The 2 Billion Dollar Man: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

[Mark Kohut]

So, as I thought I remembered but I don't follow sports much, Kareem had taken his Muslim name three years before he had it legally changed to Kareem.

Som TRP did not really get his name wrong by a year in IV..not really if one is a sports fan, right?

--- On Sun, 10/4/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: The 2 Billion Dollar Man: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Sunday, October 4, 2009, 6:09 AM
> Jabbar did not want a bidding war so
> the teams had to submit sealed
> bids to hire him. He was purchased for $1000, 000.
> 
> He changed his name. He changed the game. And the TV
> stations cut up
> the tournaments into samller and smaller pieces and made mo
> money mo
> money mo money.
> 
> 
> 
> Never a mere athlete, Alcindor emerged in 1968 as a person
> of
> political and religious principles. In high school in the
> early 1960s,
> his racial consciousness had been raised by the civil
> rights movement,
> Birmingham church bombings, Harlem riots, and a racially
> insensitive
> coach. He wore his hair Afro-style, participated in the
> verbal and
> visible "revolt of the black athlete" led by California
> sociology
> professor Harry Edwards, and in 1968 effectively boycotted
> the Mexico
> City Olympics by refusing to compete for an assured place
> on the
> United States Olympic basketball team. For some time he had
> been
> studying Islam, and in 1968 he dispensed with his Catholic
> religion to
> become a Muslim. His Muslim mentor gave him a new name,
> Kareem
> Abdul-Jabbar, "generous and powerful servant of Allah";
> three years
> later he legally changed his name.
> The NCAA championship game was first televised in 1954, but
> television
> didn't have a major impact on the tournament until 1969,
> when NBC's
> national telecast drew a large audience, mainly because
> UCLA was going
> after an unprecedented third straight championship.
> UCLA's remarkable record--five more titles in the first six
> years of
> the 1970s, including four more in a row--helped build even
> larger
> audiences of viewers who wamted either to see history in
> the making or
> to see the streak end. In 1973, NBC's first prime-time
> broadcast of
> the championship game, UCLA's victory over Memphis State,
> drew a 20.5
> share, a record at the time for any basketball game,
> college or
> professional.
> NBC expanded its coverage in 1978 to include the four
> regional
> championship games leading up to the Final Four. Other
> early-round
> games were carried on the TVS network and by NCAA
> Productions. "March
> Madness," as the tournament is now known, became a reality
> when CBS
> agreed to pay $18 million a year for television rights from
> 1982
> through 1984 and ESPN began to televise all of the games
> that CBS
> didn't cover.
> The NCAA tournament is now one of the major sports events
> on TV.
> Shortly after losing its share of the NFL television
> package in 1994,
> CBS agreed to pay $1.725 billion for rights to the
> tournament through
> 2002. Although no single game draws an audience comparable
> to that for
> the Super Bowl, the total package of games, with its
> built-in regional
> favorites, rivals the NFL's playoff series, the NBA
> playoffs, and the
> World Series in fan interest and television appeal.
> The television money has made the tournament the NCAA's
> largest single
> source of revenue by far, especially since the association
> has lost
> rights to most major college football games.
> 
> http://www.hickoksports.com/history/ncmbask.shtml
>