I don’t remember the exact date. But I do vividly recall once flying into Boston’s Logan Airport well after midnight. I had been on a speaking tour. I was exhausted. The whole terminal was virtually empty that night, as I far as I could tell. I finally got to the exit-door, where I was hoping to find a taxi. Just then a hand reached down in front of me to open the door. I turned and looked up, way up – it was the seven-foot-two-inch Kareem Abdul-Jabbar! All I could do then was to mumble to him, one of the world’s greatest athletes, “Thank you.”
Which, paradoxically perhaps, brings to mind some early learnings of my own, during my sophomore history tutorial. The object of my study at that time was what the American philosopher Sidney Hook had called The Hero In History. According to this way of thinking, human history isn’t most fundamentally moved along by obscure and often violent forces. Human history, rather, is a focused drama that’s driven by the lives and works of great men and great women. Caesar or Eleanor of Aquitaine, according to this way of reading things, are the history-makers, not so much the Roman mobs or the impassioned members of some popular medieval movement like the Franciscans; or even the malign forces of floods and famines. Everything devolves around the heroes and the heroines.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar! A great man, a hero, I have long thought. I have followed his remarkable story closely for many years.* His own Muslim faith has appeared to me to have been self-authenticating. More existentially, he loomed large for me, as I also found myself driven by my media addiction to the fabled Boston Celtics of Abdul-Jabbar’s era, players like Bill Russell, John Havlicek, and Larry Bird.
So I was delighted to learn that that very star in the heavens of my own cosmos will be giving this year’s commencement address at my alma mater, Harvard. This, in my view, might be even more important in the greater American scheme of things these days than Harvard’s recent and commendable, and much publicized, resistance to Trump.**
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*Here is a summary of some of Abdul-Jabbar’s many achievements, beyond the basketball courts: “Abdul-Jabbar became a best-selling author and cultural critic. He published several books, mostly on African-American history.[269] His first book, his autobiography Giant Steps, was written in 1983 with co-author Peter Knobler. The book’s title is an homage to jazz great John Coltrane, referring to his album Giant Steps. Others include On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance, co-written with Raymond Obstfeld, and Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, World War II’s Forgotten Heroes, co-written with Anthony Walton, which is a history of the first black armored unit to fight in World War II.”
**For details about Kareem’s visit to Harvard, see: The Harvard Gazette, April 22, 2025.