people had to stay in college and they learned the fundamentals. They also had to go to class and learn a few things that had nothing to do with the game. And they had to be patient and mature a little bit. It's really very good for a basketball player to go through all that in their teenage years. SI: Could you teach the sky hook to one of today's centers? Abdul-Jabbar: I could teach the sky hook to anyone who wants to learn it, even little kids who can't palm the basketball. It just takes a little bit of patience. SI: Your father was a New York City Transit policeman and a Juilliard-trained jazz musician. Did either profession ever appeal to you? Abdul-Jabbar: My dad was a second-generation police officer. My grandfather had been a police officer in the West Indies. But I probably would have gone for music. My grandfather used to speak of how he didn't like picking up and dropping off prisoners. He felt like he was dealing in human misery and he was glad to leave that behind when he came to America SI: You own five horses in Southern California and you often ride the trails in the San Fernando Valley. Are people surprised to see a 7-foot-2 cowboy come moseying down the trail? Abdul-Jabbar: Yes and no. It's nice to see somebody who recognizes me on the trail. People stop and say hi. They see that my feet aren't dragging on the ground and they are surprised. Horse people are really interesting. SI: The game is tied between your UCLA team and Bill Walton's UCLA team with 20 seconds remaining. Your team has the ball after a timeout. What play do you call and what happens? Abdul-Jabbar: I'd post up, get the ball and threaten the sky hook. If I could, I'd take the shot on Walton. But if I couldn't get that shot off, I'd pass the ball to John Vallely who would hit the jumper. SI: When is the last time you sat down to watch Airplane? Abdul-Jabbar: It's been a long, long time. SI: At this point in your life, why do you have the desire to teach the game? Abdul-Jabbar: I realized that a lot of knowledge really hasn't been transferred across the generations. When I had to do some work with Shawn Bradley in the past, he didn't know anything fundamentally that could help his game. I thought that was really weird, somebody in his position, that was getting paid all this money and he wasn't really fundamentally sound. I saw at that point that there could be a niche for me to teach what I know. SI: Is there anyplace on earth you can go without being recognized? Abdul-Jabbar: There hasn't been one yet. I can't remember going anyplace where I wasn't recognized. Right after Desert Storm we toured Saudi Arabia and played some games. One day I was in Mecca and went to the shrines. I was relaxing in a courtyard and several people from various places in world came up to me and said, 'Are you Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?' That, to me, meant I must be well known. SI: What's your role with CBS? Abdul-Jabbar: I can talk about what it means to get all the way to the championship game and win it. I know what that's about and how that is a special circumstance. But basically I'm there to tell people the how and why of what they're watching on the court. How things happen and why they happen and, at times, why they don't happen. SI: Your UCLA teammate Mike Warren once said that your freedom of youth was stolen. If you could talk to yourself at 17, what advice would you have for the young man? Abdul-Jabbar: That the position you are in will give you a lot of advantages, but you will also lose a few things, certainly some innocence. While you are young, the rest of the world gets to be naive. You don't. You have to give something up. Looking at the whole picture, though, you get more than you give up. --Richard Deitsch Issue date: March 10, 2003
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