Lew Alcindor To Attend UCLA

May 4, 1965 - Lew Alcindor, the nation’s most sought-after high school basketball player, announced today his intention to attend UCLA next fall.

Poised and articulate during his first news conference, the 7-1, 18-year-old Power Memorial senior said he chose the West Coast school “because it has the atmosphere I wanted and because the people out there were very nice to me.”

Alcindor visited the UCLA campus a month ago, soon after the Bruin basketball team won its second straight NCAA championship. In Los Angeles today, J.D. Morgan, the university’s athletic director said, “We are tremendously pleased.”

Alcindor had hinted earlier that he might choose St. John’s. “It would have been St. John’s or NYU if I had decided to stay in the East,” he said today. “I suppose my parents would have liked me to do that, but I had to make the decision myself.”

There had been a separate rumor that Jackie Robinson, a UCLA graduate, had pressured Alcindor into going to UCLA, but Alcindor denied it today.

“I’ve never spoken to Robinson,” he asserted. “My parents haven’t, either. And I was never offered a contract by the Harlem Globetrotters, as people said. Even if I were, I would never have considered it. I want to get a good education.”

Much of the rumor-mongering was caused by the shroud of secrecy which has surrounded Alcindor. Today’s unveiling did much to clear the air. Lew plays the saxophone, has no sports heroes, talks to Wilt Chamberlain occasionally, says he has never been advised what to do, and considers the two greatest men in the world to be Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk.

“If I hadn’t of protected him,” said Jack Donohue, his coach at Power, “he never would have had the chance to live like the normal 16 or 17-year-old. Wasn’t he entitled to that? I’ll say one thing: now that it’s over and he’s made his choice, I’m relieved. It was a lot of pressure on me — keeping him protected. This young man is going to UCLA, and that’s that.”

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