The room was dark, with dim lighting and maroon carpet. Alongside McKinney stood Paul Westhead, his new assistant. The players mostly sat in chairs—veterans primarily on one side, rookies and free agents on the other. As always, Abdul-Jabbar was in the front, the legs from his 7-foot-2 frame stretched out like twin giraffes. A handful of veteran post specialists (Kenny Carr, Don Ford and Dave Robisch) listened intently, knowing their careers were on the line. There were five rookies (Johnson, Kiffin, Mack, Scott and Holland, the sharpshooter out of UCLA) as well as a pair of second-year guards (Cooper and Ron Carter) thought to be fighting for a single spot. Abdul-Jabbar, Nixon and Wilkes were the mainstays.
McKinney wasted little time distancing himself from the high-stress, high-tension Jerry West. He spoke little of team rules and regulations, instead insisting that the Lakers would run the hell out of the rest of the league. The offensive system was a symphony: When the basketball came off the glass, one guard would immediately break for the foul line for the outlet, while the other guard slashed to mid-court. “His offensive ideas were genius,” said Ron Carter. “Little dribbling, lots of passing, lots of speed.”
The next morning, at nine o’clock, the new-look Los Angeles Lakers took the court for the first time. There was casual banter followed by casual stretching led by Jack Curran, the team’s crusty forty-six-year-old trainer. Westhead lined the players up on a baseline and began the wind sprints—dash to one end of the court, touch the floor, dash back, dash again, dash back. Most of the veterans ran on cruise control. “Hard,” said Cooper, “but not super hard.” Then it was Johnson’s turn. When Westhead blew the whistle, the rookie burst across the court, his long arms and longer legs blurring like a greyhound in motion. Though built like a World Wrestling Federation competitor, Johnson was shockingly fast. He moved as a sprinter, with an upright running motion similar to that of Houston McTear, the star American 100-meter runner. He left his peers in his wake, crossed the baseline and immediately popped back to run another. Some Lakers were impressed. Some were incredulous. Most were irked. “I could see right off that my intensity was very different from the cool, laid-back style of the NBA,” Johnson later wrote. “Most professional athletes try to conserve their energy, especially before the season begins. My teammates were shocked.”
Nixon, in particular, didn’t know how to deal. Until Johnson’s arrival, he was the fastest man on the roster. Were there a sprint, Norm Nixon was finishing first. “Raw speed,” said Ron Carter, a Laker guard. “Norm was just super fast. No one could beat him or get the better of him. Until Earvin got to town.”
Once practice officially began, the Magic Johnson Show kicked into high gear. Johnson dove for loose balls, soared for rebounds, boxed out bigger players and recklessly tossed elbows. When Nixon told him to cool it, the rookie talked trash right back. “Don’t be intimidated by a kid,” he barked. “Don’t be intimidated. . . .” In particular, Nixon seemed to resent the way Johnson took the offense into his own hands. McKinney wanted the rebounder to immediately turn and pass up the court. When Johnson grabbed a ball off the boards, however, he dribbled. “Norm would flash across the middle and Magic would ignore him,” said Carter. “Norm would get very agitated, and there was this undercurrent with Magic not following the rules.”
Johnson’s most striking attribute wasn’t the effort. No, it was the passing. Nixon was a precise ball distributor. His passes were crisp and, with rare exception, on point. “We all knew Norm would get us the ball,” said Wilkes, the veteran forward. “He was terrific. But when Magic came along, from day one, it was just— Wow!”
Actually, it wasn’t Wow! It was Pop! Within ten minutes of the Lakers’ first five-on-five scrimmage, Johnson was popping teammates upside the head with impossible-to-anticipate passes that seemed to curve and bend around the bodies of unsuspecting opponents. “The thing about a 6-foot-9 point guard is his ability to see above a defense,” said Wilkes. “It was remarkable. I remember running my routes in those early practices. He threw me this pass—just spectacular—that I didn’t see. I mean, I wasn’t open, and nobody in his right mind would think I was open. But Earvin saw it, and the ball just thumped me right in the head. Pow!”
McKinney stopped practice and told Johnson that a pass was useless if the recipient couldn’t see it coming. Johnson nodded, said he understood, agreed—“Then practice began,” said Wilkes, “and the first pass he threw me was this wicked no-looker between defenders that nailed me in the head again. I got the point. ‘You be ready for my passes, or else you won’t get them.’ Jack wanted Magic to adjust to us but, truthfully, we all needed to adjust to him.”
One player in particular had little interest in any of the Magic hoopla. Ron Boone, an eleventh-year swingman fighting to make the team, had seen this sort of nonsense before, and he had no stomach for it. A one-time eleventh-round draft pick out of Idaho State, Boone had spent his entire career in the shadows of pretty boys and golden children. “Boone was a tough, crafty guy,” said Michael Cooper. “He’d been around the block.” During a particularly heated practice, Boone intentionally smacked Johnson in the back of his head with a forearm while fighting for a rebound. Johnson glared at Boone. “You better know,” he said, “I’m going to get you back.”
“Keep moving, rookie,” Boone replied. “You’re not going to do anything.”
Johnson turned and punched Boone in the neck. Boone fell to the ground. “Don’t you ever do that shit to me again!” the rookie screamed, as Boone charged toward him. McKinney ejected both men from practice, and as he walked toward the locker room, Johnson scanned the court and hollered, “I might be a rookie, but none of you guys are gonna punk me!” Boone uttered nary another word. His days with the team were numbered.
“Ron had averaged a lot of points [with Utah] in the ABA, and he thought he was something special,” said Cooper. “Magic went to work on him—hard.”
“Just knocked Ron Boone on his ass,” said Lon Rosen, an intern with the team. “Earvin was respectful, but he did not take anything.”*
Sharman, the general manager, particularly appreciated Johnson’s intensity. The 47-win 1978–79 season had been a disappointing one, and the franchise was determined not to waste Johnson’s arrival by pairing him with riffraff. With the league adding a three-point line for the first time, Sharman used the number fourteen pick in the draft on Holland, a 6-foot-3 dead-eye shooter who had averaged 17.5 points as a senior at UCLA. “Brad,” Sharman raved, “was maybe the best outside shooter in collegiate history.” In the off-season’s most highly publicized trade, the Lakers and Utah Jazz swapped forwards, with twenty-three-year-old Adrian Dantley heading to Salt Lake City in exchange for Spencer Haywood, a thirty-year-old veteran.
Throughout the previous season, the Lakers had been burdened by teaming Abdul-Jabbar in the frontcourt with a pair of men (the 6-foot-5 Dantley and the 6-foot-6 Wilkes) both better suited for the small forward slot. At 6-foot-8 and 225 pounds, Haywood was all power forward. His arms were muscular, his torso was Herculean, his leaping ability off the charts. Nine years earlier, in 1970, he gained his first dose of national fame by launching an antitrust suit against the NBA in order to join the Seattle SuperSonics. Haywood, just twenty-one at the time, had jumped to ABA’s Denver Rockets after his sophomore season at the University of Detroit but was banned from the NBA because of the league’s eligibility rules. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court before the NBA agreed to a settlement, and Haywood spent much of his time in Seattle being booed and heckled in opposing arenas. “It wasn’t always fun,” he said. “But it built character.”
NBA owners detested Haywood. NBA fans detested Haywood. NBA executives detested Haywood. NBA players, however, generally loved the man. “Everyone called Spencer ‘Woody,’” said Tom Nissalke, his coach with the Sonics. “He could run, he could jump, he was a good shooter. When he drove to the basket, it was like watching the parting of the Red Sea. And he mostly did it wi
th a smile.” After scoring 30 points per game as a rookie with Denver, he averaged at least 20 in five years in Seattle. Though Haywood’s production gradually tailed off with the Knicks and Jazz, Los Angeles thought he would fit perfectly. Haywood played thirty-four games for the New Orleans Jazz in 1978–79, but when the franchise announced its relocation to Salt Lake City, he balked. “I just flat-out refused to report to camp,” he said. “New Orleans is a great town. Just great. But back in the 1970s, no brother wanted to go to Salt Lake.”
Around the same time Dantley learned of his banishment, Haywood was sitting in a dentist’s chair, still woozy from anesthesia. The phone in the office rang, and Sharman was on the line. When the words Welcome to the Los Angeles Lakers entered his ear, Haywood assumed it was merely the gas playing tricks on his hearing.
“It’s like a dream situation for me,” he later said. “Here I am for the first time in my career with a bona fide, official team. I’ve been trying to get to L.A. for nine years.
“My role is going to be to assert some leadership and do some strong rebounding. I’ll be the guy to get that second effort off the offensive boards. I’ll be a garbage and muscle man, too.”
Haywood reported to the Ocotillo Lodge two days later. Instead of languishing in Mormon Central, he was surrounded by familiar veterans and a spectacular rookie point guard. “Magic was just a kid, but his enthusiasm got to me from the start,” Haywood said. “I don’t care if others were turned off—I thought it was great. Magic made every practice a game, every workout a game, every drill a game. When you’re in the league a while, and when you’ve become a little complacent, you need a wake-up call sometimes.
“Magic Johnson was our wake-up call.”
CHAPTER 4
CENTER OF COMPLICATIONS
Not that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wanted a wake-up call.
Or even an alarm to ring.
Now entering his eleventh NBA season, the Lakers’ star greeted Magic Johnson’s arrival with neither derision nor euphoria nor so much as a shrug. To Abdul-Jabbar, the rookie was merely the latest heavily hyped addition to a team that always seemed to be acquiring heavily hyped additions.
No matter whether Johnson soared or stumbled, the thirty-two-year-old knew he would, as always, be getting his. Abdul-Jabbar had averaged 23.8 points and 12.8 rebounds per game in 1978–79, and led the NBA with 316 blocked shots. His go-to offensive weapon, the deadly skyhook, was virtually unblockable, and rivals near and far agreed he was, along with the retired George Mikan, Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, one of the four greatest forces the sport had ever seen. Abdul-Jabbar had already won five MVP awards, making him one of two men to capture that many (the other was Boston’s Russell). “He was an absolute pain to play against,” said Rich Kelley, a longtime center with the Phoenix Suns. “He wouldn’t physically beat you down or talk a lot of trash. But at the end of every night you’d look up and see he hung 22 [points] and 12 [rebounds] on you. And he made it look easy.”
“Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the greatest basketball player I ever saw,” said Dave Robisch, his backup in Los Angeles in 1977 and ’78. “I saw Oscar Robertson, I saw Jerry West, I saw lots of legends. But Kareem was on his own level.”
As Johnson spent his time in Palm Desert bounding around like a new puppy, Abdul-Jabbar went about his routine. Every year, Lakers veterans were allowed to “adopt” a rookie during camp, so Kareem paired with Magic. Instead of demanding he sing the Michigan State fight song or act out scenes from What’s Happening!!, Johnson merely had to fetch Abdul-Jabbar the morning New York Times, as well as a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. “I think Kareem was happy to have Earvin on the team,” said Paul Westhead, the assistant coach. “But did he make a fuss about it? Certainly not.”
What Abdul-Jabbar could not possibly grasp, though, was that there would be a direct correlation between Johnson’s rapid rise to stardom and his own dour disposition. For all his greatness as a player, Abdul-Jabbar failed to understand that carrying a team and inspiring a fan base involved more than mere statistics.
It meant being nice to people.
Theoretically, Abdul-Jabbar could be. Behind closed doors, when the spirit struck, stories abound of his sharp sense of humor and keen satirical insights. He was the one who, during a training camp meal at Benihana in 1979, taught an undrafted rookie named Irv Kiffin how to use chopsticks, and who sent the son of teammate Ron Boone autographed goggles for his birthday. In the early 1980s, a pair of Laker reserves, Mike McGee and Larry Spriggs, arrived at the Forum in identical purple shirts. McGee, a 6-foot-5, 190-pound guard, wore an extra large. Spriggs, a 6-foot-7, 230-pound hulk, wore a XXXL. Alone in the locker room during warmups, Abdul-Jabbar snuck into the stalls of both men and swapped shirts. “I walk in after the game and Cap [all Lakers referred to Abdul-Jabbar as Cap—short for his status as the team’s captain] is laughing his ass off,” said Spriggs. “I’m thinking, ‘What’s up with this guy?’ So I start putting my shirt on, and it’s brand-new, and I can’t figure out why it’s so damn tight. And Geet’s shirt [McGee’s nickname was Geeter] is hanging off of him. Cap can’t control himself—laughing like it’s the funniest thing on earth.”
Another time, Michael Cooper offered Johnson one hundred dollars to sneak up in the locker room and swat the Los Angeles Times sports section out of Abdul-Jabbar’s hand. He did so, and the center guaranteed revenge. “I’m gonna get you, Coop,” he said. “I’m gonna get you.” A few weeks later, while Cooper was sleeping on a Northwest Airlines flight from Detroit, Abdul-Jabbar tiptoed up to his seat and placed a dollop of Nair atop his miniature Afro. “All of a sudden Coop wakes up, screaming from the burn,” said Gary Vitti, the Lakers’ trainer. “His head is burning, and he has a nickel-size hole in his hair, where he was bald. Kareem just sat there, chuckling. ‘Heh, heh, heh.’”
In public, however, Abdul-Jabbar was the darkest of dark clouds, moody and aloof and, in the opinions of many, unjustifiably arrogant and dismissive. “He developed the habit of not looking at you,” said Claire Rothman. “He’d talk to you but look over here. I’ve always thought he had the idea that if he didn’t look at you, you didn’t see him.” Many fans are of the belief that, in exchange for excessive ticket prices and ceaseless adulation, athletes owe the public a bit of gratitude. Abdul-Jabbar did not. He was, as author Jackie Lapin once wrote, “a Gulliver in a world of Lilliputians,” nearly as famous for rebuffing requests as he was for leading UCLA to three national titles. Endless were the stories of his airport antics; of hiding in bathroom stalls with a book (When he wasn’t on a basketball court, Abdul-Jabbar was almost always reading); of telling young boys and elderly ladies and priests and nuns and rabbis and military veterans that, no, he wouldn’t write his name on a scrap of paper.
“Some little kid would ask for an autograph and he’d say, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ said Linda Rambis, who worked as the vice president and general manager of Forum tennis during the early 1980s. “But Kareem was, otherwise, an incredible professional.”
“I remember one time standing next to Kareem by the urinals inside an airport bathroom,” said Brad Holland, a Laker guard. “I mean, literally, Kareem is peeing, and someone is standing there asking for an autograph. And he’s supposed to be nice to everyone? It was hard, I’m sure.”
“Sometimes he wouldn’t even answer—just ignored the person,” said Tony Campbell, a future teammate. “I liked Kareem, but I had a real problem with that.”
“I was with Kareem in Salt Lake City once,” said Josh Rosenfeld, the team’s longtime media relations director. “We were walking across the street to the basketball arena, and a man stops his car and jumps out. His wife is in the passenger’s seat, and they have a new baby with them. The man is thrilled, and he says, ‘Kareem, this is the greatest day of my life! I just picked up my first son from the hospital and I’m taking him home, and now I meet my all-time favorite player. Would you mind signing an autograph
for my son?’
“Kareem blows the guy off. Just blows him off completely. And the guy turns around and screams, ‘Hey, Kareem, fuck you!’ And Kareem looks at me with a smile and says, ‘I’m glad I didn’t sign for that particular gentleman.’”
With Johnson’s arrival, it was as if Los Angeles fans were handed 3-D glasses and all of Abdul-Jabbar’s flaws could be seen in vivid detail. What many failed to understand (or, perhaps, cared to understand) was that moodiness and anger aren’t mere entities, created in utero.
No, they must be cultivated over time.
• • •
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar hated white people.
Read that sentence again.
And again.
And again.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar hated white people and, quite frankly, why wouldn’t he have? Born on April 16, 1947, in New York City, he was named Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. by his parents—Cora Lillian, a department store price checker, and Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Sr., a transit police officer and jazz trombonist who graduated from the Juilliard School of music and later played with Art Blakey and Yusef Lateef. Lewis entered the world weighing twelve pounds, ten ounces and measuring twenty-two and a half inches long—signs that America had received its latest future beanstalk.
Growing up in Harlem’s Dyckman housing complex, Lewis became increasingly aware that life for black Americans was painfully confounding. In his autobiography, Giant Steps, he recalled a boyhood trip with his mother to Associated, the neighborhood grocery store. “The store manager decided we were dangerous customers, or maybe he just felt like wielding a little power that day,” he wrote. “He intercepted my mother and told her to check her bag up front. The store was full of people with all sorts of baggage, but he was going to make us the example. My mother took this for what it was, another in a lifetime of petty harassments, and told the man that if he had to satisfy himself that she was no thief, he could inspect the package when she left.”
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 7
