When Bruce Lee met Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a month after the 1968 national college basketball championship, he was still known as Lew Alcindor, the most hyped young basketball star in history.
Lew was seven feet two and, for his whole life, had been unable to hide. He disarmed reporters with a fierce intelligence masked by a laconic intensity. He was just completing his junior year at UCLA, and after indulging in two years of partying, drugs, and women, he wanted something different. “All sophomore and junior years I’d been looking for something to believe in,” he would later write.
During those two years, he had been in the eye of the storm. In the “Game of the Century,” witnessed by fifty-two thousand in the Houston Astrodome and millions more on television on January 20, 1968, he brought men’s college basketball to new heights. That night he played with blurred vision after having his cornea scratched. UCLA lost by a basket to the University of Houston, breaking their forty-seven- game winning streak, and the team melted down in its aftermath. Lew’s closest friend, a Black man from South Central Los Angeles, quit the team in a dispute with coach John Wooden, and racial tensions simmered in the locker room the rest of the season.
To him, Bruce was as effective a teacher as John Wooden. Both were focused on fundamentals, preparation, and what worked.
By the end of the season, Lew had led UCLA to its second consecutive national championship and was voted Most Outstanding Player for the second year in a row. It was the year that began the “March Madness” era. But after the season, he retreated.
Born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor in 1947, the day after Jackie Robinson desegregated pro sports, he had grown up in an integrated housing project in uptown Manhattan. In third grade he stared at a Polaroid of his class: “There I was, freakishly towering over all the other kids, with skin much darker than everyone else’s.” When he was twelve, his white friends abandoned him. His former best friend picked a fight with him one day, calling him a “jungle bunny” and “big jungle n——r.”
At seventeen, Lew stepped out of the subway in Harlem and was caught in the first hours of six days of rioting that followed the police shooting of a Black teen. As bottles and bullets whizzed by and buildings went up in flames, he ran home. “Right then and there I knew who I was and who I was going to be. I was going to be Black rage personified, Black power in the flesh,” he later wrote. He led his team to a 79-2 record and two national high school championships. But once, to motivate him in a game, his coach had called him a “n——r,” and he never forgot it.
In his sophomore year at UCLA, in 1967, he was traveling with extra security because of death threats. He took comfort in listening to hard bop and reading about African and Asian history and religion. He was particularly captivated by The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the late Black leader’s journey into Sunni Islam, and sought out young Black Muslims in Los Angeles.
That summer he was the only college athlete among a group of prominent Black athletes invited by Jim Brown to meet with Muhammad Ali to try to change the boxer’s mind about his anti-war stance. Ali had asked, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” After declaring, “I don’t have no personal quarrel with those Vietcong,” he saw his heavyweight boxing title revoked, and faced a prison sentence for draft evasion. The men spent hours grilling Ali on his position, then emerged to face the press. Alcindor sat beside Brown, Ali, and Bill Russell as the athletes joined together in a historic show of solidarity for Ali.