They have never seen Larry Bird play, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a football player. (Class of 2002, #31)
Members of the class of 2002 were born in 1980. Larry Bird retired from pro basketball in 1992 when members of this class would have been 12 so this item assumes that anyone in this class would not have watched professional basketball or noticed one of the NBA’s most popular players play for one of the league’s most popular teams until after the age of 12. The summer after his final NBA season, Bird played in all eight games for the gold-medal winning United States basketball “Dream Team” alongside Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley. Sports Illustrated called that team “arguably the most dominant squad ever assembled in any sport.” What 12 year old wouldn’t be interested in watching that given the hype surrounding the Olympics that year?
The second part of this item assumes that when two athletes have the same or similar names the memories of the first (older) athlete are cancelled out by the existence of the second (younger) athlete. In this case the authors of the Beloit Mindset List want you to believe that a middling NFL running back had erased the memory of one of the NBA’s all time greats. In fact in the middle of Karim Abdul-Jabbar’s (nee Sharmon Shah) (KAJ-NFL) rookie season (1996) Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (KAJ-NBA) was named to the NBA’s “50 Greatest Players” list complete with the accompanying hoopla. The similarity between the two athletes’ names was mentioned in game recaps and KAJ (NBA) eventually sued KAJ (NFL) for trying to ride his name to glory and profit. KAJ (NBA) eventually prevailed and in 2000 KAJ (NFL) changed his name to Abdul-Karim al-Jabbar, but by that time all the HGH injections couldn’t salvage his brief NFL career.
KAJ (NBA) played in the NBA until members of the class of 2002 were 9 years old. As in the Larry Bird item above, to buy into this you would have to believe that kids don’t watch basketball until they are at least teenagers. Not only that, you would have to believe that kids on every basketball court in America had never tried a “sky-hook” and had never heard of its originator.
Six -time NBA champ, and six-time MVP, KAJ (NBA) played for 20 seasons and has a list of accomplishments too long to list here. Compare that to KAJ (NFL) who played five seasons from 1996-2006. He gained only 3,411 yards in his NFL career and was notable only for being the NFL touchdowns leader in 1997 with 33. His career ended with a whimper in 2000 with a one-game stint with the Indianapolis Colts in which he gained -2 yards on 1 rushing attempt.
This doubly dubious item clearly shows that the BCML’s authors know nothing about sports, fame, or the college students whose intelligences they attempt to insult.