LOS ANGELES — He towers over Star Plaza at Staples Center, this 16-foot, 1,500-pound bronze version of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He is shooting a sky hook, of course, and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to believe that if set free, this frozen version would roll the ball softly off his fingertips, swishing into an unseen bronze basket.
It was always Kareem’s fate in this city to be revered, but not in the same way others have been. Magic Johnson, for instance. Wilt Chamberlain. Kobe Bryant. Even Shaquille O’Neal, nowhere near the player, was larger-than-life in his early L.A. days, and even he leaves a deeper impression.
It is easy to wonder — it is almost essential to wonder — what basketball in our time and in our town might look like if this statue sat 3,000 miles away, in a place of prominence near the marquee at Madison Square Garden. Basketball New York, of course, is experiencing this season merely the latest humbling by Los Angeles.
Before this year, you may recall, the Lakers were every bit as pitiful as the Knicks across six solid years, they were 163-329 — exactly the same record as the Knicks. Even last year, with LeBron James on the roster, they were a league-wide punchline, an epic failure.
It’s hard to remember that now, with the Lakers cruising in the West at 30-7 after Tuesday night’s 117-87 stomping of the Knicks. They are cruising to another deep playoff run. Across the past 47 years — dating to the last time they faced each other in the Finals — the Lakers have had their potholes and their downswings. But they have always managed to find a way out. This time, it’s James and Anthony Davis.
Once upon a time it was Kareem.
“I wanted this to be in New York,” he said a few years ago, when he was at the Garden to watch the Knicks. “But life is pretty funny sometimes.”
Think about the way the NBA looked on the morning of June 16, 1975. The teams that had met three times the prior five years for the championship, representing either coast, were graying and groaning.
The Knicks went 40-42, then exited the playoffs meekly in a 2-1 miniseries loss to Houston. Willis Reed and Dave DeBusschere were long gone. Clyde and Pearl had lost a step, and Bill Bradley was a year away from retirement. The Lakers? They were 30-52, second-worst record in the 18-team league. Wilt was on the beach. Jerry West and Elgin Baylor were long gone.
At that precise moment — sunrise on June 16 — the Knicks had two world championships to their credit, the Lakers one. And they believed they were on the doorstep of making the kind of seismic move that would alter their history — and the league’s history — forever. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had announced he wanted out of Milwaukee.
“I have no family here,” he said then. “I have few friends here. I don’t want to be here.”
Where he wanted to go was home, and that meant New York, where he’d been a high school star at Power Memorial, where he’d grown up in the Dyckman Street projects. Knicks president Mike Burke and GM Eddie Donovan understood what an opportunity this was. The knew Kareem’s intentions. They flew to Milwaukee, offered up any two players on the Knicks’ roster, and produced a check for $1 million.
“They tried to bully us with money,” Bucks GM Wayne Embry said years later.
But the Bucks wouldn’t be bullied. They weren’t going to just give Kareem away — and while a million bucks is nice, in the NBA, draft picks are better. And the Knicks were already starting to fritter away picks, losing their No. 1 in 1975 for trying to poach George McGinniss from the ABA. And the Bucks knew something else.
Kareem may have preferred New York, where he was born.
But he also loved L.A., where he had become a superstar in college at UCLA. The Lakers had draft picks to spare. They had a player the Bucks coveted — Brian Winters, ironically a product of Archbishop Molloy in Queens. And on June 16, 1975, the deal was done. Kareem was a Laker.
On that morning, the Knicks had two championships in New York, the Lakers one in Los Angeles. The count is now 11-2 the other way. And the left side of the hyphen sure seems more likely to grow than the right side. Life is pretty funny sometimes.
