From the Archives: A Look at 1967 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Long before he wrote Newsweek's cover story on LeBron James, UCLA star Lew Alcindor, now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, was on the cover himself. Here's an excerpt.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was still using his birth name, Lew Alcindor, when Newsweek put him on the cover in early 1967. The UCLA sophomore and soon-to-be USBWA College Player of the Year was 7 feet, 1 inches of "lyrical power and mobility," sinking a record 67 percent of his shots. He would join the Milwaukee Bucks in 1969 (for a salary of $250,000), move to the Lakers in 1975 and retire from the NBA in 1989. He remains the highest-scoring player of all time.
When Alcindor came up, teams were still pretty evenly divided between black and white players, but that was beginning to change; the biggest stars—Boston Celtic Bill Russell, Philadelphia 76er Wilt Chamberlain and Cincinnati Royal Oscar Robertson—were African-American. The
