Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is an American former professional basketball player. He played 20 seasons in the National Basketball Association for the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers. He is the NBA’s all-time leader in points scored, games played, field goals made, field goal attempts, blocked shots, defensive rebounds, career wins, and personal fouls. In 1996, he was honored as one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History. He has also been an actor, a basketball coach, a best-selling author, and a martial artist.
About Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in brief
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is an American former professional basketball player. He played 20 seasons in the National Basketball Association for the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers. He is the NBA’s all-time leader in points scored, games played, field goals made, field goal attempts, blocked shots, defensive rebounds, career wins, and personal fouls. In 1996, he was honored as one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History. He has also been an actor, a basketball coach, a best-selling author, and a martial artist, having trained in Jeet Kune Do under Bruce Lee and appeared in his film Game of Death. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton selected him to be a U.S. cultural ambassador. He was born in New York City, the only child of Cora Lillian, a department store price checker, and Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Sr., a transit police officer and jazz musician. He grew up in the Dyckman Street projects in the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. At birth he weighed 12 lb 11 oz and was 22 1⁄2 inches long, and by the age of nine he was already 5 ft 8 in tall. By the eighth grade he had grown to 6 ft 7 in and could already slam dunk a basketball. He led coach Jack Donohue’s Power Memorial Academy team to three straight New York city Catholic championships, a 71-game winning streak and a 79–2 overall record. His 2,067 total points were a New York high school high school record. The high school boys basketball team won 10 national championships when he was in 10th and 11th grade and was runner-up in his final year of high school.
He made his debut as a sophomore at UCLA in 1966 and received national coverage: Sports Illustrated described him as ‘the tallest player in college basketball history’ He was a record three-time MVP of the NCAA Tournament. In 2007, ESPN voted him the greatest center of all time, in 2008, they named him the second best player in NBA history, and in 2016, they called him the second best basketball player in the NBA history. In his final season as an assistant coach at UCLA, he had a strained relationship with the coach after the coach called him n-word after the final game of his senior year. He did not play during his first year at UCLA though his prowess was already well known. His final season at UCLA he was one of only four players who started on three NCAA championship teams; the others were Curtis Rowe, Curtis Rowe and Shackelford Bibby. He also played for coach John Wooden on three consecutive national championship teams. In 1975 he was traded to the Lakers, with whom he played the final 14 seasons of his career and won five additional NBA championships. Over his 20-year NBA career, his teams succeeded in making the playoffs 18 times and got past the first round 14 times; his teams reached the NBA Finals on 10 occasions. At the time of his retirement at age 42 in 1989, he is ranked third all- time in both rebounds and blocked shots.
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