Invited to a Black Youth conference by a young San Jose State College professor named Harry Edwards, who was organizing a Black athletes’ boycott of the 1968 Olympics, Alcindor spoke with conviction:
I’m the big basketball star, the weekend hero, everybody’s All American. Well, I was almost killed by a racist cop shooting at a black cat in Harlem. He was shooting on the street—where masses of people were standing around or just taking a walk. But he didn’t care. After all we were just n——rs. I found out that we don’t catch hell because we aren’t basketball stars or because we don’t have money. We catch hell because we are black. Somewhere each of us has got to make a stand against this kind of thing.
But in the media, an explosion of racist invective followed him and other Black athletes as they were accused by white writers of being ungrateful, unpatriotic, uppity “Black Hitlers.”
Weeks after the 1967 championship, the NCAA banned the dunk—in what became known as the “Alcindor rule”—an effort he believed was racist. Forced to improvise, he contemplated how to deal with triple-team defenses and worked on a new offensive weapon: the skyhook. One night after watching a Zatoichi flick, he was struck by the idea that the blind swordsman’s grace, control, and precision might be exactly what he needed. Instead of brute force, he thought, I will slide and roll and slip by them without fouling. In New York City, Alcindor started training in aikido.
“A victory [in martial arts] is your mind over someone else’s mind, as much as, if not more than, a simple physical mastery,” he later wrote. “The discipline also becomes a means of staying in shape mentally and keeping your entire inner self trained.”
That fall Alcindor visited the Black Belt offices to meet a fellow aikido adept, Mito Uyehara, and ask him if he knew someone with whom he could continue his martial arts training. Alcindor had become especially curious about tai chi. “This guy Bruce Lee—he’s really good at it,” Mito told him. “He knows more about those things than I do.”
“Who’s Bruce Lee?” Alcindor asked. “He was Kato in The Green Hornet.”
Alcindor was skeptical he could learn anything from an actor. “No, no! He’s the real deal.”
That night Mito drove to see Bruce and said he was sending Lew Alcindor over. “Who’s Lew Alcindor?” Bruce asked.
Mito explained that he was the tallest and most famous college basketball player in the country.
“I don’t watch basketball.”