Abdul-Jabbar Takes His Place in Hall : Basketball: USC’s Cheryl Miller and five others join former Laker great in the Hall of Fame.

When one has been on nine championship teams, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has, and scored more points and played in more games than anyone before or since, the Basketball Hall of Fame is not a measure of one’s career. Players like Abdul-Jabbar are the reason the Hall was founded.

Monday night in Springfield, Mass., the Hall made it official, inducting Abdul-Jabbar along with Cheryl Miller, the former USC star and now coach of the Trojan women’s team, another athlete who towered over her game.

“When I started playing, I never thought I’d end up here,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “For me, it was basically a way to go to college.

“My parents never wanted me to be a basketball player. They didn’t care. They wanted me to go to college.”

Miller was introduced at Monday’s news conference by a Hall official, who remarked that her brother, Reggie, the Indiana Pacer star, “now has a famous sibling in Springfield.”

Said Cheryl, “But he makes more money than I do.”

Cheryl said she’d already heard from Reggie.

“Reggie called and asked if this was the legend,” she said.

Abdul-Jabbar won three NCAA titles in his three varsity years at UCLA, then six championships in a 20-year NBA career, one with the Milwaukee Bucks, five with the Lakers.

He scored a never-to-be-approached record 38,387 regular-season points. The No. 2 all-time scorer, Wilt Chamberlain, had 31,419. No active player has 28,000. Abdul-Jabbar’s 20 seasons, 1,560 games and 57,446 minutes are all records.

“I realized I was from another era in the NBA,” said Abdul-Jabbar, an old Brooklyn Dodger fan, “when there was no one left who remembered the 1955 World Series.”

By the time Abdul-Jabbar retired in 1989, there weren’t many NBA players who remembered the 1965 World Series and some who couldn’t have told you much about the ’75 Fall Classic. At 42, Abdul-Jabbar was still the starting center on a Laker team that made the NBA finals. At 41, he averaged 19.6 points a game for an NBA champion.

Abdul-Jabbar was always a reluctant celebrity. An old grade school teammate at the ceremony, Jimmy Engel, remembered him as someone who just wanted to be “a regular guy like the others.”

Abdul-Jabbar, 48, says he would consider a coaching job and remains a steadfast critic of the antics of some modern NBA players.

“The professional athletes today could use some lessons in sportsmanship,” he said. “And they are rewarded for that kind of behavior. That is a problem.

“The team aspect is what makes basketball--five people working together. When I was in high school it was always, ‘Watch the Celtics and [Bill] Russell.’ Team play was always the way it was done. And at UCLA, Coach [John] Wooden just reinforced that.”

“The players today are super athletes but they don’t know how to play as a team. It’s not the money. It’s the lack of education and discipline that can only be learned from years of coaching in high school and college.

“They’ve never had to hold down their egos and work with four other people holding down their egos. When players in high school are told they don’t have to do book reports because of all the money they are bringing into the school playing basketball, it corrupts any type of character development.

“Discipline and intelligence are what makes a really great athlete.”

Abdul-Jabbar flew his grade school coach, Farrell Hopkins, to Massachusetts from Key West, Fla. to attend the ceremony. When Hopkins met Abdul-Jabbar in 1957, Kareem was a fifth-grader.

“I was 5 foot 6 and maybe weighed 100 pounds,” said Abdul-Jabbar. “And just because I wanted to play so bad, Coach Hopkins let me be on the team. I owe him a lot.”

Was Abdul-Jabbar good then?

“No,” said Hopkins. “But he developed.”

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Also inducted were the late NBA referee Earl Strom, Minneapolis Laker coach John Kundla, Minneapolis Laker player Vern Mikkelsen, Old Dominion star Anne Donovan and Aleksandr Gomelsky, the longtime coach of the Soviet Union men’s team who coached his players to a victory over the United States in the 1988 Seoul Olympics.