When you were growing up in New York, did you ever imagine that this would happen, that you would reach that pinnacle? I No, I did not. I was always seen as being I was too thin, you know. I was supposed to be like Will Chamberlain, you know, three pounds of men. You know, I never made it that far, you know, Hi, Brian, Hi Katie. That was Kareem Abdul Jabbar, one of the NBA's all time grades. By the way.
He's seven ft two and weighs two pounds soaking wet, or so we're told, and he is our guest this week. I had the chance to speak with him earlier this month in Los Angeles at the Milking Conference. You and I got to hang out there, Brian. It was really fun and fascinating, and we recorded this interview out of the studio and in front of a live audience. Kareem was absolutely captivating. People were so excited to see him because he does transcend sports. Brian. I think he's become
a voice for so many important social issues. You know, I grew up in l a in the eighties and nineties, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar was a really big deal. Even for somebody like me who wasn't a rapid sports fans watching fan instead of the latest game. Yeah yeah, I just teed that right up for you, didn't I subcommittee hearings were a little more exciting for me than the Lakers.
But anyway, we digress. He was a voice on a lot of social justice issues, on a lot of the way that African Americans were being mistreated, particularly during that period, and even as his basketball career ended, his activism really continued. He was a prolific campaigner for Hillary Clinton last year. He's spoken out on criminal justice reform and on Muslim issues too, because famously he converted to Islam as a young man, and so we we cover all of that.
Are you covered all of that in your conversation with Kareem? You know, I first got to know him Brian when he got involved with Stand Up to Cancer, because he was diagnosed with lymphoma and was very generous with his time and support of that organization that I started along with some other crazy women. And uh, he was always struck me as being an exceedingly philanthropic and thoughtful individual.
We had a wide ranging conversation about his faith, of course, about his relationship with John Wooden, about race relations today, about Donald Trump, and of course about basketball duh. And I wanted to know if he ever gets tired of hearing that people consider him the greatest basketball player of all time, because it has to do with the game I love so much. I can't hear that too much.
You know, I'm very proud that I somehow worm my way into that conversation whether I am or am not the greatest ever, at least people wonder about that, and that that's I'm pretty proud of that. You have so many highlights as you look back on your career. But when we were in the green room waiting to go on, I asked you if you had a snapshot of one moment in your basketball career, what would that be? Oh? Well, for me, that's very easy, especially for the fans here
in Los Angeles. Beating the Boston Celtics, you said, people always ask you about that. Right now they do. I mean especially here because it's so much residents. Yet that's at that point the Lakers were oh and eight against the Celtics in World Championship competition. Going back maybe to when the Lakers were in Minneapolis, it just went all the way back and there's just a long, uh period of frustration and the season. The very season before that, we gave a game away in Boston Garden. We were
very very angry about that. So being able to come back the next year and beat them and win the final game in Game six in Boston Garden was incredible. It was very special woman for the team, for the franchise, for all the folks here in Los Angeles, and for me personally. You know, I was m v P. I was able to leave my team, uh at its most important time. So, yeah, you're not a real smiley person, but you're smiling when you're telling that story. Well, yeah,
that's that's that's a great one. You know, you always feel good when you know you get the guy. You're the guy that rises in with the cavalry and saves everybody and the pretty girls kiss you and all of that stuff. You have written a new book, uh it is the twelve book, and it's called Coach Wooden and Me are fifty Year Friendship on and off the Court. And you start this book by talking about when you
got the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama. And I know that he brought up your n c A, the banning of dunking during your time in college, and he said, when a sport changes its rules to make it harder just for you, you are really good. Well, it must have been very very cool to get that Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was especially an incredible group of people. Right. That's the thing that got to me. So many people there that I admired and who had
affected my life in many different ways. Uh, Robert de Niro or Ellen or Cecily Tyson Coach wouldn't have gotten that same Presidential Medal of Freedom thirteen years earlier. Right, And Um, I was going to read a passage that that you wrote early on. You're so prolific. Where do you find all this time to write? I get help, I do, get help, you do. But you're a good writer though. Yeah, And I got a great guy that helps you with my my research, and uh, he's great. Well,
let me read this passage. Um. Coach was an old white Midwesterner with old fashioned ideals. I was a quiet, but cocky black kid from New York City who towered eighteen inches over him. He was a devout Christian. I became a devout Muslim. He loved big band music of the swing era. I love modern jazz. On paper, it's understandable that we would have a good working relationship as coach and player. But nothing on that same paper would even hint that we would have a close friendship that
would endure a lifetime. So talk to me about your friendship with Coach woulden how it developed, what he taught you, and and tell us a little bit about why he was so universally admired. He was universally admired because he had so much patience with us. He wanted us to be the best we could be. You want us to be the best uh husbands and fathers we could be. He wanted us to be the best citizens we could be.
And he just used basketball as an analogy to teach us about life and about discipline and a whole lot of things that we thought we knew everything about when we got here. I just I laugh, you know, because I just thought, Hey, I'm ready, I should be going into the NBA, but I have to go to college. But I wanted to go to college. You know, I'm I'm the first person in my family graduated from college. Coach wouldn't really explain it to us how important it was,
how important learning things were. Uh, the values that endure in families and successful teams. Any success that I have, uh is uh gotta be He's got to take some of the credit for it. Your friendship lasted his entire life really after you got to know him. He used to go see him and sometimes just kind of sit quiet and Uh. We were both baseball fans, so we talked about a number of things. UM. Coach wouldn't know a whole lot about the things that just astounded me.
Some of it I didn't find out until very late in the time that I knew him, Like some of the stuff that he did for the civil rights movement. It is unbelievable for me. Coach woulden Uh was involved in getting the n a I a National Association of Intercollegiate Athletic Association that tournament integrated. They invited his team in nineteen seven to come. He had a very good team team that year. Um, they wanted to be come.
He said, yeah, sure, and then they told him all about it and said, oh, you have a black guy on your team. You can't bring him here. It's it's for white's only. Coach Wins said, you know, we we played the whole season together. We're not going to stop that at this point, thank you very much. We're not coming. And he hung the phone up on the guy and
the team didn't go. Next season, his team did better, and the n ai tournament people called him again with the same conversation, and they got the same reply, and he got ready to hanging the phone up, and but they relented and h coaches player ended up being the very first Black American to to play in that tournament. Now I played for coach, wouldn't right at the end of the Civil rights movement. He never spoke to me
about it. I didn't find out about it until, uh, shortly before he died that he had done that and it had been an advocate for black athletes. And uh, yeah, I know that many of your books have been about African American history, speaking of that, about Black Americans who have had a profound and sometimes overlooked impact on this country. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Um,
how do you feel about the state of race relations today? Um, it's disappointing to me to see some thing's moving backwards. I don't think things can go, but so far backwards after President Obama, who did I thought such a great job. Um, but I'm disappointed to see some of the old things start to try to rear their heads. You know that so many of our children, I know my children don't feel racial issues like my generation had to deal with them,
or especially the generation before me. Um I was born. And it's it keeps getting better. I think each generation that our children are are able to say, hey, we're all Americans. We be come from a very many different cultures around the world. Los Angeles County has over they speak over a hundred languages in our schools. I found this out. I know people in the l a unified school district and tell me, so, man, these things over
a hundred languages. Um. The malting part of the world is incredibly large, and we can all come here and be Americans. It's it's an incredible system that we have and yet and moving backwards, so that that that's bothered me, and uh, I hope that uh it's gone far enough and uh we all stop and think a minute and keep it moving forward. You know. It's it seems far, far too often when we hear about a young black
man being killed by police under sometimes questionable circumstances. I was just reading yesterday about that fifteen year old boy in Dallas who uh was shot by a police officer when the car he was in was backing up, and initially the police that it was reversing in an aggressive manner um. That statement, by the way, was later retracted. But how do we stop these heartbreaking incidents from happening?
Have you? You know, there's been so much attention on these shooting scream as you well know, do you do you see any solution or anything that's happening in departments, say, around the country that gives you hope or you know, every time you hear about a story like this, do you think, why, why isn't more being done to address
this problem? Well, I'm encouraged by a few things that that I see in that attempt to try to deal with these issues, with the cameras, the uh, the body cameras, and just the fact that that we can talk about it now and I know that it's a problem. For the longest time, people used to deny that it was a problem, and then they have Then they have this
thing called the cell phone with cameras on it. Right, everything changed that That changed a lot of things because people began to understand that it really was a problem. Lack Americans weren't making these things up just to cover their own innate criminality. People believe that mynth. You know that that's a myth. People would actually believe that. But
now we can see that it's it's just bias. Um, all criminals deserve to be apprehended and prosecuted, no matter what color they are, no matter you know what the crime. That said, Uh, we can't be biased in doing that. You know, either it is probable cause that there isn't you know, lots of workern as you know, is being done with implicit bias, you know, unconscious bias at police
departments all over the country. So do you do you feel hopeful that retraining and I mean some of this is so deeply ingrained, right, very it's it's ingrained in the culture of our country. Some of it goes back to, uh, the fugitive slay that which was I believe eighteen fifty where one I think I'm kidding, I don't know, Yeah, yeah,
I think you're right fifty one. But um, whatever it was American citizens were told that they should apprehend and hold escape property, which actually were people fleeing, uh, being kidnapped and worked to death in the South, so that they could make a profit on on cotton. That that's was the premise. You know, Uh, this is our property, and you guys got to help control these people because we can't control them in there again, innate and lee
wild people because they come from Africa. And it was a real great the propaganda job that enabled that that system to last until people realized that these people were human beings. And thank having for President Lincoln. Uh, despite despite what Mr Trump has to say, which brings me to my next topic, how do you think he's doing as president? Jeez Um, it's real obvious disparity between what we're going through now and I thought the competence and
honestly of President Obama, it's a dramatic difference. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be back with more from Kareem Abdul Jabbar right after this, and now back to my conversation with Kareem Abdul Jabbar or kJ as I call him. You. You wrote a piece for the Washington Post about what it means to be black during a Trump administration. And here's an excerpt injustices were easier to endure when there seemed to be a sustained path
to improvement that the country supported. But now we have the what have you got to lose? Non policy? The bulldozes the path to rubble. Specifically, how do you believe that path is being bulldozed kareem um? Just the way that they're trying to uh return tax dollars to the wealthiest one percent on the backs of people who need money, uh for better educational opportunities and roads and airports and
train infrastructure, bridges, tunnels. They need to be upheld taking away from the things that benefit the middle class and give lower class people jobs. It's not it's not a good formula. And I don't you know, having someone who's a multi millionaire in office who doesn't care or even understand the the workings of how people make it from the lower classes into the middle class or possibly into
the upper class. He doesn't understand how that happens because he was smart enough to you know, inherit two hundred million when he when he was born. You know, I didn't have those kind of smarts, so I had to do it the hard way, and um, most of us have to do it that way. Let's let's talk about when you converted to Islam nearly fifty years ago. What motivated you to do that? Cream. I was raised Catholic, and the Catholic Church had a big hand in the
slave trade. I resented that, but I had a strong belief in monotheism. So as a person of African descent, I wanted to practice Monotheism in a way that was more compatible with where I was from, and that was Islam. I learned about his Lama. I read the autobiography of Malcolm X. That really prompted me to want to learn about Islam, and I found it to be something that made sense to me, and I converted when I was
about the nineteen or twenty years old. We've seen hostility towards Muslims, not just in this country but around the world. What can be done about that? And what do you think is the most misunderstood part of Islam? I think the most misunderstood part about Islam is that they feel that, uh, we're taught to be violent. The Muslim community during the time of the Prophet were was attacked, and they learned
how to be vigilant, and that's in the Koran. To be vigilant, but to make peace with people and to keep up your end of all peace treaties. That that's what the Koran tells us. That's what most Muslims used to try to do. And now there's some crazy people. Let's say that they are Muslims and they are barbaric, murderer some of the things that they've tried to put out there, these issist people, it's it's barbarity. They didn't
learn that from the teachings of the prophet Muhammad. It's just it's like saying that the Christian knights of the ku Klux Klan represent the teachings of Jesus, So that that's impossible. This radical Jahodism or whether they want to call it, um, that's not that's not compatible with the teachings of Islam. And I hope people can get that. Thank you know, you've you've spoken out about this, You've
written about it extensively. Um. One of the complaints that you know, I've heard in various circles is that there aren't enough moderate Muslims speaking out, not just in this country, but around the world against this this fundamentalists uh interpretation if you will, of the Kuran. Do you wish that more people would speak out against that as a way of really explaining what Islam truly is well, I don't think that voices of moderation are heard in the places
where these things are happening. The places where these things are happening are are ruled by uh, really bad governance, strong men, kings. Uh, they're very often corrupt. If they have any mineral wealth, there's one group that controls it and controls all the wealth in the country and therefore sets the agenda for everything. And the common person is forgotten in those places. And you have really very wealthy elites that they don't It's like a whole family of Trump's,
you know, like thousands of them. It's bad stuff. You know, they have a very distorted view of what life is about. What was your reaction when President Trump temporarily banded travel from at first seven and later six predominantly Muslim countries. I was very disappointed. I think he's trying to escapegoat He's trying to escapegoat one group, and um, I think it's caused some very bad things that start happening. Hate crimes have risen. We saw what happened in the Jewish
cemetery in St. Louis, the mosque in Texas. Any mom I think in New Jersey was was murdered. Um. You know, it's it's getting really more serious. Acts of violence directed against Muslims or against people who people think are Muslims. Some seekh people, most the people from India who wear turbans. People some people think they're Muslims, they're not. They're They're getting attacked. It's getting crazy and it doesn't make sense.
And the leader of our country should try to really calm this whole atmosphere down and you know, be rational. There are people we need to fear, but just anybody who looks different fearing them is not That's that's not going to get it. Let me ask you about your chronic mylod My Lloyd leukemia. You were diagnosed in two thousand nine. Today you're still in remission, feeling good, very good.
Thank you, and you were awarded a double Helix Medal in two thousand eleven for your work and raising awareness for cancer research. You've been very helpful to stand up to cancers and we appreciate that so much. Greem Um, so so how thicky, How how did that diagnosis change you for your priorities, your perspective. I think it really helped me understand that how precious my time is. Well,
Raymond and I talked about this. He said, the Angel of Death was on vacation in China, going to all the beaches, and now are driving up and down with your boulevard in a cab looking for you. Um, things start to you know, your perspective changes, you know, all of a sudden, Hey, you might run up on the end of your days and you want to make sure that you you do the right things for all the people and all the causes that that are important to you. You know. So it's really helped me get a lot
more done. You are so outspoken about a variety of issues. Do you ever regret sort of putting yourself out there in such a way. I know you have two million Twitter followers. I don't even want to read those comments. Cream. That scares me to death, even the idea of that. Um, but I'm sure you get a fair amount of backlash. Yeah, yeah, I know you do. Yeah, yeah, thanks for reminding me. But he comes in the form of like tweets. Now you don't really get any thing right, No, but that
that that's uh. Actually it's easier for them with with tweet, they don't have to thinking. It's very hard for these people, and you limit the number of characters that see. It's easier on them. You know, do you ever do you ever engage with them? No? No, never, No. I really took a lot of heart and inspiration from from Mr Lewis, Mr John Lewis. I remember watching on the news the time when he let those people across they had been Pettis Bridge, and I wept. I was like fourteen or
fifteen years old. I was crying. And the man is he's not bitter, he's not angry. I've heard him speaking. He said, if you don't put your life on the line, you're not committed to non violence and uh progress, And it just it It makes me smile and makes me realize that they you only have so much time, and you can't worry about how you leave here. You got to leave here doing the right thing. That's such a that's such a great way to end our conversation. But
I have a few more questions. Real quickly. Um. I wanted to ask you. First of all, you turned seventy. You're so skinny. Yeah, so so what up with that? You just do have to watch what you eat? Apparently not. I've always been skinny, I know that. But but I mean how you you how for someone who's spent so much of his life in top physical uh shape? How how has it felt to age? If you're Kareem Abdul Jabbar,
I feel that I've done pretty good at it. Um. You're building a swimming pool, Yeah, so I can swim every day? Yeah? Is that something you do regularly? Swim? Yeah, it's a family thing. Kareem moved to Orange County and he's building flaming fool. I asked him if he saw the Real Housewives there. He said, no, no, no, I don't want to say but not even at the grocery store. No, no, no. My grandmother was from a part of my family's fur in the West Indies. I grow on from Trinidad, part
of training dad called Grand River. There's there's no plumbing out there. She swam in the river to bathe or in the ocean. So flaming has always been a big deal. What else do you do to stay in shape, some yoga, jump rope and stuff. I'm trying to keep the pounds off and stay healthy and cherish these days. I'm on borrow time now, so I'm hoping I'm gonna be huge debt here. Um, Jim Gray are my friend Jim Gray
is here somewhere. And I said, Jim, think of a really good sports question for Karee because I'm not super sporty, but so this was his question. You came along with Bill Russell, Bill Walton, we're big men. Really mattered, Um, but what do you think about the current stars like Steph Curry and Lebron It's become a smaller man's game and the time when giants roam the earth is kind of over now. I don't really understand that question, but
it sounded good and and I thought it. I don't know, I kind of he was very poetic and he just came up with it like that. So what do you
think of that? He's talking about what they call small ball and it means that the three point shot has changed the game, No, no question that that wonderful year when we beat the Celtics for the first time from the very first Uh, for the first game of the season to the last game of the playoffs, we made nine odd three point shots in the In the twenty fifteen season when Golden State won, between the first game of season and the last game of the playoffs, they
made one thousand, seventy seven three point shots. Game has changed different games, so you know that. You know, putting a premium on a shot like that means that if you have long distance sharpshooters, they'll be able to score more efficiently because that extra point really changes it. If you can defend those guys and uh dominate under the glass and not let them get any second shots, you can still dominate the game. So there will always be space on the court for very tall guys that can
do that. But there might be fewer of them, but they'll never be like totally gone. Um, they won't be able to get rid of us, Son't that That's That's what I'm saying. You know why I love talking to Kareem. This was really a privilege for me. Kareem Abdul Jabbar okay where ribs. Thank you so much to the Milk and Institute for hosting this episode's conversation at their global conference in Los Angeles. It was a fascinating experience. I
really appreciated the opportunity to be there. Also, to their engineers, by the way, who recorded this, a big thank you to Gianna Palmer for producing the show, to my bff Jared O'Connell for mixing it, and to Noor Richie for additional production assistance. Noura, by the way, just got her hair cut. It looks quite fetching. And now do we have to say everybody else's fetching social media? Maybe Alison Bresnik also fetching. And to Emily Beena always fetching for
her part in producing this show. Mark Phillips, thank you as always for our addictive theme music, at least addictive to the We never met Mark Phillips, so I can't say whether he's fetching or not, but sometimes we'll have an opportunity to to see him in person. Me while Brian Goldsmith and I are executive producers of this and Don't forget, you can email us at comments at correct podcast dot com. You can find me on social media
all too often, according to my husband. I'm Katie Couric on Twitter and Instagram, Katie dot corric on Snapchat, brian Is Goldsmith b on Twitter and if you like our show, please rate and review it. It helps more people to find it on Apple Podcasts, and please subscribe as well. We will talk to you next time.