My Father the All-Star
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. in New York City in 1947, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is widely considered one of the greatest basketball players of all time. He was named the NBA’s Most Valuable Player a record six times and is the league’s all-time leading scorer with 38,387 points. In addition to being an athlete, Abdul-Jabbar is an actor and author. In 2016, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama. He has five children, Habiba, Sultana, Kareem Jr., Amir, and Adam.
Everyone in los angeles got swept up in Lakers Mania in the early 1980s. Magic Johnson and my dad were huge celebrities. But they were also really different men, and my father didn’t benefit from the comparison. Magic was friendly and well-liked—he was always having parties at his huge house or throwing them at Lakers owner Jerry Buss’s estate in Beverly Hills. My dad lived in Bel-Air. We didn’t even know the neighbors. Win or lose, my dad didn’t want to be bothered. He wanted to go home and be by himself.
The flashiest thing in my father’s house was an Andy Warhol portrait of him based on a Polaroid Warhol had taken. Otherwise the place was typical for the era. It was a one-story bungalow with Persian carpets everywhere, a Jacuzzi in the bathroom, and a room full of records. I have a lot of memories of my father spending hours in that room, listening to music, or in his bedroom, watching television. I grew up mostly with my mom, but my siblings and I spent summers with my dad. He often seemed distant and disconnected from us children, even though he complained bitterly about our mom having been awarded custody of us.
My brothers would try to bond with my dad by listening to jazz with him. I never did. I hate jazz. Part of the reason is that my dad would put on discordant acid jazz and speed down Sunset Boulevard in his Mercedes-Benz. I associate those old albums with feeling queasy. Weird episodes like that defined our relationship when I was young.
My dad wasn’t just weird with me. He was weird with everyone. He wasn’t a status-conscious person who performed for other famous people. His closest friends weren’t who you’d expect. They were Lou Adler, who produced The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Richard Rubinstein, who made Pet Sematary. That wasn’t because my dad wanted to be an actor. He never took an acting class, never asked Lou or Richard for roles (though Richard did cast him as a genie in an episode of Tales from the Darkside). He just got along well with them. Richard shared my dad’s love of the Dune series and eventually bought the film rights to make a miniseries. Lou, who produced Carole King’s Tapestry, also owned the Roxy Theatre, a famous LA nightclub, so he and my dad bonded over music. Richard and Lou accepted that my dad didn’t understand the concept of returning favors. The people who stayed friends with my dad all really wanted to be able to call him a friend.
If my father had lived a normal life, I think he would have caught on more quickly that he didn’t have normal relationships with people. But because he was very tall and very famous and black, he didn’t have normal relationships with anyone anyway. No one knew how to handle him, but they wanted to be his friend—even if he treated them poorly or was aloof, which he often was. Since he was that way with everyone, I didn’t take his behavior personally. Nevertheless, it hurt.
Even before my parents divorced, the NBA schedule kept my dad away from home. During my childhood, there wasn’t a continuity to his presence. Though I vaguely knew that his whereabouts were tied to the basketball season, mostly it felt like he just showed up and then was gone. This makes it hard to talk about my father, since building the story is like sorting through random film clips. I remember attending the premiere of Airplane! with him and thinking that we were just going to a movie. My siblings and I tried to play some basketball with him, but he wouldn’t let us get the ball. My dad taught me to ride a bike, and he taught me to play baseball. He did those things. He just disappeared for months in between.
Still, I was proud of him. I called him Big Daddy when I was really young and basked in his stature. One time when I was playing at the park, a boy got on the slide in front of me. He stood at the top of the ladder and said I couldn’t come up. I was upset, so I told him I was going to get my daddy. And I did. My father showed up, and suddenly the kid was looking Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, this seven-foot-tall man, straight in the eyes. My dad was very matter-of-fact. He told the kid he could slide down the slide or get knocked down it. My dad would never have hit the kid, but for me, his daughter, he could be threatening when he wanted to be.
Habiba (age sixteen), Sultana (age nine), and Kareem, 1988
My brothers and sister were willing to remain silent in order to get along with my dad; I wasn’t, which contributed to his impression that I was a troublesome child. For example, I’d demand to know why he didn’t call on my birthday. Whenever he failed to live up to my expectations, I would get emotional and tell him, which made him uncomfortable.
Changing my name didn’t help, either. My siblings and I were born into the Hanafi Muslim community outside Washington, DC, which was intensely isolated. We grew up observant, but I don’t consider myself Muslim. The name Abdul-Jabbar was, from my perspective, a name handed to my father by a spiritual leader of a religion toward which I felt ambivalent. When I was seventeen, I made the decision to change my last name to Alcindor—my father’s family name—and asked my mom to sign the legal documents. A story about it ran in the National Enquirer, and my dad threw a fit. To this day, I don’t think he’s forgiven me, but I hope he’s made peace with it.
For years, my father was at the epicenter of the universe that is Los Angeles. But that never changed the way he saw the world or himself. He was always 100 percent himself, for better or for worse. I think I’m like my dad. I freeze people out. I can be a little standoffish. But there are good things I’ve gotten from him as well. I’m not status conscious—I like people for unpredictable reasons. I always thought that was a nice thing about my dad. Most important, though, I’ve learned to be myself, unapologetically and always.