Game 48: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - A Great Paella

Ferdinand L. Alcindor, Jr., the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, was born April 16, 1947 in New York City. He was raised in Inwood, the northernmost tip of Manhattan, by his mother Cora Lillian, a congenial Southern belle from North Carolina, and his father Ferdinand L. Alcindor, Sr., an often emotionless WWII veteran and longtime NYPD officer. But it was in the jazz clubs of Harlem where the NYC high school basketball star (6’9” by eight grade) first saw cracks in the facade of his father, a Julliard-trained jazz trombonist who would’ve played for a living if it would’ve allowed him to provide for his wife and quickly growing only child.

Beginning with these rare chances to bond with his old man, jazz was and remains the love of Kareem’s life. He named his first autobiography Giant Steps after John Coltrane’s classic album. On The Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance, one of many books written by Abdul-Jabbar, celebrated the jazz musicians of that historic cultural era. While still playing for the Lakers, he signed a deal with MCA to produce jazz albums, sign new talent, and oversee the re-release of classic albums. And by the time he was a decade and a half into his 20 year career, he had amassed a 3,000 record jazz collection in his Bel-Air home, custom built and designed to fit his 7’2” body.

Then one night in 1983, all off those records went up in flames.

On January 31st, 1983, Abdul-Jabbar’s house was packed with family and guests. He was across the country with the Lakers, but his longtime girlfriend Cheryl Pistano and their 2-year old son were inside asleep, as were Pistano’s two brothers, her friend, and her friend’s baby. According to LAFD, Pistano was awakened by their cat around 2 AM and smelled smoke, but couldn’t find the source. She went to bed after a reassuring call with a “contractor who had recently installed a fire-proof roof,” but the fire department arrived about an hour later as the sneaking fire eventually revealed itself and consumed the mansion. All six people were safe, having crawled out of windows, but the house was a complete loss.

Included in that destruction were Abdul-Jabbar’s uninsured oriental rug collection, his library of books, and the thousands of records he had collected over four decades of life. According to friend Quincy Jones, his MVP trophies were melted. Lakers courtside regular and music producer Lou Adler said that after hearing that everyone was okay, his thoughts went to how “devastated” Kareem would be about his jazz collection. Luckily, all of his sports memorabilia from his historic career were kept safe at his mother’s home in Brooklyn. But most of the money he spent during his long career was in that house and insurance didn’t cover all of the repairs. To make matters worse -- or better, if you look at it from an optimistic angle -- the fire indirectly led to Abdul-Jabbar finding out several years later that his business manager Tom Collins was stealing from him and Pistano for years. The lawsuit he filed against Collins later that decade sought $59 million in damages.

But in the ashes of the records, rugs, books, photos, and countless other items, the notoriously stand-offish Abdul-Jabbar was shocked to find people coming to his aid, both celebrities and regular people. Abdul-Jabbar had known Muhammad Ali back when the then-Cassius Clay held a press conference with nine of the nation’s top black athletes to discuss his anti-draft stance -- now known as the 1967 Ali Summit. Ali, a role model to Abdul-Jabbar as the first prominent Muslim athlete/activist, offered a financial hand immediately after the fire. But it was the gifts from random strangers that stuck with the moody center. As he told The New York Times, ''After a game we had played in St. Louis, these two old ladies came running up to the team bus waving these albums in the air and saying, 'Here, we want you to have these.' That's all they wanted. It was something.''

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For most of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s professional career, the big man had a reputation for being, to put it nicely, a little bit mercurial. Aloof, frosty, brooding, detached. A jerk, a prick, an asshole. Abdul-Jabbar instead uses the word “shy” at the end of the excellent HBO documentary Kareem: Minority of One. He was a shy boy who happened to be over 7 feet tall, always sticking out on a crowded Manhattan sidewalk. A shy Black boy who says he didn’t realize he was Black until he saw the 1st grade photo of his all-white class, a shy Black boy growing up during the height of the Civil Rights Era.

His demeanor as an adult was not manufactured, it was organically grown by being unapologetically black in the racial petri dish of 1960s America. A young Lew Alcindor experienced brutal police race riots in Harlem first hand. During a bad game as a high school star, he felt betrayal when his beloved high school coach told him that he was “playing like a n——-.” When he became college basketball’s most dominating player the nation had ever seen, the NCAA banned the slam dunk for a decade in an attempt to stop him.

Racial and religious slurs were thrown at him when he converted to Islam and his patriotism was questioned when he skipped the 1968 Olympics to protest America’s treatment of African-Americans. Abdul-Jabbar subscribed to the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam in his first decade of a Muslim, ostracizing himself from his Catholic parents. And after spending 22 years in the diverse metropolitan cities of New York City and Los Angeles, Abdul-Jabbar found himself becoming more and more isolated and angry in the snowy white, pun intended, city of Milwaukee for six years. God help any little white boy who asked Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for an autograph during that time.

“Kareem is like a cat. When he wants to be around, he’s right there, and when he doesn’t, he’s unapproachable,” Cheryl Pistono told People magazine shortly after their home burned down. Maybe it was after the fire destroyed his possessions but spared his young son and partner. Or maybe it was when he found an unexpected outpouring of support from the fans he had written off years earlier. But in the years that followed, Abdul-Jabbar began to open up, to let people see the kind, warm, intelligent bookworm with a sly sense of humor who he had simply elected not to let people see. It’s a shy guy thing. You wouldn’t understand.

During his 20th and last season, Abdul-Jabbar’s reputation was wholly rehabilitated to the point where his final games turned into a warmhearted retirement tour.

In a precursor to today’s NBA where players like Dwyane Wade, Dirk Nowitzki, and Kobe Bryant receive tribute videos and gifts from rival teams and standing ovations from fans who spent decades booing them, Abdul-Jabbar was showered with gifts and applause. Even the Celtics fans at Boston Garden gave him a standing ovation.

The current day image of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is that of a gentle elder statesman. A historian who has written over a dozen books, most of them not about basketball. A public intellectual who regularly writes columns about injustice and who has served in both the Obama and Trump administrations in spaces as varied as the President's Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition and the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee. Just an all-around funny, nice guy. And all it took was the destruction of the things he treasured to put things in perspective.

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A Great Paella

6 tablespoons olive oil

3 medium cloves of garlic

1 ½ cups uncooked Uncle Ben’s Rice

¼ teaspoon saffron

½ cup dry sherry

1 3-pound fryer chicken, cut into serving pieces

½ pound beef round, cubed

1 pound haddock, cooked and flaked

½ pound fresh lobster meat or 2 5-ounce cans lobster

1 7.5 ounce can minced clams, drained

1 7.5 ounce can shrimp or ½ pound fresh cooked shrimp

3 large Italian sausage, cooked and sliced diagonally

½ cup chopped onion

1 bay leaf

1 teaspoon salt

1 ½ cup boiling water.

Heat 3 tablespoons olive oil in large skillet. Add onions, chicken, and beef and cook over medium heat for 20 minutes, turning chicken and beef until browned. Remove chicken. Add haddock, lobster, clams, shrimp, sausage, garlic, and bay leaf and toss well. Remove from heat.

In another skillet heat the remaining 3 tablespoons of olive oil and add rice. Saute, stirring constantly until lightly browned. Add salt, saffron, and boiling water. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes. Spread rice in the bottom of a shallow 3 quart baking dish. Top with fish mixture and chicken and bake at 350 degrees until chicken tests done, about 20 minutes. Remove from oven. Pour sherry over all; let stand 10 minutes. Remove garlic and bay leaf before serving.

This is going to sound like a joke, but 12 hours before I made this paella consisting of beef, chicken, haddock, lobster, clams, shrimp, and sausage, my urologist told me I should minimize the animal protein out of my diet. It turns out my kidney stones are due to low levels of citrate, something I’m now remedying by taking two potassium citrate pills a day for… the rest of my life, I guess? But he also said that limiting salt and animal protein from my diet wouldn’t hurt.

Well, Doc, I’m happy to tell you that the sausage was Beyond Beef. Other than that, sorry. Also, I wouldn’t be shocked if Beyond Beef is chock-full of sodium.

Paella is difficult to make only because of the massive amount of ingredients required. Other than utilizing every square inch of your kitchen counter, it’s not as intimidating to whip up as you might think. Kareem’s paella was definitely lacking in ingredients… and had too much of others. I’ve never eaten paella, but I think of shrimp and mussels and other dead seafood staring me down as I sit at a Spanish seaside cafe. This recipe did not need the beef and honestly could’ve gone without the chicken. In any case, what I was left with was fine, but a little dry and lacking in flavor. I looked up other paella recipes and they include lots of lemon juice, chicken broth, parsley, canned tomatoes, and other assorted spices.

Kareem’s paella wasn’t inedible by any means, but I drenched it in hot sauce to make up for the lack of flavor. In case you try to make this on your own but aren’t cooking for 10 people, I halved all of the meats but made the normal amount of rice to properly fill my cast iron grill.