Ninety Seconds: Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf's Story

Andrea Cassini

Ninety Seconds: Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf's Story image

The National Anthem is a ritual that you’ll notice before international sporting competitions. It serves the purpose of stirring national pride in both the audience and the participants. Many countries, such as the US, also observe the practice before domestic sporting fixtures too.

As a musical expression of national identity, many people will view the anthem as something that should always sit above political discourse and disagreement. Completely separate. The conversation around athletes’ conduct during the national anthem and how it relates to national and personal identity has been revisited recently around the figure of Colin Kaepernick.

The concept of athletes expressing political perspectives more generally has also been on the agenda in basketball specifically, with LeBron James being told by a Fox News host to ‘shut up and dribble’. Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum or your  personal views towards the divisive issues above, sports also have a universal and powerful ability to bring people together. We are going to look at a story from the 1990s that explored these same issues and resurfaced in popular discussion more recently. It begins with contentious political discourse and leads to the other side of the world, community and lifelong friendships.

90 Seconds

National Anthems last about ninety seconds. Taken in isolation, such a small amount of time may seem trivial. But that was enough time to change Mahmoud Abdul Rauf’s life.

Abdul Rauf Michael Jordan

Mahmoud Abdul Rauf was originally given the name of Chris Jackson. But just like a politically-driven athlete before him (Muhammad Ali), in 1993 he chose to go by the name that he perceived God to have given him (Mahmoud Abdul Rauf). Abdul Rauf came to Islam through the writings of Malcolm X and his faith continued to shape his path both as a person and as a basketball player.

In his own words, during those ninety seconds whilst the anthem played, Mahmoud claimed to feel like he was disrespecting his beliefs. Listening to the anthem with his back straight and his shoulders squared, while the star spangled banner was being lifted up and waved by a uniform-clad trooper. The flag is held as a symbol of freedom, but Abdul Rauf claimed that in certain other parts of the world, it represented something different. Abdul Rauf also began to question the strict wording that athletes should “stand and line up in a dignified posture” He thought this contradicted the very freedom that the lyrics spoke of.

In 1994 Mahmoud Abdul Rauf began questioning the rule. He stayed in the locker room, entertaining himself, warming up or strolling along the sidelines. He hid himself from sight. That was until March 10th, when he decided to behave according to his beliefs and for everyone to see. He made his way to the hardwood earlier than usual and when the music started, he sat; the only one, ostensibly, among the 17,171 that packed McNichols Arena in Denver, Colorado that night.

Ninety seconds, and the elephant in the room had emerged from its hiding spot. For both the media and the audience, all hell broke loose.

“My duty is to my creator, not to nationalistic ideology”, he said.

“In Greece they'd stone him”, one newspaper replies.

“One cannot be for God and also be for oppression”, he argued back.

Looking retrospectively, Abdul Rauf explained his decision.

That was a gradual process. It came through my reading. I began to read more, I began to think about issues more. And the more I read and the more I thought, I said… Why am I doing this? I don’t want to be like some type of robot, just doing things because other people are doing it. I began to question, why am I doing what I do? Do I believe that this is the right thing to do? So I came to this decision. I said, “No.

“Go back to Africa”, read one of the many letters sent to his home address. “I am glad that you finally decided to stand for the national anthem because you have a lot of young children looking up to you, wanting to be like you. You would have probably ruined their future because they would have grown up and disrespected our country like you did”.

With less polished prose, someone simply slams a “F*** you, Mahmoud”. He keeps those letters to this very day, stored in a trash bag, and sometimes he pulls them out to read them once again. The hate still hurts, but it reminds him of the reasons behind his choice.

Ninety seconds to change a life. A one-game suspension, to go along with the fine he received, was no big deal in comparison to the accusations and stigma that eventually pushed him out of the league.

Abdul Rauf the Player

Mahmoud Abdul Rauf was a restless prodigy, walking the thin line between love and hate wherever he played. This was partially because his style of play was twenty years ahead of its time and many struggled to decipher it. Denver welcomed him warmly in the 1990 NBA Draft, trading All Star Fat Lever in order to select him. His two-year stint at LSU had been an absolute blast, playing alongside the irrepressible Shaquille O'Neal. Jackson (as he was known then) had a 48 point outburst in just his second game with the Tigers, a feat that earned comparisons to the great Pistol Pete Maravich.

Chris Jackson LSU

His offensive stats were almost unheard of in college basketball, and something that new Atlanta Hawk and former Oklahoma Sooner Trae Young managed to emulate recently.

In his first NBA years, though, Abdul Rauf’s mood at any particular time tended towards “annoyed”. He didn’t play as many minutes as he would have liked and he didn't shoot well when he did play. The Nuggets are playing fast for that time period (99.8 possessions per game, third in the league – in 2018, they'd be dead last) but they fail to accommodate his style of play.

Quoting Phil Jackson in 2016, who in some way triggered the Abdul Rauf conversations more recently, said he was “Steph Curry before Steph Curry”.

 

A well-behaved playmaker didn't dare to be such a volume shooter off the dribble, and much less from three point range, and yet he did. Even ten years later, Steve Nash didn’t grasp how valuable it could be to run the ball looking for individual offense and play the position that way. Speaking about his career retrospectively, Nash said “I wasn't smart enough to see that maybe I should shoot 20 times a game”.

Abdul Rauf’s beliefs dictated that his lifestyle was very different from many of his teammates. That number 1 he wore on his jersey told that very story: all by himself, against everyone else. You won’t find many stories about him partying into the early hours or spending much time in nightclubs for example. While traveling through the country with his Nuggets, Abdul Rauf instead chose to spend his time on the road by visiting low-income communities and praying at local mosques.

Ramadan fasting challenged his already thin frame, seeing him slim down to just 145 lbs. In Denver they asked questions and they grumbled. Neither did they understand his muscular spasms, his tics, or his manias: all of them symptoms of Tourette's syndrome. The condition had been a torment through his childhood before he received a late diagnosis and finally, some answers. To fight these symptoms as a player he had developed some coping strategies, like focusing on the perfect free throw shooting technique. Abdul Rauf boasts the second best all time (single season) free throw percentage (behind Calvin Murphy) when he shot .956 on 229 attempts in the 93-94 season.

Shooting statistics from this time period often don’t compare to current players due to the ways in which the game has changed. For comparison though, Abdul Rauf for his career shot .905 from the free throw line. For comparison:

  • Steph Curry - .904
  • Steve Nash - .904
  • Mark Price - .904
  • Peja Stojakovic - .895
  • Ray Allen - .894
  • JJ Redick - .891
  • Klay Thompson - .852

In fact, the only reason Mahmoud Abdul Rauf does not appear as the all time leader in free throw percentage is due to his shortened NBA career. In order to qualify for the all time list he would need to have made 1200 attempts. He finished on 1161 attempts.

The people around him saw his tourettes coping mechanisms like the obsessions of an alien. Then, suddenly, love blossomed. A 51 point career high against John Stockton’s Jazz in late 1995. A 39 point and 10 assist outing against Jason Kidd's Mavericks. Two playoff runs, and the historical 1994 campaign where the Nuggets, owners of the last spot in the Western Conference, beat the odds and sent the Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp-led Seattle Supersonics packing. Those were the iconic Nuggets featuring Dikembe Mutombo, Brian Williams and Laphonso Ellis, clad in the navy jersey with golden numbers and logo – a fresh start after the (likewise remarkable) jerseys sporting the Mile High City's skyline.

After that March 10th discussed earlier however, there was no love lost for Abdul Rauf. A loophole and a compromise allowed him to listen to the anthem standing up, but with his chin facing down and his hands gathered in prayer. Denver didn’t like the continual political  discussion about it and they didn't want him around by the end of the season, shipping him to Sacramento. Displaying what an issue the subject had become, four men stormed into a Denver mosque playing The star-spangled banner with their trumpets. Through Abdul Rauf’s actions, Islam more generally was being associated with ‘unpatriotic’ perspectives.

Suiting up for the Kings, Abdul Rauf's numbers went down and rookie Anthony Johnson surpassed him in playtime. He started to feel abandoned. “It was close to impossible to play in the U.S. after that. The doors were shut, but I said the NBA wasn’t the only show in town and I was going to make use of my God-given talent – even if it meant playing in Timbuktu”.

 

Not Quite Timbuktu

Abdul Rauf moved to play in Europe. Furthering his detachment from mainstream US society even further, came the tragic events of September 11th 2001. After this date, to be an American Muslim that criticized the USA and the government, was like walking around with a target drawn on his back. So Abdul Rauf was to stay in Europe. Every trip became a pilgrimage at heart, leading him closer to Mecca, which he finally visited while playing in Turkey, for Fenerbahce.

For most professional basketball players, leaving the NBA means bidding farewell to a certain lifestyle, a job and a home that welcomed you. In Abdul Rauf's case, it was arguably the first place he ever really called home. The place where he was born, in humble and humid Gulfport, Mississippi, was (quite literally) falling apart. While he was pondering whether to enroll for his third year at LSU or to declare for the NBA Draft, he climbed the stairs to the bathroom, opened the faucet and the sink came crashing down on his feet. He decided he would never walk through that door again before having earned enough money to give his family a better life.

He built a new house outside town, but it was vandalized, then burned down. Hurricane Katrina also stormed through Gulfport, wreaking havoc. LSU’s campus was not always a happy space for Mahmoud either. The more he delved into the books and thoughts of Malcolm X, thanks to his coach Dale Brown and the history and civil rights classes he was taking, the more he became uncomfortable with being a student athlete. He didn’t like the dynamic of the University gaining money thanks to his athletic prowess, but him getting nothing (financially) in return.

In Europe, the recent Abdul Rauf revival wasn't as shocking as it was in the US. It's no surprise to see him competing at fifty years old in the BIG 3 League, still in great shape and quick, because he played throughout Greece, Italy and Russia well into his forties, ending with a Japanese appearance for Kyoto Hannaryz.

 

It’s perhaps also less of a surprise in Europe that the game has evolved in a direction he foresaw in the 90s. Maybe because Europe was detached from the associations that Abdul Rauf had in the US, clubs were able to value Abdul Rauf's (at the time) peculiar approach to playmaking without the same controversy attached to him. In a less politically charged atmosphere, it was simply his play and not his beliefs that shaped the assessment of him as a basketball player. In just one Italian season, 2004/2005, Abdul Rauf left a lasting memory among Roseto's fans. Abdul Rauf is still considered to this day one of the best foreign players to star in the Italian League.

Roseto is a small town of 25,000 people, near Teramo by the Adriatic Sea, a community glued together by an enthralling passion for basketball: despite the limited market. The local team had successful campaigns both inside domestic borders and in international competitions. As a nod to his faith, he is affectionately known as  “Il Califfo” (the caliph) and the love is mutual.

 

In 2015, ten years after he played there, Abdul Rauf was called back to Roseto by local authorities to perform a tour of schools, squares and gyms. A veritable celebration that made him spill a few tears and inspired some fresh thoughts on the strong bonds basketball can create. “I love this place dearly. When noone wanted to give me a chance anymore, Roseto was one on the few places that granted me one last shot. The town and the fans treated me like I was one of them. Since I left the town, there's always someone in touch with me, asking me how my family is faring, how am I doing. I'll always be thankful to this town, from the bottom of my heart. I'd gladly live here one day”. On the other side of the world, Mahmoud Abdul Rauf found a home.

Retrospective

Questioned about today's political scenario in sports and the role of athletes as spokespeople for a community, Abdul Rauf has mixed reactions. On the one side, he's comforted by the example of other athletes showing up for the beliefs they stand for: their stances gain a resonance that was impossible to imagine in 1996, and obtain a rate of approval that was unavailable to him.

Mahmoud Abdul Rauf Denver

He had the chance to meet with Colin Kaepernick and the conversation excited him. “There’s a verse in the Quran that says, ‘Be in the company of the righteous,’ Money doesn’t matter. Family doesn’t matter,” Abdul-Rauf said. “I don’t mean that in a bad way, but you get to the point the truth means more to you than anything. That’s powerful. It’s nice to be in the presence of people like that”.

Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the political views of outspoken athletes like Abdul Rauf, his career in particular counterintuitively speaks to the ability of basketball to bring people together. The fact that even someone as controversial as he was considered in this time period was able to plant new roots, find a new home in a new culture and share some of his greatest professional memories demonstrates this point.

The “Steph Curry before Steph Curry” as Phil Jackson immortalised him, both in style of play and through his overt political perspective predicted future trends. But he wasn’t stagnant as a person or in his views. From Abdul Rauf’s perspective, his journey has been one of striving to continually improve. “I strive to be the best person I can, the best human being, although I don't know if I'll ever get there. This is my battle. Being the best I can under many perspectives: intellectually, spiritually, morally, socially. I fight every day”.

The National Anthem lasts just 90 seconds. That was enough to change Mahmoud Abdul Rauf’s life.

Andrea Cassini