Damn!

Excuse the language, but that was my one-word response when I learned that basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was suffering from leukemia. It happened earlier this week, and for me, it was the worst day since Magic Johnson announced he had to retire from pro basketball after learning he was HIV positive.

Forgive me for going old school on you, but allow me to reminisce about the brother for a little bit.

Kareem – that’s what the brothers called him during his heyday, especially the Muslim brothers who were also into hoops – began his legend while still in high school. He played for Power Memorial Academy, a Catholic high school in New York City. But his fame spread farther south, to the Washington, D.C. suburb of Hyattsville in Prince George’s County.

DeMatha High School, a perennial basketball powerhouse located in Hyattsville, clashed with Kareem’s team on Jan. 30, 1965. Power Memorial had won 71 straight games. In the clash of Catholic school juggernauts, DeMatha defeated Power Memorial 46-43 and held Kareem, then known as Lew Alcindor, to 16 points.

It wasn’t often Kareem was held to a mere 16 points in those years. He averaged over 30 his senior year of high school, and then went on to college and led UCLA to three NCAA championships. He won an NBA title with the Milwaukee Bucks in 1971 – totally humiliating my beloved Baltimore Bullets in a four-game sweep.

Eventually, Kareem wound up with the Los Angeles Lakers. He played four seasons there before some 6 feet, 9 inch point guard prodigy named Magic Johnson showed up and reenergized the team. Kareem and Magic were the backbone of the “Show Time” Lakers, dueling perennially with Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics or Dr. J’s Philadelphia 76ers for the NBA title.

It was a time when, for me, watching the NBA was a joy.

For 19 straight seasons, I watched NBA action for four reasons and four reasons only. Those reasons had names. They were Kareem, Magic, Larry and Michael Jordan. By the time Jordan had led his Chicago Bulls to their second three-peat in 1998, Kareem, Magic and Larry had already retired. Once Jordan left the Bulls, I was more or less done with the NBA.

Really, who does the NBA have today? Kobe Bryant? Sorry, he’s no Magic. Lebron James? Sorry, he’s no Jordan. Kevin Garnett? Sorry, he’s no Larry. And there isn’t a center in the league who comes even remotely close to Kareem.

But Kareem has given me more than just basketball memories. He went to a Catholic school where academic achievement was emphasized. (This was during the era when black Americans considered academic achievement a pre-requisite for survival. Today, the more clownish among us claim it’s a “white thing,” but I cling to the notion that most of us still believe what black folks in Kareem’s day believed.) He majored in history at UCLA, took his college courses seriously and, after his NBA career, wrote some books. One is “Black Profiles In Courage.” My favorite is one Kareem co-wrote with Anthony Walton. That one is called “Brothers In Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WW II’s Forgotten Heroes.”

“Brothers In Arms” was published in 2004. The story of the 761st Tank Battalion – an all-black unit derisively called “Eleanor Roosevelt’s niggers” by racists – was one that needed to be told, and, indeed, was long overdue in being told. The casualty rate of the unit was nearly 50 percent. Its members were in combat six straight months (the average time in combat for most troops was one or two weeks before being rotated back to the .....

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