Abdul-Jabbar compares calls for Olympic boycotts in 1968 and 2008

In 1968 I was a 20-year-old college junior whose basketball success had made me famous. I'd been honored as most outstanding player in the NCAA tournament, named the U.S. Basketball Writers Assn. player of the year, and played the "game of the century" against the Houston Cougars at the Astrodome. So it wasn't surprising that I was invited to try out for the Olympic basketball team to represent the U.S. in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Any other year I would have been proud and elated at the prospect of playing for my country against the world's elite athletes.

But 1968 wasn't like any other year.

The Vietnam War had divided the country more violently than any time since the Civil War. The nightly news clips of U.S. planes bombing the Vietnam jungle were paralleled by clips of angry, sometimes bloody, clashes between war protesters and war supporters.

Violence was almost as rampant at home. First Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, then Robert Kennedy. The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago featured thousands of anti-war protesters who were met with police violence.

In the midst of all this international and domestic turmoil, the Olympic Games represented, to some, an opportunity to bring people of all nationalities together, maybe heal some wounds. To others it represented the usual hypocrisy of ignoring the political problems in the name of entertainment and profit.

And there I was in the middle. Twenty years old. The age of many of the soldiers who were fighting and dying in Vietnam. Some of them were my childhood friends. Because of my visibility as an athlete, whatever I chose to do would have international reverberations.

At that time sociology professor Dr. Harry Edwards, only in his mid-20s, urged black athletes to boycott the Olympic Games in Mexico City.

"For years we have participated in the Olympic Games, carrying the United States on our backs with our victories, and race relations are now worse than ever," he told the New York Times Magazine in 1968. "We're not trying to lose the Olympics for the Americans. What happens to them is immaterial. . . . But it's time for the black people to stand up as men and women and refuse to be utilized as performing animals for a little extra dog food."