Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf: A Portrait of Perfection

Imagine being alone on a basketball court for hours. Left in seclusion long after your teammates have retreated to the showers and headed home. Physically exhausted beyond all bearable thresholds. Body aching to the point of near collapse.

Now imagine wanting to leave more than anything else. Wanting to put down that basketball. Wanting to change out of your sweaty clothes, and the shoes that now hurt your feet. Wanting to meet up with your friends. Wanting to be anywhere but where you’re at.

But, for some reason, IT won’t let you.

IT holds you there beyond your control. IT won’t let you leave until you take that basketball that you long to put down, and put it through the hoop 10 times in a row without so much as hitting the rim.  IT holds you there until you demonstrate perfection.

And once perfection is achieved, IT lets go just as easily as IT took hold.

The IT I am referring to is a neuropsychiatric disorder of the brain called Tourette’s Syndrome that results in uncontrollable body movements and tics, and IT has haunted former NBA great Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf his entire life.

Born Chris Wayne Jackson on Mar. 9, 1969 in Gulfport, Mississippi, Abdul-Rauf was the middle of three boys born to Jacqueline Jackson, a cafeteria worker thought also to display the strange symptoms of the inherited disease.

Growing up in a poverty-stricken home with a single mother, Abdul-Rauf was known to frequent the city's playground basketball courts, often practicing for hours on end, shooting hundreds of free throws a day, meticulously perfecting the trajectory and arc on his shot and the way the ball would strike the net.

Making sure the ball didn't even touch the rim.

IT wouldn't let him leave these rundown courts until IT told him his shot was perfect.  

In some patients, symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome manifest in such a way that the brain will establish unreasonable goals that simply must be achieved before feeling satisfied.

When he shot those hundreds of free throws, each and every one had to feel perfect. The ball would have rest in his palm in exactly the right way. The ball would have to roll off of his fingertips in exactly the right way. The spin on his shot would have to feel perfect.

He would stay there on that playground until he had completely met the goal his mind unknowingly set for him.

This was both the blessing and the curse of Abdul-Rauf's life.

This same disease that left him in tears at night, crying himself to sleep because he was unable to control the tics and strange behavior, was also the same disease that forced him into the countless hours of practice that would ultimately lead to his success as a professional basketball player.

At Gulfport High School, Abdul-Rauf would emerge as an athletic prodigy. In a city where circumstances often seemed bleak, he quickly became the city's darling and its beacon of hope.

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