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

by Pearlman, Jeff

  Cooper appeared in two more games that season, averaging a basket and one-third of an assist. Yet the Lakers saw enough to bring him back the following year. He beat out Boone for the final roster spot and established himself as not merely a valuable contributor (Cooper averaged 8.8 points in 82 games—including 23 starts) but a positive locker room influence. Cooper became tight with both Johnson and Nixon, in part because he was fun-loving and charismatic, in part because he was a threat to neither man on or off the court. “I really got to know Magic well during training camp his rookie year,” Cooper said. “He’d always knock on my door to wake me up for breakfast, knowing full well I wasn’t a breakfast person. That became our routine—walking over to Denny’s to grab breakfast together. I would have the newspaper and he’d always say, ‘Coop, gimme the sports!’ We had a real bond that comes from togetherness. Same with me and Norm. A bond—like a brotherhood.”

  Unlike the two stars, Cooper wasn’t fighting for ball-handling duties. Also, unlike the two stars, Cooper had recently married his college sweetheart, Wanda Juzang, and wasn’t having sex with every other female in Los Angeles. “Michael was actually very shy back then,” said Wanda. “He was quiet and quite sweet. You had to like him.”

  • • •

  Now beginning his fourth season, Cooper’s good-natured demeanor was needed more than ever. Johnson couldn’t look at Nixon. Nixon couldn’t look at Johnson. Kupchak was underwhelming and Abdul-Jabbar was, as usual, standoffish. Though the team went 6-1 in the exhibition season, no one was happy with Westhead’s increasingly dogmatic stances. “I didn’t like Paul Westhead as the coach, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone,” said Clay Johnson, a Lakers guard. “His whole style . . . his whole setup . . . none of it worked or made much sense. He wasn’t an NBA-caliber coach.”

  The Lakers opened the regular season with an October 30 clash against the Houston Rockets at the Forum, and while players talked a good game about cohesiveness and teamwork and finding ways to win, the sentiment was hogwash. In the days leading up, Westhead reminded his men that the offense was changing (ever so slightly) yet again. He referred to it as an “option” system—meaning the players would have multiple options to choose from. “Westhead equipped the team with about 50 possible options on offense,” wrote Scott Ostler in the Los Angeles Times, “which is more than you get with Baskin-Robbins and less than you get with Heinz. But maybe more than you need on the basketball court.”

  Added Randy Harvey, also in the Times: “There will be more movement from everyone and less of Magic Johnson dribbling out front while waiting for the offense to set up. Norm Nixon calls himself a small forward in this offense. While that is not entirely accurate, he will be roaming the baseline more than in the past. The players admit they are confused by the offense and will be for the first few games; but they will continue to depend much of the time on the NBA’s simplest play. A fist in the air means pass the ball to Abdul-Jabbar.”

  So how, in hindsight, would Laker players describe Westhead’s approach?

  Nixon: “Awful.”

  Cooper: “Confusing.”

  Kupchak: “Well, it was . . . different.”

  Mark Landsberger: “I still don’t really understand it.”

  Jamaal Wilkes: “Looking back, it could have been better.”

  Eddie Jordan: “Paul thought half-court basketball controlled the game. And it did for most teams, but not for those Showtime Lakers.”

  Johnson: “Once we got down the court, it was four guys around the perimeter and Kareem following the ball. That meant Jamaal is standing now, Norm is standing, I’m standing. No throwing. No making the defense move. We were predictable. Once [Kareem] got it, he would kick it out with five seconds left on the clock. It was throwing everybody off.”

  Even Pat Riley, Westhead’s assistant and a man of genuine loyalty, was scratching his head over the shifts. Although he never said so publicly, behind closed doors he expressed confusion over a system that deemphasized the Lakers’ greatest strength—a pair of point guards who could think on the fly. Johnson found a sympathetic ear in Westhead’s right-hand man, whining to him about the blessed Jack McKinney offense that won the team a title, then was promptly dismantled.

  Los Angeles was a significantly more talented team than the Rockets, who now featured a Methuselahan Elvin Hayes at power forward and perhaps the weakest bench in the Western Conference. Yet with the Lakers operating a system that called for slow and steady over speedy and blurring, Houston controlled the tempo, once again repeatedly dumping the ball into Moses Malone, who scored 36 points in a 113–112 double overtime win.

  Watching from his skybox, Buss was apoplectic. “What’s going on?” he asked. “I just don’t like this.”

  When the game concluded, he ventured into the locker room and was greeted by spiritless silence. He cornered Nixon, who scored but 12 points. “Why are you playing that way?” Buss asked. “When you get down the court, why don’t you [drive to the basket] like you used to? What’s happening?”

  “Well,” Nixon said, “this is the new offense.” He proceeded to sketch a diagram for Buss, further frustrating the owner. To the wealthy real estate developer, this didn’t look like a high-functioning scoring machine. It looked like something from a junior high chalkboard. “Theoretically, we were going into a more pure fast break, but nobody was fast-breaking,” Buss later said. “And as I talked to people, it was coming out more and more and more that this was just an entirely new offense. . . . People had criticized Paul—he felt—so severely because he had used McKinney’s offense in the world championship. And then, by winning that championship, he had been made the coach.

  “So he went to a different offense which would be clearly recognized as his own. I felt that he was therefore proving his point with my team. I felt he was on a crusade. . . . I felt like he was saying, ‘I’m going to use this team to prove my point,’ and he had done this without consulting me. I just didn’t go along with it. I had specifically hired McKinney to begin with because that’s the way I wanted my team to play.”

  Los Angeles followed with a 102–100 defeat to the inferior Portland Trail Blazers. Before the game, Westhead sidled up to Johnson and demanded more aggressiveness on the glass. “Yeah, I hear. I know,” the guard replied. “You got me playing thirty feet from the basket. I got to stop the [other team’s] break.” Westhead wasn’t having it. He insisted, again, on more boards. “Coach Westhead,” Johnson said, “I can’t run thirty feet in to try to get an offensive rebound, then try and be back on defense at the same time.”

  “Well,” said Westhead, “I don’t want to hear this.”

  That night, in the lobby of the Portland Marriott, Chick Hearn, the veteran announcer and knower of all things Lakers, approached a handful of reporters. “In a few weeks,” he said, “you guys might have a really big story to write.”

  “We all knew,” said Steve Springer, one of the team’s beat writers, “that this thing with Paul couldn’t last. There was just no way.”

  The Lakers won two of their next three games, but it mattered not. The chemistry between coach and players was becoming increasingly strained and awkward. Especially the chemistry between coach and one particular player.

  “Magic really came to hate Paul,” said Cooper. “I mean, he really hated him. Magic’s the type of guy, when he gets on the bus he says hello to everybody—‘Hey, what’s up? How you doing? What’s going down?’ Now he would get on the bus, walk straight to his seat and just sit there. He wouldn’t even look at Westhead—not even for a second. Magic would walk right past him, like he wasn’t even there.

  “In practice, usually Magic would be on the top of the key, asking for the ball, and he’d be bobbing back and forth, all energy. Now he would just stand straight and still. And I said, ‘This shit is not looking good.’ And Westhead would talk, giving instructions like coaches do, and Magic wouldn’t look at
him. Westhead would tell him what he wants, and Magic would say, cold as ice, ‘So you want me to go over there and do that?’ And he did exactly as he was told. But usually Magic would dribble and bounce and respond with energy. But with Westhead . . . you had a coach trying to get his star’s attention, and his star basically saying, ‘Fuck you. I don’t believe in a thing you’re doing.’”

  On the night of November 10, 1981, the Lakers fell to 2-4 with a humbling 128–102 destruction at the hands of San Antonio. Playing without George Gervin, one of the league’s elite scorers, the Spurs still had their way with Los Angeles. The Lakers appeared to have three options: (a) fast-break off a miss, (b) dump the ball into Abdul-Jabbar, (c) stand around and stare at one another. As the Spurs took a 30-point fourth-quarter lead, fans inside the HemisFair began singing the Queen hit “Another One Bites the Dust.” It was humiliating, and afterward several players responded to questions by shrugging and saying, “Ask the coach.”

  Reporters asked the coach. “I have no answers,” Westhead said. “If I had, I would have thought of them before the game.”

  Johnson, who scored 24 points, was despondent. He glared at the stat sheet and crumpled it into a ball. “Tonight I had to get mine on the break and tip-ins,” he said. “Everybody thought I was playing bad in the first four games because I was only scoring 12 or 14 points. Everybody said, ‘What’s wrong?’ Nothing was wrong. I only took seven shots against Phoenix [in a 101–99 loss four days earlier] because those were the only shots I had. But that’s [Westhead’s] system. That’s what he believes in. I can’t go out on my own.”

  Did he believe in the system?

  “I’m only here just playing,” Johnson said. “I just do what I’m supposed to do.”

  • • •

  As soon as the game against the Spurs ended, the Lakers equipment team packed up all the gear, loaded the buses and departed to the airport for a quick flight to Houston. The trip that night was quieter than usual. The players were better than this. They knew they were better than this.

  But Paul Westhead and his offense . . .

  Upon arriving at Houston Intercontinental Airport early on the morning of Wednesday, November 11, the players ambled down to the baggage claim area, then headed to the bus. Without saying a word, Johnson—large headphones covering his ears, singing Earth, Wind & Fire aloud—walked to the median in the middle of the road and turned the music up. “Sometimes,” he told the media, “I just have to sit in the sunshine and think.”

  Only it wasn’t sunny. It was cloudy.

  “I got on the bus, had some food in my hand,” said Cooper. “I looked out the window and there was Magic, and he’s sitting out there against a pole with his feet up.”

  Cooper approached his friend from behind and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “E, what’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Coop, man, I ain’t having fun,” Johnson said.

  “What are you talking about?” Cooper said. “We’ve just hit a little rough patch. That’s all.”

  “No, Coop, it’s not gonna get any better,” Johnson said. “I’m telling you, it’s not getting any better.”

  Cooper knew Johnson was prone to emotional highs and lows, knew the same man now brooding might be cracking a joke twenty-five seconds down the line. “E, let’s get on the bus,” he said. “Come on. . . .”

  “No, Coop, this shit ain’t fun,” Johnson said. “I’m calling Dr. Buss today.”

  “What’s that supposed to do?” Cooper asked, naïvely.

  “Doc listens to me,” Johnson said. “Doc listens to me.”

  Indeed.

  “That was the moment,” Cooper said years later, “when I found out Magic had more power than anybody on the team. OK, maybe not more power, but the ability to make things happen with Dr. Buss. He called that night, and everything in the history of the Los Angeles Lakers changed.

  “All it took was one call.”

  • • •

  Here’s the weird thing—the Lakers proceeded to win. And win. And win. And win. As soon as Johnson complained to Buss, Los Angeles went on its best run of the season, beating three sound teams (Houston, Portland, Phoenix), as well as the inept Pacers (coached by Jack McKinney). Nixon, Los Angeles’s unofficial off-the-record marksman, anonymously told a reporter that “the only bad thing about winning is we’re keeping [Westhead] alive.” None of his teammates would argue the point.

  In the midst of the streak, Buss called Bill Sharman, the general manager, and Jerry West, the assistant, into his office for a lengthy talk. Though the two men considered themselves the franchise’s sole basketball decision makers, Buss’s ear now belonged to Magic Johnson. Ever since the playoff loss to Houston, Buss increasingly shared the point guard’s position that Westhead was either impossibly stubborn, in over his head or incapable of change. Now, with Johnson again directly requesting Westhead’s dismissal, the owner felt compelled to act.

  “Let me start off the meeting by saying that I’ve reached a decision that I would like to fire Paul Westhead,” he told the two men. “However, there’s three of us here and if the two of you want to talk me out of it, I’ll let you talk me out of it. . . .”

  Sharman and West had both coached the Lakers and knew the job was far from easy. Few towns came with greater media pressure and public scrutiny. They also knew what it was to cope with an agitated superstar. Sharman had the mercurial Wilt Chamberlain for two seasons, and West rarely grasped what was going through Abdul-Jabbar’s mind during their three years together. In other words, while they acknowledged Westhead was far from perfect, they thought he deserved the benefit of extended time. “Paul warrants at least another week to see if things can straighten out,” West told Buss.

  Sharman nodded. “Jerry’s right,” he said. “Nobody should forget what Paul did for us in 1980.”

  Buss listened and seemed to agree. Maybe things would work themselves out.

  • • •

  The nonsense needed to stop.

  Paul Westhead had thought this for quite some time. He believed Johnson—to the public a smiling, hugging, laughing Laker golden child—was behaving not as a leader but as a chemistry killer. Though coaches are generally insulated from intricacies of locker room banter, they also usually know what’s being thought and, to a certain degree, said. No, Westhead wasn’t present for Johnson’s talks with Buss and Nixon and Cooper. He was, however, intelligent enough to understand the warm vibes of a championship had been lost, and that the NBA’s most powerful player no longer wanted him around.

  “There was friction,” Westhead said. “It was obvious.”

  Had Westhead been coaching during a different era, with a staff of five or six assistants, perhaps Johnson and Nixon and the gang could have been reached; perhaps someone would have spoken up on his behalf, would have (rightly) noted that Westhead’s career coaching record—110-50—was one of the best in NBA history.

  Yet, save Riley, an undistinguished colleague who primarily kept quiet and went about his job, Westhead was alone.

  On the night of Thursday, November 18, the Lakers and Utah Jazz squared off at the Salt Palace. The game appeared to be a mismatch. The Jazz was an awkwardly constructed team, dependent on two one-dimensional scorers (the undersize power forward Adrian Dantley and the young shooting guard Darrell Griffith). Yet with Westhead’s offense once again befuddling all involved, Utah stayed close. As the game neared halftime, the Lakers called a time-out. Westhead laid out a play and looked toward Johnson, who was in the process of asking Jack Curran, the trainer, for a cup of water. “Earvin!” Westhead said. “Shut up! Get your ass in this huddle and pay attention!”

  “I am paying attention,” he replied.

  “Well,” said Westhead, “you should be looking at me.”

  An hour later, it happened again. The Lakers led 113–110 with four seconds remaining. Jazz co
ach Tom Nissalke pulled his players aside to diagram a final strategy. The Lakers surrounded Westhead, and he explained that Griffith would probably come off a screen, but keep an eye on Rickey Green in the—

  “Magic!”

  Johnson was sitting on the end of the bench, sulking. He was purposely looking elsewhere, hoping Westhead might notice.

  “Damn it,” Westhead said. “How about getting in the huddle here?”

  “I am in,” Johnson replied with a quick bark. “I’m here.”

  “Forget it,” Westhead said. “You’re clearly not paying attention.”

  The coach would have been right to substitute Eddie Jordan into the game; to pull Johnson with 10,802 fans watching; to embarrass him as many a coach had done to many a player in the past. “You couldn’t have blamed Paul,” said Cooper. “Earvin was being disrespectful in full view.”

  Instead, Westhead reinserted Johnson, watched the Lakers hold on for the three-point triumph, then debated what to do next. “I couldn’t wait until the next practice to speak to him,” Westhead said. “It was pressing. And I wanted this to work out for both of us. I certainly didn’t want to alienate him.”

  After the players entered the small visitors’ locker room, Westhead requested a moment of Johnson’s time. They walked into the nearby equipment room. Johnson leaned against a table. Westhead stood. “I’m tired of your horseshit attitude,” the coach said. “And I’m not going to put up with it anymore. Either you start listening to me, or you don’t have to play.”

  Johnson first participated in organized basketball as an elementary school student. Through the years, he had never—not once—disrespected a coach. He was a man raised to defer to authority. Yet Westhead struck him as less authority figure, more clueless bully.