The 1961 Christmas Holiday Festival in Schenectady, N.Y., featured the local team, Linton High with Kentucky-bound star Pat Riley, and a mighty team from New York, Power Memorial Academy with this freshman kid, Lew Alcindor, who was supposed to be pretty good.
"We heard about him. Back then, we didn't know much about teams," said Riley, the eventual All-American, pro player and Hall of Fame coach. "There might be newspaper accounts … but I didn't know who Power Memorial was. Our coach told us, 'We have one hell of a tournament and there is a player on this team that is going to be one of the greatest players ever.' But I really didn't know much about Lew Alcindor at the time. And when I saw him play, he was a ninth grader."
Suffice to say Riley learned a lot about his adversary over the next few decades.
But before all that, unending waves of attention surrounded the man who, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, evolved into the greatest NBA scorer ever. Some who knew him as Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, tabbed the greatest New York City basketball product by The Post, recalled moments of the legend's early years.
"I'm covering college basketball and I get a call about a tripleheader at Fordham," said author Phil Pepe, a longtime New York sportswriter who was then at the World Telegram. "They had a high school game and a college game and this time they're going to have a grammar school All-Star game.
"Someone said, 'You might be interested in the grammar school game. One kid 14 years old and 6-7 and one kid is 13 and 6-8,' " Pepe recalled. "I said, 'How soon can you get them in my office for a story and picture?' An hour later I was setting eyes on Lew Alcindor for the first time."
Pat Heelan, the 14-year-old Brooklyn/Queens star, may have faded from memory but the legend of Abdul-Jabbar of the Manhattan/Bronx team grew and grew.
"There's no greater player in New York City history than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar," said former Power Memorial teammate Art Kenney who starred in Europe for eight years.
Abdul-Jabbar became the fulcrum of the Power Memorial team that won 71 straight games with the 1963-64 team designated the High School Team of the Century. When Abdul-Jabbar chose UCLA from among 60 suitors, colleges outlawed dunks. But in so doing, rule-makers unleashed an unspeakable horror on defenses everywhere: the sky hook.
Lew Alcindor elevating over the competition while a star at Power Memorial Academy.Photo: AP
"He had without a doubt the singular greatest weapon ever devised in the history of the game in the sky hook," said Riley, who calls Abdul-Jabbar the greatest ever. "With his size and the ability to shoot it he probably benefited more than anyone else when college basketball banned the dunk. While at UCLA he couldn't dunk the ball, so he developed this array of shots, the sky hook with his right hand and he could make layups, right, left."
The sky hook had its genesis with those Power teams of coach Jack Donohue. Kenney, who grew up with the prodigy in upper Manhattan where they attended St. Jude's grammar school, has a painful memory of the center trying to perfect the shot.
"At 6-8, I was the tallest [teammate] and we would do drills together," said Kenney. "On his sky hooks, he was going laterally, he wasn't going toward the basket. We were working on our left pivot foot and I was trying to get up into him to make him feel uncomfortable, pressuring him, pushing him, fouling him. So he planted and with his elbow he wound up, not intentionally, popping me right in the nose. And I saw stars. I had a vision of Kareem and stars."
The biggest star, naturally, being Kareem, whose father was a New York City policeman and whose mother was a seamstress, a talent that came in handy with a son who seemed to grow by the hour.
"We had a lot of discipline at Power," said Kenney, a member of Fairfield University's Hall of Fame. "You had to dress properly, your pants couldn't be too tight or too short. One time, Kareem got [detention] because his pants were too short. We said, 'Yeah when he came in his pants were the right length but then he went through a growth spurt before lunch."
Though Kenney described Abdul-Jabbar as "off the court, a lot of fun with a wry, New York sense of humor," the height often made him a target.
"When we were still in grammar school, I recall riding the subway to All-Star games with him. He already was 6-8 and as thick as the subway pole we were holding on to," said Joe Browne, senior advisor to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and who in 1960 was coach Jack Curran's first scholarship player at Archbishop Molloy.
"Other riders always would point at him, laugh at him and otherwise make fun of his height. I was six feet in the eighth grade and received just a little of the same ridicule," Browne said. "People can be cruel at times."
After twice losing to Power in the finals, Browne resigned himself that Molloy would be No. 2 as long as Abdul-Jabbar's monstrous presence lurked on city courts. But he tells anyone that he and the legend are etched in record books.
"Kareem and I still hold the New York State high school record for most blocked shots in a game," Brown said. "We share the record because in one game he blocked 12 of my shots so I feel I have a part of that mark."
Persistence is a virtue. Although sometimes not a wise one.
Abdul-Jabbar led Power to three City Catholic High School titles and a 95-6 record. But he experienced the Harlem riots, endured racial slurs. His relationship with Donohue grew horrifically tense after the coach's use of a racial slur.
Growing up, Jackie Robinson was Abdul-Jabbar's hero. He was a huge Dodgers fan.
"I arranged to take him to a Mets game when the Dodgers came in and got permission to take him in the Dodger clubhouse. Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Maury Wills, Willie Davis treated him like more of a celebrity than they were," said Pepe, who also swapped record albums with the jazz-loving Abdul-Jabbar.
"If he had his way he probably would have played baseball," Kenney said. "But he wasn't very good."
Well, that basketball thing worked out. And none saw it better than Riley, who played against Abdul-Jabbar, played with him then coached him to four of his six NBA titles.
"The numbers really do speak for themselves," Riley said. "He wasn't Michael Jordan or LeBron James or Magic [Johnson], but from a pure basketball productive, world championship, Most Valuable Player, he was that guy," Riley said.
Lew Alcindor, blocking a shot while with Power Memorial, was often made fun of because of his height.Photo: Bettman/Corbis
"For 22 years he was there every night. He had a great mental toughness," Riley said, noting Abdul-Jabbar never retaliated in anger but just raised his game and embarrassed opponents. "He is probably the truest example of the old cliché, 'Let sleeping dogs lie.' Don't wake them up. Just let him be good tonight and get 27. Don't make him go for 50. … Just incredible. So I do toast him as the greatest player ever."
Even though Abdul-Jabbar beat him back in 1961.
"That was always a point of contention between he and I," Riley said, laughing about the game where he scored 19 points and Abdul-Jabbar scored eight — before fouling out. "I used to kid him about it. He was a freshman and I was a senior.
"Kareem had eight points and we made sure he was in foul trouble. One of the back stories is my dad was a minor league baseball manager [with] the Schenectady Blue Jays. All the umpires who worked [there] used to be high school refs — football referees, baseball umpires or basketball officials — and the one official officiating that game used to be an umpire of my dad's and was a drinking buddy. I think he called four of the five fouls on Kareem. He did foul out. The next year they came back, I was at Kentucky. They beat us by 50."
Yup, let sleeping dogs lie.
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