Kareem Adbul-Jabbar: renaissance manWhen I was a young lad, I was well keen on basketball. My parents both played representative basketball for Canterbury (dad, in fact, was captain, and most capped player in the province's history until Clyde (the Glide) Huntly came and took the record off him), and I played from an early age until my late teens.

Other than my parents, one of the people that inspired me was the towering frame of Kareem Adbul-Jabbar - the super-lanky centre of the LA Lakers, one of the two glamour NBA teams of the 80s era (the other being Larry Bird's Boston Celtics). We only ever got the finals series of the NBA (this was all pre-Sky, pre TV3, of course, so it took a fair bit to knock rugby and cricket off the screens), so for much of that time, the only games we got to see on the telly were the Lakers and Celtics battling it out for the NBA 'world' title. Which was all right by me, of course - it was pretty much Magic Johnson and Kareem v. Larry Bird and Kevin McHale - all superstars at the time, and some of the games were absolute epics.

Kareem was one of the 7" monsters of the time, had his trademark sky hook (try blocking a sky hook from a 7" centre - it's impossible) and, as a result of his natural talent and being part of a team that included the likes of super-guard Magic Johnson, is still the top NBA scorer of all time (38,387 points, a massive 7000 points clear of second place - Wilt Chamberlain, and poor old Michael Jordan languishes back in 4th with a measly 29,277 points.) I thought he was great. Go the tall and lanky guy!

Anyway, turns out he's not just a great basketball player. A post over at MetaFilter today reveals that along with his 'acting' (you may remember him from the Airplane parody film, or, if you've ventured into B-Grade kung-fu land at some time, the Bruce Lee film Game of Death), but also a coach (no real surprise there, except he coaches underprivileged Native Americans, instead of a super-rich NBA team), a best-selling author, a jazz expert, and, brilliant, a prescription dope-smoker. What a legend.

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