Riley checked with Hearn, who offered his blessing. He then took a week to ponder the career shift. “After seven or eight days of not sleeping,” he said, “I’m committed to it. It’s something I’ve always had in the back of my mind, that I would like to try it.”
On November 27, Riley debuted as Westhead’s sidekick. The Lakers beat the Jazz, 122–118, then won 11 of their next 16 to welcome in the new decade with a 27-13 mark. From afar, everything appeared to be running smoothly in La-La Land. The Lakers were winning, the Forum was selling out and athletic glory had returned to a fan base longing for it.
• • •
“Eighty percent.”
Spencer Haywood is sitting by a swimming pool in the rear of his Las Vegas home, sipping from a glass of chilled water. The year is 2012, and he has been retired from the NBA for three decades. He no longer has anything to prove or anything to play for. There is no need for political correctness or distracting banter. A contract offer does not await. Neither does a call from a coach or GM.
He is sixty-three years old, and free to utter whatever he wants.
“Eighty percent,” he says, once again. “I have no doubt about it.”
The number is the answer to a question posed by a reporter: What percentage of NBA players were using cocaine during the 1979–80 season?
Haywood’s reply is delivered with nary a flinch. Later, he directs one in the direction of his old drug dealer, who concurs with the assessment. “Oh, yeah,” the man says. “It was everywhere.”
Because he was young and new and a wee bit naïve, Westhead genuinely believed his men were playing with clear heads and drug-free bodies. He heard the whispers that cocaine was an issue in the NBA, and that other teams were struggling to contain the problem. But not here, not Los Angeles, not when the Lakers were performing so ably. “I was clueless,” said Westhead. “Marijuana? Dope? I can honestly say I had no idea.”
At the same time the Lakers were rolling along, putting forth some of the best basketball in recent memory, at least half the members of the roster were using cocaine—many recreationally, a couple dangerously. “Cocaine was the perfect Los Angeles drug,” said Jeanie Buss, Jerry Buss’s daughter. “People could party all night and they honestly didn’t think it did them any harm. There was a belief that you could do coke and it wasn’t addictive. I never tried cocaine, but one night I was at a club and this guy was hitting on me. I was nineteen, he was probably thirty. And he goes, ‘Do you like snow?’ I said, ‘I hate skiing. It’s just too cold.’ Then I realized . . .”
“In our town,” said Linda Rambis, “nothing said, ‘I’m rich!’ like a pile of coke.”
Haywood recalled a party during which he got high with eight Los Angeles teammates. “It was the drug of the league,” said Mark Landsberger, a backup forward who joined the team midway through the season. “With so many games it gave you energy when your body was feeling down. A lot of guys depended on it to get us up for games. If you did it once in a while, using your judgment, you were OK. If you didn’t . . .”
On December 18, 1979, readers of the Los Angeles Times were greeted by the headline LAKERS HAVE A FAMILY PROBLEM. The piece concerned Haywood, who by now had forgotten the initial buzz of coming to the Lakers. After injuring his hip in the third game of the season, Haywood was benched in favor of Jim Chones, a more rugged bruiser who better protected Abdul-Jabbar under the boards. McKinney pulled Haywood aside at the time, assured him he was still a key contributor and played him, on average, twenty-seven minutes per game.
When Westhead took over, however, his spot on the bench stayed warm. Haywood insisted McKinney had guaranteed him a certain amount of playing time. “Well,” said Westhead, “I can’t do that.” From an Xs and Os standpoint, it was the right call. Upon arriving in the NBA in 1970, Haywood was introduced with a Sporting News article titled, A NEW RUSSELL? IT’S HAYWOOD’S GOAL. He established himself as one of the league’s most dynamic performers. He could shoot from the outside, score on the inside, rebound, block shots—“Everything,” said George McGinnis, a longtime opposing forward. “Back in the day, power forwards were just big brutes. But Spencer was a monster. He had every tool in the case.” With the Lakers, though, Haywood was becoming an embarrassment. He dropped easy passes, got lost on defense, ran at half speed. In a November 25 game against Kansas City, he botched several plays and was buried on the depth chart behind the dreadful Don Ford. (Quipped Peter Vecsey in the New York Post: “Ford is so disliked as a player . . . management is thinking of holding a Boo Don Ford Night.”) One week later, after playing just four minutes against the Bucks, he went into an anti-Westhead tirade to teammates. “He hates me!” he screamed. “Paul Westhead fucking hates me!”
On the morning of December 14, Haywood arrived at the team’s shootaround, but told Westhead he had to leave early for a doctor’s appointment. That night, in a game against the Pistons, the coach motioned for Haywood to replace Chones.
“Coach, I can’t see,” Haywood said.
“What do you mean?” replied Westhead.
“I can’t see,” Haywood said. “But I’ll be OK. I’ll be OK.”
At halftime, Haywood informed Jack Curran, the Lakers’ trainer, that he was having an allergic reaction and was unable to function. The morning after the 138–122 victory, Haywood showed up on time for practice but insisted he couldn’t participate. As a result, Westhead benched him for the next game, a Sunday afternoon clash with the San Antonio Spurs at the Forum. During time-outs, Haywood circled the perimeter of the huddle, making a show of not paying attention. In the second half, fans began to chant his name—“Hay-wood! Hay-wood! Hay-wood!” The player swirled his towel in the air and raised his fist. After the game, he referred to Westhead as a liar. “The fans,” Haywood said, “know what’s going on.”*
Only they didn’t.
Spencer Haywood was a cocaine addict.
In some ways his struggles with substance abuse were predetermined. Haywood grew up in the cotton-picking Delta town of Silver City, Mississippi, one of ten children born into addiction. Haywood’s grandfather was an alcoholic, as were multiple siblings. “My sister Lina was a functioning alcoholic,” he said. “My brother Joe was a functioning alcoholic. My brother Andrew died of alcoholism.” Haywood started smoking marijuana during his year at Trinidad State Junior College in Trinidad, Colorado, and discovered cocaine in 1978, while playing with the New York Knicks. “I liked pot because it was organic, but coke wasn’t organic at all,” he said. “It was manufactured, and instead of making me mellow and relaxed, it did the opposite. I would use coke and see bugs, spiders, the most demonic things that ever existed.”
Haywood, though, was hooked. When he reported to the Lakers, he convinced himself he could change. He and his wife, Iman (at the time one of the world’s most famous fashion models), were parents to a one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Zulekha, and he sought to be a good father and sound role model. In between the team’s two-a-day training camp workouts, Haywood often hit the tennis court for an hour of serve-and-volley in 100-degree heat. “I didn’t want to waste the opportunity,” he said. “I wanted a championship.”
Once the Lakers returned to Los Angeles for pre-season games, though, Haywood committed a tragic mistake. A friend in Beverly Hills told him about a new, non-nasal method for enjoying cocaine. It was called freebasing. Haywood watched several people take hits. He was intrigued. “A man can’t know the world unless he’s willing to be adventurous,” he once wrote. “My main gripe with cocaine had been the crap they cut it with, and the damage to the nose, and this process eliminated both those problems.”
Haywood asked his friend to cook the cocaine. He took a hit from the pipe.
“Harder!” his friend screamed.
Haywood inhaled deeply.
“No, harder!” he yelled.
Haywood took another powerful suck.
“G
ood,” the friend said. “Now hold it in.”
Haywood’s eyes opened widely, his legs jolted with electricity. “It was like having sex and winning the lottery and scoring fifty points all at once,” he said. “I couldn’t stop grinning.”
Haywood spent the remainder of the season craving that high. With Iman often on the road—Milan this week, Paris the next week—Haywood found himself with unlimited free time and pockets stuffed with NBA dollars. He was being paid $500,000 by Los Angeles—and spent $300 per week on drugs. “But you have to remember,” he said, “I got most of my coke for free. There were plenty of folks hanging around who were more than happy to supply me with the stuff in return for being my buddy and getting closer to my glamorous world.”
“Spencer,” said Landsberger, “was the first crackhead I knew.”
In order to bring himself down as a preface to the cocaine rise, Haywood took to warming up with two pints of Bacardi 151 rum. Then, after concluding with the pipe, he popped Quaaludes—“to get me low again,” he said. On one particular night, Haywood overdosed on Quaaludes and fell asleep on his bathroom floor. He woke up five hours later to find his friend smoking his crack.
The Lakers once hosted a four-team pre-season tournament at the Forum. Afterward, a dozen players from the different clubs congregated at Haywood’s home for an all-night crack session. While cooking the rock, the pipe exploded, sending shards of glass into the faces and arms of some of the NBA’s elite players. “We were so shaken up that we waited a long time before proceeding with the party,” Haywood wrote. “About ten minutes.”
Inside the Lakers locker room, players spoke to the media as if cocaine were a foreign entity, unwelcome in a place where hard work reigned. The sentiment was nonsense. Landsberger, who admits to “letting the Hollywood lifestyle get to me,” openly acknowledges having used drugs alongside Haywood, as does Ron Carter, the guard (“Spence got me to do it once, and it made me really paranoid,” Carter said. “I remember leaving his place, saying, ‘God, if you let me come down, I’ll never do this again.’”) and Michael Cooper, the second-year swingman. “I did coke with Wood a little bit,” he said. “I dabbled. But when it got to the extremes—where I started getting real extreme—I was like, ‘Spencer, I have to play basketball.’
“Spencer’s biggest issue, I think, was loneliness. Iman was always gone with the baby, and he’d just be there in his apartment, looking for something to do, filled up with empty time. I tried to tell him, ‘Wood, get out of this house. Come on over. Get away from this stuff.’ I mean, we lived right down the street from each other, and my wife, Wanda, was a great cook. But he’d always say, ‘No, no, no, I’m OK. I’ve gotta call my wife.’ That was his line—‘I gotta call my wife . . . I’m OK.’ But he wasn’t OK. A lot of us knew that.”
“He just wasn’t around,” said Ollie Mack, a rookie guard. “That team was very tight, especially on the road. Movies, dinners. But Spencer was never seen.”
Two players who didn’t use were Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar. Both men viewed Haywood less as a teammate and more as a barrier between the Lakers and the NBA championship. “Boy, Kareem did not like Spencer,” Landsberger said. “There was real bad blood.”
Well aware of his stand-in status (on March 13, it was announced that McKinney, itching to return but struggling in his recovery, would miss the entire season), Westhead treaded lightly. He let Johnson and Nixon handle the ball, tried to keep Abdul-Jabbar engaged, left Wilkes and Chones to themselves. Yet when it came to Haywood, he sought to marginalize a player who, in his mind, was a dysfunctional has-been. Haywood’s playing time dwindled, and as the Lakers wrapped up a magical 60-22 season, the forward felt like an outcast. He was mad and hurt, and in denial about his substance abuse. After Los Angeles clinched the Pacific Division with a 101–96 home victory over the Jazz, bottles of champagne were distributed throughout the clubhouse. Toasts were made, booze was splashed. “This is it, baby!” Nixon shouted. “The first step.”
By his locker, surrounded by reporters, Haywood surveyed the scene, smiled and raged. When asked whether his jump shot was returning (he scored 10 against Utah), Haywood smirked. “It’s been there,” he said. “I just need PT and confidence. The jumper has been sitting there in the cooler, like good wine.”
When he was relayed the quote, Westhead grunted and walked off. To him, Spencer Haywood barely existed. He was an unwanted nuisance. “I had the greatest opportunity of my career right there in front of me,” Haywood said years later. “And I blew it. I fucking blew it.”
• • •
Entering the playoffs, Los Angeles appeared unbeatable. They kicked the post-season off by decimating the overmatched Suns, four games to one. “I’ve been in the league seven years, and I’ve never seen Kareem play better than he is right now,” John MacLeod, the Sun coach, said after the final game, in which Abdul-Jabbar scored 35 points with 16 rebounds.
By defeating Phoenix, Los Angeles was guaranteed a meeting with Seattle, the defending NBA champions.
Though the Lakers weren’t exactly a team to carry a grudge, there was something about the Sonics that rubbed them wrong. The two teams battled for Pacific Division supremacy, with Seattle finishing 56-26 and four games back. If the Lakers were sleek and smooth, the Sonics were a slab of concrete. Sikma, the team’s young center, was a 6-foot-11 bruiser who had no problem using elbows and knees to keep Abdul-Jabbar uncomfortable. Shooting guard Dennis Johnson knew every trick (many of them dirty) in the book. The Sonics were trash-talk specialists, prompting Chones to throw some back before a late-February meeting. “I think we’re the better team,” he said. “Everybody is hung up on what they did last year. We’re better.”
The series opened at the Forum on April 22, and—for the Lakers—it began horribly. Coming off of a hard-fought seven-game brawl against Milwaukee, the Sonics were supposed to be leg-heavy and worn down. Instead, Fred (Downtown) Brown, the team’s third guard, went off for 34 points and Sikma hit a free throw with two seconds remaining for a 108–107 stunner. “We weren’t intimidated at all,” said Sikma. “Were the Lakers more talented? Probably. But they didn’t scare us. I think we all believed we’d win that series and repeat.”
The Lakers battled back to win the second game, 108–99, and a weirdness accompanied the series as it shifted to the Pacific Northwest. Seattle played its games inside the Kingdome, also home to the NFL’s Seahawks and Major League Baseball’s Mariners. It was an enormous building that seated forty thousand fans, and helped the Sonics lead the NBA in attendance. However, Game 3 was scheduled for April 25, and the Mariners already booked the building for their series against the California Angels. The Center Coliseum, generally the second option, was also unavailable—thanks to the Ice Capades.
Hence, the Lakers and Sonics would play the most important game of the season inside Clarence S. (Hec) Edmundson Pavilion, a gymnasium on the University of Washington’s campus that seated 8,524 fans. It was, to all involved, utterly ridiculous. Westhead took one look at the gym and deemed it “the difference between the Forum and Inglewood High School.” Which was too kind. The Hec was fine for a college intramural battle between Edna’s Edibles and the Tools, but little more. The floor was plagued by dead spots, the seating plan was archaic. The building was constructed in 1927, and featured brick arches, ivy-coated outside walls and photographs of Husky sports legends like Bruno Boin. On the morning of the Sonics’ pre-game workout, forward Wally Walker strolled beneath the bleachers and asked (with a smile), “Anybody know where the varsity locker room is?”
When Game 3 began, the Sonics seemed to hold the advantage. Hec was a dump, but it was a loud, intimate, poorly ventilated dump that favored the home team. The Lakers, however, countered with their own X factor—a 7-foot-2 center with a skyhook. Abdul-Jabbar scored 33 points, including 13 in the final quarter, as the Lakers captured a 104–100 win. Two nights later, Los Angeles again broke Seattle, coming back fr
om a 21-point third-quarter deficit to win 98–93. Los Angeles’ 24-2 surge was sparked by Abdul-Jabbar, whose 25 points led all scorers. Afterward the Sonics sat in their dilapidated locker room in pained silence. “It was embarrassing, what occurred today,” said forward Johnny Johnson. “Just embarrassing.”
Though it went largely unspoken, the series was over. In an uncharacteristically brazen moment, Abdul-Jabbar cracked: “They claim they like to play with their backs against the wall. At this point they’re about to go over the wall.” On April 30, Abdul-Jabbar scored 38 and the Lakers, back inside the Forum, terminated the Sonics, 111–105. This time, as the final buzzer went off, the center didn’t browbeat Johnson for wrapping his arms around his neck. The Los Angeles Lakers would be appearing in the NBA Championships for the first time in seven years.
The hug made perfect sense.
• • •
Generally speaking, professional athletes approach the biggest series of their lives with uncompromised intensity.
The TV is turned off.
The phone is unplugged.
The wife deals with the children, the accountant handles the bills, the gardener mows the lawn.
The athlete focuses solely upon the task at hand.
For the active members of the Los Angeles Lakers, this meant setting their sights upon the Philadelphia 76ers, winners of 59 games and the newly minted Eastern Conference champions.
Philadelphia was the Lakers’ polar opposite. Tough. Physical. Menacing. Though the team’s best player, Julius Erving, was an ethereal sky walker who averaged 26.9 points per game, he was surrounded by a workmanlike crew of blue-collar bangers and dogged defenders. The 76ers were forward Bobby Jones diving for a loose ball; center Darryl Dawkins shattering the backboard after an earth-splitting slam; Maurice Cheeks hounding the opposing point guard. Even though the Lakers had the better record, eleven of eighteen polled NBA head coaches predicted a Philadelphia triumph. “We were anything but wimps,” said Steve Mix, a scrappy reserve forward. “We would fight you, we would hound you. We were tougher than Los Angeles.”
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 11
