When Bruce Lee Trained with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Summary

When Bruce Lee met Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a month after the 1968 national college basketball championship, he was still known as Lew Alcindor, the most hyped young basketball star in history.Article continues after advertisement Lew was seven feet two and, for his whole life, had been unable to hide. He disarmed reporters with a fierce intelligence masked by a laconic intensity. He was just completing his junior year at UCLA, and after indulging in two years of partying, drugs, and women, he wanted something different. “All sophomore and junior years I’d been looking for something to believe in,” he would later write. During those two years, he had been in the eye of the storm. In the “Game of the Century,” witnessed by fifty-two thousand in the Houston Astrodome and millions more on television on January 20, 1968, he brought men’s college basketball to new heights. That night he played with blurred vision after having his cornea scratched. UCLA lost by a basket to the University of Houston, breaking their forty-seven- game winning streak, and the team melted down in its aftermath. Lew’s closest friend, a Black man from South Central Los Angeles, quit the team in a dispute with coach John Wooden, and racial tensions simmered in the locker room the rest of the season. To him, Bruce was as effective a teacher as John Wooden. Both were focused on fundamentals, preparation, and what worked. By the end of the season, Lew had led UCLA to its second consecutive national championship and was voted Most Outstanding Player for the second year in a row. It was the year that began the “March Madness” era. But after the season, he retreated.Article continues after advertisement Born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor in 1947, the day after Jackie Robinson desegregated pro sports, he had grown up in an integrated housing project in uptown Manhattan. In third grade he stared at a Polaroid of his class: “There I was, freakishly towering over all the other kids, with skin much darker than every...