The only saving grace, he thought, was Donald Dell’s guaranteed contract. “If I hadn’t had that,” he said, “I’d have been long gone.”
By the end of that miserable 1974–75 season, it was apparent that the Lakers had to put their team through a complete make-over. Losing wasn’t acceptable in Los Angeles, and it certainly wasn’t acceptable to team owner Jack Kent Cooke, especially when his hockey team, the Kings, which shared the Forum with the Lakers, weren’t making a dent in the standings or at the box office. The Lakers had to be fixed, and fast.
That was where Kareem Abdul-Jabbar came into the picture. He had one year left on his contract in Milwaukee and had made it clear to management there that he had no intention of re-signing at the end of the 1976 season. The Bucks had won the NBA title in 1971 and had lost a seven-game series in the finals to the Celtics in 1974. One title in six seasons was not enough to sate Abdul-Jabbar. Beyond that, Milwaukee was the heart of the Midwest. Abdul-Jabbar had grown up in New York, had gone to college in Los Angeles, and had become a Muslim after the 1971 season, a political statement that hardly endeared him to the typical Bucks fan.
Newell had been friends with Bucks general manager Wayne Embry for years. When he heard that Embry was looking to move Abdul-Jabbar rather than lose him for nothing in a year to free agency, he opened talks about a swap. First, though, he had to convince his coach, his front office, and, most important, his owner that it was worth giving up the players the Lakers would have to give up to get Abdul-Jabbar.
“When you look back at it now, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world to do,” said Sharman. “But back then, none of us was all that sure. Kareem was thought of as a little bit of a troublemaker if only because he was so quiet and kept to himself so much, and we knew it was going to cost a lot to get him. But Pete kept hammering away, saying you couldn’t go wrong trading for the best player in the game, and there was no doubt Kareem was the best player in the game.”
The toughest sell turned out to be Cooke. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to make a deal, he very much wanted a superstar on his suddenly starless team. But he knew it would cost a lot, both in terms of players and dollars, to land Abdul-Jabbar. And so while Newell negotiated with Embry, Cooke was off negotiating with Portland owner Herman Scarkovsky to make a trade that would bring Bill Walton to Los Angeles.
When Newell finally learned what Cooke was up to, he was stunned.
“What stunned me was that Mr. Cooke was always going on and on about not liking Walton,” Newell said. “He would say to me, ‘What is wrong with that young man, Peter? What is he thinking about with that haircut and that beard and all those people he has living in his house? It’s just awful, Peter, awful.’”
Cooke apparently didn’t think the beard, the long hair, or the way-out friends would be so bad if Walton were wearing a Lakers uniform. Walton had been in the league for one year at that point and had experienced only mixed success, largely due to injuries that had limited him to 35 games as a rookie. He had averaged just 12.8 points per game when he had been able to play. Because of that he would cost less than Abdul-Jabbar, both playerwise and moneywise.
Newell thought Walton was a great talent but an unproven player. Abdul-Jabbar was the best player in the game. To him it was a no-brainer. “I told Wayne if we were going to make a deal, we had to move fast, because if Mr. Cooke went off and made his trade with Scarkovsky, that would be the end of it,” Newell said.
There was one other factor: the New York Knicks. They also wanted Abdul-Jabbar, who had grown up in the city. His acquisition would make a heroic homecoming for a team that had fallen on hard times with the retirement of Willis Reed and Dave DeBusschere and the aging of Walt Frazier and Bill Bradley. The Knicks needed a talent and excitement injection every bit as much as the Lakers and were willing to spend a lot of money to bring the hometown kid home.
“But that was the big difference,” Newell said. “They were offering a lot of money because they really didn’t have any players to trade. I had players who could help Wayne’s team.”
Knowing time was short, Newell and Embry agreed to meet in Denver to try to hammer out a deal. Newell offered four players: center Elmore Smith (important, because the Bucks would need a center), guard Brian Winters, and two young players the Lakers had just taken in the first round of the draft, Junior Bridgeman and David Meyers. Embry knew he was going to get ripped by some for trading Abdul-Jabbar with a year left on his contract. But the Bucks had only been 38–44 that season, even with Abdul-Jabbar averaging 30 points a game.
He agreed to the deal.
Then he flew back to Milwaukee to convince ownership to make the deal. Time was so short—Cooke was ready to pull the trigger on the Walton deal if Newell couldn’t close on Abdul-Jabbar —that Newell sent his lawyer back to Milwaukee with Embry so the papers could be signed as soon as Bucks’ ownership agreed.
“Mr. Cooke really wasn’t sure if we weren’t better off with the younger player,” Newell said. “He was willing to go along, but only if I got it done in a hurry, because he didn’t want Walton getting away. I had to keep reminding him that Kareem was only twenty-eight. Not exactly over the hill.”
Embry called Newell at 7:00 A.M. the day after the meeting in Denver. His ownership had bought in. When Newell told Cooke the deal was done, he told him to go ahead and make it. On June 16, 1975, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar became a Los Angeles Laker.
“I remember Mr. Cooke saying, ‘Peter, I hope you’re right about this,’” Newell said. “I think in the end we did the right thing.”
Abdul-Jabbar’s fourteen productive seasons as a Laker and five championships—as opposed to the single title Walton won in Portland before injuries crippled his career—would appear to bear Newell out.
No one was more thrilled to hear about the deal for Abdul-Jabbar than Kermit Washington. On a practical level it meant he would have to spend less time filling in at center than he had in the past. Abdul-Jabbar always played a lot of minutes and rarely got into foul trouble. On a personal level it meant he was going to be teammates with his hero and role model.
“Kareem was a great player,” he said. “He always seemed to conduct himself with dignity, and I knew he had graduated from UCLA in four years. I thought if I could be like him, I’d be doing okay.”
Washington was never going to be 7-foot-2 and was never going to possess one of the most potent offensive shots in the history of the game, Abdul-Jabbar’s unstoppable skyhook. But he had graduated from American in four years and carried himself with dignity, so there were parallels.
Being Abdul-Jabbar’s teammate was thrilling, but not always easy. The Lakers’ new star had never been outgoing, and coming back to Los Angeles didn’t change that. Occasionally he got angry with Washington in practice for being too physical with him when the two would go head-to-head. And while his presence made the Lakers better, he didn’t provide the kind of immediate turnaround that had been hoped for. The Lakers finished 40–42 and out of the playoffs for a second straight season. Abdul-Jabbar played in all 82 games and averaged 27.7 points per game, but it wasn’t enough. The team hadn’t yet been able to find anyone who could begin to replace West. Goodrich was still a good player but starting to fade, and there was little help for Abdul-Jabbar up front.
Specifically there was very little help from the 1973 number one draft choice, now in his third lackluster season. “I was as miserable as you can be,” Washington remembered. “I wasn’t playing, when I did play I didn’t play well, and my knee was giving me fits. Other than that, it was a wonderful season.”
He only got into 36 games and played half as many minutes as he had the previous season. His points and rebounding only slipped a little, because they couldn’t go down very much from 4.5 and 4.1. By the end of the season, Washington knew he was one year away from being out of a job if something didn’t happen. “I think they had pretty much given up on me,” he said. “They just looked at me as a mistake. Once the changes h
appened, I was convinced I was gone—at the end of the next season, unless they could somehow trade me before that.”
The changes came at season’s end. Even though Walton had been limited to 51 games and the Blazers had finished three games behind the Lakers, Cooke had not been happy about the fact that his team had finished under .500 after he had spent so much money to get Abdul-Jabbar. Jerry West wanted to coach. So Cooke made West the coach, promoted Sharman to general manager, and “reassigned” Newell to a consulting job. Washington, who had been terrified of West when they had been teammates for a year, was convinced that West would do everything in his power to trade him or even try to convince Cooke to buy out the last guaranteed year of his contract.
“Kermit was right,” West said years later. “Based on what I had seen of him, I thought the best thing we could possibly do was make a trade for him before the season started.”
Washington was at a loss. He went home to D.C. for a few days and had lunch with Mike Cardozo, who was then handling contracts at the newly renamed ProServ.
“What am I going to do, Mike?” he asked, almost rhetorically. “I just can’t play the way they want me to play. If I don’t get off the bench this season, I’m going to be out of the league.”
Cardozo knew Washington was right, he wasn’t just another rich basketball player bemoaning his fate. “Why don’t you go talk to Pete Newell,” he suggested. “He’s got a lot of time on his hands right now and he was a great college coach. Maybe he can help you learn how to play the forward position.”
Washington was convinced that a big part of his problem was that he had never been coached on how to play the power forward position. Back then the NBA wasn’t aswarm in assistant coaches the way it is now, and there was very little time for coaches to work individually with players. Washington was only vaguely aware of the fact that Newell had been a great college coach, but when Cardozo suggested going to him it sounded like as good a proposal as any other he had heard. So one morning he went to Newell’s new office and presented him with the idea.
“Basically I said, ‘Help me,’” he remembered. “I told him I’d work as hard as he wanted as long as he wanted. Of course I had no idea what I was getting myself into.”
Newell had always been loathe to interfere with players while he was the general manager, feeling he was treading on the turf of the coaching staff. The only time he had ever worked individually with players as a general manager had been in the summer of 1971 in San Diego, when Alex Hannum had left the team and no new coach was in place yet. The players he had worked with that summer were Stu Lantz and a talented but frustrated kid who had just finished his rookie season: Rudy Tomjanovich. “Stu needed to work on going to his left, Rudy needed to work on creating his own shot,” Newell remembered. “I really enjoyed working with them, but I only did it because we didn’t have a coach at the time.”
Now, though, he wasn’t the general manager. He had always liked Washington and felt responsible for him since he had drafted him. But he wanted to be certain Washington was serious about doing the kind of work that would be necessary to make it worth both their whiles.
Most mornings they went at 7:00 A.M. to the gym at Loyola Marymount, which was where the Lakers trained during the season. LMU was also the home of the L.A. summer league at the time, and there were some days when they couldn’t get the gym, even early in the morning.
“When that happened we would just get in the car and drive to a high school gym someplace and convince the custodian to turn the lights on for us,” Newell said. “One way or the other, we found a place to work.”
And work they did. It was, as Washington always likes to put it, “a living nightmare.”
Newell knew he had to change Washington’s game technically at both ends of the floor: get him to play facing the basket on offense, to develop some kind of jump shot so he would be a threat away from the basket, and get him to be able to guard quicker people with some proficiency on defense. The defensive part was the hardest, because Newell insisted on repetition to make Washington stronger: slide drills, hands-up drills, every drill that players despise. Washington hated every second of it but never backed off, never missed a day, never came up with an excuse not to show up.
“There was one drill he had done in college,” Washington remembered. “You got down in a stance, put both hands up, and started sliding. First to your left, then to your right. Every thirty seconds or so he would call out, ‘Change,’ and you would have to go in the other direction. It was the most brutal thing I’ve ever done.”
The first day Newell had Washington do the drill he collapsed in a heap after three minutes. “Kermit,” Newell told him, “by the time I’m finished with you, you’re going to do this drill for twenty minutes.”
“Not possible,” Washington answered.
“I remember one morning we were finishing up and we were doing the slide/hands-up drill and I was all over Kermit, screaming in his face not to quit, not to give up, not to back off,” Newell said. “A couple of younger guys who were coming in to warm up for a summer league game walked in and saw me screaming in Kermit’s face. They recognized Kermit as a Laker, a real live NBA player. I heard one of them say to the other as we were finishing, ‘Wow, I guess that old man has no idea who it is he’s yelling at.’”
By the end of the summer Newell could see that he was yelling at a different basketball player. Washington did the slide/hands-up drill for twenty minutes every morning the last two weeks. The work was paying off, Newell was convinced of it. Washington felt a lot more confident and knew he was in the best shape of his life, but the payoff wouldn’t come until training camp. He would have to go in there, overcome his fear of Jerry West, and show the new coach that he was a different player than the one who had never averaged more than 5 points or 4 rebounds a game during three years in the league.
“I knew I had an uphill battle with Jerry,” he said. “But at least when I finished the summer with Mr. Newell I felt like I was going into the battle with some weapons. I was better all alone in that gym. The question was, would I be better with other NBA players on the court with me?”
The answer was an emphatic yes. West could see it almost from the first day of camp. It wasn’t as if Washington hadn’t been in shape in previous years—that had never been his problem—but now he was in better shape than anyone on the team. And clearly he had new basketball skills.
“He was a different player, especially on offense, but on defense too,” West said. “I had thought of him before as someone you couldn’t play for long stretches, because it was like playing four-onfive on offense and you couldn’t do that. But he had moves now, he could make something happen facing the basket. He had made himself into a power forward.”
Washington’s confidence grew with each passing day at training camp. By the time the season started, he had gone from the end of the bench to the front of the bench; from an average of eight minutes per game—when he got into a game at all—to playing half the game, every game. Soon after the season began, he became either the sixth man or a starter, because West recognized that he brought the kind of ruggedness to the floor that made life much easier for Abdul-Jabbar.
Often West had Washington cover the opponent’s best inside player. He could now afford to keep him on the floor for long stretches because his offense, while hardly spectacular, was good enough that the other team had to guard him. At Newell’s insistence, he had worked for hours on a jump shot that he could take to fifteen feet, something he had never been able to do in the past. Beyond that, given the added minutes he was playing, Washington was a force on the boards, averaging almost 10 rebounds a game even though he only played about half the game most nights.
Buoyed by Washington’s improvement and the addition of Cazzie Russell, a proven scorer at the small forward spot, the Lakers were the best team in the league during the first half of the season. Up in Portland, Bill Walton was finally healthy and beginning to become the dominating
center everyone had expected him to become when he first came into the league in 1974. For the season, he would average almost 19 points per game, more than 14 rebounds a night, and 4 assists, using his superb passing skills to find the open man in the Portland offense. With Walton healthy almost the entire season—he did still miss 17 games—the Blazers emerged as a force.
But they couldn’t beat the Lakers. Three times during the first few months of the season the teams met, and three times the Lakers won. Abdul-Jabbar was still a better player than Walton, thanks in large part to his experience, and Washington was one of the few players in the league strong enough to not be dominated by power forward Maurice Lucas, who was the Blazers’ leading scorer and the league’s number one intimidator. At 6-8, 240 pounds, with a mean streak that literally scared opposing players, Lucas often took over games with one snatched rebound or even a fierce stare. Washington wasn’t nearly as skilled as Lucas, but he was every bit as big and strong. He wasn’t about to back down to him.
“The first half of that season was my dream come true,” Washington said. “All the work in the summertime was paying off. I felt more confident, and I knew everyone else had more confidence in me too, especially Jerry and Kareem. That meant a lot to me. We were playing well, and I knew I was one of the reasons. I kept thinking to myself, ‘All of this is too good to be true.’”
The only negative connected to all the newfound minutes Washington was playing was the chronic ache in his right knee. He had first damaged the knee as a rookie, but rest had always been a tonic when it began to really bother him. During those first three seasons, he had gotten plenty of rest. But now, after a summer of hard work and an NBA schedule that meant playing four or five nights a week for lengths of time he hadn’t even thought about since college, the knee began to hurt again.
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