After eight full seasons, McKinney could brag of a 144-77 record, five Middle Atlantic Conference championships and four NCAA Tournament appearances. He was one of the nation’s best collegiate coaches and a man other schools thought of when a vacancy loomed. He also happened to be happy. He, his wife, Claire, and their four children lived in a small house on a pretty street. “I had other offers,” he said, “but I always rejected them.”
On March 18, 1974, he was fired.
It happened on a Monday. Jack McKinney remembers that. It’s not the day that stands out, so much as the utter shock. Until recently, McKinney had actually held the dual roles of coach and athletic director, just as Ramsay had before him. “It was great in a lot of ways,” McKinney said. “But I went to the priest who was in charge and told him both jobs were too much for me. I had a family to worry about, and I couldn’t do both any longer.”
McKinney was asked to pick a position: Either stay as the basketball coach, or stay as the athletic director. The choice was an easy one—his love was hoops, not paperwork. The school hired the Rev. Michael Blee to take over as the athletic director. McKinney was pleased, even though Blee promptly kicked him out of his office, moving him across the hall to a room the size of a large tissue box. McKinney’s load was lighter, and he could fully devote himself to Saint Joseph’s rise to national basketball prominence. That year, 1973–74, the Hawks—saddled with a puny $50,000 recruiting budget and picked by one Philadelphia sportswriter to win three games—finished 19-11, and McKinney was named the Eastern College Coach of the Year. The team reached yet another NCAA Tournament, losing to Pittsburgh, 54–42, in the first round of the Eastern Regional. Three days later, Blee—a humorless seventy-year-old with an affinity for not smiling—told McKinney that he lacked “teaching value” and needed to pack his belongings.
As the fired coach rose to leave, Blee cleared his throat. “I don’t think,” he said, “that you should mention this until you get another job.”
The next day, McKinney mentioned it. “There hasn’t been a word said to me all year in a negative way by the athletic director,” he told a handful of local print reporters as tears welled in his eyes. “I’m shocked. I just don’t understand it. They told me it was in the best interests of the college that I not be rehired. This is something I find difficult to accept—I don’t understand why I was fired.”
One day later, approximately eight hundred students attended a campus rally to protest the dismissal. They marched toward the president’s office, chanting “Bring back Jack!” while burning an effigy of Blee. The school’s alumni association issued a statement calling for McKinney to regain his job, and for Blee to be canned. The statement termed the firing “immoral” and “illogical.”
“It’s a funeral,” said Kevin Furey, a Hawks player. “Supposedly it was a matter of respect. No one, except for my father, got more respect from me than Coach McKinney.”
Within a couple of days, the heat died and McKinney was simply another man without a job. He sulked around his house, cleaning up rooms, taking long walks, wondering if this was the end of his collegiate coaching career. He thought about sales. Or, perhaps, teaching. Surely, there was a high school team in need of someone with his experience. “That was probably the lowest I’ve ever seen Jack,” said Claire McKinney. “Saint Joseph’s was a special place to him. He went there, played there, learned about coaching there. To be discarded like that . . . I don’t know if he’s ever fully recovered.”
That July, in the midst of his funk, McKinney set off to work his annual basketball camp in the Poconos. It would be, predictably, standard stuff—help a bunch of aspiring stars pick up the intricacies of the game. On the day he arrived, McKinney was walking down the steps of his hotel when he ran into Hubie Brown, an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks.
“Hey, Jack, what are you up to?” Brown asked.
“I just got fired,” he said glumly.
“Right—I heard about that,” Brown said. “It’s terrible. I’m really sorry.”
Pause.
“Hey,” Brown said, “would you be interested in going to Milwaukee?”
Milwaukee! Land of . . . eh . . . bratwurst and beer and strip malls and, well, not much else.
“Absolutely!” McKinney said. “What do you know?”
Brown, luck had it, had recently accepted the position of head coach for the Kentucky Colonels of the ABA. The Bucks were in desperate need of an assistant for Larry Costello. “I’ll call Larry today,” Brown said of Milwaukee’s head coach. “Hold tight.”
Within forty-eight hours, McKinney found himself on a flight from Philadelphia to Milwaukee. Costello picked him up at the airport. The two stopped at a diner. A quick lunch turned into four hours of Xs and Os and offensive philosophies. “We never got any further,” McKinney said. “He hired me and took me back to the airport.”
McKinney had never considered the NBA as a landing spot. In his mind, it was a league overpopulated by disinterested tall people. Upon arriving in Milwaukee, however, he was immediately embraced as a contemplative, intellectual counterpart to the high-strung Costello. The player who valued him most was Milwaukee’s center, a complicated superstar named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The majority of team officials steered clear of the All-Star, whose moodiness and unpredictability served as Plexiglas shields. McKinney, however, never flinched. He critiqued and criticized, assisted and enabled. Costello and Abdul-Jabbar would exchange, at most, fifty words in the course of a month. McKinney, meanwhile, became the star’s sounding board. “Everyone respected Jack,” said Jon McGlocklin, a Milwaukee guard. “He filled the role of the guy players could talk to and confide in.”
Two years later, McKinney was hired by his old pal Jack Ramsay to serve as an assistant with the Portland Trail Blazers. The next three seasons were some of the happiest of McKinney’s life. He was in his early forties, working alongside his mentor and close friend, helping guide one of the league’s most talented young teams. The McKinneys lived in a beautiful home in Lake Oswego, a Portland suburb with hiking trails and bike paths and bountiful nature. “It was a great place for kids to grow up,” said Dennis McKinney, Jack and Claire’s son. “It was pretty perfect for us.”
In 1976–77, his second season with Portland, McKinney was part of a team that won the NBA championship. Much was made of the two Philly guys walking the sideline, especially when the Blazers faced the 76ers in the finals. Should their team win, McKinney and Ramsay promised to sprint up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, à la Rocky Balboa.
When Portland hosted Game 6, leading the series three games to two, a city sat on edge. There were no other top-tier professional sports franchises in town, and since the team’s debut in 1970–71, Portland basketball fans had endured six losing seasons in seven tries. Finally, they were approaching something special and meaningful and uniting.
With less than ten minutes remaining in the game, the Blazers led comfortably by 12. Then by 10. 8. 6. 4. When the clock reached eighteen seconds, the advantage had been reduced to 2. Finally, after a bevy of wayward 76ers shots (Lloyd Free is blocked! George McGinnis’s fourteen-footer falls short!), the buzzer sounded. McKinney looked at Ramsay, who looked back at his friend. They embraced. “The greatest day of my coaching career,” McKinney would later say. “Nothing was a close second.”
• • •
And now, on July 18, 1979, Jack McKinney was inside the Forum, alongside the strangest sports owner he’d ever encountered. Jerry Buss wasn’t the first multimillionaire he’d met, but he was the first one to deliberately show off his chest hair.
For several hours, the two talked—some about basketball, much about life. McKinney and Buss couldn’t have been more opposite. McKinney was straitlaced, “bland and businesslike,” wrote Joe Gilmartin in the Sporting News. Yet Buss loved his narrative, the way he didn’t let an unfair firing turn him bitter. The new Lakers owner was
a fan of strength and stamina and athleticism. Above all, though, he was a fan of resiliency.
The men met one more time, and on the front sports page of the July 27, 1979, Los Angeles Times, the news became official: MCKINNEY, LAKERS SAID TO HAVE REACHED ACCORD. An introductory press conference was held on July 30 at the Forum, where thirty members of the Southern California media were offered pretzel sticks, cans of Coca-Cola and these opening words from a euphoric Buss: “The Lakers need a change from the style of play they had last year. . . .”
With that, the reporters met a man they had (with rare exceptions) never before heard of. Appropriately dressed in a dull brown suit with a dull brown tie, McKinney was neither charming nor effusive. He was as Hollywood as a tube sock. No slicked-back hair, no $5,000 outfit. “All he does,” wrote Scott Ostler in the Los Angeles Times, “. . . is coach basketball well and get along with people—even players and sportswriters.”
When asked to explain his coaching philosophy, McKinney didn’t hesitate. “A constant running game,” he said. “I’d like a moving offense, rather than having everyone else standing around watching Kareem all the time and putting pressure on him. I think we can do that. When you have someone like Magic, I think you can do that. We’ll run every chance and under every possible situation.”
Watching the press conference on a television from inside his room at the Plaza Hotel, Earvin Johnson was beaming from ear to ear.
The words were music.
• • •
In the aftermath of the NBA Draft, Magic Johnson had come to the Forum to officially meet the press and charm the masses. The Lakers sent a limousine to pick him up. The driver was a former Playboy bunny. “I’m sure he was thinking, ‘I’m in the right place,’” said Bob Steiner, the team’s publicity director. Before he was taken to the arena, however, Johnson stopped off at Jerry Buss’s house to meet his new boss. When the doorbell rang, the master of the house was upstairs combing his hair. “You bring in Earvin and offer him a drink,” Jerry Buss said to his seventeen-year-old daughter, Jeanie. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
When she opened the door, Jeanie Buss was greeted by a smile—“A magnificent, beautiful smile,” she said. The two sat down and engaged in awkward adolescent banter. “I’m real excited I was drafted here,” Johnson said. “I’m gonna play in Los Angeles for three years and then I’m gonna go finish my career with the Detroit Pistons, because that’s where I grew up and that’s who I want to play for.”
Jeanie excused herself, dashed up the steps and charged into the bathroom. “Dad! Dad!” she said. “He says he wants to play for the Pistons!”
Jerry Buss barely flinched. “Jeanie,” he said, “you have nothing to worry about. The first time he puts on a Laker uniform and walks out onto the Forum floor, he’s never going to want to leave.”
On the drive to the arena, Johnson gazed out the window at the orange trees and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Were they in California or heaven? Thirty minutes later, Johnson engaged in a session with the media that was beyond compare. This was California’s first real exposure to Johnson’s smile and charisma and optimism. Brad Holland, the team’s second first-round pick, was also sitting at the table. He was a local kid who had played at UCLA—and he was invisible. “It was all Magic,” said Ostler. “He wasn’t just good. He was dazzling.”
“Until that moment, the NBA was—for many Americans—black guys in short shorts snorting cocaine,” said Pat O’Brien. “Magic was a savior.”
Asked whether he could help a team that had enjoyed only one home sellout in 1978–79, the nineteen-year-old cleared his throat and smiled. “If there are some crazy basketball fans,” he said, “tell ’em to come on out. The Lakers already be winnin’ without me. Now we’re gonna be exciting!”
When the press conference ended and the lights inside the Forum were dimmed, Johnson crossed the court, plopped down in an empty seat and dreamed. He pictured lobbing the ball to Abdul-Jabbar, whipping no-look passes to Jamaal Wilkes. He eventually walked into the Lakers’ darkened locker room, where the nameplates seemed to glisten.
ABDUL-JABBAR
WILKES
NIXON
DANTLEY
What was he doing here? How did this happen?
Though he didn’t fully see it in himself as a young boy, Earvin Johnson Jr. was meant to be a star. That’s a clichéd sentiment, obviously, used a thousand times a day to describe the most charismatic and precocious among us. There’s always some kid deemed by neighbors to be the next president, the next quarterback, the next Broadway standout. Yet from the time he was a tyke, growing up in a yellow frame house at 814 Middle Street just north of the Grand River on the west side of Lansing, Michigan, Earvin had “It.”
He was the sixth of ten brothers and sisters. His father, Earvin Sr., was an assembly worker at the Fisher Body plant (he worked the awful 4:48 P.M. to 3:18 A.M. shift) who earned additional money on weekends by running his own rubbish route or pumping gas at the nearby Shell station; his mother, Christine, was a junior high cafeteria worker. The Johnsons ate dinner together every evening, and on Saturday nights, Christine would make a batch of homemade pizzas, and the family would gather around the television. Grades and effort were important; empathy was more important. “I ran into Earvin’s fourth-grade teacher in a grocery store,” Christine Johnson once said. “She laughed and started telling me a story about him. It was the first day of school in her first year of teaching, and the class was giving her fits. Spitballs were flying. Children were yelling. Earvin stood up and told his classmates to get in their seats, to behave, to listen to the teacher. She said everybody stopped and did just what he said to do.”
Young Earvin’s nickname was June Bug because he was always on the move, and his goals changed by the hour. He wanted to grow up and be a member of The Temptations; an astronaut; a movie star; the next John F. Kennedy. “I was a dreamer,” he said. “And when you’re a dreamer, I think, you dream about everything, almost, on the face of the earth.”
There were jobs. Plenty of jobs. When he was ten, Earvin cut neighborhood lawns, and at fifteen, he was a stock boy at Quality Dairy. He also helped a family friend named Jim Dart on his Vernor’s Ginger Ale route. On Friday nights, he took shifts as a janitor in a nearby building, vacuuming floors, emptying trash cans, cleaning bathrooms. With no one around, he’d kick back in a leather chair and prop his feet on a desk. “I’d start giving out orders to my staff,” he said. “‘Do this, do that.’” Throughout his career, Johnson often thought back to a television commercial from his boyhood for Camay soap. In the spot, a wealthy, elegant woman stepped into a bathtub. “See that bathtub,” young Earvin said to his sister Pearl. “Someday I’m gonna have one just like that in my house.”
His big dreams—coupled with an unrivaled work ethic—translated to sports. Johnson was rarely seen without a basketball, either tucked beneath his arm or bouncing against the pavement. Everywhere he walked, the weathered Spalding came along. “If I was going on an errand for my mother, I’d dribble on the sidewalk, making a game out of trying to miss the cracks,” he once wrote. “Or I’d dribble one block right-handed and one block left-handed. Then I’d dribble home with a sack of groceries in my arm.” When it was raining outside, he’d be in his room, acting out Warriors-Pistons with a rolled-up pair of socks. On Sunday afternoons, he and his father watched the NBA Game of the Week on TV. Every once in a while they’d go to Detroit’s Cobo Arena to catch Dave Bing and the Pistons. “My father would point out the subtleties of the pick-and-roll play,” Johnson wrote, “and explain the various defensive strategies.” By fourth grade, Earvin played in four different leagues. He’d find action wherever he could—the nearby YMCA, a church gym, the Main Street school yard courts. On Sunday afternoons after church, he’d peel off his suit, slip into his shorts, T-shirt and red Chuck Taylor All Stars and dash out the front door, searching for a game. Any ga
me.
Because he was named for his father, Johnson often went by Little Earvin. Only he wasn’t little. When, as a seventh grader, he tried out for the team at Dwight Rich Junior High, Earvin stood high above the competition. He was six feet tall and could dribble with both hands, post up down low and run the court like a deer. As a ninth grader he reached 6-foot-5, and once scored 48 points in a game. Were he merely a big kid with athletic gifts, Johnson would have been simply noteworthy. However, the youngster was distinctive. He was caring and empathetic, bighearted and open-armed. Throughout junior high, he waited excitedly for the chance to attend Sexton High, a basketball powerhouse located five blocks from his doorstep. Then the news came that, thanks to forced busing, he would be sent for tenth grade four miles away to Everett High, a 92 percent white school on Lansing’s south side.
Johnson was crushed. Two of his older brothers, Quincey and Larry, had been bused to Everett, and their lives were miserable whirlwinds of fights, awkwardness and rejection. “I was upset,” he said in 1977. “All the dudes I went with went to Sexton. I went to every Sexton game. I was a Sexton man, and then they came up with this busing thing.” Earvin braced himself for hostility and then, briefly, experienced it. But while Larry had been confrontational, Earvin decided to greet people warmly. When black students were offended that the only music being piped into the lunchroom was performed by white artists, Earvin asked the principal for a change. It was granted. Shortly thereafter, when no black girls were accepted for cheerleading, Earvin led an even-tempered protest of all the black basketball players. Before long, the squad was integrated. “Earvin had a goodness in his heart that you didn’t see too often,” said George Fox, the Everett High varsity basketball coach. “He accepted people for who they were, without looking at color or class. He was special—it was very obvious.”
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 5
