It was noted here, a few days ago, that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is in the country.

Today, he was in the building — the offices of The National here in Abu Dhabi.

It created a bit of a stir, even though most people in the UAE are not familiar with the former Laker and Bruin, the NBA’s leading scorer and one of the greatest to play the game.

If nothing else, a 7-foot-2 guy has never before walked into the newsroom here.

What did Kareem have to say?

Most of it had to do with “healthy living”, an issue The National often touches on here in a country with a very high rate of adult-onset diabetes, which often is lifestyle related. Keeping active, losing weight, monitoring your diet — that’s the idea and that was his message.

It certainly appears that Kareem, who is 67, is in pretty good shape. And always has been, even when he got a leukemia diagnois a few years back. (The cancer is gone.)

He gets regular exercise, he says, from yoga and martial arts, and he looks hardly any heavier than when he retired, in 1989.

He was given the title “guest editor” of The National and came in with a fairly sizeable entourage of PR people who had organized his visit to the UAE. The crowd was augmented by curious newspaper staffers, several of whom followed him for the duration of what was about a 30-minute stay.

He sat at the round table in the middle of the room, where news meetings are held, and answered questions posed by the newspaper’s editor.

(The story from that conversation can be seen here, and the whole of the exchange can be seen on video here. Oh, and you can see me walking past the interview at about the 6:20 mark.)

I wasn’t among those who stood as close as they could to the conversation; I have been in a lockerroom with Kareem numerous times, not that he talked much, as a player.

But I could hear him, from time to time, and I was struck by how “American” he sounds. Sure, we expect Americans to have an American accent, but his is particularly mainstream, and you would never confuse him for any other sort of English speaker.

(Give the video a listen.)

So, that made for a bit of excitement. When Kareem was done, he headed back out to the parking lot to get ready for his next opportunity to relay tips for healthy living.