NBA: Legends Series – Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf: Dying with a free soul

Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf is considered to be Stephen Curry of the 1990s. But he sacrificed his sporting career to defend his values. Also because he used the national anthem as a protest before the games, he was suddenly no longer wanted in the league.

The NBA is currently marked by political statements. Especially since the election of Donald Trumps as US President, many players and executives have drawn attention to themselves and expressed their opinions publicly. At the beginning of the year, Raptors President Masai Ujiri Trumps countered statements about African countries that the POTUS is said to have called “filthy holes”:”When I come out of a filthy hole, I am proud of it,”said Nigerian-born Ujiri to ESPN.

Two years earlier, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick caused a sensation with his #takeaknee action. He knelt during the national anthem to draw attention to police violence and racism, and received much praise and support from the social networks, including various professional athletes. However, this did not change anything at the end of his sporting career.

Kaepernick was by no means the first athlete in the history of US sports to use the hymn as a protest. In a way, he followed in the footsteps of the 1968 Black Power demonstrators Tommie Smith and John Carlos and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, who risked his NBA career in the 1990s to send a political signal – even though he had to fight hard to make it to the top of the Association.

Abdul-Rauf grew up – unlike Ujiri – in a place that Trump would probably call a shithole. With his single mother, he spent his childhood in a neighborhood in Mississippi, where Abdul-Rauf was surrounded by poverty, drugs and prostitution every day.”Luckily, I knew early on what I wanted to do,”he said in a speech at the Al Tawheed Center in 2013:”I wanted to be the best basketball player I could be. It was a way out of the shit for me. I didn’t just want it, I needed it.”

Apart from the external circumstances, Abdul-Rauf was also slowed down by Tourette’s syndrome, which is why many people “depreciated it early”.

Before he trained with a team in high school, he worked alone on his skills on the open field,”I imagined an opponent who defended me extremely closely. The imagination is the strongest force and I wanted to defeat it. I thought to myself,”If I can do this, no real defender can stop me.”

And that’s how it was: After playing mostly older teenagers around two years old at high school, he became the most successful freshman college scorer of all time in 1988. The record of 30.1 points per game has not yet been beaten, and Oklahoma’s Trae Young is unlikely to succeed. Directly in his third game for LSU, Rorte scored 48 points before conquering 53 points on the scoreboard in his fifth game. In his second year he also convinced and then took the plunge into the NBA.

In the 1990 draft, the Denver Nuggets took third place to secure the rights to it. And after just two quiet years, the 1.85-metre high Point Guard already showed its extra class: an elitist scorer with a strong distance throw and artistic finishes on the basket in his arsenal.

He was also an extremely strong free-throwing champion: he hit 90.5 percent of his 1,161 freebies in his career. If he had been on the Charity Line 39 times more often – 1,200 free throws are needed to qualify for the All-Time-Freiwerfer – he would probably be the best free thrower of all time.

Quite a few compare Rauf with Steph Curry, who has won two MVPs and just as many championships in today’s NBA with a similar style of play:”I have seen some highlights on YouTube and there are certainly some overlaps,”the chef himself told Bleacher Report.

Page 1: Abdul-Rauf: From a “shithole” to the NBA

Page 2: Conversion to Islam and a Hymn Protest as Trigger for Descent