Basketball, Religious Conversion, and Name Changes
We do Kareem Abdul-Jabbar a disservice by refusing to historicize his religious conversion and name change.
I came across a remarkable photo today. An impossibly tall high-school basketball player stands, lanky and proud, on the streets of New York City in 1963. He’s wearing a jersey with number 33, the same number he would wear at UCLA and then for the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers, as we went on to set the NBA scoring record and become one of t…