Rothman was put in charge of taking a space with all the pizzazz of a library and creating something that, a decade later, Detroit Pistons forward John Salley would call “the sexiest place in the league.” She began by special-ordering an enormous red canopy that announced THE FORUM CLUB in large letters. On a recent trip to Las Vegas, Rothman had visited a shopping mall where the concrete floor was treated with an acidic glaze that brought out a rainbow hue. “So we did that outside the Forum Club, too,” she said. “We put down new carpet, made a finish out of walnut shells . . . just spared few expenses to make it amazing.”
Before long, the Forum Club wasn’t merely a bar inside an arena. It was one of the hottest spots in Los Angeles. In the hours leading up to almost every game, as 250 or so people ate fancy sit-down meals, Buss hosted a dinner for friends and celebrities at his personal table. Employees anxiously wondered who would show up on any given night—Rob Lowe? Charlie Sheen? Tony Danza? John Candy? Dyan Cannon? Jack Nicholson? Ali McGraw? Luther Vandross? John Travolta? With a cigarette perpetually stashed between his fingers and a Playmate of the Year candidate by his side, Buss reveled in the beauty of his success. This was his room inside his building, and everyone was there to watch his team. When the game began, Buss sat far off the court, in a section near the top of the building. He didn’t need to be near the players to feel the action. He had the Forum Club. “Dad was so happy,” said Jeanie Buss. “He knew how fortunate he was.”
If the Forum Club seemed lively before games, it was wild and exotic and enrapturing afterward. Being a Laker in the 1980s came with multiple perks—none greater than regular access to a world thought to be written about only in Penthouse essays. As soon as the fourth quarter wrapped up and the average fans headed toward the parking lot, the Forum Club exploded into bright color and neon light. “We’d rush to the locker room, change and rush into the Forum Club,” said Clay Johnson, a backup guard. “We reserves had to get up there before Magic and Norm arrived. Because once they were there, we had no chance. We wanted first dibs on the women.” Select high-end season ticket holders could purchase Forum Club passes for the relatively inexpensive price of three hundred dollars. Once inside, they mingled with athletes, actors, dancers and singers.
“In a way, visiting teams probably enjoyed the Forum Club more than our guys did,” said Linda Rambis. “It was an escape for them. A vacation from Milwaukee or Detroit or wherever they played. It’d be, ‘OK, you kicked our asses—now where’s the Forum Club?’”
Behind the bar, Donna Grinnel mixed screwdrivers and bloody Marys and martinis while people reached into their wallets to pull out hundred-dollar tips. “Jerry West taught me how to drink at the Forum Club,” said Ron Carter, the guard. “I was standing at the bar and he said, ‘Hey, kid, you don’t just come into a place like this and lean against the bar doing shots. Order a few shots now, then order straight orange juice. Everyone watching all night will be impressed that you’re drinking straight orange juice—when truth is you’ve already had three shots of tequila.’”
Toshio Funaki, the executive chef, served twenty-two-dollar seafood medley salads and sixty-dollar steaks. “I went there every night I could,” said Pat O’Brien, the CBS sports personality. “The Forum Club was Studio 54, but maybe better. Think of everything you’d want in a scene, it had it.”
O’Brien speaks the truth:
Scantily clad women: “Oh my God,” said Larry Spriggs, a Laker forward from 1983 through 1986. “It was as if you were a shark and you had a room filled with tuna. You had your pick of the litter at the Forum Club.”
Buss boasted a quirky entourage of friends the local media referred to as the Seven Dwarves. They followed him everywhere, and included John Rockwell, a character actor, and the Wilder brothers, Dave and Ron. The most charismatic of the group was Miguel Núñez, a nineteen-year-old Hollywood wannabe who had appeared in a handful of low-budget horror movies. During games, one of Núñez’s jobs was to scour the stands, look for the most breathtaking females and hand them post-game passes to the club. Women would attend the games hoping to get noticed and, ultimately, selected. “Then they’d all show up and fill the room,” said Cooper. “Gorgeous women all over. Usually in life, guys go to clubs to meet the girls. At the Forum Club, girls came to meet guys.”
Members of the Laker Girls were paid thirty dollars per game. The perks were a free meal, a morsel of fame, forty-one exciting nights during the regular season . . . and Forum Club access. When the games ended, many of the women (all young, all gorgeous) changed from their purple-and-gold outfits into equally revealing ensembles. “If you were a part of it, you could go there,” said Aurorah Allain, a longtime Laker Girl. “Well, we were a part of it.”
“The Forum Club? Unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable,” said Wes Matthews, who visited as a journeyman guard, then joined the Lakers in the late 1980s. “Magic had his own section in the back where he had twenty-five to thirty women waiting for him. Why wouldn’t you go there? It was the pickup spot. You go in there, you’re gonna come up, as they say in the hood. You’re coming up with something. A lot of the players will tell you they couldn’t even concentrate, they wanted the game to end ASAP so they could go upstairs. Everyone and their mama was trying to get in, trying to get with the Laker Girls. They could have opened that place alone, just as a club.”
“If you couldn’t get laid at the Forum Club,” said Jeanie Buss, “you couldn’t get laid.”
Drugs: According to one Forum Club regular, many of the waiters doubled as either cocaine dealers or the middlemen for cocaine dealers. “Pretty much everybody had their coke hookup there,” he said. “It was a great place to get drugs, because nobody really cared. It wasn’t like security was going to bust you.”
Technically speaking, drugs weren’t allowed in the Forum Club. Also, technically speaking, the sinks inside the Forum Club bathrooms didn’t serve as coke stations. “You remember that scene from Scarface with the big pile of cocaine?” said Zoubul. “Well, I had something like that inside the Forum Club. Someone put a big pile of coke on the table, and I took my hand and slapped it all onto the floor. There was this one guy, a known dealer, and he really wanted to have access. He tried bribing me to get in. I told him, ‘I know what you do. . . . I know what you want.’ But, really, it didn’t matter. These were the 1980s. I couldn’t stop cocaine from the Forum Club. It was impossible.”
Restricted Access: For Laker players, the best thing about the Forum Club wasn’t who could get in—but who couldn’t. Namely, wives were rarely permitted. On nights when the family attended the game, Laker players would skip the Forum Club and head home. On nights when the wife and kids were out of town, the Forum Club was ideal. “I actually didn’t know we weren’t supposed to be in there,” said Wanda Cooper. “I rarely went, and maybe that’s why. There were a lot of hoochie mamas in there. But there was something to walking in the midst of the hoochie mamas and knowing who you are. ‘I’m Mrs. Michael Cooper—you’re a wannabe. I have his children, his ring, his word. This is my man.’ So when I walked into an environment like that, I wasn’t coming for combat or even to see. I was coming to grab a glass of wine—and you better back off my man.”
Said Michael Cooper: “The Forum Club was the best fucking place in the world, but, man, Wanda hated it. Hated it. My wife wanted it shut down. It was worse than Las Vegas. It was sin city. If I told my wife I was going to the Forum Club, it was ‘Why? Why are you going up there? What for? You want a beer? We’ll stop on the way home for one.’ Wanda was understanding of the NBA lifestyle, but if I ever went up there, I had to go up with her.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the stoic center, rarely ran wild with his teammates. He was a father of four and had a steady live-in girlfriend named Cheryl Pistono. Yet the Forum Club was somehow protected by a magical invisible force field, where nothing got in and nothing got out. “He had a set of twins he was often with at the Club,” sa
id Zoubul.
“Kareem was with one of the Laker Girls for years,” said Suzy Hardy, a Laker Girl for four seasons. “It wasn’t cool to go with players, because we all knew those guys weren’t going to be exclusive. But, hey, it happened. Especially at the Forum Club.”
A favorite Forum Club story of the era comes at the expense of Nixon, who used to date Diane Day, the former Las Vegas showgirl and a member of Motion, a dance troupe on the popular television show Dance Fever. One night, Carter and Nixon entered the Forum Club after a particularly hard-fought game. They approached the bar to order drinks and heard, from a corner, the harmonic voice of Jeffrey Osborne, the soul singer who had performed that night’s National Anthem. Osborne was sitting backward on a chair, his chest peeking out from a halfway-unbuttoned shirt, and he was crooning his hit, “Love Ballad,” to a swooning Day.
“Norman’s face went blank,” said Carter, laughing. “Me and Cooper just cracked up until we cried, it was too funny. But that was the Forum Club. You never knew what was gonna happen. It was the place where anything was possible.”
• • •
If basketball die-hards thought the 1981–82 champion Lakers personified basketball perfection, the following season left them breathless. First, the Lakers now had a full season of McAdoo, who often spelled Rambis midway through the first quarter. Second, though Rambis averaged only 7.5 points per game, he was playing with a barbaric physicality many of the soft western teams lacked. Newspaper columnists referred to Rambis as the Lakers’ weak link—two words that turned a normally mild-mannered ballplayer into a bull. “Kurt would kill you if it meant getting the ball,” said Mitch Kupchak. “Without reservations.”
The biggest change, though, was the addition of Worthy.
When he was selected first overall by Los Angeles, rival executives moaned about the unfairness of the league’s best team adding one of college basketball’s best players. Yet, for all the hype and accomplishments, he arrived for training camp and underwhelmed. Worthy hailed from Gastonia, North Carolina, a town of just under 50,000 residents, and felt out of place in Hollywood. Kupchak once described Worthy as someone who “looks like he’d make a good undertaker”—meaning his emotions stayed within and his expression rarely changed. At the University of North Carolina, Worthy—blessed with unusually lengthy arms and a rapid-fire first step—dominated the ACC as a power forward. The consensus thinking was that he would come to the Lakers, humiliate the un-athletic Rambis and the aged McAdoo, and become an immediate starter. “I thought that, too,” Worthy said. “I knew I was quicker than Kurt, so I thought I’d kick his butt and steal his position. Then Kurt embarrassed me. He was fundamentally sound and much more skilled than anyone—myself included—gave him credit for. He knew all the angles, all the tricks. It was no contest.”
Riley couldn’t hide his disappointment. Before the opening game of the season, he took the rookie aside and asked him to focus on core fundamentals. Worthy was a so-so rebounder and a poor defender. His outside shooting was inconsistent. He worked hard, but most of the Lakers worked even harder. “You could see the natural talent in James,” said Rambis. “He needed to learn to play in the NBA. It’s a different universe.” Over the season’s first few weeks, Worthy was used selectively. Not wanting to take away minutes from Jamaal Wilkes, Riley initially tried him at power forward, and the results were merely so-so. Then, gradually, Riley began inserting him for Wilkes. A few minutes here, a few minutes there. No fuss, no mess. While the draft’s number two selection, forward Terry Cummings from DePaul, was being asked to carry the Clippers, Worthy simply blended in. “Worthy is lucky,” said Dick Motta, Dallas’s coach. “Being picked number one, you usually live in a glass house where everything you do is magnified. You have very little leeway to grow up properly.”
Over time, Worthy discovered confidence, and Riley discovered faith. The coach began offering more minutes (he averaged twenty-seven per game through January), and the results were eye-opening. On December 29, in a game against Golden State, Worthy shot perfectly—6-for-6 from the field, 5-for-5 from the line—and exploded past forward Larry Smith with a twisting, spinning, twirling move that an impressed Johnson nicknamed the Dipsy-Do-360-Clutch-Skin-and-In spectacular. For all his shortcomings, Worthy possessed a burst that even Nixon—perhaps the league’s fastest player—couldn’t keep up with. “His speed was remarkable,” said Cooper. “Guys that big aren’t supposed to move like that.”
By January 30, the Lakers appeared to be running away with the Pacific Division. At 34-10, they boasted the conference’s best record. They had just demolished the Atlanta Hawks, 109–85, to win their seventh straight game, and arrived in Boston for a matchup with the Celtics feeling unbeatable. In a meeting with his players, Riley implored them to not merely outlast Boston but drub them. “Make this a statement game,” he said. “You want them to remember taking a beating.”
In the lowest moment of the season, the Celtics dismantled the Lakers, 110–95. Larry Bird scored 21 and Cedric Maxwell 16, but the star was center Robert Parish, who walked past, around and over Abdul-Jabbar for 24 points and 18 rebounds. With increased frequency, centers were playing Abdul-Jabbar not as an object to handle with care but one to clobber. Moses Malone had written the manual, and Parish—not as skilled as Malone, but plenty strong—followed carefully. Abdul-Jabbar shot 8 of 15 from the field in the first half, but was held to 7 points in the second. “They weren’t doing anything different,” Wilkes said. “They were just doing it more aggressively.”
If the game itself were a disaster (and it was, unambiguously, a disaster), the aftermath was a thousand times worse. That night, Abdul-Jabbar’s palatial $1.7 million Bel Air mansion was destroyed in an extensive electrical blaze. His girlfriend, Cheryl, and their son, Amir, woke up surrounded by flames, but were able to escape. “The AP called me, and I got there at four in the morning,” said Josh Rosenfeld, the team’s media relations director. “It was an awful scene. Just heartbreaking.” The center could deal with the loss of the structure itself. What crushed him, however, was the incineration of his three prized collections—oriental rugs, irreplaceable Middle Ages Qur’ans and more than three thousand jazz albums. “My record collection,” he said, “was probably the single most important thing that was destroyed.
“The beautiful pieces of glass and art that I had bought and gathered over the years were gone, as were my basketball trophies, my childhood pictures, all my clothes.”
Abdul-Jabbar left to return to Los Angeles, and the Lakers began their worst stretch of the year. They were shamed in a 21-point loss to the Spurs at home, then three days later fell to the meek Kansas City Kings. The Celtics traveled to Los Angeles for a February 23 rematch, and won again, this time 113–104. “The Lakers aren’t in a slump,” Mike Littwin wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “The economy is in a slump. The Lakers are in a depression.”
Watching from nearby was Jerry West, the team’s recently promoted general manager. As a coach, the former Laker star struggled with the ups and downs of an NBA season. He was volatile and high-strung and an awful fit for the job. Now, as the GM, his angst level—heightened by a lack of control—was even worse. During games, West often either sat in his office or drove around the Forum, listening to Chick Hearn on the radio. He didn’t have the stomach to watch in person. “The Lakers were my life, and I took it, probably, too seriously,” said West. “I loved it, loved the game and the job, but I didn’t get the joy out of it that I should. It’s a classic example of putting too much pressure on yourself.”
West closely examined the Lakers’ struggles, and he developed a handful of conclusions. First, with Kupchak out for the year and Landsberger a mediocre sloth, the team required a backup center (after talk of adding Houston’s Caldwell Jones or Cleveland’s James Edwards, the Lakers underwhelmed by sending a future second-round draft pick to Chicago for Dwight Jones, a ten-year veteran with faded skills). Second, Mike McGee, the se
ldom-used shooting guard, was a waste of space and needed to be moved elsewhere (West found no takers).
Third, Norm Nixon was a problem.
This, of course, was nothing new to West, who had coached Nixon through the guard’s first two seasons. To the general manager, Nixon had always been the sort of player a team could do without: gifted, yes, but high maintenance and egotistical beyond compare. When he was playing well and helping the franchise win, the negatives could be tolerated. Now, however, Nixon was in the midst of his worst season. He was averaging 15.1 points per game while shooting a career-low 47.5 percent. His assists and steals were both down, as was—it seemed—his confidence. Nixon fought knee problems throughout the year, and insisted pain was the cause of his trouble.
West, however, had other ideas. Over the course of Nixon’s time in Los Angeles, rumors circulated that he was a hard-core user of cocaine. The notion wasn’t without reason. Nixon was one of the NBA’s great partiers, a man whose late-night exploits and sexual conquests were Grade A locker room fodder. West was well aware of the reputation, as well as of Nixon’s profound love for the Forum Club. “Once the perception of being a drug user is out there, it’s very hard to erase,” said Nixon. “There were articles that talked about me buying Quaaludes and cocaine—totally untrue. Look, I love L.A., and I was friends with some of the actors and celebrities. I owned a clothing store at one time, so I dressed in nice clothes, but always bought it at cost. All these things led to the perception of what I was. But was it real? I’d argue no.”
West could tolerate much. A serial philanderer during his playing days, he knew Lakers drank, Lakers smoked, Lakers had sex with groupies. Such was life in the NBA. Cocaine, however, wasn’t merely a drug. It was an energy sapper; a focus snuffer; a career killer. Therefore, the general manager of basketball’s marquee franchise took a step that would forever contaminate the already toxic relationship he had with his veteran point guard.
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 26