Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has been very vocal lately about how he feels he has been treated by the Lakers organization. It started with him saying he feels slighted that they never erected a statue for him, but he also went on to vent more frustrations. The Lakers have responded to Kareem.
In a Q&A with former Lakers center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar published Thursday morning on this blog, he talked about his “fractured” relationship with the organization, suggesting as he did in a recent Sporting News interview that a symbol of this is the lack of a statue honoring the Lakers star outside Staples Center.
I passed the interview along to Lakers spokesman John Black to give the team the opportunity to comment on it, along with three specific questions that came out of Abdul-Jabbar’s interview. Since he spoke with the Sporting News in a report focusing on how he felt slighted at not having a statue, Abdul-Jabbar said that Linda Rambis, the Lakers’ manager of special projects, had told his publicist, Deborah Morales, that he would be the next Laker to have a statue but didn’t specify when.
“Linda Rambis did place a call to Deborah Morales yesterday due to the puzzling comments that have come out the past few days,” Black wrote in an email. “However, Deborah has been made aware, as has Kareem, for quite a while that we plan on putting up a statue of Kareem, and that it would be the next statue erected, so to say that her call yesterday was to inform about this would be incorrect.”
As a Lakers special assistant coach for the last six seasons, working with center Andrew Bynum, Abdul-Jabbar said he had to take an unspecified paycut in 2009, which he described as “drastic,” even though he said his role wasn’t reduced. He said he was only willing to stay because he was diagnosed in November 2009 with a rare form of leukemia and needed the health insurance.
“When Kareem was initially hired six years ago as a Special Assistant Coach,” Black wrote, “he worked regularly at practices and before games in a mentoring role with Andrew Bynum. After a few years, Andrew no longer needed such a time-consuming effort with Kareem, so the amount of work needed was lessened, therefore Kareem’s schedule and workload was lessened. In reflecting the lesser work and hours, Kareem’s salary was adjusted. However, as with all employees here, we do not discuss compensation or contract issues, therefore will not go into details regarding Kareem’s pay.”
Read the entire response from the Lakers at LAtimes.com.
