Hooking a Job

It is the last Saturday night in April. Sooner football, the next thing to a religion in this state, is months away. So the locals wander in to Cox Convention Center Arena to check out the new guys in town, the Oklahoma Storm of the U.S. Basketball League.

About 2,500 people pay for an $8 or $12 seat--the elite pay $25 to sit courtside--and scatter throughout an arena that seats 14,000. They cheer for Randy Duck and Doug Gottlieb and Sterling Davis and Albert White and Gabe Frank and the rest of the good guys wearing home red. And they boo Fred Warrick and Kenny Gregory and Skip Youngblood and the rest of the visiting Dodge City Legend.

But their attention never strays far from the legend in their midst, the new coach of the Storm, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It is he who gets the biggest cheers, the most autograph requests, the largest number of hands extended.

And for the first time in his life, he is really enjoying it.

Half a continent removed from the city of his greatest glory and a world apart from the life of privilege he lived for so long, Abdul-Jabbar, at 55, has come to this city of nearly half a million to reinvent himself and carve out a new role in the game he so long dominated.

Denied an opportunity to coach in the NBA or at a major college largely because of the perception that he lacks the personality to be a leader, Abdul-Jabbar has come to the minor leagues to prove his doubters wrong.

“I’m thankful for the opportunity,” Abdul-Jabbar says. “The people here have been real nice. Nothing crazy, but they honk when they see me on the street and they are real friendly.”

His biggest fan is James Bryant, the Oklahoma lawyer who owns the team and hired Abdul-Jabbar.

“He reminds me of my history professor,” Bryant says. “He’s not an intellectual athlete. He’s an intellectual. I can see where he easily might have been misunderstood in the world of professional basketball.”

So what brought Abdul-Jabbar back to basketball?

“They say even old fire horses can still hear the bells,” he says.

He is working his way slowly into the job, using five assistant coaches to carry much of the load, both in terms of strategy and team motivation.

Part of the coolness toward Abdul-Jabbar was generated by the stoic silence he showed the world both on and off the court. He knows that won’t cut it in the coaching profession, and, if Saturday night is any indication, he has undergone a personality change.

On the bench, Abdul-Jabbar is animated and vocal, barking orders, waving his arms and opening his eyes wide in enthusiasm at the good moments and shaking his head dejectedly at the bad. He even finds time to come over to the scorer’s table to chide play-by-play announcer Robert Allen for not eating his dinner.

The Storm holds on to win when Eric Coley blocks a Warrick shot in the final seconds. Abdul-Jabbar runs off the court, left fist in the air, as if the Lakers had just beaten the Boston Celtics to win the NBA championship.

Is this really the Abdul-Jabbar so many came to know and not love?

Giving the Silent Treatment

“As big as he is, Kareem uses silence to create a tension that anyone who is uncomfortable in his presence might find unbearable. It’s a testing process that he has incorporated into his life. I find it unfortunate but understandable that, in order to get close to Kareem, one had to undergo this emotional frisking.”

Peter Knobler in “Giant Steps,”

the book he co-wrote with Abdul-Jabbar

Abdul-Jabbar never had a problem on the court. While the other two dominant centers of the Los Angeles era, Wilt Chamberlain and Shaquille O’Neal, depended on sheer bulk to bulldoze any hapless defender stuck in their path, Abdul-Jabbar relied on athleticism and finesse.

No other player in memory had been blessed with Abdul-Jabbar’s combination of gifts, the 7-foot-2 frame of a center, the quickness of a small forward and the shooting touch almost of a guard. Adding to that Abdul-Jabbar’s unique offensive weapon, the sky hook, made him seem unstoppable.

And he usually was. In high school, where, at New York’s Power Memorial, he led his team to a 95-6 record over four years, including a 71-game winning streak. In college, where, at UCLA as Lew Alcindor, he led the Bruins to three NCAA titles and an overall mark of 88-2. And in the pros, where he won six NBA titles, one with the Milwaukee Bucks and five with the Lakers, and, over a 20-year span, became the NBA’s all-time leading scorer with 38,387 points.

Enough said?

Abdul-Jabbar thought so.

“I didn’t want to talk to the public,” he says. “I didn’t want to talk to the media. I was not people-oriented. I really wasn’t very good at communicating. I just wanted to play and go home.”

With the media, he would often respond with terse answers or roll his eyes at a question and flash that bone-chilling Abdul-Jabbar stare.

“It was not my cup of tea,” he says. “I was more cerebral, thoughtful, into other things. Public recognition was not what I was into.”

His silence became deafening after Magic Johnson joined the Lakers in 1979, smiling and bubbly, a media magnet.

“To me, the media was a necessary evil, “ Abdul-Jabbar says. “To him, it was heaven on earth. He did enough interviews for two or three teams. I would have been happy if he had done mine.”

There was resentment among his Laker teammates as well because Abdul-Jabbar often seemed aloof. Although he didn’t deny Abdul-Jabbar’s value to the team, one player carried around and proudly displayed a book of matches that read, “Trade Kareem.”

Getting the Silent Treatment

Although he knew he hadn’t exactly won friends or influenced people, Abdul-Jabbar didn’t figure it would matter when he left the game in 1989 at 42. He wasn’t planning on coming back.

After 33 years on a basketball court, starting in the fourth grade, he says he was “totally burned out.”

So he plopped himself down on a beach in Hawaii for a while, spent time with his kids--he has five ranging in age from 10 to 30--and eventually pursued his passion for black history. After writing a second book on his basketball career, he authored “Black Profiles in Courage” in 1996.

But the itch for basketball came back. It started when he was asked by the Philadelphia 76ers to work with 7-foot-6 center Shawn Bradley.

“He didn’t have a clue,” Abdul-Jabbar says. “He’s a gifted athlete, but he didn’t understand defense. He didn’t understand other aspects of the game.”

In 1998, he took a baby step into coaching by becoming a volunteer assistant for Alchesay High on the Fort Apache Indian reservation in White River, Ariz.

Abdul-Jabbar also taught history on the reservation and wrote a book about his experiences, “A Season on the Reservation: My Sojourn with the White Mountain Apaches.”

Having decided he was ready for a giant step, Abdul-Jabbar put out the word that he wanted to become at least an assistant in the NBA.

Only two executives, Wes Unseld of the Washington Wizards and Ernie Grunfeld of the New York Knicks, responded by interviewing Abdul-Jabbar.

How about the Lakers?

Just before Phil Jackson was hired, owner Jerry Buss, knowing Abdul-Jabbar’s expertise on Oriental rugs, invited his former center out to lunch to discuss a home he was redecorating.

In between the salad and the rugs, Abdul-Jabbar managed to slip in his new career goals.

“I told him I was interested in a coaching job or a front-office position,” Abdul-Jabbar says, “but I never heard from him again. People feel that they can talk to me about anything other than that. I don’t get it. But I’ve moved on.”

Contacted in Los Angeles, Buss said he followed up on the conversation by recommending Abdul-Jabbar for a coaching position at USC.

The Hall of Fame center finally made it to the NBA midway through the 1999-2000 season when Jim Todd replaced Chris Ford with the Clippers. Abdul-Jabbar was brought in to work with center Michael Olowokandi, an experience that proved to be less than satisfying for Abdul-Jabbar

“He wasn’t receptive to me,” Abdul-Jabbar says. “He talked about being receptive, but he wasn’t. He tuned me out because I expected him to work on things that he felt nobody else was working on. Some of the players had already packed in the season and were thinking about things like tennis.”

After the season, Todd was gone and Abdul-Jabbar was back on the job market.

Following the Wooden Steps

So now that he will be standing on the sideline, which of his many coaches will Abdul-Jabbar emulate? John Wooden, architect of the UCLA dynasty, and Jack McKinney, architect of Showtime.

Abdul-Jabbar loved Wooden’s focus on fundamentals and McKinney’s knack for putting players in positions that best fit them.

“Coach Wooden was so far beyond us in terms of understanding the game,” Abdul-Jabbar says. “I think about him a lot.”

Don’t look for Abdul-Jabbar to lose patience as Jerry West often did as a coach.

“It wasn’t because they couldn’t play up to his level,” Abdul-Jabbar says. “People who don’t have patience, don’t have patience. Jerry was very emotional and couldn’t understand people making all that money and not making the effort.”

And don’t look for Abdul-Jabbar to take the scholarly approach of Paul Westhead.

“He was fine as long as he followed what Jack [McKinney] had laid out for him,” Abdul-Jabbar says. “But he kept trying to turn the volume up.”

And don’t look for Abdul-Jabbar to play the psychological games employed by Pat Riley.

“That wears thin, very thin, very quickly,” Abdul-Jabbar says.

Almost Mythical

Growing up in Chicago, Johnell Sloan considered Abdul-Jabbar his hero, spending hours trying to perfect a sky hook of his own. Now Sloan has a chance to learn personally from the master as a member of the Storm. And he couldn’t be more excited.

“Who wouldn’t want to play for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?” Sloan says. “He’s almost a mythical type. Why would any kid in America not want to be in this situation? He played for 20 years, he’s the all-time leading scorer, he played for John Wooden, he played for Pat Riley. You just want to squeeze his brain, learn all you can. You want to be around him 24/7 until he says, ‘Johnell, get away from me.’”

His players, Sloan says, want to pay him back for the experience he has given them.

“We all want to win the USBL title for him,” Sloan says, “because he has been snubbed by the NBA. How can a Larry Bird or an Isiah Thomas be a coach and not him? We all want to show the NBA he deserves to be there.”

Abdul-Jabbar says his next giant step, to a major coaching position, doesn’t necessarily have to be to the NBA.

“A college would be great too,” he says. “I do a lot of lectures at college and I like the academic atmosphere. Anything along those lines would work for me as well.”

There’s also a possibility that, after this three-month experiment--the 30-game Storm season concludes at the end of June--he might decide coaching is not for him.

“It doesn’t look like that will happen,” Abdul-Jabbar says. “I like it. I’m drawn to it.”

He says it with a big smile. At 55, Abdul-Jabbar seems to be finally reaching out, loosening up, silent no longer as he embraces the basketball world he kept at his considerable arm’s length for so long.