Hakeem Olajuwon

Hakeem Abdul Olajuwon, nicknamed "the Dream", is a Nigerian-American former professional basketball player, born in Lagos on 21 January 1963. He played 18 seasons in the NBA, primarily with the Houston Rockets, and led them to back-to-back championships in 1994 and 1995. He won the NBA Most Valuable Player award in 1994, two Finals MVP awards and two Defensive Player of the Year awards, and remains the only player in league history to win the MVP, Defensive Player of the Year and Finals MVP awards in the same season. He retired as the league's all-time leader in blocked shots (3,830) and was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008. ^{1 2}

He was selected as one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History and, in October 2021, to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team, and he won Olympic gold with the United States team in 1996. ¹

He was born in Lagos to Salim and Abike Olajuwon, working-class Yoruba owners of a cement business, and credits his parents with instilling hard work and discipline in him and his siblings. He has expressed displeasure at his Nigerian childhood being characterised as backward, noting that Lagos is a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic city. ¹

In his youth he was a soccer goalkeeper, which gave him the footwork and agility that later balanced his size and strength and contributed to his shot-blocking. He did not play basketball until the age of 15, when he entered a local tournament while at the Muslim Teachers College in Lagos. ^{1 3}

He emigrated from Nigeria to play at the University of Houston under coach Guy Lewis. He was not highly recruited and was merely offered a visit to work out for the coaching staff, on the recommendation of a friend of Lewis who had seen him play; arriving at the airport in 1980, he found no one to greet him and was told to take a taxi to the university. ¹

After redshirting his first year while awaiting NCAA clearance, he played mostly as the sixth man in 1981-82, then transformed his game over a summer spent playing against NBA MVP Moses Malone in Houston pickup games. With teammates including Clyde Drexler he formed the "Phi Slama Jama" teams, famous for their above-the-rim play, and led the Cougars to consecutive NCAA championship games in 1983 and 1984, losing to North Carolina State and to Patrick Ewing's Georgetown. He was voted the NCAA Tournament's Most Outstanding Player in 1983 and a consensus first-team All-American in 1984. It was his college coach who, watching him dunk so effortlessly, gave him the nickname "the Dream". ¹

The Houston Rockets selected him first overall in the celebrated 1984 NBA draft, which also included Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley and John Stockton. Teaming with 7 ft 4 in Ralph Sampson as the "Twin Towers", he reached the 1986 NBA Finals, losing to the Boston Celtics. After Sampson was traded in 1988, Olajuwon became the Rockets' undisputed leader: he led the league in rebounding twice (1989, 1990) and in blocks three times (1990, 1991, 1993), and on 29 March 1990 recorded one of the four quadruple-doubles in NBA history. ¹

A bitter contract dispute nearly saw him traded before the 1992-93 season, but he remained in Houston and became the first non-American to start an NBA All-Star Game, the first non-American to win the NBA MVP award, and the first non-American to win Defensive Player of the Year. ¹

The championships

In 1993-94 he won the MVP, Defensive Player of the Year and Finals MVP awards in a single season, a feat never repeated. The Rockets beat the New York Knicks in the 1994 Finals for the franchise's first championship, and Olajuwon avenged his college championship loss to Patrick Ewing. The following year, after a lacklustre regular season, his Rockets swept Shaquille O'Neal's Orlando Magic in the 1995 Finals for a second consecutive title, as the Hall of Fame records. ^{1 2}

He played twenty consecutive seasons in Houston, collegiately and professionally, before a final season with the Toronto Raptors (2001-02), as the Arabic article also records. He retired as the league's all-time leader in blocked shots with 3,830, having scored 26,946 career points. ^{1 2 3}

This section sets out what the sources report. It is not a verdict by the museum.

The English article devotes a section to his Muslim faith: in his college career and early NBA years he was often undisciplined, talking back to officials and amassing technical fouls; later he took an active interest in spirituality and became a more devout Muslim. On 9 March 1991 he altered his name's spelling from Akeem to Hakeem, saying, "I'm not changing the spelling of my name, I'm correcting it". He recalled: "I studied the Qur'an every day. At home, at the mosque... I would read it in airplanes, before games and after them. I was soaking up the faith and learning new meanings each time I turned a page. I didn't dabble in the faith, I gave myself over to it." His teammate Clyde Drexler said in 1995: "His religion dominates his life." ¹

He played while observing Ramadan — abstaining from food and drink from dawn to sunset — which fell during the playing season throughout his career, and was noted as sometimes playing better during it: in 1995 he was named NBA Player of the Month for February even though Ramadan began on 1 February that year. ¹

As to his school: Wikidata records his religion as Sunni Islam, while neither the English nor the Arabic article names a school; under the museum's rule a school is not recorded from a single source, so his record states exactly this. ^{4 1 3}

He is considered a Houston icon and one of the city's most beloved citizens. The article reports great success in the Houston real estate market, with estimated profits exceeding $100 million, and that he buys with cash-only purchases because paying interest is against Islamic law. He splits his time between Jordan, where he moved with his family to pursue Islamic studies, and his ranch near Houston. ¹

In the 2006 offseason he opened his first Big Man Camp, teaching young frontcourt players post play; he runs it for free, and has worked with players including Yao Ming, Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard and LeBron James, saying in 2016 that Bryant was his best low-post student. He made a special appearance for Team Africa at the 2015 NBA Africa exhibition game and was inducted into the FIBA Hall of Fame in 2016. ¹

On 10 April 2008 the Rockets unveiled a sculpture of him outside the Toyota Center, and he was inducted into the Hall of Fame the same year. In October 2021 the NBA honoured him on its 75th Anniversary Team. He is one of only four players to record a quadruple-double, and holds the record for 5x5 games with six. ^{1 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• The English article gives him as the third of eight children and the Arabic article as the third of six; the count is not used in this article, and the discrepancy is recorded in the two source entities' reliability notes.