Though he wasn’t quite as edgy as he’d been in his youth, Riley still came across as a guy you didn’t mess with. He drank hard and stayed out late enough to violate numerous Rupp curfews. He could hustle pool with the best of them. “He got down from New York, and it took me six weeks to figure out what he was saying,” said Larry Conley, his Kentucky teammate. “He had this unmistakable New York swagger, and people didn’t quite know what to make of it. There were times he’d say things and I’d just laugh at him. He’d look at me like I lost my mind. I’d say, ‘Pat, you’re so full of shit. Do you think people really buy into your shit?’ And he’d smile and say, ‘Well, some of them do.’”
Riley played three varsity seasons for the Wildcats, averaging 18.3 points and 8.4 rebounds. From a distance, he and the stern Rupp formed an odd tandem. Kentucky’s coach was an arrogant taskmaster who didn’t have much interest in hearing his players speak. He looked at the members of the Wildcats not as human beings, but as spare parts to be plugged in here and there. He was famously bigoted, once complaining that the university’s president was pressuring him to “get some niggers in here.”
Riley and his teammates didn’t like Rupp. Players spoke only when spoken to. When Rupp cracked a joke, nobody was permitted to laugh. However, they also acknowledged his genius. “He was [General Norman] Schwarzkopf,” Riley said. “He was a great, great presence. I take basically a lot of my philosophy from his coaching. I had four years of a drill-type mentality.”
Riley joined the varsity as a sophomore in 1964 and the season was, by Kentucky standards, an unmitigated disaster. The Wildcats finished 15-10, and the following year was expected to be little better. Before opening the season against Hardin-Simmons, Rupp demanded an intrasquad contest between the starting five and the substitutes. The game ended with the starters winning by two, and Rupp was apoplectic. For all his skill as a recruiter, Rupp had somehow overlooked height. No starter was taller than 6-foot-5, and Riley—a junior who, in platform shoes, stood 6-foot-3½—jumped center most games. “He surprised bigger guys, because he could really leap,” said Conley. “Nobody expected that sort of athleticism from a little guy like Pat. But he got up there.”
Behind a breakthrough season from Riley, who averaged 22 points and 8.9 rebounds per game and was named third-team All-American, the Wildcats pieced together an undefeated year. Like their star forward, they were hard-edged and scrappy and nearly impossible to topple. They rolled through the NCAA Tournament and wound up in the championship game against number three seed Texas Western, the first team with an all-black starting lineup to play for a title. Across the nation, the all-white vs. all-black story line captivated more than just sports fans. This was old vs. new, segregation vs. diversity. “Truthfully,” said Conley, “we wanted to win a basketball game. I don’t think any of us thought about race in that game. Just winning.”
Most members of the media assumed Kentucky’s fast-breaking offense would overwhelm the bulkier Miners. Instead, Texas Western forced the Wildcats into a bevy of uncharacteristically awful shots. It hardly hurt that, over a thirty-seven-minute stretch, the Miners hit 26 of 27 free-throw attempts. “You could feel the intensity on the court,” Riley said. “Trash talking started there . . . there wasn’t much dunking, but [Texas Southern’s David Lattin] dunked over me, ripped the net down and he said something that let me know he was serious about this game. They were committed. Very talented and committed.” When the buzzer sounded and a 72–65 upset was sealed, Riley returned to the locker room and bawled. He scored a team-high 19 points, and only years later could admit Kentucky fell to the better team.
“It was,” he said, “the greatest heartbreak of my life.”
Riley’s senior year was, from beginning to end, a disappointment. Having slipped a disc in his back in a waterskiing mishap over the summer, he never regained his old form. His scoring average fell to 17 points per game, his shooting percentage from 52 percent to 44 percent. Leading up to a January 16 game at archrival Georgia, Rupp told Sports Illustrated’s Larry Boeck that he was considering asking Riley to leave the team. “If Pat can’t do well tonight, that’s it—it’s over,” he said. “I just might take up his uniform.”
Riley performed admirably enough in a 49–40 loss to the Bulldogs to stay (he scored 10 points, with 6 rebounds), but an ugly season never improved. The Wildcats finished 13-13.
Even though his back was a mess, and even though he was undersize, and even though his senior season had been horrific, Riley was selected seventh overall in the 1967 NBA Draft. The expansion San Diego Rockets liked his tenacity and intensity, and figured a Rupp-trained player could transition smoothly from college to the pros. They signed him to a lucrative four-year, $100,000 contract. “[Rockets coach] Jack McMahon drafted me first because he had the same operation I did,” Riley said. “He said, ‘If he can play with a slipped disc, he’s good enough for me.’”
Riley drove from Lexington to San Diego in a yellow 1967 Corvette convertible. He made most of the trip with the top down and the music blasting. The kid was unlike anything veteran Rocket players had seen. Riley dressed like a movie star, and looked like one, too.
Having also been drafted by the Dallas Cowboys with an eleventh-round pick, Riley flew to Texas and met with Tom Landry, the team’s coach. There was no chance he would play in the NFL, but the ego surge was electrifying. Riley came to California cocky and carefree—and eminently likable. “He had swagger,” said Jon McGlocklin, a Rocket guard. “Not in a bad way. He knew he was good, and showed it.” Yet Riley’s NBA transition was a difficult one. The smallish players he dominated in college were now working as pharmacists and bookkeepers and office managers. McMahon took one look at Riley—who seemed smaller in person than on television—and switched him to guard. “I’ll never forget my first day in training camp,” Riley said. “After about five minutes, Jack McMahon pulled me over to the sideline and said, ‘I drafted you and my job is depending on you, and that is the worst five minutes of basketball I’ve ever seen.’”
“Jack,” Riley replied. “I’ve never played guard before.”
“You better learn,” McMahon said. “You better learn fast.”
The Rockets were, predictably, dreadful, finishing 15-67 and last in the Western Division. Riley averaged 7.9 points per game and never lived up to his billing. He was the classic tweener—too slow to cover opposing guards, too small to challenge opposing forwards. His ball-handling skills were mediocre, his marksmanship awful (Riley shot 38 percent from the field). “In college, he was this white leaper,” McGlocklin said. “In the NBA, that wasn’t the strength of his game.”
Riley spent three undistinguished years in San Diego, was claimed by Portland in the 1970 expansion draft and, five months later, was sold to Los Angeles. Chick Hearn, the distinguished Laker announcer, had suggested to team brass that Riley would bring grit to a soft roster. He was correct. Over the next six years, Riley always arrived at training camp in tiptop shape. As teammates spent their time away from the court playing golf and eating hamburgers, Riley thought of himself as a soldier in basic training. “I was always afraid of losing my position,” he said. “I’d do whatever I had to do to stay on the team. But the Lakers with Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West were a hell of a team on which to be a role player.”
As a disposable part on some of the greatest clubs in NBA history, Riley had a very specific job description: Sit on the bench, play scrappy defense and, during practice, make Jerry West’s life a living hell. “His number one task was to beat the shit out of me,” West said. “He wasn’t supposed to kill me, but he sure tried his best.”
In 1971, when Bill Sharman replaced Joe Mullaney as the Los Angeles coach, he pulled Riley aside.
“You want a job?” he said.
“Hell, yes,” Riley said.
“Well,” said Sharman, “keep West in shape.”
With Riley averaging 6.7 points in 13.8 minu
tes per game, the 1971–72 Lakers won a league-record 33-straight games en route to the NBA championship. Though the title failed to make up for the loss to Texas Western, Riley felt as if his career now had meaning. He knew what it had been like to be a star on a team that fell short, and now he was a scrub for the kings of basketball. “When I finally realized that I couldn’t be a front-line player, I also came to the conclusion that I wanted a career in the game,” he said. “I wanted to stay in the NBA.”
Riley averaged a career-high 11 points per game three seasons later, but failed to ever again reach such heights. Suffering from a bad knee and limited production, on November 3, 1975, Riley was shipped to Phoenix in exchange for journeyman guard John Roche and a draft pick. He played sixty unremarkable games for the Suns. “I used to take Novocain and cortisone shots for quadriceps tendonitis,” he said. “It was dumb. Once when I was with Phoenix, blood was running down my leg after two injections, one on either side of my knee. I couldn’t feel anything below my thigh. That was the mentality—whatever it took.”
When Phoenix placed Riley on waivers, he was thirty-one and lost. He retreated, tail between his legs, to Los Angeles, and constructed an eight-foot fence around his home. “It was a year of mourning,” he said. “I’d spent my whole life with the game as my main force. When it was gone, there was a terrible, aching hollow.”
Riley wrote a four-hundred-page basketball book that he showed no one. He hung out by the beach. He attended a Laker game—the one when the security guard wouldn’t grant him access to the press lounge.
Then, one morning, Hearn called about the announcing gig. . . .
And—like that—he was now the head coach of the team he’d loved. Just a couple of years removed from being denied access, he was access. If the Lakers under Westhead had been an unimaginative lump of coal, the Lakers under Riley were a neon rainbow. The proof came on November 29, when the Rockets returned to the Forum and endured one of the worst beatings in recent franchise history. No longer was Los Angeles willing to repeatedly lob the ball into Abdul-Jabbar, then watch Moses Malone administer assault and battery. No, this time Johnson and Nixon exploded up and down the court, running circles around (and through) Houston’s shoddy defense. When Malone closed in to offer defensive help, Johnson and Nixon would dish off to Wilkes (18 points) in the corner or Cooper (14 points) slashing through the lane. Los Angeles ran 48 fast breaks that resulted in 52 points—numbers that nearly doubled the highest output under Westhead.
Final score: 122–104.
“It sounds so simple,” wrote Randy Harvey in the Los Angeles Times, “it makes you wonder why the Lakers haven’t been able to do that to Houston before.”
Although Buss had insisted West would handle the offense, such was not the case. He primarily sat on the bench, whispered occasional suggestions and sipped from a plastic cup of water. Not that Riley was an offensive innovator. He engineered few actual changes from McKinney’s system, save for allowing Johnson to determine the course of action. “If you have a Magic Johnson, you give him all the leeway he needs,” said Jim Brewer, a veteran Laker forward. “You can still have some base plays, and we did. But there are certain players who need to be allowed to run free and operate independently. That was Magic, and Pat was smart enough to see it.”
Throughout college and professional sports, far too many coaches feel pressured into implementing a preferred system, even if it is a poor fit for the personnel. Not Riley. “Pat was intelligent,” said Nixon. “He inherited a championship team. So you just saddle that up and ride it. He learned on the fly that championship teams police themselves. You don’t have to ask a championship team to play hard, you don’t have to ask them to get their rest. Pat didn’t have to tell us how to practice hard, or what to expect in games. Really, in the beginning, he just needed to keep things organized and let us play. That’s not rocket science, but it’s also not as easy as one might think.”
On the morning of December 2, Sharman announced that the “interim” tag would be removed from Riley’s title, and a couple of days later West returned to the front office. Bill Bertka, a former Laker scout who had recently worked as Tom Nissalke’s top assistant with the Utah Jazz, was hired to be Riley’s right-hand man on the bench. “Best situation a person could have walked into,” said Bertka, who left Salt Lake City in the midst of a 25-57 season. “You had a young coach willing to learn and listen, a deep roster, a great organization. What wasn’t to like?”
For the first time in months, the Lakers seemed happy. They were outscoring opponents by an average of 10.5 point per game, scoring 10 more points per game than they did under Westhead. The winning proved to be a cure-all. Johnson and Nixon stopped bickering. Cooper was turning into one of the game’s most explosive slashers. Wilkes was as smooth as ever and a healthy Kupchak was good for 12 points and 11 rebounds most nights. Even Abdul-Jabbar, now touching the ball less frequently, had reason to smile: He was averaging 23.9 points and 8.7 rebounds while starring in Pioneer Fish ‘N Chips’ new advertising campaign—“A Big Meal at a Small Price!”—that broke his teammates up in laughter. Johnson praised the center as, among other things, “the key,” “the centerpiece” and “the focus.”
“Earvin was brilliant leading a team,” said Bertka. “He knew running things on the court and running things off the court were both important jobs. He went out of his way to credit Kareem, to let him know how important and necessary he was. Were they the best of friends? No, probably not. But Earvin made sure there was always respect and professionalism.”
The relationship between Abdul-Jabbar and Johnson was equally simple and complex. On the one hand, the Lakers boasted two of the greatest players to ever step onto an NBA court, and their unique talents (Johnson as a distributor, Abdul-Jabbar as a scorer) meshed seamlessly. There was no fighting for the last shot, no arguing over who took the ball out of bounds, who called the final play, who posted up down low. Because the Lakers ran so often—with plays generally developing, progressing and culminating within a seven-second span—it was easy to overlook the beauty and ease with which the two men excelled as one.
And yet, egos are egos, and NBA superstars rarely lack them. Abdul-Jabbar resented Johnson’s contract, Johnson’s buddy-buddy relationship with Buss, Johnson’s stardom. He wasn’t Nixon, a flamboyant man who felt robbed of the spotlight. No, Abdul-Jabbar—awkward, standoffish, emotionally stunted—didn’t quite know how to react. He wanted praise, he shunned fame. He wanted attention, he loathed attention. Why didn’t more fans approach him? Why should he have to sign autographs? He craved the love of teammates. He didn’t bother to talk with teammates. Whether one liked Abdul-Jabbar or loathed Abdul-Jabbar, people could agree he was the most cuckoo of cuckoo birds.
When Johnson first arrived in Los Angeles, he sought Abdul-Jabbar’s approval. He imagined the two as stars in some sort of buddy movie, the aged gunslinger taking the rookie sheriff under his wing, showing him the ropes over burgers and Coca-Colas. Alas, it was not to be. Abdul-Jabbar expressed neither like nor dislike toward Johnson. They coexisted, as colleagues coexist. Few jokes, no dinners. “Not pals,” said Cooper. “But friendly enough.”
It mattered not. Abdul-Jabbar recognized Johnson’s command of the offense, and also realized that—despite his admiration for Westhead (Abdul-Jabbar was the only player to call the coach after he was fired)—the change had been beneficial. This wasn’t merely the best Laker team Abdul-Jabbar had played on. It was, he was beginning to believe, the best team he had ever played on—including the 1971 Milwaukee Bucks, who won 66 games and the NBA title. “We were building something special,” said Kupchak. “I’d never been on a team with that much talent. Never even close.”
Everything was going swimmingly until the night of December 19, when the Lakers traveled one and a half hours south to San Diego to face the Clippers. Coached by Paul Silas, San Diego reigned as the joke of the NBA. The team was 6-16, played in the dumpy S
an Diego Sports Arena and, rightly, ranked last in the league in attendance. “We were,” said Swen Nater, the club’s center, “brutal.”
For the Lakers, a trip to San Diego was akin to a mini vacation. The travel was easy, the opponent dreadful. Even without Abdul-Jabbar, sitting out with a sore right ankle, Los Angeles was far superior. Riley started Kupchak—who was averaging 14.3 points and 8.3 rebounds—at center, and Los Angeles ended the first quarter with a 28–27 lead. “It was great,” Kupchak said. “My parents were in the stands visiting from New York. My aunt and uncle lived in San Diego, so they were there. I was starting, which was rare.”
Early in the second quarter, Kupchak was filling the lane on a break when Johnson, standing to his right, shoveled a pass his way. The Clippers’ Joe Bryant* slid forward to stop the play, and Kupchak planted his left knee, hoping to avoid a collision. “It immediately gave out on me,” Kupchak said. “I fell to the ground in incredible pain.” With teammates gathered around, Kupchak held his knee tight and howled. The injury was diagnosed as severe yet treatable—a broken bone that would take at least eight weeks to heal. A few days later, however, a more detailed look showed that Kupchak’s ligaments were torn and that he suffered major cartilage damage. “Devastating,” he said. “The most devastating injury I’d ever had.”
The Lakers held on for a 106–100 triumph, but news of the win was dampened by news of the loss: With Kupchak gone for the season, the Lakers needed another big man.
Sharman worked the phones, talking with Houston about the so-so Billy Paultz. He called the Clippers about Nater, Cleveland about Bill Laimbeer, Atlanta about Steve Hawes, Utah about Danny Schayes—all mediocre fill-ins with limited upsides.*
Finally, with desperation setting in (Riley even started using an un-athletic rookie named Kurt Rambis), Sharman reached out to the New Jersey Nets about a faded former superstar named Bob McAdoo. Once upon a time, in the early 1970s, McAdoo had been on the short list for the league’s best player. Between 1973 and ’76, he led the NBA in scoring three straight times, averaging 30.6, 34.5 and 31.1 points per game, respectively, for the Buffalo Braves. He won the league’s Most Valuable Player award in 1975. “Bob was deadly, man, just deadly,” said George McGinnis, the longtime Indiana Pacers star. “From seventeen feet on in, he was automatic. The best-shooting big man I’ve ever seen.” Yet as time seemed to erode his skills and the callousness of NBA life corroded his enthusiasm, the glow faded. The Braves traded him to the Knicks in 1976, beginning a five-year, four-team odyssey from New York to Boston to Detroit to New Jersey. Were McAdoo’s talents the same with the Celtics as they had been with Buffalo? Perhaps not. But back in the 1970s, the black athlete who dared complain about contract figures or playing time was labeled a problem child and banished to the netherworld of journeyman-ism. Even as he continued to tally 20 points and 8 rebounds on a nightly basis, McAdoo could not repair his reputation. Buffalo’s management accused him of “malingering.” The Pistons refused to return him to the lineup after he rehabbed from an injury, and a heckler—Leon the Barber—would arrive nightly simply to mock McAdoo with the refrain “McAdoo, McAdon’t, McAwill, McAwon’t!” Multiple newspaper headline writers in multiple cities offered up MCADOO ABOUT NOTHING to describe his brief stays in town. “So much bullshit,” McAdoo said. “So damn much.”
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 21