Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, Jr., April 16, 1947) is a retired American professional basketball player, coach, actor and author. During his 20-year professional career in the NBA, from 1969 to 1989, he scored the highest points total of any player in league history (38,387), in addition to winning a record six Most Valuable Player Awards and six NBA championships. He also has been an actor, a basketball coach, and an author. In 2012, he was selected as a U.S. cultural ambassador.


 * "In Spring 1966, after enrolling at UCLA, Alcindor tried LSD with friends. "It was a gorgeous clear blue day that had shimmered even before we started, now it was simultaneously dead still and shaking like mad," Kareem writes. "There were jet-stream trails behind everything that moved... We talked about race, the difference between black and white, cosmic realities, cosmic myths. We were nineteen and I loved it." After four or five trips, Kareem decided what he learned from acid was that he didn't need to take it. He "didn't do much" after freshman year and stopped entirely by his junior year. The "information overload" of it can be frightening, he warned, and the effects last for a long four hours or more. "I found that I'd learn enough just by living in a normal state of consciousness and concentrating, applying my intellilgence to what I wanted to know."