Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Am I writing about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for today because I wrote about Barbara Billingsley for yesterday? Um, yes. Yes, I am. The symmetry was impossible to resist. Am I also writing about him because he deserves to be written about? You’re damn right I am. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is an American icon, and we need to talk more about him. So okay, at least a solid ninety percent of his acting career is him playing a variant on himself; even on Emergency! He played a basketball player stuck in a car, and that’s pretty much just himself. Both of these things can be true.

He was born in New York at 22.5 inches at 12 pounds 11 ounces. He was an only child and my Gods I’m not surprised. His great-uncle was Trinidadian doctor John Alcindor, who published on, among other things, a paper about the connection between poverty and cancer rates. His great-uncle died years before he was born, but honestly it’s not hard to imagine a family where social issues were discussed. He himself attributes his passion about racial issues to the Harlem riot of 1964, which happened when a 5’6” fifteen-year-old was shot by a 6’2” off-duty police officer who claimed he felt threatened. It also didn’t help that a coach he’d apparently felt close to called him a certain word.

I am the wrong person to sum up his basketball career, which is admittedly outstanding. Almost every section of it is longer than the entire Wikipedia page of quite a lot of the people who have been covered for this column, and that’s not even the ones who don’t even have Wikipedia pages. Apparently he had a reputation for being hard to get along with; he says he was shy and distrustful, and given his history that’s not enormously surprising. He’d trusted his coach and then discovered what his coach thought of him.

His acting career actually started when he was with the Milwaukee Bucks. He did an episode of Mannix in 1971; he was playing a basketball player and credited as Lewis Alcindor. Then in 1974, he started doing it more regularly, appearing in The Game of Death with Bruce Lee, under whom he studied jeet kune do. Most of his appearances have remained playing some version of himself, yes, including his delightful cameo in Glass Onion as Benoit Blanc’s Among Us buddy. And, okay, Roger Murdock. Who is not Kareem Abdul-Jabbar no matter what you think, kid. It’s a fantastic role and he’s clearly having fun with it.

But there is also Kareem Abdul-Jabbar the writer, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar the activist. He says people tell him to stick to basketball, but he’s been writing about politics since he was a child. He’s also allowed to have feelings. He is black and he is Muslim and of course he’s scared. Probably not for himself—the optics of going after him, personally, are appalling. But he doubtless knows a lot of other people who are not as safe as he is, and he has expressed concern for all of them. He’s also a fascinating film critic and his written books for both children and adults. He contains multitudes, and he’s doing a lot and will continue to do so I’m sure.