In the days following the messy press conference, the mailboxes inside the Los Angeles Times office were stuffed with notes from basketball die-hards damning the Laker point guard as the second coming of Satan. Johnson tried his best to deflect the criticism, issuing a statement that read, in part, “I’m just happy to be here in L.A. I wasn’t happy. Some of the other guys weren’t happy. But I didn’t make the changes. That was up to the head man, Dr. Buss.” Nobody bought it. The newspaper printed as many letters as possible, and the sentiment was near universal: The pampered infant was no longer worthy of wearing the purple and gold. Jim Murray, the Times’s star sports columnist, went even further. “The man they thought belonged on a shelf as a stuffed toy alongside Yogi Bear and Bambi turned out to be a guy who would bait a trap for Mickey Mouse,” he wrote. “Now we know why they call him Magic. He made the boss disappear.”
Throughout the league, opponents thrashed Johnson as manipulative and immature. Larry Brown, coach of the New Jersey Nets, insisted he would never add the guard to his team—even though his awful guard rotation included Darwin Cook, Phil Ford and Foots Walker. “They can have him,” Brown said. “I’ve seen what’s happened to that team.” Bob Mazza, a Beverly Hills–based public relations executive who handled Johnson’s affairs, told the Los Angeles Times his client wouldn’t be hurt. “My feeling is this is going to blow over,” he said—then watched as multiple companies rushed to drop Johnson as an endorser.
Truth is, Johnson was both hero and goat, and neither hero nor goat. Westhead was losing the team, and Johnson was but one of many players overcome by unhappiness. It took courage to speak out, courage teammates like Nixon and Cooper lacked. But it was also a selfish act that resulted in a decent man losing his job. Randy Harvey, the Los Angeles Times beat writer, stated it perfectly: “If the perception around the country today is that he is a spoiled brat and a prima donna, that is no closer to the truth than the perception of him before as every mother’s son. Realistically, he has never been as wonderful as he appears on the 7-Up commercials, and he is not as disruptive a force today as his critics would have you believe.”
Riley met with Johnson the day after being hired, and told him that things were about to change. The Lakers would run again. Abdul-Jabbar would remain a focus on offense—but not the only focus. He wanted Johnson to return to being the free-flowing, instinctive point guard who once led the Lakers to the championship. In short, he wanted to bring back Showtime.
Ah, Showtime. That was the term a select few had used to describe McKinney’s offense—an exciting brand of run-and-gun that brought spectators to their feet. Long before he actually purchased the Lakers, Buss enjoyed frequenting a club on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica called The Horn. It was a small, smoky joint known for good music and stiff drinks and long-legged hostesses. The Horn was where such talents as Jim Nabors and Guy Hovis had been discovered, and where Dick Curtis once cut a record, Live at The Horn. In the moment before featured acts took the stage, the lights dimmed and a performer, covertly placed at one of the club’s small round tables, stood and crooned, “It’s shoooowwwttttttime!” Other singers would join in, harmonizing along—“Shoooooowwwwwtttttimmmmme . . .” Buss never forgot how one electric phrase could excite an entire crowd. He came to love the idea of “It’s Showtime!” and wanted his basketball team to pair with the verbiage.
When Riley took over, Buss once again talked up “Showtime” as if it were a literal basketball philosophy. He told anyone who would listen that his team was about to return to Showtime, that the Forum would be a place where Showtime reigned. To Buss, Showtime was both a basketball philosophy and an arena-filling approach. Showtime was short-skirted Laker Girls. Showtime was Jack Nicholson sitting alongside Dyan Cannon atop the court. Showtime was loud music, big breasts, screaming adoration, fans dressed in their absolute best. “My dad would always explain it like this,” said Jeanie Buss. “If you have a friend coming to town to visit Los Angeles, he’s going to say, ‘I want to go to Disneyland, I want to go to the beach and I want to see a celebrity.’ Well, where would you take him where he’s guaranteed to see a celebrity? A Laker game. He made the Forum a draw in and of itself.”
Said Pat O’Brien, the CBS broadcaster: “The Forum was the first place I ever saw people bring binoculars to a basketball game, because there were a million things to look at.”
Buss mostly kept his distance. He wanted the Forum to be cool and hip, and he trusted his employees to deliver. Against his better judgment, he even paid a fan named Barry Richards thirty-five dollars a game to stand along the sideline in a white tuxedo and perform as “Dancing Barry”—a goofy shuffler who grooved during time-outs.
There are only two notable moments when Buss put his foot down. The first came when Lon Rosen, working in the promotions department, sent the Laker Girls onto the floor accompanied by a male baton twirler. “If you ever have something like that on again,” Buss said, “it’s going to be your last day.” The second involved Jeanie Buss and Linda Rambis coming up with a plan for “Slam Duck,” the Lakers’ first-ever mascot. “He was an edgy duck with a Mohawk and a piercing,” said Rambis. “We hired a cartoonist to draw him up, and we thought we could send him to schools instead of the players. Dr. Buss looked at it and said, ‘No way. No possible way.’ In hindsight, he was right. But the duck was cute.”
For his part, Riley shrugged, smiled and said whatever needed to be said. He conducted his first practice on the afternoon of Friday, November 20, with West glued to a chair along the sideline and Buss—still somewhat confused over who was running his team—perched in the stands. Riley was thirty-six years old, as much a peer to his players as a leader. Yet as he gathered his team around for a quick pep talk, the room went silent. “I’m tired of excuses,” he said. “We’re too good for such nonsense. . . .”
For the first time in weeks, Earvin Johnson was Magic again. He enthusiastically dribbled the ball up and down, yapping toward teammates, hanging on all of Riley’s words. His passes were crisp, his attention crisper. If some players had begun to view him suspiciously, those thoughts faded into a blur of spinning twirls down the lane; of no-look, behind-the-back dishes; of a point guard reborn and stirred to life. “Earvin needed the change,” said Cooper. “He couldn’t have gone on the way things were.”
The new Lakers made their debut that Friday night, facing a Spurs team that had embarrassed them by 26 points just ten days earlier. Led by the unparalleled George Gervin, San Antonio came to the Forum sporting a league-best 9-1 record. “Los Angeles had a lot of scorers,” said Paul Griffin, a Spurs forward. “But we felt we could play with them and eventually wear them down.”
A sellout crowd packed the building, many there to make Johnson aware that he was now persona non grata. The opening introductions were awkward. Johnson was usually the first Laker introduced and the king of the palace. The enunciated syllables of his name were always drowned out by applause and squeals. This time, as Lawrence Tanter, the public address announcer, started into “Earv . . .” the Forum erupted in boos. This was the sort of Forum razzing reserved for Gervin and Moses Malone and Bernard King—rivals who had scorched the home team. As Johnson walked onto the court, he bit his lip and pretended not to notice the scorn. “What you must do is ride it out and not break concentration,” Riley told him. “Just play your game and you’ll turn the crowd around.”
The general assumption was that Johnson would have to re-prove himself to the Laker faithful. This could take a few games, a few weeks, maybe even a few months.
Instead, it took approximately twenty minutes. As Riley said (and did) very little, Johnson ran Los Angeles to perfection, totaling 20 points, 16 assists, 10 rebounds and 3 steals in a 136–116 rout. By midway through the second quarter, the Forum was once again Johnson’s. He dribbled down the left sideline, crossed the half-court line and tossed an alley-oop to a streaking Cooper. Less than thirty seconds later, Johnson hit a miniature
jump hook. Then he connected with Abdul-Jabbar. Then he burst past Johnny Moore, the Spurs point guard, for a layup. He pumped his fist and flashed his smile and reverted to the Magic of old. “I’m just here trying to have fun and win some games,” he said. With the Lakers up by 6, Johnson either scored or assisted on 18 of the next 21 points. Abdul-Jabbar contributed 30, Wilkes added 18 and Cooper and Nixon both had 12. Afterward, Sports Illustrated’s Anthony Cotton asked Johnson whether he was, at long last, happy. “Yeah, I’m happy—and so are him and him and him,” he said, pointing to his teammates’ vacated lockers. “This is the way it was two years ago, with easy buckets. You see the way we were moving tonight? Pow-pow-pow.”
“That’s the kind of basketball I like to watch,” added Buss. “I think everyone was high emotionally, but let’s give it ten or twelve games before we draw any conclusions.”
Predictably, Riley was quickly hailed as the savior of Los Angeles. The Lakers won 11 of their first 13 games under their new coach, playing loose and fast and up to their talent level. The idea—backed by the press—was that Riley had brought something new to the table, that here was an offensive genius coach perfectly matched with an offensive genius point guard. Even when Riley tried pooh-poohing the praise (“Nothing changed,” he said. “Nothing. Paul was a great coach. I’ve done nothing”), few were willing to acknowledge the truth—that Johnson was the orchestrator.
No, in Pat Riley, they had found their dashing leader.
They had found their matinee idol.
• • •
Pat Riley didn’t merely hate the word. He recoiled from it.
Coach.
In his first days . . . weeks . . . months leading the Lakers, he simply wanted to be known as Pat, the guy with the glasses and the long brown hair who, if a few things broke his way, could possibly help right the ship. To Riley, Coach wasn’t merely a word or title. It was an honor, bestowed upon those who had paid their dues and earned their glory and risen above mere mortal status.
Riley had spent his college days at the University of Kentucky, playing for the revered Adolph Rupp. He was Coach. He had been a rookie with the San Diego Rockets under Pete Newell, a revered guru. He was Coach. With the Lakers, he’d played for Bill Sharman, a four-time NBA champion with the Boston Celtics and eight-time NBA All-Star. He was Coach.
“Dignity, respect, pride,” Riley said. “Those are what coaches are to me.”
Most notably, as a boy, growing up in Schenectady, New York, Pat had learned sports at the feet of his father, Leon Francis Riley, a longtime minor league outfielder and first baseman. In 1944, Lee Riley was called up by the Philadelphia Phillies and had one hit—a double—in twelve at-bats over four games. He was, in his son’s mind, the ultimate coach. “In twenty-two years he gets a cup of coffee and a promise that they’d give him the next coaching job that opened up in the big leagues,” Riley said. “He gets passed over, and he just says, ‘That’s it.’ He went home and burned everything that had to do with his baseball career.”
Patrick Riley was born on March 20, 1945, eleven months after his dad’s debut with the Phillies. The youngest of Lee and Mary Riley’s six children never really had a choice whether or not to play sports. He spent much of his early years in the back of a wood-sided station wagon, hopping from town to town as his father managed across the minor leagues. “We were always in hotels,” Pat once recalled. “My early memories are of playing hide-and-seek in dark ballrooms, with rain against the windows.”
One would think the son of an athlete would bask in the glow of a sportsman father, yet Pat was painfully familiar with the profession’s dark side. Though his dad was an accomplished hitter who once paced the Can-Am League in home runs and, in 1937 and 1938, led the Nebraska State League with batting averages of .372 and .365, respectively, he retired as an active player feeling not merely unfulfilled, but rejected. Those 12 at-bats with the Phillies were a drop of chocolate syrup to the tongue, a tantalizing taste of what could have been, but never truly was. As a result, upon quitting the game as a manager, Lee devoted much of his attention to alcohol, drinking away his sorrow and anger, as well as the bitterness of multiple failed business ventures. He ran a small restaurant-bar that didn’t last, then opened his own convenience store, Riley’s Variety. That closed quickly, too. A dashingly handsome man, Lee walked with the grace of a runway model. He was 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds, and liked to dress in suits and ties. On the outside, he was the image of confidence. Inside he was a wreck. On more than one occasion he showed up intoxicated to his children’s sporting events. He was, those who knew the Rileys said, prone to violence.
“I could sense his disappointment for years after [his managerial career ended],” Riley said. “Not being able to fulfill his lifelong dream. He never said, ‘Hey, this is what they did to me or this is what happened.’ I mean, even Mother rarely talked about it. But it ended very bitterly and he carried that with him for a long time.”
Lee was excessively tough on his children, and viewed nurturing as something women did. “Back in those days, you didn’t coddle kids, I guess, like you do today,” said Dennis Riley, Pat’s older brother. “He was the all-time disciplinarian. He might give you a pop if you got out of line.”
Lee Riley’s kids would be strong and powerful and tough—whether they were actually strong and powerful and tough or not. The family had settled in Schenectady when Lee briefly managed the local Blue Jays, a Philadelphia affiliate. It was a blue-collar town of fifty thousand residents, a place identified with the black smoke oozing from the top of railroad engines. “A great town for us to grow up,” said Mike Meola, Pat’s childhood friend. “There was very little violence, and enough to do to keep you occupied. Lots of playgrounds, a drive-in movie theatre, a speedway. I loved it. We all did.”
When Pat was nine, his father found him sitting in the garage, weeping after some bullies had administered a pummeling. Lee demanded Pat return to the nearby park to confront the boys. Pat promptly took another beating. “A guy chased me home with a butcher’s knife one time,” Riley said. “I got my ass kicked.”
The results: Lots of bloody noses and lots of grit. Pat Riley became a kid you didn’t mess with. Not quite a thug, but certainly a ruffian. When he wasn’t attending classes at St. Joseph’s Academy, he could often be found hanging out on a street corner, a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his T-shirt. He found trouble more than once—stupid little things like shoplifting and vandalism. While in sixth grade, he and some friends broke into a local school and stole ice cream from the cafeteria. They were caught by the police. “My dad came down,” he said. “That was it for me. I had to change my ways.”
Coincidentally, that same day the St. Joseph’s sixth graders were scheduled to play a game of basketball against the ninth-grade team. It was a mere recreational exercise; get some of the younger kids on the court and have them see how the older boys worked together as a team to succeed.
Riley scored 19 points, and the sixth graders somehow won. It made no sense. “People were staring at me from the stands, wondering, ‘Who is this kid?’” Riley said. “I walked into class the next day and it was the first time I ever got any recognition. The teacher [Sister Mary Samuel] talked about me, and I could see the kids looking at me with a little different look in their eyes. And I said to myself, ‘That’s all I gotta do?’ My life changed. I could feel it.”
From that day forward, Pat Riley thought of himself as an athlete. He went on to Linton High School, where he emerged as a strong-armed catcher in baseball, a starting quarterback in football and a dominant forward in basketball. Riley loved the sounds and rhythms of the gymnasium, the squeaking of sneakers against wood, the magic of a ball swishing through a net. His coach, Walt Przybylo, viewed the sport not merely as athletic competition, but as a chance to instill general lessons. Each day, before practice began, he sat his players down on the bleachers for discussions. “One day he
’d go off on attitude,” Riley said. “And another, on the injustice he’d suffered getting his car serviced. One night he gave our manager, Howie Lorch, and me a ride home from practice. On the way he stopped at Flavorland to get a six-pack. It was snowing and there were big banks of snow piled up. You couldn’t see, and Howie said, ‘Let’s hide the car.’ He got behind the wheel and drove the car into a fire hydrant and got it stuck there. The next day, Walt Przybylo lectured the team about what these two idiots did to him the night before.
“Only now,” Riley said years later, “do I appreciate that. They slip into your subconscious, those voices. They stay in there, waiting.”
Riley averaged 28 points per game as a senior, good enough for 70 to 75 schools to recruit his services. He was actually more coveted for football, and took trips to Penn State, Michigan, Michigan State, Syracuse and Alabama. “I could throw the hell out of the ball,” he said. Ultimately, though, Riley was swept off his feet when Rupp, the University of Kentucky’s larger-than-life basketball coach, came calling with a scholarship offer.
“When Adolph flew in,” he said, “that sealed it. He came up and talked to my mother. He didn’t even talk to me. But that sewed things up.
“I used to have a hard time with coaches who were loud and demonstrative. I found it distracting. I operated best in a sea of tranquility. The environment created by Rupp, his blinding emphasis on basketball, was work—but quiet, undistracted work.”
Riley was a weird fit in Lexington, Kentucky, land of southern drawls and racial divides and, to a kid from a relatively multicultural background, startling close-mindedness. He was mocked by teammates for the speed of his sentences and the precision of his words. Louie Dampier, a fellow freshman, was assigned to be Riley’s roommate. His first impression of the New Yorker was a memorable one—sunglasses, turtleneck sweater, pleated blazer, tight powder-blue slacks and pointy-toed loafers. “Look what we have here,” Dampier muttered to himself.
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 20