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

by Pearlman, Jeff

  In Game 3, Nixon and Johnson attacked Philadelphia’s porous defense. Because he was talkative and funny and big, Dawkins—nicknamed Chocolate Thunder—emerged as a media darling. Yet, as a defensive low post presence, he was vastly overrated: CHOCOLATE THUNDER, OR CHOCOLATE SOUFFLE? a Los Angeles Times headline asked. If one wasn’t blowing past Dawkins, he was almost certainly getting fouled by him. Nixon, in particular, took advantage, scoring a game-high 29 points in an easy 129–108 win. Though Cooper contributed only 12 points, he spent much of the game spewing trash toward the opposing players. He liked Erving and respected Erving. He did not, however, fear Erving. “You think we’re fucking adjusting our game?” he said. “You think you figured us out? Take a look at the scoreboard, motherfucker.”

  In the victory’s aftermath, Riley praised Bill Bertka, his assistant coach and a renowned defensive guru. Years earlier Bertka had received a letter from Clair Bee, the esteemed college basketball coach who first implemented the 1-3-1 zone defense. “Bee swore by it,” said Bertka. “I always thought of him. When we beat Philly, we sprung the 1-3-1 half-court trap on them, and they didn’t have a clue. That was all Clair Bee.”

  Two nights later the Lakers won again, 111–101, and the drama of a close series was gone. Though Erving spent the post-game assuring writers his team was not a corpse, his team was a corpse. “Even we knew we had to play our absolute best,” said Dawkins. “The Lakers were better than us. I hate to say it, but they were. They were a deep, deep team.”

  The Sixers pulled together to win Game 5, but on the night of June 8, a sold-out Forum watched the Lakers capture their second NBA title in three years, 114–104. Though the chatter was of Riley and Johnson (who was named MVP by averaging 16.2 points, 8 assists and 10.8 rebounds), Wilkes made the difference. He scored a team-high 27 in the finale, hitting one clutch shot after another.

  When the game came to an end, Wilkes entered the locker room, grabbed a bottle of champagne and poured it atop his head. The cool liquid streamed over his eyes and onto his lips. As Buss had promised, this wasn’t the cheap stuff. It was Dom Perignon—ninety dollars per bottle and well worth the price.

  What had started off as the worst season of Wilkes’s life had ended sweetly.

  “All I wanted to do,” he said, “was soak it all in.”

  CHAPTER 10

  CLUBBING

  There have always been genuine debates concerning the hierarchy of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers.

  Was the most important star Magic Johnson or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?

  Was Michael Cooper a better all-around player than Jamaal Wilkes?

  Would Bob McAdoo have been a more suitable starter than Kurt Rambis?

  One thing, however, is universally agreed upon: Of the sixty-nine men to wear the purple and gold between 1979 and 1991, no one matched the pure stupidity of Mark Landsberger.

  By “stupid,” we’re not referring to court smarts (or lack thereof) or worldliness (or lack thereof) or even the ability to break a one-dollar bill into four quarters (or lack thereof).

  No, Mark Landsberger was stupid in the way of a granite slab. He had a brain and all the proper neurons and dendrites other human beings are gifted with. And yet Laker players and employees seemed to take universal delight in arguing whether Landsberger’s IQ was closer to 10 or zero or, if this is even possible, -14.

  “Mark Landsberger was a nice kid,” said Claire Rothman, the team’s longtime vice president of booking. “But he was dumb like a post. I’m guessing he literally could not walk and chew gum simultaneously.”

  “Good lord, Mark was the dumbest person I’ve ever met,” said Michael Cooper. “Friendly—but historically dumb.”

  Landsberger arrived in Los Angeles via trade from Chicago in February 1980 and impressed with his rebounding ability and immense size. He was 6-foot-8, 230 pounds and built like a large pile of sand. He once collected 29 rebounds in a game against Denver. When he crashed the boards, Landsberger was almost certainly the one coming up with the ball. “It’s amazing, because he had no hops whatsoever,” said Ron Carter, a Laker guard. “Mark would always have two or three of his shots blocked every game. But he really rebounded.”

  Yet of all the (small) things Landsberger brought to two Los Angeles title runs, his greatest contribution was unintentional laughter. Simply put, Mark Landsberger—cursed and blessed with a staggering lack of self-awareness—made teammates crack up. Within the first few days of joining the Lakers, Landsberger met with Riley to review the playbook. Over the course of two hours, the then-assistant coach went through the team’s assignments and packages. Landsberger had played collegiately at Minnesota and Arizona State, then for two and a half years in the NBA with the Bulls. He was a well-established veteran and Riley presumed most of this stuff was self-explanatory. Hence, he was shocked when Landsberger asked, with 100 percent seriousness, “Do you guys have any rebounding plays?”

  “That’s a true story,” said Steve Springer, the veteran Laker beat writer. “But it’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

  “I once asked Mark’s wife how the off-season was,” said Lon Rosen, a Laker employee. “She said it was great—‘Mark’s now using knives and forks when he eats.’”

  Landsberger stories come in all shapes and sizes. There was the time, for example, when the Lakers promotional department sent Landsberger to a local supermarket to meet the fans. A boy approached with a team poster. “Can you sign your name and number?” he asked.

  “Why do you want my number?” Landsberger asked.

  “I’d just like to have it,” he replied.

  “OK,” said Landsberger, sighing. He proceeded to scribble M-A-R-K L-A-N-D-S-B-E-R-G-E-R in script, then added 3-1-0-7-5-0-6-7-2-8.

  “Dumb,” said Josh Rosenfeld, the team’s media relations director. “Just really dumb.”

  “Mark spoke at my summer basketball camp,” said Mike Thibault, an assistant coach. “He was there to give an hour-long clinic on rebounding. He took seven minutes and ran out of words.”

  The Lakers played an exhibition game against the Clippers in Palm Springs. Several hours before tip-off, Landsberger sat in the hotel lobby, inexplicably wearing his gold number 54 jersey while drinking a large chocolate milkshake he had purchased at McDonald’s. Jack Curran, the team’s trainer, suggested Landsberger either change his shirt or drape a napkin over his chest.

  “I’m fine,” Landsberger said. “Don’t wor—” SPLASH! The shake spilled out of the cup and splattered across his torso. Landsberger jumped up and cursed as those around him broke out in laughter. “Fucking Landsberger,” Curran said. “That’s the only jersey we brought with us.”

  That night, Landsberger checked into the game with what appeared to be a Frisbee-size splotch of dog feces across his jersey. “It was hilarious,” said Rosen. “But that sort of stuff doesn’t help you stick around for long.”

  Had Landsberger been a hard worker, he might have contributed. However, his stupidity was coupled with a love of the nightlife and, occasionally, cocaine. Though players always dismissed any suggestion of drug use on the team, white powder was as much a part of the Lakers as it was any other big-city, easy-access 1980s sports franchise. According to one person who traveled with Los Angeles, flights often involved numerous trips to the bathroom for snorts of flake cocaine. “If anyone says the Lakers didn’t have guys who did blow, it’s laughable,” he said. “There was never a shortage of cocaine.” Cooper, who also used the drug, said his most vivid memory of Landsberger is “Mark walking around with a bag of coke in his hand.”

  Teammates loved telling Mark Landsberger stories and, specifically, “Mark Landsberger with Unattractive Black Women” stories. They nicknamed him Jig, short for Jigaboo, and guffawed many nights away sitting at a table inside a black club in Detroit or Oakland or Chicago and watching the world’s goofiest white man maneuver his way with the 300-pound sisters. “Mark just
loved black women, probably even more than we black guys loved black women,” laughed Cooper. “He also loved the strip clubs. It’d always be, ‘C’mon, Coop, let’s go to the strip clubs! Let’s go!’”

  Was Mark Landsberger the biggest partier on the Lakers? Maybe, maybe not. He certainly didn’t have the access to gorgeous women that came to Johnson and Nixon, certainly never used as much cocaine as Spencer Haywood. And yet, there was one thing about the man that separated him from not only every teammate but (in all probability) every other NBA player—his marriage.

  To the bafflement of everyone on the roster, Mark and Marianne Landsberger told each other almost everything. Under their unique family guidelines, what happened on the road didn’t have to remain a secret. “It was strange,” said Cooper. “The Landsbergers weren’t what you’d call a conventional couple.”

  This had all been well and fine until the early weeks of the 1982–83 season, when Landsberger—already out of favor with Riley for sloppy, dumb, uninspired play—committed the most unspeakable of professional NBA sins. At the time, the Lakers were on top of the basketball world. They were not only the defending champions but the improved defending champions.

  After Ralph Sampson decided to return to the University of Virginia, Los Angeles won the coin toss for the number one pick in the NBA Draft and selected James Worthy, the All-American forward out of the University of North Carolina. Worthy was a 6-foot-9, 225-pound bundle of talent, one who—over time—would prove to be a significantly better NBA player than Sampson.

  Furthermore, any remaining morsels of trepidation had vanished from Riley, who was now fully in charge and implementing a McKinney-esque run-and-gun offensive philosophy that thrilled his players, exhausted opposing teams and delighted the fan base. After losing the opener to Golden State, Los Angeles took seven straight wins, and 12 of 14. They were fun, exciting, unique, flashy. And really horny.

  At least that’s what Mark Landsberger told his wife, in the type of vivid detail Chick Hearn tried to bring to every Laker telecast. According to Mark, this guy was doing this, that guy was doing that, these two guys were doing this with her and her and her.

  He hardly lacked material. When professional athletes come to Los Angeles, they’re promised a bevy of easy sexual conquests. When professional athletes come to Los Angeles and win, they’re handed them. Life for the world-champion Lakers was akin to some sort of aphrodisiac circus. Decked out in short skirts or tight leather pants, groupies lined the hotel lobbies by the dozens. “I’ll always remember pulling into Houston one year in the middle of the night, and there were five drop-dead gorgeous women in the lobby of the hotel,” said Rosenfeld. “And as the guys went to their rooms, you saw the women one by one go to the pay phones.” Perfume-scented notes always awaited the players—one or two for someone like Landsberger or Mike McGee, thirty or forty for stars the magnitude of Johnson or Nixon. Pick a hotel—any hotel—and regular faces and names and glares awaited. The Hyatt Regency in Atlanta. The Camelback Sahara in Phoenix. The Crown Center in Kansas City. The Holiday Inn-Coliseum in Cleveland. “It was as if they were in a rock band,” said Linda Rambis, Kurt Rambis’s wife and a sales and marketing associate with the team. “They’d go to a town, and the groupies were everywhere.”

  “It was crazy,” said Ron Carter, the guard who later worked as Buss’s assistant. “They were a team of whores, and Magic was the biggest whore. Not just on the team—the biggest whore I’d ever seen. He loved women—two, three at a time. One day we were on the road and I asked him, ‘When the hell do you sleep? Do you ever sleep?’ We’d show up at a hotel in a new city, and there’d be two or three women specifically waiting for him. He’d sleep with them, then kick them out. At shootaround later in the day, there’d be two or three more girls. He’d sleep with them. Then, after the game, there’d be two or three more girls. He’d sleep with them. Earvin didn’t drink and Earvin didn’t smoke and Earvin didn’t touch drugs. His vice was women.”

  “I went out with Magic, and he must have had thirty to forty girls clinging to him,” said Landsberger. “There’s just so much temptation—you go to a club and a dozen girls are hitting on you. What are you supposed to do? Say no?”

  Johnson, at least, was young, single and free to live life as he felt fit. So, for that matter, was Nixon, his near equal as a lothario (Nixon’s nickname was Savoir Faire— defined by Merriam-Webster as the ability to say or do the right or graceful thing). If the pickings were particularly slim, four . . . five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight players would catch a taxi to the hottest strip club in town. Once there, lap dances (and more) were generally on the house. To have a Magic or Coop or Norm or Worthy in your establishment was worth its weight in advertising gold, and the Laker stars knew it.

  The problem, however, was that Landsberger knew it, too. He was there. In the hotels. In the strip clubs. Buying shots, snorting lines, dancing with scantily clad women. The world was the Lakers’ oyster, and Mark Landsberger had to share the excitement with the one person he loved most—his wife.

  “I was walking through the press lounge at the Forum one night in 1982,” said Carter. “I was working for Dr. Buss. There were about seven Laker spouses and girlfriends sitting at a table. I was trying to get through the room as fast as possible, and as soon as I saw them, and the way they were looking at me, I thought, ‘Um, this is not good. This just is not good.’”

  The first to speak up was Wanda Cooper, Michael’s wife of four years. The unofficial leader of the Laker Wives, Wanda was a quick-witted woman who carried herself with the confidence of a saber-toothed tiger. Mark Landsberger had confided in Marianne that Michael Cooper was fooling around on the road. “Wanda found out via my wife,” Landsberger said. “She tricked my wife. I told my wife to keep it confidential. So Wanda told my wife that I was cheating on her, and then Marianne told her what I’d said. It got pretty ugly.”

  On the Lakers, errant passes were forgiven and botched layups were forgotten. Johnson regularly made amends with Nixon, and Nixon regularly made amends with Johnson. The one thing none of the players were willing to overlook, however, was disloyalty. By letting his wife in on their secrets, Landsberger had violated the unspoken code of the professional athlete: What happens behind the scenes stays behind the scenes. “That’s the angriest I’ve ever seen Kareem,” said Butch Carter. “Mark was so fucking stupid. He got Kareem in trouble, Coop in trouble . . . just so fucking stupid.”

  On the evening of November 15, the Lakers arrived at the Camelback Sahara, the hotel they regularly stayed in when traveling to Phoenix. Riley arranged for the players, coaches, staff and traveling media members to meet in a private banquet hall at noon the following afternoon for an early Thanksgiving feast. “All the players were at one table,” said Randy Harvey, who covered the Lakers for the Los Angeles Times. “The writers were at another table. And Mark Landsberger was at a table by himself—exiled. That was Mark’s suspension for sharing stories. He was all alone.”

  Despite some initial anger, most of the wives were fully aware of their husband’s extracurricular activities. At the time of the Landsberger exile, Harvey spoke with one off the record, asking whether she was concerned that her spouse was fooling around on the road. “Nah, it’s OK with me,” the woman told him. “It’s just one less night I have to suck his dick.”

  No one within the organization tried especially hard to keep the wild behavior covert. Everything started at the top, where Buss—fifty years old, but with the libido of a rabbit—paraded around town with women barely of age to drive. “Jerry loved the excitement of it,” said Rothman. “And the little nymphettes thought he could get them movie careers.” It was, to the uninformed, a disconcerting sight. Though Buss was certainly a handsome enough man, he looked downright grandfatherly alongside many of his women. Buss seemed to date a different person every week, and—before moving on to the next bubbly beauty—would snap a photograph and place the image in
one of his dozens of scrapbooks. Every so often, upon request, he would break out an album and talk about the experiences. Many names he remembered. Many, he forgot. “Jerry once told me something I’ve often thought of,” said Lance Davis, Buss’s longtime friend. “He said, ‘Lance, people try and give me shit over the women I go out with. Why would I want to go out with an older woman when I can go out with one with a fresher, hotter body? Why wouldn’t I go out with a twenty-six-year-old Playmate with a hot body?’ Jerry said it kept him young and alive—and it clearly did. He was the king, and the Forum was his palace.”

  When Jack Kent Cooke initially built the arena, he insisted there be a place where he could play host to the inevitable line of dignitaries and financial bigwigs who would come calling. The resulting space, the Forum Club, was—under Cooke—a nice yet uninspired room with a kitchen, a bar, a dining facility and a meeting area. Cooke could be found there during games, but few people actually went looking for him. One celebrity, a comedian from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In named Arte Johnson, attended somewhat frequently. “We had to wear a suit and a tie in there at all times,” said Harold Zoubul, the Forum’s general manager for food and beverage. “There was a piano player, and the room was fairly quiet. It was nice, but not all that fun. Mr. Cooke never invited more than eight, ten people. I think he felt as if he was above inviting people. He really was quite the asshole.”

  When Buss assumed control of the organization, he took one look at the Forum Club and saw endless possibilities. The same man who fired the organist and replaced him with USC’s marching band; who initiated the Laker Girls and approved their skimpy outfits; who stuffed the building with as many celebrities as possible—well, he wanted a spot where the action happened.