Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's scoring record lasted nearly four decades
When he retired at 42 in 1989, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar owned the NBA career marks for points, games, minutes and blocked shots, among others. His 38,387 points, built largely on an unstoppable skyhook, stood as the league's top total from 1984 until 2023. He also once played a pilot in Airplane!
He was born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. on April 16, 1947, in Harlem, the only child of a department store price checker and a transit police officer who also played jazz. His father's family came from Trinidad. He weighed nearly 13 pounds at birth, reached 5 feet 8 inches by age nine, and was 6 feet 8 inches and dunking by eighth grade. The constant staring left him often depressed as a teenager.
At Power Memorial, a Catholic boys' school in New York where he was among the few Black students, he chose number 33 to honour New York Giants fullback Mel Triplett and kept it for life. Nicknamed the Tower from Power, he helped build a 71-game winning streak and set a city scoring record of 2,067 points. At UCLA he won three straight national titles and was named the NCAA tournament's outstanding player three times, still a record.
The one-year-old Milwaukee Bucks drafted him first overall in 1969, and in 1971, at 24, he led them to their first championship before adopting the Muslim name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Traded to the Lakers in 1975, he spent his last 14 seasons in Los Angeles, winning five more titles and anchoring the Showtime era. He collected a record six MVP awards, made 19 All-Star teams, and saw his teams reach the Finals ten times. ESPN later called him the greatest center ever and second only to Michael Jordan overall.
Basketball was only part of it. Bruce Lee taught him the martial art Jeet Kune Do and cast him in the film Game of Death, and in Airplane! he played co-pilot Roger Murdock, whom a boy keeps mistaking for Abdul-Jabbar. He has written best-sellers and coached, was named a U.S. global cultural ambassador by Hillary Clinton in 2012, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2016.
Source: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
