# The Anthem *A Biography of Mahmoud Abdul Rauf* — Legendary Biographies No. 011 - **Subject:** Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (born Chris Wayne Jackson) - **Written by:** Devon Marable - **Shelf:** Sport / Basketball - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 198 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-482-7) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Gideon Marsh (ISBN 979-8-90623-479-7) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/011-the-anthem.html ## About this book March 12, 1996. The Denver Nuggets fine their twenty-six-year-old point guard one game's pay — $31,707 — for refusing to stand for the national anthem. The next morning the league suspends him outright. The reporting is wall-to-wall. Within a year Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf is out of the NBA. His name is not on a single retired jersey, and not on either of the league's anniversary teams. He averaged 19.2 points a game the year before the anthem refusal. Devon Marable's biography opens earlier, in Gulfport, Mississippi, where Chris Wayne Jackson was born in 1969 to a single mother and a Tourette's diagnosis that would shape his entire athletic life. From there the arc moves through Gulfport High and a 1989 LSU recruit class that included Shaquille O'Neal, through Dale Brown's tutelage and the NCAA scoring titles, through the Denver years and the 1991 conversion to Islam that gave him his name. Marable traces the post-NBA years with equal care: the Turkish and Italian and Russian and Saudi clubs that bought one more season of his shot, the 2001 arson that destroyed his Gulfport home, the 2023 STAND documentary that made the case nobody in the league had been willing to make on his behalf at the time. What emerges is a portrait of a great shooter, a religious convert, and a twenty-six-year-old who was told to keep his mouth shut, and would not. ## Contents 1. Gulfport 2. The Noise Inside 3. Baton Rouge 4. Mile High 5. The Convert 6. The Ambidextrous Game 7. The Anthem 8. The Firestorm 9. Sacramento and Silence 10. Exile — Istanbul 11. The Wandering Years 12. The House That Burned 13. Islam in America 14. The Body Electric 15. Kaepernick 16. In the Blink of an Eye 17. The Cost of Being First 18. Still Standing ## Questions **Who is The Anthem about?** Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (born Chris Wayne Jackson). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Anthem — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,634 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 198 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Devon Marable spent a decade as a reporter for ESPN The Magazine before turning his attention to book-length biography. His writing focuses on the complex personal realities of athletes whose public careers dominated headlines while their private struggles and triumphs remained largely unrecorded by the daily press. Through meticulous archival research and deep interviewing, he reconstructs the quiet, human moments behind monumental sports histories. His published titles include The Chicago Compound, The Akron Origin, The Crumlin Plumber, and The Stolen Bicycle. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he spends his free time restoring vintage road bicycles and volunteering at a local youth community center.