The Anthem

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.