Legendary center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar takes us inside the world of professional basketball and the climax of one of the greatest careers in sports history in this candid, personal diary written during his final season. Kareem is an intimate and richly detailed book that tells the story of Abdul-Jabbar's last walk through the long NBA season, the 1988-89 campaign with the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers.

From fall training camp in Hawaii to the NBA finals in late spring, Kareem offers us a rare window on the behind-the-scenes world of the Lakers, including incisive portraits of Magic Johnson, James Worthy, Byron Scott, Michael Cooper, Pat Riley, Jerry West, and even Jack Nicholson. It was a year of sellout crowds and the dramatic push for a third consecutive world championship; of highs and lows; of emotional farewells around the league, beginning in New York's Madison Square Garden and ending with a last good-bye in the L.A. Forum; of a consummate athlete facing the ultimate challenge of ending his career on par with his own reputation and standards of excellence.

Abdul-Jabbar chronicles all of this as it happens, recording his private reflections and also his priceless memories from a career that has bridged three decades of basketball. He looks back to his boyhood in New York, where he learned the game in the city's gyms and on the playgrounds of Harlem; his years as a high school phenom at Power Memorial; the early inspiration of Bill Russell and Jackie Robinson, and, later, of John Wooden at UCLA; his early friendship with and later estrangement from Wilt Chamberlain; his first pro years in Milwaukee with Oscar Robertson; and his supreme moments with the Lakers.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was forty-two when he retired at the end of his twentieth professional season, the first and perhaps last man in the history of the game to have reached that milestone. He left the game as the NBA's all-time leading scorer, the master of the skyhook, a player who dominated his sport longer than anyone before him, and now he's also left an extraordinary piece of sports literature that will be read for years to come.

Kareem is a rare glimpse into the heart and soul of a champion -- a basketball immortal's farewell to the game.

Genre: Autobiography > Sports Figures
Binding: Hardcover with dust jacket, 260 pages
Condition: Like New (images are of actual book with dust jacket)
Published: Random House, 1990, First Edition
ISBN: 9780394559278

SKU PBK-323 || FREE SHIPPING

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