Kareem Of The Crop Abdul-Jabbar Prepares To Enter Hall Of Fame

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would have had trouble fitting into today’s woofin’ world of the NBA. Too businesslike. Not enough style. Too buttoned-down. Not enough pizzazz.

He didn’t wear an earring and didn’t have a tattoo, and before middle-aged baldness made him one of the NBA’s early shaved heads Holy Dennis Rodman! - he had the same colored hair every night.

He didn’t do a lot of talking, a definite drawback in modern basketball. He survived strictly on talent, playing an old-fashioned, nuts-and-bolts game for 20 magnificent seasons with quiet dignity and loud domination.

He was just the best player of his generation and on Monday he gets the payoff for his accomplishments - induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Today’s basketball often seems to value style over substance. Players bump chests, preen for the cameras and strut around as if they’d just discovered the cure for cancer. Abdul-Jabbar has noticed, saying simply, “They didn’t have the ‘Play of the Day’ when I was playing.”

The only chest bumping AbdulJabbar ever did was under the hoop, banging for baskets and rebounds, which, remember, was the whole idea of the game in the first place. Few did it better.

Consider the numbers: He scored a record 38,387 points in the regular season. Add the playoffs and the total is 44,149. He played more games (1,797) and blocked more shots (3,189) than any player in NBA history.

In a 1975 game against Detroit, he pulled down a record 29 defensive rebounds. A year later, he set a record for the season with 1,111 defensive rebounds.

Had enough? Well, there’s more. He played in 19 All-Star games and won six MVP awards. He barely has enough fingers to accommodate all his championship rings - three from UCLA and six from the NBA, one with the Milwaukee Bucks and five with the Los Angeles Lakers.

He was truly Special K.

This is the kind of impact Abdul-Jabbar had. The Bucks finished in seventh place, 28 games under .500 in 1969. Then they won the coin flip for the No. 1 pick in the draft, selected the best player in college basketball, and two years later were world champions.

In his prime, Abdul-Jabber was the kind of force who turned games his way. He had a long, loping stride down the court and when he got where he was going, he played like a traditional center, with his back to the basket. That’s almost never done now in the slammin’, jammin’ style of modern basketball.

At 7-foot-2, Abdul-Jabbar wasn’t an acrobatic, fly-through-the-air player. He scored the bulk of his baskets with the sky hook. He’d extend his arm, looking for all the world like a eagle spreading one enormous wing. Then he’d launch the hook shot over the defender and more times than not, it would drop smoothly through the net.

“I was able to beat one-on-one coverage every time and shoot high percentage shots that created a lot of stress on the defense,” he said. “That gave everybody who played on the perimeter an extra step, and we were able to win consistently using that theory of play.

“Nowadays, I don’t see anybody that’s in there able to score as consistently as I did as far as shooting percentage and getting good shots.”

That means Abdul-Jabbar’s scoring record is probably safe for some time to come. The closest active player is 11,000 points away, and that’s only if you count creaky Moses Malone as active. Michael Jordan was 17,000 points short when he retired and his 457 comeback points didn’t do much to change that.

Abdul-Jabbar’s style might not have been exciting enough for the MTV generation, but it worked for the big guy who made uniform No. 33 his personal ID. And it quickly caught the attention of the basketball authorities after UCLA won a fierce recruiting battle for him.

He was only 7 feet then, but he was still growing. The other 2 inches were added during three national championship seasons with the Bruins.

The NCAA took one look at him and, in an attack of utter foolishness, decided to ban dunk shots. That was no problem for the big guy. He had this hook shot and as long as they didn’t ban that, he was OK.