Sharman and West loved the idea of adding Kupchak, but not for $800,000 a year. Not only was the contract too big for a role player (Kupchak had averaged 12.5 points and 7 rebounds coming off the bench the previous season), but it would inevitably result in a handful of Lakers suddenly feeling underpaid and underappreciated. Westhead, however, was convinced he would serve as the ideal sidekick to Abdul-Jabbar, and urged Buss to make the move. Los Angeles promptly sent Jim Chones, Brad Holland (“Great guy,” said Butch Carter, “but couldn’t play a single lick”) and two future draft picks to Washington—then endured a tidal wave of justified criticism. On August 6, 1981, the Los Angeles Times ran a top-of-the-sports-section piece headlined LAKERS GET KUPCHAK; WERE THEY SNOOKERED?—and the answer from most NBA gurus was an unambiguous “Yes.”
Could an argument be made that Kupchak was worth the dough?
“No,” said Jerry Colangelo, the Phoenix general manager.
“No,” said Carl Scheer, Denver’s president.
“I don’t think eight hundred thousand dollars for a second-stringer is good judgment,” said Donald Sterling, owner of the San Diego Clippers (and when Donald Sterling was questioning one’s decision-making ability, you knew you had problems).
“Am I missing something?” asked Pat Williams, the 76ers general manager. “This kind of thing frightens me. You just can’t operate with that kind of economic insanity. Boy, oh, boy.”
Had Kupchak been, simply, a basketball player with sound credentials, the contract would have been panned. However, Kupchak wasn’t, simply, a basketball player with sound credentials. He was a brittle man who underwent an operation for a herniated disc while in college, then two back surgeries in five NBA years—yet continued to compete in a manner that all but guaranteed future spans on the deactivated list. Once, while playing for Washington, Kupchak dived on the floor for fourteen loose balls in a game against the Kings. Abdul-Jabbar, by comparison, probably hadn’t dived for fourteen loose balls the entire season. “Mitch was relentless,” said Ferry. “He didn’t think about saving his body or holding back.”
Now he was a highly paid Laker, though far from alone in that designation. Stirred awake by the loss to Houston, Buss felt a need not merely to spend but to spend lavishly and irrationally. He made efforts to acquire two big-salaried stars (Milwaukee’s Marques Johnson and Denver’s Kiki Vandeweghe) via trades, and though both fell through, the league took notice. The Lakers would do whatever it took. “Is Westhead a real genius?” Buss asked a reporter. “We’ll find out. He asked me to get the talent. He wanted it this way. Now we’ll find out what he can do.”
Although the additions of McGee and Kupchak were important, the earth-shattering move wasn’t an addition but a refortification. Shortly after the trade with Washington, Buss renegotiated Johnson’s contract, tearing up his old deal in favor of an unprecedented twenty-five-year, $25 million agreement that would run well into the player’s retirement. Both men agreed to keep quiet about the numbers, but word leaked out of the league office. “I don’t know how Magic can be totally loved by his teammates now,” said Wilt Chamberlain, the former Lakers center. “He’s getting all that money, and all the publicity.”
Abdul-Jabbar, the longest-tenured member of the team, greeted the news of Johnson’s windfall with uncharacteristic emotion. The morning after it was announced, he asked the Los Angeles Times, “What is [Johnson], player or management? We don’t know.” He was right to question whether the point guard’s relationship with Buss went too far. During his rookie year, Johnson had dinner with Buss after nearly every home game. The two would play pool together, go house hunting together, talk for hours about food and women and sports. Abdul-Jabbar was not alone in finding this troubling. He derisively referred to Johnson as Buss’s “favorite child,” and said the team’s morale was on the brink of ruination. “They were giving him all this money and saying, ‘Here’s the ball, go entertain everybody,’” he said. “They would never have said it, but the unstated thing was not to win, but to entertain.” After the setback against Houston, Abdul-Jabbar noted, Buss suggested he would love to acquire Moses Malone, the Rockets center. Abdul-Jabbar openly wondered whether he was wanted in Los Angeles, and hinted at demanding a trade to his hometown New York Knicks. “In many ways, a basketball team is like a family,” he said. “If you pick one person out and put him in front of everyone else and say, ‘This is my favorite child,’ other people in the family are definitely going to be affected by it. No one knew exactly what was going on. Some members of the team wondered if their value lay in competing for the affection of the owner, rather than in what they do on the court.
“I’ve always felt the people in New York appreciate quality basketball and I could provide that.” (Buss, of course, had no intention of trading a six-time MVP.)
Nixon, jealous of Johnson even without the $25 million deal, was irate. He had tried his best to convince himself that the two were equals as star guards, star ladies’ men, big-time performers. Then . . . this? Nixon ran into Johnson in a hallway at the Ocotillo Lodge. A pained expression crossed his face. “Buck, what’s going on?” he said. “The guys are talking. They say you are hanging out all the time with Buss. That’s a no-no in this business.”
“I didn’t know that,” Johnson countered. “Dr. Buss is my friend.”
In Nixon’s mind, players and owners were Democrats vs. Republicans, pitchers vs. hitters. No, they didn’t have to fight one another. But they sure as hell weren’t supposed to be routinely hitting Studio 54 arm in arm.
“Players and management don’t hang out together,” Nixon said.
“Hey, I’m hanging out with Dr. Buss,” Johnson replied. “That boat has already sailed.”
“Well, I’m telling you, we don’t know how to take you,” Nixon said. “If something is said in the locker room, we don’t know if you are going to take it back.”
“What are you talking about, Norm?” Johnson shouted. “I’ve already been in your locker room for two years. Has anything we’ve said gotten back to Dr. Buss?”
Nixon shrugged and walked off in silence.
• • •
By the time the Lakers once again reported to Palm Desert for training camp, everything was a mess. Westhead greeted his men by quoting from the memoir of Viktor Frankl, a Nazi concentration camp survivor, who wrote, “Anything that does not kill me makes me stronger.”
The players didn’t care. About the words. About the coach. About each other.
The star guards could barely look at one another. Johnson, still recovering from the knee injury, was, in Westhead’s words, “having trouble beating fourth- and fifth-round draft choices.” Every time West watched McGee huck up some off-balance, one-handed twenty-five-footer, he cursed Westhead under his breath. Kupchak was an unimpressive lug with limited moves, a creaky back and a sign dangling from his neck that read I AM OVERPAID, AND EVERYONE HERE KNOWS IT. Wilkes, approaching his twenty-ninth birthday, looked a step slow. Two rookies who intrigued Westhead—forwards Kurt Rambis from Santa Clara and Kevin McKenna of Creighton—were dismissed by most of the other players as merely the latest great white hypes (in a sport that regularly produced them). Abdul-Jabbar, unusually agitated even for a man who was always agitated, wondered whether he should have followed through on his demand to become a Knick. His play in camp was so poor that one day, in an intrasquad scrimmage, a journeyman center named Bob Elliott (who averaged 7.5 points in 73 games for the Nets the previous season) scorched him for 40 points. “It was something incredible,” said Rambis, a free agent. “Bob just lit Kareem up. Then they cut him.”
The Lakers were known as Hollywood and high-flying and running and gunning and fun, fun, fun, fun. Yet there had never been a more miserable time to be a part of the club.
Thank goodness for Michael Cooper.
Throughout the history of American sport, all successful teams boast at least one player who
can cross chasms of class, status and production. Back when Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig struggled to relate with the New York Yankees, pitcher Lefty Gomez was the go-between. When the Chicago Bears struggled with a racially divided locker room in the late 1970s, Walter Payton bridged myriad gaps.
Based solely off of reading the newspapers and watching the games on TV, Cooper would have been defined as an emerging complementary player with unrivaled defensive tenacity but little offensive talent. He was, however, much more than merely a role player.
“Michael Cooper,” said McKenna, “was the glue.”
Unlike the majority of the Lakers, Cooper wasn’t really supposed to be there. Raised within shouting distance of the Forum in Pasadena, young Michael was an infant when his parents, Marshall and Jean, divorced. He and his brother, Mickey, were brought up by a grandmother, Ardessie Butler, in a seven-bedroom house stuffed with a forever-changing rotation of cousins, aunts and uncles (Ardessie was the mother of ten children). His love of competition came via one of his uncles, Tom Butler, a former Negro League ballplayer who encouraged his nephew to engage in every possible sport. “Michael always had a mental toughness about him,” Tom Butler said. “He seemed to have a jump on the other kids because he’d already have thought out the smartest way to achieve his goal.”
Yet while Cooper was always one of the area’s better athletes, he was damned by a physique that crossed Shelley Duvall and a light pole. No matter what he ate—ice cream and cake, mashed potatoes coated in gravy, deep-fried bacon—Cooper could not gain weight. Not that he was particularly deterred. Because his hero was Paul Warfield, the outstanding Cleveland Browns wide receiver, Cooper fancied himself one day running fly patterns in the NFL. Then, in a pickup game at Madison Park when he was eight years old, a boy named Herman Bluefur knocked young Michael unconscious with a hit to the cranium. “That was it for football,” Cooper said. He gave baseball a shot, but took a particularly hard fastball to the leg in a Little League game—“and baseball was off my list, too.
“Truth is, I was best at basketball, but mainly because I could run up and down the floor without getting tired,” he said. “I could outrun people for long stretches, I could defend people because I moved my feet well. I never really knew the fundamentals, but I had some talent.”
Cooper’s hoops awakening took place when he was fourteen and won a scholarship from the local YMCA to attend Jerry West’s Camp Clutch at nearby Occidental College. Still an active player with the Lakers, West was addressing the children on the virtue of free-throw shooting when he called Cooper out of the audience to demonstrate his form. He rose, nervously approached the line and connected on all four attempts. “That was when I first said to myself, ‘OK, I really want to learn how to ball,’” he said. “I caught the bug.”
Cooper played junior varsity basketball his first two seasons at Pasadena High School—practicing well, working doggedly and attracting the attention of no one. Then, during varsity tryouts early in his junior year, a coach named George Terzian took notice. The kid had very few moves, a mediocre handle and was embarrassingly weak under the boards. But, man, was he long. And quick. And hardened. “Coop,” he told him, “your best bet at going somewhere via basketball is learning to play defense. You need to play defense with your feet. Stop reaching with your arms, start sliding.” Whenever Cooper reached with his hands during practices, he’d be forced to run five laps around the gymnasium. Terzian attached a ball to the top of a long stick, and used it to teach Cooper how to block shots with two hands. “He’d hold the stick up at different angles and different heights,” Cooper said, “and I’d have to run up and block the shots. I learned it wasn’t about hitting it hard so it goes out of bounds, but blocking the basketball to teammates.”
Long before stopper was a common basketball term, Cooper was Terzian’s stopper. He’d lock him up with the opposing team’s best player, and watch as a star who averaged 25 points per game finished the night with 6. “We had fourteen defensive principles that we’d teach the kids,” said Terzian. “And Michael mastered all fourteen. He was taking charges as a teenager, and he never flinched doing so.”
“I fell in love,” Cooper said, “with defending.”
Such was an untraditional approach to getting noticed by college recruiters, most of whom seek out the 6-foot-10 giant or the dead-eye shooter. Cooper, however, was intriguing. Pacific University stopped by, as did Seattle Pacific and Occidental College. Marv Harshman, the University of Washington’s head basketball coach, came multiple times. “Marv liked his game, liked his approach,” said Terzian. “The only issue was his grades.”
Because he was a low-C student, Cooper wound up attending Pasadena City Community College. He averaged 19 points as a freshman for the Lancers, and returned as a sophomore thinking his time in the spotlight had arrived. Five games into the season, however, his biology professor alerted Joe Barnes, the head coach, that Cooper (averaging 30 points per game at the time) was skipping classes and wouldn’t receive a grade for the semester. He was immediately suspended. That day, Barnes called Cooper into his office and changed his life. “Michael,” he said, “you can go one of two ways right now. You can’t play basketball for us, but you can come to practice and work out. There’s a lot of quality basketball being played down at [adjacent-to-campus] Victory Park, which will keep you sharp. But what you need to do—more than anything—is buckle down and get your grades together. I’ll help you as much as I can, but it’s important that you do most of it yourself. This isn’t just about playing basketball. It’s shaping the foundation of who you are, of how much you want to expand yourself and become something and someone of substance.”
A devilish voice in Cooper’s brain whispered, “To hell with it—just go get a job and play ball on the side.” However, Barnes’s words were louder and more powerful. Though miserable and lonely, Cooper worked his grades up to a B average, and when John Whisenant, an assistant coach at the University of New Mexico, called, Barnes raved about a young man who had found his way. What Cooper didn’t know at the time was that the school was in the midst of a full-blown basketball apocalypse. The previous season, six black players quit the Lobos, accusing head coach Norman Ellenberger of racism. “The pitch Norm made to me was ‘Look, I’ve got all these open spots I have to fill,’” Cooper said. “I’m getting all these junior college all-stars, and you have an immediate chance to start.”
Though mildly concerned (“You don’t want to play for a racist if you can avoid it,” he joked), Cooper couldn’t ignore the opportunity. He arrived in Albuquerque half expecting to find the grand wizard of the KKK but, instead, meeting another coach who would change his life. If Terzian and Barnes gave Cooper a BA in Defensive Tenacity, Ellenberger offered a combined masters/PhD program. The Lobos went a surprising 19-11 Cooper’s first season, and Ellenberger set his new stopper loose. “Coach Terzian taught me about containment—push them, contain them, guide them toward your team,” Cooper said. “Ellenberger was like, ‘Fuck that, Coop. You’re our defensive player. I don’t want them to score at all.’
“Man, did I love that,” said Cooper. “Absolutely fucking loved it.”
As a senior in 1977–78, Cooper averaged 16.1 points per game as the Lobos—briefly ranked fourth in the country—finished 24-4 and led the nation in scoring. Though Cooper’s thin frame and iffy offensive repertoire kept him off most NBA radars (“I honestly never thought of him as an NBA player,” said Mark Felix, a Lobos teammate. “He was sort of a frail kid with a big heart”), he was lucky enough to play for a man (Ellenberger) who was golfing buddies with Jerry West. The Laker coach attended five Lobo games Cooper’s senior year and convinced the organization to tab him with the sixtieth pick of the draft.
“I was out at the gym, because I knew I wasn’t going to get drafted,” Cooper said. “I’m playing basketball, and my cousin Brad comes running onto the court, screaming, ‘You gotta come home! You gotta come home! You�
��ve been drafted, man! Jerry West already called the house! You’ve been drafted by Los Angeles!’”
Shortly thereafter, Cooper reported to the Lakers’ summer league team at Loyola Marymount. Years later, he recalled walking into the gymnasium and staring at Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Norm Nixon, Jamaal Wilkes, Ron Boone, Lou Hudson. He was shaken from his awestruck daze by Jack Curran, the team’s trainer.
“You Cooper?” he asked.
“Yup.”
“OK,” Curran said, “put your stuff down and get your ass over to the table so I can tape you.”
The veterans disappeared at day’s end, and Cooper was just another young scrub, desperate to impress West enough to earn an invite to training camp. Everything went smoothly until the third game against Phoenix, when the Suns’ Andrew Wakefield tripped and toppled into Cooper’s left knee. “It swelled up three times its normal size,” he said. “What’d I think to myself? Easy—‘Fuck!’”
As he was carried from the court, Cooper spotted a friend, Morris Davis, sitting near the baseline. “I’ll be back,” he whispered, “and I’m going to be a star.” He had suffered a torn MCL, the sort of injury that, at the time, meant at least eight months of inaction. That night, Cooper cried himself to sleep, wondering what in the world he’d done to anger the basketball gods.
By week’s end, though, he realized this was the best-possible career move. Had Cooper remained healthy, the Lakers—overloaded with veterans—almost certainly would have cut him loose. Because he was hurt, however, the team could place him on the injured reserve list with minimal contractual obligations. “Mike,” West said, “what I want you to do is rehab, get your knee strong.” Six months later, Cooper was given a clean bill of health. On December 22, 1978, with two minutes remaining in a blowout win over the visiting Washington Bullets, an obscure forward named Michael Cooper entered the game, replacing Ron Boone. There was no standing ovation, no excitement over the debut. He was just a skinny kid out of New Mexico. “To me, it meant everything,” he said. “It meant I made it. Finally. Man, I played those last two minutes like they were the first two minutes. Game wasn’t even close, but I didn’t care. I’d arrived.”
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 17