Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s

by Pearlman, Jeff

  “That’s the good and the bad part of the NBA. The good part is the competitiveness of the players. But you can also be a competitive player in a nonconfrontational way on your team. Magic wasn’t competing with Norm for anything. But Norm didn’t see it that way.”

  Now, as Johnson healed, his adversary stepped in. With Nixon at the helm, the team dropped five of its next eight, including a pathetic 122–108 home setback to the woeful Bulls. “These are rough times,” Westhead said. “It is a learning process in losing a few.” Before long, Nixon was the daily subject of trade banter. There was talk of sending him to Chicago for Reggie Theus; to Seattle for Gus Williams; to Cleveland for Mike Bratz. Los Angeles denied the rumors, but the gossip was legitimate. Westhead didn’t like Nixon’s attitude, and West didn’t seem to like Nixon—period. He had to go.

  “I knew what was up,” Nixon said. “And I knew what I was up against.”

  As soon as the city’s columnists started to pen Norm Nixon’s basketball obituary, though, the team came to life. Having initially gone 11-11 without Johnson, the Lakers segued into a torrid hot streak, capturing 17 of their next 23. Part of it was a good squad coming together. Abdul-Jabbar and Wilkes had some terrific nights and Sharman, the general manager, stole a steady reserve point guard named Eddie Jordan from the Nets for a future draft pick.

  On December 19, Scott Ostler of the Los Angeles Times wrote a piece titled LAKERS ARE FINDING OUT WHY NBA CHAMPS DON’T REPEAT. The story was a brutal state-of-the-Lakers overview. According to Ostler, players were becoming increasingly angered by Abdul-Jabbar (who was an offensive black hole) and increasingly pessimistic about Westhead. They specifically cited the coach’s recent decision to bench Chones and Cooper and replace them with Jim Brewer, a so-so veteran, and Butch Carter, the rookie out of Indiana. Westhead’s stated reasoning—“We need to create a better balance of energy.”

  Wrote Ostler: “Enough bad vibes have been vibrating to arouse speculation that the Lakers have contracted Titleitis, the dreaded disease which could prevent them from repeating.”

  Sharman, West and Westhead could accept criticism from the press. They could accept criticism from the fans. What irked the three, though, were the ever-increasing anonymous quotes emanating from inside the locker room. While the writers protected their sources, everyone knew the identity of the team’s most loose-lipped, most negative-minded player. “If [Norm Nixon] doesn’t stop talking,” one Laker official said at the time, “he’ll talk himself right out of L.A.”

  “You could approach Norm and come away with some valuable information,” said Springer. “He wouldn’t put his neck out there on the record, but off the record he was tremendous.”

  • • •

  Shortly after Magic Johnson injured his knee, he told Malcolm Moran of The New York Times that perhaps it was an act of God. “I thought [my career] was always going to be good things,” he said. “Maybe it was a blessing in disguise, to let me know it can end as fast as it started. Wham. It made me keep it in the right frame of mind. It kept me from getting a big head, and thinking that things would always be like this.”

  Johnson spent his time away from the court buried in a cocoon of misery. His life became an ode to mind-numbing routine—at two P.M., he’d turn on the television to watch Ironside. One hour later, Wild, Wild World of Animals began. Then Barnaby Jones, M*A*S*H, Scooby-Doo! (yes, Scooby-Doo!), All in the Family, the local news and, lastly, a follow-up episode of M*A*S*H. Sometimes, a teammate stopped by with a bag of McDonald’s. Sometimes, he spent the entire day alone.

  If Johnson needed some reinforcement that things wouldn’t always be “like this” (championships, bubbly, endorsement deals, nonstop love), it came on the morning of February 27, when he was scheduled to return to the Lakers’ active roster. In Southern California, Johnson’s triumphant rebirth was celebrated with the pomp and circumstance of a general back from war. MAGIC’S BACK! pins were the rage outside the Forum, and his whereabouts and condition became pressing fodder for the region’s news agencies. Upon opening the Los Angeles Times’s sports section over breakfast (as he always did), Johnson was greeted with a story headlined TONIGHT, THE LAKERS PUT A LITTLE MAGIC BACK IN THEIR LIVES. Written by Alan Greenberg, the piece mainly highlighted the excitement felt by Laker management and coaches. One quotation, however, jumped off the page. When asked how he felt about no longer being the primary ball handler, Nixon didn’t hold back. “It’s not my preference,” he said. “But I don’t want to be negative about it. Magic is a wiser player (than the previous season). He realizes that we sometimes can have two point guards handling the ball. The guy is a great talent. Even if there was resentment within myself, the guy plays as hard as he can, so he can do anything he wants to do.”

  Anyone who knew Nixon understood the words were mild compared to the sentiment. Yes, he liked the kid—in the same way all of the Lakers liked the kid. Beneath the peaceful exterior, however, was mounting resentment from players over the way people regularly spoke of the franchise as “Johnson’s”—as if he were not merely a participant but the CEO and moral compass. Though the good vibes of a championship season concealed the cracks, they had been there from the start. As soon as Johnson arrived in Los Angeles to sign with the Lakers, he was embraced by Jerry Buss in a way few owners had ever embraced a player. Buss viewed his new twenty-year-old star as both a terrific basketball standout and a magnet. The smile. The walk. The conversational skills. He was someone people wanted to be around, someone women really wanted to be around.

  Buss—one of Southern California’s great partiers—made Johnson a semiregular nightlife sidekick. Maybe he couldn’t teach him how to break the full-court press. But he was sure happy to show him how to survive on three and a half hours of sleep and woo the Southern California babes. “My dad had the energy of a twenty-year-old,” said Jeanie Buss, Jerry’s daughter. “That was the thing about him. Most people evolve as they get older, and settle into certain life patterns. Well, he didn’t. He wanted to be out until four o’clock in the morning. I used to go out with him until I was twenty-five. Then I was like, ‘I can’t do this any longer.’ I didn’t have the energy.” When, in 1980, a Los Angeles Times story quoted Johnson as saying, “You’ve got to lay back a little. There’s no way to have a social life like I would like to have playing as many games as we do. I do the things I like to do, but I keep it at a minimum,” teammates fell to the floor laughing. Thanks to Buss, Johnson was ubiquitous. The Lakers phenom was on the dance floor of Club Soda. At the bar of The Odyssey. Listening to music at The Palace and Xenon West and a dozen other nightclubs and hot spots. “Jerry Buss was a Hugh Hefner clone,” said John Papanek, a basketball writer for Sports Illustrated. “He was always walking around with five or six hotties hanging off his appendages.” In fact, Buss was more than merely a clone. He and Hefner were close friends, and the Lakers owner could often be found at the Playboy Mansion—land of swimming pools, caviar and one hundred pairs of delectably large breasts.

  Just how big a player was Jerry Buss? “My second year with the Lakers, Norm Nixon and I decided to sneak out of training camp one night,” said Ron Carter, a guard. “There was a party at a club, and Stevie Nicks was holding it. So we sneak out, have a great night, and as we’re leaving the club at eleven forty-five P.M. who walks in but Jerry Buss. We run into the men’s bathroom to hide, and Dr. Buss sends one of his guys in to get us and have a drink with him. That man was like no other. He’s the only owner I’ve ever heard of who’d come into the locker room and ask two important questions—‘Where are you guys going tonight?’ and ‘Can I come along?’”

  Buss brought Johnson to the mansion, and watched proudly as he emerged as one of the most revered eligible bachelors in Los Angeles. Early in his career, teammates nicknamed Johnson Buck, and the story has long gone that it stemmed from his playing like a “young buck”—aka with great passion. “But that’s complete bullshit,” said Ron Carter.
“It’s not what people think. We called his ass Buck because during the days of slavery, the plantation owners would always use the strongest buck to impregnate all the women. And Earvin was such a whore, we called him Buck. The media never got that story right.”

  “Magic was ridiculous back then,” said Mark Landsberger, the reserve forward. “I went out with Wilt Chamberlain one night to the opening of a club, and he must have had fifteen to twenty white girls come up to him. I was amazed. Well, Magic topped that.”

  Johnson was the rarest of Hollywood breeds—an overnight star. He wasn’t the struggling actor waiting tables in hopes of a shot. No, he was instant Cary Grant, placed in the spotlight and handed an all-access VIP pass. Before long, Johnson’s endorsement opportunities dwarfed those of Abdul-Jabbar, formerly the Lakers’ top pitchman. He could be seen in advertisements for 7-Up and Spalding, a copy machine company and an outfit that designed men’s pants. He even had his own chocolate chip cookie.

  Nixon, on the other hand, was just Nixon. Buss took him out, but not all that often. He appeared in a movie, The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, but had only a couple of endorsement opportunities. He was more handsome than Johnson but lacked the charisma and 1,000-watt smile. According to Springer, the Orange County Register beat writer, Nixon owns “the greatest streak in sports history—two straight years of road trips without ever being minus the company of a woman for a night.”

  “I knew Norm,” said Springer. “I was close with him. We were in Richfield, Ohio, in the middle of nowhere on a Monday night, because we got there the day before the game. We’re staying at the Holidome, which was a Holiday Inn that was basically a minimum-security prison—there was nowhere to go. There was a Dairy Queen across the street and a blizzard outside. It was probably three degrees below zero. And we’re the only ones staying in this hotel. There’s nobody else. Norm and I are playing Ping-Pong and I say, ‘Well, Norm, it looks like your streak is going to end tonight.’ He goes, ‘We’ll see.’ At nine o’clock a Jaguar pulls up, this woman gets out in a full-length fur coat. She comes over and Norm goes, ‘Go upstairs—I’m playing Ping-Pong. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’ Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.”

  But not surprising. “The truth is, the friction between Earvin and Norm went way beyond basketball,” said Cooper, who was close with both guards. “That situation went to the party life. They were fucking the same girls. That was a problem. Dr. Buss was best friends with Hugh Hefner, and that door was open to Magic. And Norm being known, until then, as the number one available bachelor in Los Angeles, as the swinging guy who liked everything, it was awkward.

  “This was his team before, but he hadn’t won anything until Magic came along. So they’re bumping heads with girls, they’re fucking the same girls. They didn’t argue about it, but you could hear them talking about it—‘Well, man, you need to stay away from Peggy,’ and such and such. They were friends. Good friends. But then it became competitive with them over basketball and women. We used to call ourselves the Three Musketeers, because we did everything together, and now it was as if I was torn between two lovers.”

  Added Ron Carter: “Norm was my friend, but he was cocky as all hell. He has zero lack of confidence, ever. On or off the court. He saw everything Magic did as a competition. For the ball. For playing time. For women. Who’s the coolest? Who’s the smartest? Me and Coop would sit back and just watch. They certainly respected each other. But there was this weird tension.”

  Predictably, Johnson’s first game back was greeted in Los Angeles as a celebration of the human spirit. Two hours before tip-off, a gaggle of reporters and photographers lingered in the team’s locker room, recording every step, itch and scratch. When Johnson entered the trainer’s room to have tape applied to his ankles, media folks followed. Wrote the Los Angeles Times: “U.S. Senators receive less coverage.” Added The New York Times: “The press coverage was like that for a departing astronaut.”

  When asked to explain why so much was being made of a point guard getting back onto the basketball court, Westhead thought long and hard. “I had seriously wondered if Magic was human,” he said. “I doubted that he was. The day before his surgery, I thought, ‘Gee, this guy’s going to have surgery just like the rest of us.’ The operation was at eight A.M. on a Monday and I wanted to visit him. I didn’t want to go too early because he would still be doped up. I figured I’d go around six o’clock and find out what this guy was really like. So I went to the room and the door was closed and I thought, ‘Aha! A sign! He’s crying and moaning.’ I pushed the door open and peeked in and there was Magic propped up in the bed with a Dodger cap on backward, a piece of apple pie shoved up under his face, watching a football game, yelling at his father and a bunch of friends playing cards to keep the noise down. I couldn’t believe it. I walked away that night thinking, ‘What does this guy have that no one I’ve ever known has?’ I guess he’s human, but it’s only a guess.”

  A sellout crowd of 17,505 stood on its feet for forty-five seconds as Johnson was introduced by Larry McKay, the public address announcer. He smiled, nodded and spread his arms, palms up, as if to say—in the words of Sports Illustrated—“Why are you people treating me this way? I’m just a basketball player and this is just another game. Against the New Jersey Nets, yet.” He lingered at the foul line as the army of photographers and cameramen shot away. “It’s a thing I’ll always remember,” he said.

  Before the game, Westhead pulled Johnson aside and told him, “There’s a Spanish word for what I want you to be tonight. Suave, suave. Easy, easy. Take it easy tonight, OK?” Though Johnson played sloppily (12 points, 11 rebounds, 4 assists) in an ugly 107–103 win, there was a comfort having him back in uniform. With ten seconds left and Los Angeles ahead by a basket, Johnson rebounded Cooper’s errant jumper, dribbled off much of the time, then passed to Abdul-Jabbar, who was fouled and made two free throws. The crowd cheered wildly.

  Afterward, as his teammates wandered away and the ocean of media members parted, a single reporter remained. He was from The State News, Michigan State University’s student newspaper, and he wanted to know if Johnson had anything to say to the folks at his alma mater.

  “Just tell ’em I’m back,” he said. “The Magic is back.”

  Only it wasn’t. Not really. Under Johnson’s leadership, Los Angeles did play somewhat improved basketball, completing the season by winning 11 of 17 games to go 54-28 and place second behind Phoenix in the Pacific Division. Yet the team was neither crisp nor motivated, and Nixon’s pouting gained momentum as the playoffs approached. “Norm’s biggest thing was always that he wanted to be bigger than Magic,” said Clay Johnson, who joined the team the following season. “He had that little man’s syndrome. You’re little, but you wanna be big. Well, you’re not going to be bigger than Magic. It’s impossible.”

  The awkwardness between Nixon and Johnson was palpable. In the locker room, silent factions formed—those who loved Magic vs. those who liked Magic but believed a slick phoniness gift-wrapped the inside ingredients. “I liked both guys,” said Eddie Jordan. “I really did. They were different, but both had their strong points.”

  “When Magic came back, it was treated like a Hollywood premiere,” said Mike Thibault, an assistant coach. “You could sense the strong jealousies in the locker room. The other players resented how he was being treated as a savior. It was ugly.”

  Los Angeles concluded the regular season with a 148–146 final-day loss to Denver. The setback was deemed irrelevant—Abdul-Jabbar and Wilkes skipped most of the action. Yet when the media entered the locker room afterward, and talk turned to the Houston Rockets, the team’s first-round playoff opponent, the Lakers’ cavalier outlook was troubling. “We’re not as good as we were against Philadelphia [in the 1980 Finals],” said Wilkes. “But it’s a progressive thing. We have to beat Houston, then we have tough matchups with San Antonio and Phoenix.”

  Most of Los Angele
s’s players assumed nothing would get in the way of an easy stroll over the 40-42 Rockets, a team with a dominant center (Moses Malone), an aged point guard (thirty-two-year-old Calvin Murphy) and an unimpressive supporting cast. “There’s no way we were supposed to lose to the Houston Rockets,” said Jim Brewer, a reserve forward. “We were better than the Rockets.”

  On the morning of March 31, readers of the Los Angeles Times opened the sports section to find an above-the-fold article with the headline THE LAKERS’ OTHER GUARD. It was penned by Mike Littwin, a young writer in his second year on the beat. At first glance, it appeared to be little more than a boilerplate playoff-eve profile of Nixon, filled with platitudes over the guard’s speed, quickness and leadership. “I set out to write a story sympathetic to Norm,” said Littwin. “Here was a guy who was a really good player, but who had the misfortune of being next to a guy who was all-world. Magic Johnson was an all-time player who’d be remembered for the next thousand years, and Nixon was just a very good, All-Star-caliber guy. I felt for him.”

  For the opening few paragraphs, the article covered standard terrain about the veteran’s value. The meat of the piece, however, included some Nixon quotations. Among the dandies:

  On Johnson arriving as a rookie: “I thought Magic would have to come in and adjust to our game. But we had to adjust to him. The first thing they said in training camp that year was that Kareem and I had been handling the ball too much.”

  On playing alongside Johnson: “I’m a point guard, a ball handler. Playing with Magic, I’m the number two guard. I’m not a number two guard. It’s not what I do best. This is not the best situation for me personally. If I can play point guard, I can be an All-Pro. I could be that on a lot of teams.”

  On his status with the Lakers: “I’m not one of the chosen people.”

  When Johnson read the piece, his heart sunk. It wasn’t just that they were teammates. It was, well, Nixon and Johnson—tensions be damned—shared a certain kinship. They were the Lakers’ starting guards, the men who had guided the team to a championship together. “Me and Norm on road trips,” Johnson said. “I don’t care where it was, we were out. Norm liked to party and, at the time, I was a young buck and I liked to, too, so we was out. It was fun.”