"The transition was difficult. It's hard to stop something that you've enjoyed and that has been very rewarding"
About this Quote
Retirement always gets sold as a victory lap, but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar strips it down to the part nobody glamorizes: walking away from a life that still feels good. “The transition was difficult” lands with the bluntness of someone used to results, not confessionals. No myth-making, no motivational poster energy. Just a reality that hits elite athletes hardest: your identity doesn’t retire when your body does.
The line “hard to stop something that you’ve enjoyed” carries a quiet rebuke to the cultural script that assumes endings are either tragic (injury, decline) or triumphant (rings, farewell tours). Kareem points to a third category: the voluntary exit from a machine that has rewarded you in every language that matters - joy, mastery, recognition, money, routine. That word “rewarding” is doing a lot of work. It nods to the addictive feedback loop of professional sports: constant measurement, constant stakes, constant proof. When that disappears, you don’t just lose a job; you lose a system that tells you who you are every night.
Context matters because Kareem isn’t just any retired star. He left the NBA in 1989 as the league’s all-time leading scorer, a towering figure whose excellence was both celebrated and contested. For him, transition meant not only aging out of competition but finding a new arena for impact - activism, writing, public intellect - without the instant legitimacy of a box score. The subtext is the ache of demotion from unquestioned authority to ordinary human: still ambitious, still capable, suddenly unscored.
The line “hard to stop something that you’ve enjoyed” carries a quiet rebuke to the cultural script that assumes endings are either tragic (injury, decline) or triumphant (rings, farewell tours). Kareem points to a third category: the voluntary exit from a machine that has rewarded you in every language that matters - joy, mastery, recognition, money, routine. That word “rewarding” is doing a lot of work. It nods to the addictive feedback loop of professional sports: constant measurement, constant stakes, constant proof. When that disappears, you don’t just lose a job; you lose a system that tells you who you are every night.
Context matters because Kareem isn’t just any retired star. He left the NBA in 1989 as the league’s all-time leading scorer, a towering figure whose excellence was both celebrated and contested. For him, transition meant not only aging out of competition but finding a new arena for impact - activism, writing, public intellect - without the instant legitimacy of a box score. The subtext is the ache of demotion from unquestioned authority to ordinary human: still ambitious, still capable, suddenly unscored.
Quote Details
| Topic | Letting Go |
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