Scholar-Athlete

There's a five-part video of a conversation with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the New York Times site right now that I recommend checking out. Aside from the fact that the interviewer, Calvin Sims, speaks in this exaggeratedly correct diction that makes him sound like a Muppet, he nevertheless gets us a real glimpse into the mind of Kareem. And what a mind it is. I can't think of another athlete of his caliber more intelligent or thoughtful. Or serious. My only complaint is that Sims didn't ask the one question everyone yearns to ask Kareem - if he'd wanted to, couldn't he have stomped on Bruce Lee in Game of Death like he was a rodent?

But oh well. I'll have to ask that one myself someday. In the meantime, here are a few gems:

-On what he did before big games: "I read. Raymond Chandler, John Le Carre..." (Funny but I think that's what Ron Artest does too).

-On why no one's beaten his scoring record: "“They’re making so much money now, nobody’s going to play for 20 years.”

-On his conversion the Islam: "I wanted to deal with real monotheism as it was explained to the prophets, and I could see clearly that up to a certain point monotheism was about one god, and then the Christians starting saying one was three and three was one, and then you had Muhammad who returned it to there being only one God. So I sort of went with what my instincts told me was the truth.”

-On his new book about the Harlem Renaissance: "I wrote the book so that people could understand me, because the Harlem Renaissance and the echoes of it really form who I am. I absorbed a lot of it through my father who was a jazz musician - he knew a lot of the jazz greats and played with them - so that music was in my household all the time on the turntable, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, Count Basie, Dizzie Gillespie..."

-On the recent eclipse of U.S. basketball in international play: "It doesn’t surprise me very much because the game isn’t being taught very well in the USA, and in the other countries they’re teaching the game according to the fundamentals of the game, as five people working together. That’s something we’re losing sight of here in America."

The Conversation with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (nytimes.com)