“But my dad was such a positive guy,” said Susan McKinney-DeOrtega, his oldest child. “Even when he was at his lowest, in so much pain, struggling just to remember, he told us he was going to beat it. And he believed it.” Ever since he had been hired by the Lakers, eleven months earlier, McKinney thought of Buss as a kind and loyal person. Throughout his long, oft-arduous rehabilitation, McKinney felt the team’s owner was pulling for his recovery, and that his return to the sidelines was inevitable. He was even asked to do some advance playoff scouting, and eagerly shared his observations with Westhead and Riley.
And now, after all that, he was learning of being fired—from his son?
“I still think of that as the moment,” said Dennis, “when I first realized how shitty people can be.”
And yet, even though the McKinney family was handed the worst news in the cruelest of ways, Buss was correct in his assessment. Jack McKinney had initially asked to rejoin the Lakers in mid-March, citing a handful of physicians who deemed him ready. Buss didn’t see it that way. “That was surely one of the hardest things my dad ever had to deal with,” said Jeanie Buss, his daughter. “My dad is a very honorable person. He wants to do the right thing, even when that’s hard to determine. I’m sure he felt he had no other choice.”
“I couldn’t admit it at the time,” McKinney said, “but Dr. Buss wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t ready.”
And now, like that, he was gone.
• • •
Though he went largely unloved (and often unliked), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar possessed a toughness most NBA players envied. With a physique more giraffe than elephant, he was routinely the target of every conceivable form of physical thuggery. To see Abdul-Jabbar in the locker room after a game was to see a man covered in a rainbow of bruises. “The way you had to play him was with as much strength as possible,” said Dennis Awtrey, a journeyman center who engaged Abdul-Jabbar in multiple battles through the years. “Kareem was a beautiful, graceful player. I mean, he was perfection on the court. So if you were guarding him, you had to mess that up.”
Much like Dawkins and Detroit’s Bob Lanier and Boston’s Dave Cowens and the majority of other NBA centers, Awtrey went after Abdul-Jabbar with a tool box filled with elbows, forearms and scratches. Once, while Awtrey was a member of the 76ers in the early 1970s, Abdul-Jabbar jabbed him in the Adam’s apple with an elbow, then slapped him across the face with his hand. “I chased him down, grabbed him and popped him below the left eye,” said Awtrey. “That was our relationship.”*
Yet, like some sort of futuristic cyborg, Abdul-Jabbar kept coming back. He would lose his temper from time to time (he famously cold-cocked Milwaukee’s Kent Benson in the 1977–78 opener) but, more often than not, simply absorbed the abuse while collecting his 30 points and 14 rebounds. “There are guys who you know will cry and cry all throughout a game,” said Cooper. “Kareem was the opposite.”
After two off days, the Lakers and Sixers reunited at the Forum for Game 5. With four and a half minutes remaining in the third quarter and the score tied at 65, Abdul-Jabbar went up for a finger roll, watched the ball fall through the net, came down awkwardly and landed on the side of his left ankle, which turned over his white low-top Adidas. A shock ran up his leg, but Abdul-Jabbar limped through the ensuing couple of possessions. Eventually, Robert Kerlan, the team’s physician, determined the injury was severe. He asked Abdul-Jabbar whether he wanted to depart for the hospital immediately or first watch the remainder of the game from the bench.
“Can I hurt it any more?” Abdul-Jabbar asked, wincing.
“If we tape it up, you won’t be able to injure it further,” Kerlan said. “But it’s going to hurt a lot.”
“I’ll try it,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “I want to play.”
The men returned to the locker room, where Kerlan wrapped the throbbing ankle in white medical tape. As Abdul-Jabbar stood, winced and limped back into the arena and onto the court for the fourth quarter, the 17,505 attendees shook the building with a thunderous ovation. It was the most courageous moment of his glorious career, and all Abdul-Jabbar could focus on was the pain.
Although he couldn’t jump off his left foot, Abdul-Jabbar finished with 40 points, 15 rebounds and 4 blocks (including 14 points and 6 rebounds in the fourth quarter). He completed a key three-point play with thirty-three seconds remaining that broke a 103–103 tie. “I felt just sick inside [watching him],” said Kerlan. “I have a lot of empathy because I could tell he was hurt badly. The 76ers really put their bodies on him when he came back in. I told him that in the fourth quarter it was as if he had auto-hypnotized himself to mentally block out the pain. He said, ‘Yeah, I guess I did.’”
As his teammates celebrated the 3-games-to-2 lead in the locker room, Abdul-Jabbar—along with Kerlan and Steve Lombardo, another team physician—walked, via crutches, down the street to the emergency room of Centinela Hospital Medical Center. Kerlan had initially assumed Abdul-Jabbar suffered a broken fibula, but X-rays confirmed an awful sprain. The ankle was injected with a mixture of hydrocortisone and Xylocaine, and Abdul-Jabbar returned to his Bel Air home.
The next morning, he was unable to walk.
• • •
“Bullshit.”
That was Darryl Dawkins’s immediate reaction when told that Abdul-Jabbar wouldn’t be making the trip back east for Game 6 of the NBA Finals.
“Didn’t believe it,” he said.
“Me neither,” said Mix, the backup forward. “Kareem would be there. Obviously, he’d be there. . . .”
Sports and gamesmanship had long gone hand in hand. There was a full day off between Game 5 and Game 6, certainly enough time for a man who had just hung 40 points to kick back on an airplane, close his eyes, ice his left ankle, gobble up some Wheaties and give it the ol’ UCLA college try.
“Everyone in the city of Philadelphia thought we were faking the severity of Kareem’s injury,” said Westhead. “Believe me, I wished we were.”
On the morning of May 15, the undermanned Lakers gathered in the American Airlines terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. To his teammates’ chagrin, Abdul-Jabbar—averaging 33.4 points through the first five games—was home. Haywood, who Buss briefly considered bringing back to fill the spot (“No way,” Westhead said. “Absolutely no way.”), was also home. Nixon, meanwhile, had torn up his left index finger in a Game 5 collision with the ball and was cocooning the hand in thick gauze. (More than thirty years later, Nixon’s finger still jetted out at a disgustingly unnatural angle.) “I pretty much had one useful hand,” Nixon said. “There was a big gap where my finger was supposed to be.”
Because NBA teams still flew commercial, the Laker players huddled in a corner, protected from the rest of society by little more than size and status and purple-and-gold luggage tags. As he waited for the flight to board, Westhead went man to man, explaining that, with Abdul-Jabbar absent, it was time to step up. Even with his mangled paw, Nixon knew he’d have to manage much of the point. Even with his tired legs, Wilkes—who’d played 214 minutes thus far—had to take up the scoring slack. Landsberger, the bruiser acquired from Chicago, needed to beat people up down low. Holland, the twelfth man who spent most of the playoffs glued to the bench, would be asked to contribute major minutes. “Coach,” Holland said, “I’ll be ready.” Chones, the backup center who began the season as a lowly Cleveland Cavalier and now sat on the brink of a title, assumed he would fill the void left in the post. “Not that it was possible to replace Kareem,” he said. “He was so good that in scrimmages during practice, he wouldn’t play with us. Because all the guard had to do was dribble down the floor and dump the ball into Kareem ten times. Game over. I wasn’t that caliber.”
When it was time to board, the Lakers ambled onto the airplane and took their standard seats. Buss insisted his players travel in style* and therefore had Mary Lou Liebich, the basketball secretary, buy out first cla
ss whenever possible. Those players assigned to coach were almost always placed alongside an empty chair (also purchased by the club). Seating was based upon a loose combination of seniority, status and playing time. Therefore, Abdul-Jabbar was always in the first row of first class, positioned in the aisle so that his storklike legs could extend into the walkway. This time, as Chones found his spot and Wilkes found his spot and Holland found his spot, passengers could hear the increasingly loud sound of someone belting out “Golden Time of Day,” the soulful hit from Maze featuring Frankie Beverly.
People let me tell you
There’s a time in your life when you find out who you are
That’s the golden time of day. . . .
It was Magic Johnson. As he turned from the jetway onto the plane, the rookie smiled widely. He usually sat in the second row of first class, alongside Cooper. This time, however, he stopped at Abdul-Jabbar’s vacant seat.
“Have no fear!” he yelped. “Motherfucking Magic Johnson is here!”
He plopped down and continued crooning.
“Right then I knew we were going to win,” said Cooper. “I just knew it.”
“The guy was exceptional,” said Chones. “Magic had creative will, and the manifestations of creative will are things like desire, attraction, cohesion. He was a rookie, but you had to believe in him.”
Once the plane was in midair, Westhead and Johnson met in the bulkhead. The coach had this preposterous idea, one the rookie would surely cringe at. “I’m thinking of starting you at center,” he said. “I know it’s crazy, and you’re best at point guard, but hear me out. I just think that—”
“I love it!” Johnson said, beaming.
“You do?” Westhead replied.
“Love it!” Johnson said. “Let’s do it.”
Three years earlier, Johnson had dabbled at center at Everett High School. There was a beautiful full-circle quality to the idea, a return to the basics of the game. The following morning, during a quick walk-through at the Spectrum, Westhead explained his plan to the other Lakers. “I wasn’t sure what Westhead’s intent was,” Wilkes said. “I guess he was saying, ‘We just lost our best player, but we have this young, charismatic phenom who is going to make it all right.’”
At the same time Westhead and Johnson were hatching a plan, the city of Philadelphia was on heightened paranoia alert. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sightings were reported left and right. A taxi driver called into a local radio station, insisting he had just dropped the center off at the Spectrum. “I’ll believe he’s not coming when the game ends and I haven’t seen him,” Billy Cunningham, Philadelphia’s coach, said. “They could fly him in at any time by private jet or something.”
Immediately before the start time, Westhead reiterated the strategy to his players. “Everybody expects us to be courageous tonight,” he said. “We’re not here to be courageous. We’re here to win.” Cooper, usually the sixth man, would start alongside Nixon in the backcourt. Wilkes, generally able to freelance along the perimeter, would have to crash the boards in Abdul-Jabbar’s absence. Johnson, officially listed as the starting center, would do . . . everything. “That was his job,” said Westhead. “To do whatever the team needed, whenever it needed it. He was our center that night, but really the position he played was ‘undefined.’” Before exiting the locker room, Johnson grabbed Abdul-Jabbar’s number 33 jersey, which dangled from a hanger in an empty locker, and tossed it in a gym bag. “Thirty-three ain’t here,” he yelled, “but thirty-two is! Now let’s go out there and kill these motherfuckers!”
Some three thousand miles away, Abdul-Jabbar sat in bed alongside his live-in girlfriend, Cheryl Pistono.* Meanwhile, inside the Spectrum, Johnson met with Westhead along the sideline before breaking for the court. “I’m gonna jump center, Coach,” he said. It wasn’t a request, it wasn’t an order. It simply was. Westhead smiled and nodded. “That fucked Philly up,” said Cooper. “They were looking around like something wasn’t right. And Caldwell Jones was looking at Magic like, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’”
Because sports and mythology often intertwine, the Game 6 narrative has often been one that evokes the best of a cheesy feel-good Hollywood production. Not only did Johnson take the jump ball, he won it, dribbled down the court, did a 360-degree midair flip and dunked over Julius Erving—blindfolded while eating a slice of cheesecake.
Not quite.
Jones, the 76ers long-armed 7-foot-1 center, stepped toward referee Jack Madden, and Johnson acknowledged he had no chance. “I just decided to jump up and down real quick,” Johnson said, “then work on the rest of my game.”
“It didn’t matter whether he won or lost the jump,” said Westhead. “It was a statement, establishing that he had replaced Kareem. He needed to do that. It was never like, ‘I’m the center—throw me the ball down low like you do Kareem.’ It was, ‘I’m here, and we’re going to win.’”
Over the next four quarters, Johnson played a game like none before, or since. The Lakers bolted out to a 7–0 lead, and extended it to 11–4 before Cunningham received a single point from one of his frontcourt players. The Sixers were befuddled—by the fast pace, by the sight of Johnson in the post, by Cooper’s lockdown defense. Philadelphia, though, battled back, tying the score at 60. In the locker room at halftime, Westhead let Johnson have it, imploring him to play stronger interior defense. After the coach finished, Johnson gathered his teammates around. “We’re about to win this game,” he said. “You’ve got to believe that. We’re about to be champions.”
In his bed, Abdul-Jabbar could barely watch. “It was a real nervous time,” he said. “I was sweating badly. Not your classic fan reaction. I had to turn the sound off.”
Los Angeles scored the first 14 points of the third quarter but—once again—Cunningham demanded his big men work the ball inside on the undersize, overworked Laker forwards. With 5:12 remaining in regulation and the Lakers leading 103–101, Westhead called a time-out, looked Johnson in the eyes and demanded something extra. “This is your opportunity,” he said. “Your opportunity.”
Though but twenty years old, Johnson was exhausted. Dawkins and Jones had mauled him. He’d played all five positions, guarded multiple Sixers, fought for every rebound and loose ball within reach. “The greatest single-game effort ever,” said Westhead. “Ever.” Upon returning to the court, Johnson tapped in a missed layup, then watched with glee as Wilkes—who scored the quietest 37 points of all time—drove the lane, hit a layup, was fouled and sank the free throw. Like that, in less than one and a half minutes, the Lakers upped their lead to 7.
“After Jamaal’s three-point play, I ran out into my yard and screamed,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “Then I came back and chewed on a pillow.”
With Johnson scoring nine points over the final 2:22, the Lakers turned a close game on its head. The 123–107 margin told the story of a blowout that wasn’t. The Lakers won, but exerted every ounce of energy in doing so. When the final buzzer sounded and the season was complete, Johnson and his teammates retreated to the locker room, which was uncharacteristically subdued. Erving, Philadelphia’s nine-time All-Star, entered unannounced and went Laker to Laker, offering a handshake and congratulatory words. “So classy,” said Holland. “He even knew who I was.” In their hearts, most of the players had expected to play Game 7 in Los Angeles. The Lakers didn’t even pack champagne—it was provided by the Spectrum’s caterers. Butch Lee, the seldom-used guard, popped the first bottle, and others quickly followed. “Magic was born to play and born to win,” said Holland, who scored eight key points. “It’s hard to picture Magic Johnson losing.”
Rick Barry, working the game for CBS, asked Johnson why, post-triumph, the locker room was so quiet. The rookie had just compiled 42 points, 15 rebounds and 7 assists to be named the Sport Magazine Most Valuable Player of the series.
“Because,” Johnson said, grinning, “it’s unbelievable.”
CHAPTER 6
WEST FALL
Generally speaking, it takes time to develop into a genius.
Sure, there are notable exceptions. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was six when he first performed publicly in Munich’s court of Bavaria. Jonas Salk began working on a flu vaccine while still an undergraduate in college. Stephen Hawking built a computer out of clock parts, an old telephone switchboard and other recycled components when he was sixteen.
Yet, more often than not, genius is something that is crafted and constructed and nurtured. Well before Albert Einstein became known as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century, he was a subpar elementary school student with a learning disability.
In the aftermath of the Los Angeles Lakers’ magnificent championship run, Paul Westhead—former obscure head coach of the La Salle College Explorers of the East Coast Conference—was proclaimed a genius. OK, the word itself wasn’t literally used all that often. But when the stories on Magic Johnson’s rookie greatness and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s sixth MVP trophy and Spencer Haywood’s implosion ran dry, the media turned its affections toward a professorial forty-one-year-old man who fell into a dream job and was wise enough to stick with his predecessor’s philosophy.
Yet now that Jack McKinney was officially gone, hired by Indiana to coach the Pacers, Paul Westhead felt liberated to implement his own ideas and philosophies.
“When Paul became a genius,” said Jamaal Wilkes, “trouble started.”
The world champions reported to Palm Desert for training camp on September 12, and, from the look of things, not much had changed. Save for the departure of Haywood, who would spend the next two years trying to clean up and reestablish himself in Italy, the Lakers’ eight core members were all back. It was an exciting time to be a basketball player in Los Angeles, what with the multiple endorsement opportunities, the increase in season ticket sales, the deafening buzz of a metropolis that, ever so gradually, was shifting from a Dodger town to a Laker town.
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 13