On the basketball court, Wilkes was a 6-foot-6, 190-pound small forward whose nickname, Silk, perfectly described one of the game’s smoothest operators. Wilkes could hit any shot from any distance, and look good doing so. “People forget, but Jamaal was a tremendous player,” said Nixon. “There wasn’t much he couldn’t do with a basketball in his hands.” Yet despite his quiet outward demeanor and ubiquitous warm smile, Wilkes’s 1981-82 season had been a trying one. Like most Lakers, he didn’t understand Westhead’s offense. Early on he had been rumored to be headed to Milwaukee in exchange for Marques Johnson, and three weeks into the season he was shooting 39 percent—almost 10 percent lower than his career average. After scoring just two points in a November 10 loss to the Spurs, he suggested he might take a temporary leave of absence to clear his head. “I was looking forward to the year, especially after being eliminated so early in the playoffs last year,” he said. “But [the death of his daughter] happened so late in the summer, it disrupted my life going into training camp. I can’t describe how something like that . . . you know. I just reacted to it.”
Teammates convinced Wilkes that the comfort of the basketball court would prove more soothing than sitting on the couch at home. “His life was depressing,” said Riley. “The team was depressing. When he said, ‘I need time off,’ I could understand that. He’s very aware and in tune. He’s more in touch with his feelings than most players. He listens to his feelings and emotions. He does what his heart tells him to do.”
Wilkes’s heart told him to play—a decision that, as he sat in the corner of the locker room in San Antonio, seemed wise. This was, after all, the reason Jamaal Wilkes fell in love with basketball all those years ago. The sense of teamwork. The joy of shooting. The thrill of winning. As a boy in Ventura, California, Jackson Keith Wilkes (he went by Keith until 1975, when he converted from Baptist to Islam and changed his name to Jamaal) couldn’t stay away from the town’s multiple pickup courts. He would play in the morning, play at night, play through the weekends. One minute, Keith would be shooting hoops at Washington Elementary School. The next minute, he’d be running back and forth at West Park. Then, a few hours later, the Boys Club. “I was six feet tall when I was eleven, so I was always one of the taller boys,” he said. “I was real fast, and I was clearly one of the better players for my age. I started playing against bigger kids, and it got hard. They kept blocking my shots, pushing me around, beating me up. I really had to adjust.”
Wilkes did, by making a singular alteration that transformed him from a nice local player into a future NBA All-Star. “I redid my shot,” he said. “Changed it completely.”
From that point on, when Keith Wilkes released, he did so from atop his head, as if pulling back a medicine ball and slinging it with all his might. The result was a thing of crooked beauty—a shot that looked simultaneously awful (upon release) and gorgeous (upon swooshing through the twine). “To me,” Westhead once said, “his shot is like snow falling softly off a bamboo leaf.”
Though Keith felt pulled toward the playgrounds, he was never overtaken by them. The trash talk, the selfishness, the arrogance—not his style. That’s primarily because his parents, Leander (a former Oakland Naval base employee who turned to the ministry after losing his son) and Thelma (a bookkeeper at the University of California, Santa Barbara), refused to step back. Sure, sports were important. But not nearly as important as integrity and discipline. Other kids collected baseball cards—Keith Wilkes collected candles. Other kids listened to the Rolling Stones—he listened to John Coltrane.
“Jamaal was raised and supported in a home environment where we strove to be more reasonable and rational than others,” Leander once told Sports Illustrated. “There was sometimes a different set of values on the playgrounds, but Jamaal was always secure. That shows. Players who aren’t secure will show a weakness of character in times of stress, be it anger or loss of control. That doesn’t happen with Jamaal.”
Keith was the kid who, among other things, set picks and properly rolled to the basket and took pride in defense. He began playing in organized leagues at age eight and endured only one losing season through college—that being with a team in third grade. As Ventura High’s starting center, Wilkes was both an All-CIF first teamer and the student class president. However, when his father was relocated to the Second Baptist Church in Santa Barbara, the family moved. “I planned to stay in Ventura for my senior year,” Wilkes said, “but as the fall approached, I missed my mother’s cooking.” The move was, basketball-wise, a difficult one. When Wilkes came out for practice, the team’s coach, Jack Trigueiro, took one look at his shooting form and stopped everything. “He had Jamaal square his shoulders up and hold the ball in front,” said Bob Thompson, a guard. “During practice, it was the weirdest experience. He was shooting air balls. He was no good at all. After practice, there was a two-on-two game with the coaches, and Jamaal went back to what was natural. Trigueiro said, ‘I’ll guard him.’ Jamaal just lit him up. Trigueiro said, ‘What the hell, Keith, from now on you shoot the ball whatever way you want.’”
As a senior at Santa Barbara High in 1969–70, Wilkes guided the Dons to 26 straight wins and the playoff semifinals. He was every Division I coach’s daydream. Wilkes could play inside and outside, pass and rebound, shoot free throws and drain rainbows from far away. He was a straight-A student with a model home life. “We always had dinner together at six o’clock,” said Thelma. “Everybody expressed themselves at the table. We listened and tried not to be judgmental. We wanted the best for them but did not want them to think that everything was mine, mine, mine.” His older sister, Lucy, skipped two grades and entered Stanford University at sixteen. Keith, too, skipped a grade. He was quiet, though not a mumbler. When Wilkes spoke, his words carried meaning. “A long time ago I saw what winning meant,” he said of his high school experience. “I decided to dedicate myself to that phase of the game, even to the point of never being flashy. It’s possible to do things differently from others and still get the desired results.”
Keith decided to attend UCLA because John Wooden, the coach, relied on neither nonsense promises nor used car salesman–esque fast talk. “He was straightforward,” Wilkes said. “A lot of people I talked to left me in a haze. He didn’t tell me I’d be first string. I appreciated that.”
In four years at Westwood, Wilkes emerged as one of the nation’s elite players. He was a two-time All-American, as well as a two-time national champion. To the delight of Bruin teammates, coaches and fans, he was also the nicest person they’d ever met. Following the conclusion of a game against USC during his senior year, for example, Wilkes changed into his street clothes, left the Pauley Pavilion dressing room and walked through the stands as the city high school playoffs were about to begin. It was, Dwight Chapin of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “Like Dylan strolling in to start a concert.”
“There he is!” a girl shouted.
“Hey, Keith!” someone else yelled. “How’s it going?”
“Right on, baby!” said another.
“Is there anybody you don’t know?” Chapin asked.
Wilkes quietly averaged 15 points and 7.4 rebounds in his UCLA career, doing whatever tasks Wooden requested. “If Keith Wilkes could have his way,” Cliff Gewecke wrote in The Christian Science Monitor, “he’d be as anonymous as a store detective.” His biggest spotlight moment came as a senior, when Leonard Lamensdorf, a young movie producer, cast Wilkes as Nathaniel Cornbread Hamilton, the lead character in the feature film Cornbread, Earl and Me, about a quiet basketball star wrongly shot and killed by police officers. “Keith was fantastic,” Lamensdorf said of a performance that was hailed by the Los Angeles Times. “He can do anything he wants to do, be anything he wants—doctor, lawyer, actor, anything.”
Wilkes was selected eleventh overall in the 1974 Draft by the Golden State Warriors, and—playing second fiddle to superstar Rick Barry—won an NBA title as a rookie. Tea
mmates made fun of his youth (he was twenty-one when he debuted) and his form (Barry: “It’s about the worst looking shot I’ve seen. I can’t stand to watch Keith shoot. He does everything wrong.”), and he took it all with a smile. “The only thing he wanted to do was come to work and blend in,” said Al Attles, the Golden State coach. “Every coach should have one team like that one, and one player like Jamaal.”
A testament to Wilkes’s reputation came after the season, when—to little fanfare and protestation—he announced the changing of his name to Jamaal Abul-Lateef Wilkes. He had first dabbled in Islam during his freshman year of college, and the focus upon meditation and inner peace appealed to him. He officially converted as a senior, to the heartbreak of his devout Baptist parents. At the time, many misunderstood Islam to be a synonym for violent and angry. “Does this mean you hate white people?” his mother asked.
Jamaal laughed. “No,” he said. “Not at all.”
Shortly after signing with the Warriors, Wilkes told Dick Vertlieb, the team’s general manager, that: (a) He had converted to Islam; (b) he would be taking a new name in the coming weeks. Jamaal Abul-Lateef? How the hell was the franchise supposed to spin that one? “Absolutely not,” Vertlieb replied. “We signed you as Keith Wilkes, you’ll play as Keith Wilkes.”
He did, and when—after the championship—the name change was again broached, no one within the organization dared challenge him. Here was a man who played hurt, who played hard and who played well. If Keith Wilkes wanted to be known as Benji Bear or Paulie Olkowski III, so be it. “He was that good,” said Attles. “Just a perfect part of a team.”
Wilkes enjoyed three seasons with the Warriors. Toward the end of his time there, however, the mood began to sour. Franklin Mieuli, the team’s owner, had promised Wilkes a new contract should he have a productive second year. The forward averaged 17.8 points and 8.8 rebounds, asked about the raise and was given the silent treatment. He was also going through a divorce with Joycelyn. “As it all played out, I started thinking I might need a fresh start somewhere else,” he said. “The idea of being back near UCLA, back near my parents was appealing. And, of course, the Lakers were the Lakers. They were a model franchise.”
Wilkes signed a four-year, $800,000 free-agent deal, then discovered no situation was without problems. Sports fans are suckers for homecomings, but Wilkes’s was awful. Hampered by a broken finger and a handful of other maladies, he appeared in just fifty-one games, averaging a career-low 12.9 points. The Los Angeles media proved unsympathetic, referring to Wilkes as both a disappointment and a bust. There were excuses to be made and scapegoats to be exposed. Wilkes said nothing. “Jamaal just wasn’t a guy who’d point fingers,” said Nixon. “He was better than that.”
With improved health (both physical and mental), Wilkes rebounded in 1978–79, averaging a career-high 18.6 points per game. When, the following year, Johnson arrived, he found an on-court soul mate. And vice versa. It was the perfect pairing of the league’s best passer and the league’s softest hands. Wilkes may well have been the only Laker not to take repeated Johnson passes upside the head, or in the buttocks, or on the shoulder blade. “You had to be ready,” he said. “And you had to always keep your head up and one eye on Earvin.”
On the night Wilkes scored 37 points in Philadelphia to help the Lakers beat the 76ers in Game 6 of the 1980 NBA Finals, the people of Santa Barbara celebrated like never before. Leander and Thelma cried and hugged, their joy a testament to two proud parents and a wonderful son. To them, Johnson’s turn at center was a side story, as was Westhead’s rookie success and Abdul-Jabbar’s injury.
This was Jamaal Wilkes’s moment, and they loved every second of it.
• • •
Two years later, the Lakers would again be facing the Philadelphia 76ers in the NBA championship series. Once more, Wilkes would be needed not only as an offensive force but as an able body to lock down Julius Erving, one of the league’s superstars.
For NBA executives, television bigwigs and countless fans, the pairing was a basketball downer. Throughout the regular season the league’s best team had been the Boston Celtics, who won 63 games to dominate the Atlantic Division. As the Lakers and Celtics worked their way through the playoffs, a buzz mounted over the likelihood of a finals pairing Johnson and Larry Bird, his collegiate rival and the Celtics’ best player. The Johnson-Bird connection dated back to the 1979 NCAA championship matchup, when Michigan State beat Indiana State in what was, at the time, the most watched basketball game in history.
When Philadelphia pulled an upset in Game 7 at Boston Garden, a nation of basketball junkies sighed with resignation. Perhaps no one was more dejected than McAdoo, the Laker sixth man who had spent a miserable twenty games with the Celtics three seasons earlier. McAdoo looked at Boston, what with their predominantly Caucasian roster and their arrogant coach (Bill Fitch, who, after the Game 7 loss bellowed, “Let me just say this. If we had played the Lakers we would have beaten them”) and their racist loyalists, and he didn’t merely want justice. He wanted revenge. “I sought to destroy them,” he said. “We all did. It was in our blood.”
The Sixers, on the other hand, were (yawn) the Sixers. Erving and shooting guard Andrew Toney, their two best all-around players, were classy and subdued. Billy Cunningham, the head coach, was a blue-collar Brooklyn kid who outworked everyone in the gym. Center Darryl Dawkins was flawed but loquaciously lovable, and Maurice Cheeks, the point guard, knew his role and played vigorously. It was a team that won through physicality and blunt force. “Look, it wasn’t the same as playing Boston,” said Cooper. “We didn’t hate Philly, or even dislike Philly. They were nice guys, good players. The NBA Finals are always intense. But . . .”
But this wasn’t Boston-Los Angeles. “It just wasn’t,” Cooper said.
The series opened at Philadelphia on May 27, following a twelve-day layoff for the Lakers. Though Riley lacked Westhead’s Philly-boy-comes-home story line, there was intrigue over how he would hold up his first time coaching on the big stage. With their star-studded lineup and awe-inspiring 8-0 playoff roll, the Lakers were heavy favorites to not merely wipe out Philadelphia but go down as a transcendent team. To many, the only one who could screw things up was Riley. Two days before Game 1, Scott Ostler of the Los Angeles Times penned a column titled A STAR IS BORN that broached the rookie coach’s emergence. At the start of the season, Riley had been as noteworthy as a doorknob. Now, he was being stopped everywhere—complimented, insulted, advised, hounded for autographs. “Two years ago he couldn’t have made the down payment,” Ostler wrote. “He’s like the passenger who lands the jumbo jet after the pilot and co-pilot crap out in mid-flight. Except that nobody had to tell Riley when to lower the flaps or how to read the radar.”
As the Lakers trotted onto the Spectrum floor for pre-game shooting, they were greeted by the familiar Philly sound of hostile howling. The noise continued throughout the first half, as the hometown Sixers built a comfortable 61–50 lead. For Los Angeles, the game was a disaster. Riley warned his players about Philadelphia’s physical tempo, but to no avail. Dawkins was tossing Abdul-Jabbar aside beneath the boards, and Erving—driving through the lane at will—had burned Wilkes for 14 points and 5 assists. “Wilkes looked as if he needed more than just an oilcan to get unhinged,” Mike Littwin wrote in the Times. “He needed Kuwait.”
Not one for hype chats or rah-rah speeches, Wilkes retreated to the locker room for halftime and, as usual, retreated into himself. He had let Erving take him away from his strengths—pulling up for jumpers on offense, denying the baseline on defense—and now the Lakers were in a deep hole. When the third quarter began, Wilkes woke up. He scored 16 of his 24 points over the twelve minutes that followed, powering a 40–9 spurt that flipped the game. With Johnson and Nixon pushing the ball at every opportunity, Wilkes was nearly unstoppable, slicing to the rim, pulling up and hitting jumpers over Erving and Bobby Jones. By the time
the game ended, the Lakers cruised to a 124–117 triumph. “Jamaal did so much, and he did it quietly so he was often overlooked,” said Cooper. “But sometimes you looked at him and realized, ‘This man is as good as anyone in the league.’”
Afterward, to Riley’s delight, Laker players broached the idea of sweeping the Sixers and the entire playoffs. “It’s something we think about just among ourselves,” Johnson said. “It’s kind of something we laugh about right now. But we think about it.”
That stopped quickly. Philadelphia rebounded to take Game 2, 110–94, and afterward, Erving—rarely prone to mental gaffes—committed one. When asked by Dave Anderson of The New York Times to explain the night’s meaning, the beloved Doctor didn’t mince words. “In our practices the last few days, we taught ourselves how to beat the Lakers,” he said. “How to beat their trap, we exposed it as a zone in the first half. How to make ’em pay for gambling. How to get offensive rebounds and make the second shot. Now it’s up to them to adjust to us instead of us guessing how to play them.”
Though Riley was still new to the craft of mentally manipulating his players, here was a softball tossed his way. Taught ourselves how to beat the Lakers? Now it’s up to them to adjust to us? Philadelphia hadn’t “figured out” the Lakers. No, Los Angeles merely played an underwhelming game. When Riley next met with his men, he made sure Erving’s words were presented. “Philadelphia thinks they’ve got you figured out,” he said. “They think they’re going to win this thing. What do you have to say about that? How will you respond?”
When the series returned to Los Angeles, the Lakers took control. Riley was now employing a seven-man rotation of Nixon, Johnson, Abdul-Jabbar, Wilkes, Rambis, McAdoo and Cooper (the Los Angeles Times took to calling them The Magnificent Seven) and the cohesiveness was magical. Cunningham was using almost every available player, which meant the Sixers were (bright side) rested, but (downside) relying on subpar NBA talent. Erving and Cheeks scared people. Steve Mix and Earl Cureton did not.
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 24