Combining pragmatism and paranoia, West hired a private investigation agency to follow Nixon and file a detailed report on his behavior. It was straight out of Mannix—weird, creepy, unprecedented in the history of the franchise. Throughout the second half of the season, Nixon unknowingly had people trailing his car, watching his house, keeping tabs on his every move. “I had no idea,” he said. “When I found out, it really shook me.”
One day, while at his house in Beverly Hills, Nixon was approached by a neighborhood kid. “Hey, Norm,” he said, “somebody is going to get robbed.”
“What do you mean?” Nixon asked.
“There’ve been cars parked at both ends of our street with telescopes,” the child replied. “Guys looking into houses. People are setting somebody up.”
Several days later, Nixon pulled into his driveway at the end of a late night out. He was walking toward the steps when someone emerged from the bushes. “Hey, man,” the stranger said, “I need to talk to you.”
“Whoa,” replied Nixon, who assumed he was being robbed. “What the hell is going on?”
According to Nixon, the man spent the next twenty minutes explaining how the Lakers hired him to work as an investigator. “I’ve been following you for the last two weeks,” he said. Nixon didn’t believe it. Followed? By his employer? No way. Then, however, the details of the past two weeks of Nixon’s life were laid out. He had gone to the bank, then the supermarket, then the drugstore, then a restaurant, then . . .
“If you still don’t believe me,” the man said, “I’ll tell you where we are parking. We are at either end of the block. I’ve got a job to do, but I like you and I felt an obligation to tell you. Now I’ve got to get back to work.”
The following morning, Nixon backed his Mercedes-Benz into the street, checked his rearview mirror and spotted one of the black cars following him.
Enough was enough. He had given his all for the Lakers. He played hard, played tough, won two NBA championships. When Johnson came along, he swallowed his pride and moved to shooting guard. This was his reward?
On the next afternoon, Nixon confronted West in his office. “You have people following me?” he said. “Are you kidding me?”
West was unrepentant. “You’ve been hanging out with some drug dealers,” he replied. “And we know that you do a lot of drugs.”
“Jerry, I’m not going to admit that to you,” Nixon replied. “I don’t care where you say you saw me, or what you say you saw me doing. I’m not going to simply tell you for your satisfaction that I do drugs.”
“That’s the first thing drug users do is deny, deny, deny,” West said. “That’s the first thing they do.”
Nixon was incredulous. He told friends and teammates about the standoff, and watched their faces drop. Many assumed the spying wasn’t related to drugs but to rumors that Nixon was having an affair with the married daughter of an NBA owner. Whatever the case, were West willing to follow Nixon, who was to say he wouldn’t follow them, too? Why, Cooper (also rumored to have issues with drugs) later learned private investigators had been employed by the team to trail him as well. Ron Carter, the Laker guard and Nixon’s friend since childhood, was particularly incensed. “I was with Norm regularly, and I can tell you, drugs weren’t happening,” he said. “Was there cocaine around? Absolutely. It was L.A. in the 1970s and ’80s. It was everywhere. Everywhere. But you can’t play at a high level and do coke. It ruined Spencer Haywood. But Norm taught me how to be around that stuff and not become a part of it.” Carter recalled a particular incident involving Nixon and Phyllis Hyman, a well-known R&B singer. “We were out at a club,” Carter said, “and Hyman pulled out a vile of cocaine and snorted coke on the table right in front of us. The moment she did that, Norm tapped me on the leg under the table, said, ‘Get up,’ and we walked away. He told me, ‘Ron, we can’t be seen in public with someone who does stuff like that.’ I’ll never forget that. I’d never even seen cocaine before.”
Drug user or not, Norm Nixon’s time with the Lakers seemed to be coming to an end.
• • •
The Lakers recovered.
Under Pat Riley, the Lakers would almost always recover. This was one of his greatest strengths as a coach. Resiliency. Riley rarely panicked, and if he did panic, he was excellent at hiding the accompanying emotions. Even with Landsberger spewing secrets. Even with Nixon being followed. Even when, on April 10, an awful turn of events damaged the team’s title hopes.
With ten seconds remaining in the third quarter of a game against Phoenix, Worthy jumped up to tip in a missed shot, landed awkwardly on his left leg and collided with Maurice Lucas, a Suns forward. Worthy fell to the floor, holding his left knee. He was carried off the court and rushed to Centinela Hospital for X-rays. The prognosis was crushing—Worthy suffered a fracture of the lateral tibial plateau of his left knee, and would miss the remainder of the year.
Of late, Worthy had emerged as one of the most important Lakers. McAdoo had been out nursing a dislocated toe, and in his place the rookie was shooting 57 percent from the field while scoring in double figures in 17 of his last 19 games.
“I’m just numb,” Riley said.
Publicly, West and Riley said all the right things. The Lakers would be fine. McAdoo was coming back ASAP. Obstacles had been overcome before. The measure of a man’s heart comes in times of strife.
In reality, a title favorite morphed, overnight, into something of a long shot. The Lakers moved quickly to fill Worthy’s spot, signing a journeyman by the name of Billy Ray Bates. A former star at Kentucky State, Bates had battled substance abuse issues throughout his career and was about to join a club in the Philippines, when the phone rang. Jack Ramsay, the longtime Blazers coach, once described Bates as “like Mount St. Helens—it’s bubbling and agitating under the skin, waiting to erupt”—and he was right. Bates arrived, practiced, sat on the bench and confused the other Lakers with his oddball banter and gestures. “Guys didn’t like playing with Billy,” said Lon Rosen, a team employee, “because he had a really moist Jheri curl, and the ball would get all slippery.” When he stepped into the court, he was dreadful. Bates shot 2 for 16 from the field. Four of the attempts were air balls. “Billy did crazy stuff every single day,” said Joe Cooper, a Laker backup center for a brief spell. “Crazy, crazy stuff.”
Rarely had a defending champion entered the playoffs on less of a roll. The team released Bates (who later was sentenced to seven years in jail after attempting to rob a gas station), activated McAdoo and signed Steve Mix, a veteran forward of little regard but, unlike Bates, of full sanity. He initially hedged (“I was in my thirteenth season, and sort of done,” he said) then was promised a doubled playoff check—the organization would take his post-season earnings and multiply them by two. “I didn’t have to be asked twice,” he said.
Despite finishing with the Western Conference’s best record, the Lakers limped into the playoffs. The club lost five of its final ten games, including twice to the Trail Blazers, its first-round opponent. Randy Harvey, the Los Angeles Times basketball writer, had spent his year chronicling the highs and lows of a difficult season. In the April 19 newspaper, he angered readers by picking the San Antonio Spurs to reach the NBA Finals. “San Antonio,” he wrote, “is too physical for the Lakers.”
Words are often disposable. Harvey’s were not. Riley clipped the article out of the Times and hung it in the team’s locker room. He realized, technically, Harvey had a point; the Spurs had acquired center Artis Gilmore from Chicago before the season, and he was the type of physical force Abdul-Jabbar struggled with.
That said, Los Angeles still featured two of the game’s top five players (Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar) as well as, in Nixon, Wilkes and McAdoo, three men who could carry a team. Were they particularly deep? No? Explosive? Not like past years. But the Lakers were still the Lakers.
On April 23, a day before they were to
open at home against Portland, Riley read his team a three-page motivational rallying cry he had written the night before. It was titled “Winning Time II.”
“Don’t ever forget what it looked like and felt like on June 8,” he began. “Remember . . .”
Of all the Lakers, Abdul-Jabbar took the words most to heart. He was thirty-six and playing the worst basketball of his adulthood. Abdul-Jabbar’s scoring (21.7), rebounding (7.5) and block (2.2) averages were career lows. “But Kareem had pride,” said Cooper. “More pride than anyone I’ve ever played with.”
He also seemed to possess newfound warmth in his heart. For years, Abdul-Jabbar looked at fans wearily. He trusted few, and with good reason. “Life as a museum piece isn’t fun,” Mark Eaton, the Utah Jazz’s 7-foot-4 center, once said. In the aftermath of Abdul-Jabbar’s house fire, however, people across America responded. At first, the packages trickled in to the Laker offices—one jazz record here, another two or three there. Before long, Abdul-Jabbar was besieged with dozens upon dozens of albums. The team checked into hotels on the road and front-desk attendants greeted him with “Mr. Jabbar, there’s a package here for you. . . .”
“I remember somewhere in the Midwest . . . it might have been Dallas,” said Rosenfeld, the media relations director. “And there was a rural Southern couple—white, with a kid. And as Kareem was walking out to the bus, the kid hands him three old, old jazz albums. And Kareem stops and looks at each one and I could tell . . . he didn’t just blow by them. He thanked them. You could see those things touched him.”
Against the overmatched Blazers, Abdul-Jabbar looked twenty-three again. OK—not physically. His miniature Afro was long gone, replaced by a closely cropped receding hairline and small wrinkles stretching from the corners of his eyes. He did, though, play as if twenty-three again. Guarded by Wayne Cooper, Portland’s wobbly center, he enjoyed one of the great playoff series of his life, scorching the Blazers for 30.8 points in a dizzying five-game romp. Portland tried every conceivable trick. During Game 3, a microphone caught Jim Lynam, a Blazer assistant, imploring forward Kenny Carr to take his arm and “whack him good one time.”
“Knock him into the basket support,” added Jim Paxson, a guard. “Who gives a shit?”
Los Angeles advanced to the Western Conference Finals where, predictably, the Spurs awaited. Ever since taking over as San Antonio’s head coach in 1980, Stan Albeck had worked to construct a team capable of toppling Riley’s bunch. The former Laker assistant called it “The Blueprint”—a player-by-player, step-by-step design to knocking off the NBA’s elite franchise. That’s why, before the season, the team had sent Dave Corzine, Mark Olberding and a bag of cash to Chicago for Gilmore, a 7-foot-2, 240-pound All-Star. “The way to beat them—if there is a way—is to be physical,” Albeck said. “And we have the physical team that can cause them problems.” In five head-to-head matchups during the regular season, Gilmore averaged 21.6 points and 12.2 rebounds against Abdul-Jabbar.
The series opened before a crowd of 15,063 at the Forum on May 8, and Albeck’s big plans fell flat. Abdul-Jabbar outscored Gilmore 30 to 7, fading away from the basket with a bevy of skyhooks and short-range jumpers. Gilmore, meanwhile, went from trying to punish the Laker to trying to avoid him. By early in the third quarter, he had already picked up a fourth foul. Los Angeles won with ease, 119–107. “We’re going to have to reevaluate our plans,” Gilmore said afterward. “I’ve got to neutralize Kareem a little bit more, try to do some things to slow him down.”
Though San Antonio managed to win two games, Albeck’s dreams were again crushed. He noted early in the series that Abdul-Jabbar would have to work to guard Gilmore, and that the exhaustion would impact his all-around game. That’s not what happened. The talk of Gilmore’s inevitable domination didn’t merely irk Abdul-Jabbar—it motivated him. Furthermore, there were the Baseline Bums, a group of tasteless Spurs fans who waved warped record albums as Abdul-Jabbar shot free throws. “Kareem,” Riley said, “has brought a different mentality to the playoffs.” Abdul-Jabbar roasted the Spurs for 25 points in a 113–110 Game 3 win, then added another 26 as Los Angeles took Game 4, 129–121. By the time the series ended with a thrilling 101–100 triumph at San Antonio in Game 6, Gilmore was reduced to a pile of rubble. Abdul-Jabbar scored a game-high 28, and the Lakers advanced to yet another NBA championship series. Over the six games, he averaged 26.5 points—almost 7 more than Gilmore.
Once again, the Philadelphia 76ers were waiting.
• • •
Much like the Spurs, the Sixers—two-time finals losers to the Lakers—had a plan.
An exceptional, remarkable plan.
San Antonio added Gilmore, thinking—if things went well—he could potentially neutralize Abdul-Jabbar.
The 76ers, however, one-upped everyone. On September 2, 1982, the team announced the free-agent acquisition of center Moses Malone, the reigning league MVP who was coming off a season in which he averaged 31.1 points and a league-best 14.7 rebounds for the Rockets. During his six seasons in Houston, Malone led the league in rebounding three times and improved his scoring every year. Malone wasn’t merely good or great. He was dominant—the type of player who could single-handedly control a game. He signed a record six-year, $13.2 million contract, and was probably underpaid.
As an added perk, Malone particularly disliked the Lakers.
That feeling dated back to January 31, 1982, when he was a member of the Western Conference’s All-Star team. Through three quarters at New Jersey’s Brendan Byrne Arena, Malone had been spectacular, compiling 12 points and a team-high 11 rebounds in just twenty minutes. Then, without explanation, Riley benched him and let Abdul-Jabbar play down the stretch. The East won, 120–118, and Malone stewed. “That,” said Robert Reid, a Houston teammate, “made the big fella mad.”
An angry Malone was a frightening Malone. As a thirteen-year-old boy growing up in Petersburg, Virginia, he once accompanied his parents on a family vacation to New York City. “There was this playground tournament up about 165th Street and Amsterdam Avenue,” Malone recalled. “There were these three fancy city dudes, and they were using their flashy behind-the-back and between-leg stuff to beat everybody. My cousin looked at them and said, ‘Hey, I know a guy who can beat you all.’ They said, ‘Who?’ and he pointed at me.” The city kids guffawed—Malone was 6-foot-6, but gawky and frail. The laughter set him off. “I found two guys who couldn’t even play,” Malone said. “We played to 32, and my team won, 32–20. I got 30.”
In 1974, Malone seamlessly jumped straight from high school to the pros. He combined Hulk-like power with an unmatched work ethic. With Darryl Dawkins and Caldwell Jones at center, Philadelphia had been an excellent team with some interior weaknesses. With Malone, everything changed. The 1982–83 Sixers established themselves as one of basketball’s all-time dominant franchises. Their 65-17 record paced the league, and Malone was again named NBA MVP, averaging 24.5 points and 15.3 rebounds. When asked to describe his game, he said—simply if not eloquently—“I goes to the rack.” With Malone situated down low, the Sixers’ perimeter stars—Julius Erving, Andrew Toney, Maurice Cheeks and Bobby Jones—were free to slash and cut and bomb away. “He took them to a level no one had ever seen before,” said Otis Birdsong, a Nets guard. “All bets are off if someone like Moses comes to town.” When asked how he thought the 76ers would fare in the playoffs, Malone—deep voice, pronounced Southern twang—bellowed, “fo’, fo’, fo’.” Translation: All three series would be four-game rolls.
They opened with an easy sweep of the New York Knicks, then won the first three games of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Bucks before dropping Game 4 in Milwaukee. Philadelphia recovered to take Game 5 and earn a rematch against the Lakers. “If I owned a farm, I’d bet on Philly,” Milwaukee coach Don Nelson said afterward. “This is the best team I’ve seen in ten years. They are the next world championship team.”
Though
loathe to admit it, Riley knew Los Angeles faced an uphill battle. Philadelphia was the stronger, deeper club. For as well as Abdul-Jabbar played against Gilmore, Riley understood there was no possible way he could handle Malone one-on-one. The plan, therefore, was a desperate one: Throw Rambis at Malone. Throw Landsberger at Malone. Throw McAdoo at Malone. Throw Abdul-Jabbar at Malone. Throw two guys . . . three guys . . . anyone who might have a prayer at Malone, and hope for the best.
It didn’t work.
In what Sports Illustrated called “an astounding display of muscle and will—qualities the 76ers had always seemed to lack,” the Lakers were swept from a series that was never close to being close. Malone averaged 25.8 points and 18 rebounds, and was named MVP. In his wake were the battered remains of Los Angeles’s interior players—“None of us could handle him,” said Rambis. “And suggesting we could was a joke.”
It hardly helped that Nixon suffered a separated left shoulder in the opening minutes of the first game—the result of a violent collision with Toney. (As he walked off the floor, Nixon was asked by Riley whether he needed a rest. “No,” he replied, “a casket.”) The Lakers tried concealing the severity of the injury, fearful the Sixers would take advantage. Then, between games three and four, Buss absentmindedly blurted to a reporter, “What do you expect of us? Nixon’s had a separated shoulder the whole time.”
It mattered not. The better team won handily. “We toyed with people, just toyed with them,” Billy Cunningham, the 76ers coach, said after the 115–108 Game 4 victory at the Forum. “It was really something.”
In the aftermath of the series, Buss, West and Riley met multiple times to plan the next stage. There was a fine line in the NBA, one that divided perennial contenders from flukes and wannabes. Unless Los Angeles made some changes, there was no reason to believe the team wouldn’t drift off into mediocrity. Such was the power of aging and the status quo.
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 27