NBA Accessories Week: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s protective goggles

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s goggles looked out of place on a world-class athlete, but fit right at home with his quiet disposition and sometimes overlooked NBA legacy.

The poster hung on my wall, commemorating something and someone I had no feelings about. It was 1989, Miami’s inaugural NBA campaign, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had played his first and last game against the Miami Heat. The poster was handed out to all attendees, my father among them, having trekked his way to downtown Miami to sit uncomfortably in the bright pink behemoth that has long since closed. There were no Heat fans that first year, merely transplants that had been fans of other teams around the country. My father had bought season tickets. He had bought them to see Kareem.

He had emigrated to the United States from Cuba, went to high school in Florida, served a tour with the Army and wound up in New York in the late ’60s. He had always loved basketball and it was easy, at that time, to become a Knicks fan and so he did. I grew up hearing stories of Walt Frazier and Earl “The Pearl” Monroe and Dave DeBusscherre’s lunchpail demeanor, and of Willis Reed and the massive shoulders that had carried the Knicks to two championships. He despised the Boston Celtics, and spat out names like Dave Cowens and, later, Larry Bird, as if they were curses.

Contrastly, he always spoke softly about Lew Alicindor, about Kareem, awkwardly mimicking Abdul-Jabbar’s patented skyhook as he did — swooping his arm in an exaggerated arc before flicking the wrist at a hoop only he could see. But the man on the poster was thin, bald and bespectacled with round, alien lenses and I never understood why his name was said with such reverence.

The goggles were for protection. At 7-foot-2, Abdul-Jabbar was a towering presence, proportionately long-limbed and impossible to defend; he still holds the record as the league’s all-time leading scorer. Defenders, weary of having Abdul-Jabbar part the clouds for the skyhook with a well-sharpened elbow, often resorted to swatting futilely at a ball they could rarely reach. If they so happened to swat at Abdul-Jabbar’s face, then that was a price they happily paid.

As a member of the UCLA Bruins in 1968, Alcindor suffered a scratched cornea. In 1974, then as Abdul-Jabbar, he was jostling with a smaller player and had his eye raked in the skirmish, painful enough for him to angrily punch the stanchion beneath the basket and break his hand. He wore the protective lenses for almost all of the 15 remaining years of his career.

I knew none of this as I looked at the figure on the poster. I saw the goggles and imagined they were corrective lenses, like the eyeglasses I wore at the time. For those who didn’t wear glasses as a child, it’s difficult to describe how incapacitated you feel without them. You can only see what’s directly in front of you, projected on a screen an inch away from your face. Or what’s it like to wake up with a sense of dread, not even taking the mere seconds to wipe the sleep from your eyes so you can see anything, if just barely, in the dim morning light. They were a weakness I had no control over and so the Abdul-Jabbar I saw every day, an aged version of the man my father described in hushed tones, seemed weak as well.

The truth was that he was far from that, but Abdul-Jabbar’s legacy is a complicated one. By almost any measure, he was an incredible basketball player. Six championships and as many MVP trophies. Nineteen All-Star appearances, all but once during his outstanding 20-year career. Winning the Finals MVP in 1971, during his championship run with the Milwaukee Bucks, then winning it again 14 years later as a member of the Los Angeles Lakers. And, for all of his scoring prodigiousness, he was also an 11-time All-Defensive team selection and led the league in blocks four times. And yet considering the conversations regarding the best players of all-time, Abdul-Jabbar is rarely mentioned.

Part of this is due to the era in which Abdul-Jabbar peaked, a time in which the league was only a fraction as popular as it is today. It was “too watered down” and “too overrun with drugs,” or, when a flimsy excuse simply wouldn’t do, racist tropes that the league was “too black” would suffice. But he also never had an entertaining rivalry like Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, or like Magic Johnson and Bird. Abdul-Jabbar was never as ruthless on the hardwood as Michael Jordan. He wasn’t a larger-than-life personality like Shaquille O’Neal, nor as versatile or as marketable as LeBron James. He was as dispassionate as he was productive, a Goliath that knew all-too-well he was immune to countless slingshots. He adjusted his goggles, clocked in to work, and then removed them after the shift was done.

There was his off-the-court behavior, too, which might lessen him more than anything. His relationship with reporters was, at best, a contentious one. He refused to participate in the 1968 Olympic Games, criticized the United States, both the government and its citizens. He was aloof and would often read at his locker, even in the middle of interviews. He was quiet or surly or angry. Maybe a little of each and more.

But it was also not without good cause, by Abdul-Jabbar’s reckoning. He had grown up in an era of great social and racial unrest and he was wary of media that would prop him up only to tear him down when, at least to Kareem, it was most convenient. His conversion to Islam was different, and seemed to put him even further beyond everyone’s understanding. He changed his name from Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar after gaining fame as a collegiate and NBA champion. While it was, perhaps, a way of Abdul-Jabbar confirming that he was undefinable by his success in basketball, more conservative critics simply saw it as condemnation of what had made “Lew Alcindor” a household name in the first place.

I have seen Abdul-Jabbar twice in my life. When I see him, I can’t help but recall the poster in my room and remember the goggles that seemed out of place on a world-class athlete. There’s added context now, like the great career that is rarely remembered, and the highlights of this fluid giant of a man, and the skyhook to a hoop he saw better than anyone. He’s had a life after basketball, filled with books (of which he’s written nearly a dozen) and political punditry. He has spoken about his love of jazz music, and even appeared — at 71 years old and after battling leukemia and undergoing quadruple-bypass surgery — as a contestant in a televised dance competition. All of these things confirm his humanity.

The first time I saw him, at a breakfast for retired legends of the game, he sat at a table by himself and carefully picked at a plate of fruit. The second time, at a youth basketball tournament, he spoke to almost no one and seemed disconnected from the game being played before him. He doesn’t wear the goggles anymore, but I see him now, cool and indifferent and older, and I know what they are for. That brilliant, unrelatable mind. The choice to be alone. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar just needs to feel protected and there may be nothing more human than that.