Baby Boomer's Size 16 Feet Hit the Dance Floor
By Cheryl Harbour

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (born 1947) made it through the first round of eliminations on this season of Dancing With the Stars. It's not easy to move that 7'2" frame and size 16 shoes around the dance floor. To be perfectly honest his footwork wasn't so fancy, but he was a good sport and beyond that, he's a basketball legend. The viewing audience gets to vote who gets eliminated and who survives to dance again - and they obviously wanted him to stay.

When he retired from professional basketball in 1989, Abdul-Jabbar held more records than anyone else in the NBA: most points scored, games played, minutes played, field goals, blocked shots, defensive rebounds, career wins and personal fouls. He still holds the records for points scored and career wins.

What has he been doing since retiring from the NBA, where he played 10 years with the Milwaukee Bucks and 10 years with the LA Lakers? He's an author, publishing two autobiographies about his playing days as well as books the New York Times described as "comprehensive history of African-American intellectual accomplishment, a memoir about growing up in the cultural shadow of the Harlem Renaissance and an admirably researched history of a black tank battalion that fought in World War II." The author of that article, Jay Caspian Kang, discovered that what the superstar had most wanted to be was a writer.

Abdul-Jabbar's legacy as an athlete is layered over with controversy because he was ahead of his time in speaking out about racism in a radical and sometimes antagonistic way. These days, he continues to have a serious demeanor and has serious things to say - but on Dancing With the Stars, he is all smiles.

For more about his life and career, read The NY Times article.

 

Image Credit: Yahoo from Sunnyvale, California, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kareem_Abdul-Jabbar_May_2014.jpg




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