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

by Pearlman, Jeff

  “You kind of get used to it,” said Josh Rosenfeld, the team’s media relations director. “But it sucks.”

  To eleven of the Laker players, the disturbances were an irksome nuisance. The men had to rise out of bed, find slippers or shoes and trudge down nine flights of stairs while mingling beneath the dark sky with Jim the accountant from Cleveland and Nancy the housewife from Urbana.

  To Abdul-Jabbar, the thirty-seven-year-old center, it was torture.

  Twenty-three years earlier, while visiting a relative in North Carolina, he first experienced the sensation of a vice clamping down upon his brain. “The pain was intense, and I felt nausea and a great sensitivity to light,” Andul-Jabbar said. “All I could think about was when it would stop. I sat in a dark room for an hour and it passed.” This was his introduction to the migraine.

  At UCLA, Abdul-Jabbar spent days in bed, paralyzed by pain. While visiting Germany in 1975, he suffered a migraine that lasted, uninterrupted, for two weeks. He tried everything—acupuncture, yoga, electrodes attached to his scalp—to ease a feeling he likened to, “an alien in your head trying to come out your eyeballs.” Finally, in the early 1980s, he made an appointment with Dr. David Bresler, a former director of the UCLA pain-control unit. Bresler concluded that Abdul-Jabbar’s condition was food-related, and that a change of diet (MSG and shellfish—bad; carrots and tomatoes—good) could have an enormous impact. “And it did,” said Bresler. “When a reporter in the Los Angeles Times asked him why he stopped missing games, he mentioned us. All of a sudden, we had fifteen thousand people applying to come to the pain clinic.”

  Though Abdul-Jabbar suffered fewer migranes, occasional flare-ups continued. As he stood outside in the cool night, fireworks exploding within his head, he wondered whether playing Game 1 was possible. The following morning, he missed a team meeting and breakfast in the hotel lobby, then missed the team bus to the Garden. Light flashed before his eyes. The thump!-thump!-thump!ing inside his skull was unbearable. Could the Lakers actually kick off the NBA Finals with Swen Nater starting at center?

  With an hour until game time, Abdul-Jabbar exited a taxi and entered the visiting locker room, head in hands. The room was sweltering (“I had a tan suit on,” said Bertka, “and I could have taken off my pants and wrung them out”), but he didn’t notice. He approached Jack Curran, the longtime trainer and master of a thousand trades. Curran had solved many problems in seven years with the Lakers, from uniform issues to equipment malfunction. He told Abdul-Jabbar to lie down on a table, grabbed his neck with his meaty hands and—POP! POP!—adjusted the vertebrae. Never one to smile, Abdul-Jabbar smiled. The pain vanished.

  That night, the Laker center reminded a national viewing audience that, even at age thirty-seven, he was still the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Throughout the league, talk of elite centers had often turned away from Abdul-Jabbar and toward Parish, Moses Malone and Ralph Sampson. It angered him. “As I get older, it’s assumed that there is a situation of diminishing returns,” he said curtly. “I’ve been able to beat those odds.”

  Boston, which had won nine-straight playoff games at home, was overwhelmed. After Bird opened the game with a layup for a 2–0 Celtic lead, Abdul-Jabbar sprinted down the court, UCLA style, took a long pass from Johnson, stepped toward the hoop and fired a mini-hook over Parish while being fouled on the arm. “He tried to outrun that headache!” said Tommy Heinsohn, who was calling the game for CBS. “That’s pretty good for an old fella like Kareem!”

  The lead mushroomed, as the Celtics seemed surprisingly disinterested. “Maybe we were so happy to be here,” said K. C. Jones, the Boston coach, “that we came out here awfully flat.” Abdul-Jabbar, meanwhile, hit his first seven shots from the field, and wound up with 32 points, 8 rebounds and 5 assists. By midway through the third quarter, Los Angeles was up 81–62, and the Boston Garden—holding 14,890 spectators—felt like a crypt. Parish fouled out with 12 points.

  When the game ended with a 115–109 Laker win, visions of an easy series danced through the minds of many Los Angeles fans. Riley had instructed Cooper to stick to Bird like masking tape, and he did so, holding the star to 24 points on 7-of-17 shooting. He lined up Worthy, the 6-foot-9 forward, on Dennis Johnson, and the Celtic point guard struggled to get to the lane. “We were the better team,” said Cooper. “That’s what I thought—we were simply better.”

  Four days later, Los Angeles set out to prove it. On a rainy night in Boston, the Lakers fought to take what would be an insurmountable 2-games-to-0 lead. Before tip-off, Riley explained to his men what a victory would mean. “You’d be cutting their hearts out,” he said. “They didn’t expect to lose once at home. To lose twice, and have to come to our building—devastating. So let’s devastate them.”

  Immediately before the start, as both teams were finishing warm-ups, Johnson stood along the sideline next to CBS’s Pat O’Brien. Decked out in the team’s snazzy purple-and-gold warm-up jacket, Johnson exuded the serenity of a Buddhist monk. His expression was laid-back and cool. His arms dangled casually to the side. To him, this wasn’t pressure, and the Celtics weren’t to be feared. The point guard was twenty-four years old, living the dream.

  O’Brien: You’re not gonna hear too many people here cheering for Magic Johnson. How does that affect you and the team? Does that get you going more?

  Johnson: Oh, yeah. It gets you up and gets you ready to play.

  O’Brien: Any place you’d rather be?

  Johnson: Well, I’d like to be in L.A., and I’d like to be in Lansing . . . say hello to my mom and dad.

  O’Brien: There you go. The Magic man.

  Over the forty-eight minutes that followed, Johnson put forth his best playoff performance since the 42-point masterpiece in Game 6 of the 1980 NBA Finals. He scored 27 points, collected 10 rebounds, added 9 assists and 5 steals. Abdul-Jabbar shot only 9 for 22 from the field, Cooper missed 9 of his 13 shots and Scott was repeatedly roasted by guard Danny Ainge, who hit a string of jumpers. Johnson, though, kept the Lakers in the game. Boston led only 61–59 at the half, and 90–87 after three quarters. They held a slim advantage throughout most of the fourth, but Johnson’s two free throws with thirty-five seconds remaining put the Lakers up, 113–111. Kevin McHale missed two free throws, and, with eighteen seconds left, the Lakers looked to be a lock. They had the lead, the ball, the game.

  Or so it seemed.

  Riley had instructed Johnson to call a time-out only in the case of McHale sinking both shots. Somehow, Johnson botched the command and, following the second miss, signaled for a TO. Riley fumed—now Boston could set up its defense. Coming out of the time-out, Worthy stepped to the sideline toward the left of his team’s basket and took the ball from Jake O’Donnell, the referee. On the floor for the Lakers were Johnson, Abdul-Jabbar, Scott and McAdoo. In past years, no NBA team handled this sort of situation better. The Lakers had been the only organization with two superstar point guards in the starting lineup, and both Johnson and Norm Nixon were pinpoint passers and wicked ball handlers.

  With McHale standing before him, arms waving, Worthy held the ball above his head and passed it to Johnson at the top of the key. Bird shifted over, and Johnson immediately tossed it back to Worthy, who lingered inches from the baseline. Instead of dribbling, Worthy looked across the court, where he spotted Scott, seemingly alone. He looped a high floater to his teammate—more rainbow than pass. As soon as the ball left his hands, Worthy knew he had committed an unforgivable blunder. Gerald Henderson, Boston’s quick guard, sprinted toward the baseline, cut in front of the pass, caught it, drove toward the hoop and laid the ball in over an outstretched Worthy. The Boston Garden came alive. Screamed Heinsohn, a Celtic legend—“The leprechaun at work here at Boston Garden!”

  “You make mistakes throughout a game—some big, some small,” said Worthy. “But that one will always stay with me. I’ve never been able to flush it out.”

  Ironically,
Worthy knew well the impact of one misguided throw. As a junior at North Carolina in 1982, he sealed the Tar Heels’ championship game victory by stealing an errant pass from Georgetown guard Freddie Brown with eight seconds remaining and his team up by one. The play became an immortalized college basketball moment. Now, Worthy—who had scored 29 points for the Lakers in his best-ever playoff showing—felt Brown’s pain. “I was the goat,” he said. “It was awful.”

  Thirteen seconds still remained in regulation, with the score tied at 113. Riley called a time-out, during which the crowd chanted, “Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.!,” as the words flashed from the scoreboard. When action resumed, Worthy walked to mid-court to, again, deliver the inbounds pass. He threw (successfully) to Scott, who tossed the ball to Johnson.

  Eleven seconds remained on the clock.

  Ten . . .

  Johnson dribbled against Boston’s Cedric Maxwell.

  Nine . . .

  Eight . . .

  Seven . . .

  Johnson dribbled some more against Maxwell.

  Six . . .

  Five . . .

  Four . . .

  And some more.

  Three . . .

  And some more.

  Two . . .

  One . . .

  With but a second left and the players and coaches on the Los Angeles bench screaming, Johnson passed to McAdoo, whose attempt was released too late. At the time, NBA shot clocks were placed on the floor, near the base of the basket. With the swarm of press photographers lined along the baseline, the digital red digits were obstructed. Johnson had no view.

  “The Lakers don’t get a shot off!” said broadcaster Dick Stockton, his voice combining excitement and bewilderment. “That was a thirteen-second play that went fifteen.”

  “I’ll never forget the look on Magic’s face,” said Boston’s Quinn Buckner. “It was one of absolute disbelief. He never messed up.”

  Twice, Los Angeles had Boston right where it wanted. Twice, the moment was blown. The Celtics held on for a 124–121 overtime win, and afterward the overheated visiting locker room was silent. Worthy was near tears. Johnson spent twenty minutes alone in the shower, trying to figure out what, in God’s name, he had been thinking.

  “We snatched defeat from victory,” the ever-wise Abdul-Jabbar said. “I guess that’s kinda inside out, though.”

  • • •

  The teams had two days off before resuming on a Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, which was enough time for the enormity of Game 2 to settle in.

  Had Worthy’s pass not drifted gently through the air, the Celtics were done and the Lakers were cruising toward exorcising all the ghosts of Boston-Los Angeles Past. Instead, momentum was now with the visitors. The Celtics faced Johnson and Co. at their best, and they survived. “L.A. is a beatable team out here,” Henderson said the afternoon before Game 3. “I sincerely believe that. We have a good chance to win one, maybe even steal two.”

  Performing as if the miscues never occurred, Los Angeles destroyed Boston, 137–104. Riley urged his team to stop playing into the Celtics’ hands by slowing the pace. Johnson listened. His 21 assists set a finals record, and he initiated the majority of his team’s 51 fast-break opportunities. “We tried to get them to run themselves to death,” Maxwell, the Celtic forward, cracked. “That was our strategy.”

  Afterward, as members of the media milled outside the Los Angeles locker room, Scott Ostler of the Los Angeles Times asked why the long holdup.

  “They’re handing out rings,” someone said.

  Wrote Ostler in the following day’s newspaper: “This series isn’t over. The Celtics might bounce back. The Lakers might slow down. It might snow tomorrow in Laguna Beach.”

  Never had Boston’s players been so humiliated. Having spent the past eight months eating up their Eastern Conference foes, the Celtics had developed a false sense of their own greatness. There was a belief, among some of the players, that the championship series was a mere formality, that they were ready to be crowned back in February. Then the Lakers ran them out of the building. “Maybe that woke them up,” said Larry Spriggs, a reserve forward. “Maybe the way we sprinted past them stirred them. Because all of a sudden they started letting us know that the finesse stuff wasn’t going to be working any longer.”

  At their core, the Celtics were basketball bullies. They played hard, they played slow, they tossed around lots of elbows. The way they were treated by the Lakers through the first three games wasn’t merely upsetting. It was offensive. “You guys have already written us off,” an agitated Dennis Johnson said to the media. “Why even bother going on with this series? What’s the point?”

  Even before it began, Game 4 felt . . . different. Although it was being played in Los Angeles, before a crowd featuring sunglass-wearing stars and starlets, the mood was very Boston-esque. Harsh. Gritty. Bird had referred to his teammates as sissies—a rallying cry to get serious. One day earlier, Jerry West told a reporter that, were the series to end after three games, he would have selected James Worthy (who, despite the mess-up, was averaging 20.7 points thus far) as MVP. When the Celtics heard this, they exploded. MVP? After three games? “It took me six games to win an MVP award,” Maxwell said of receiving the honor in 1981. “And they’re giving it to Worthy after three?”

  Throughout the first two and a half quarters of Game 4, the Lakers were the Lakers. They ran and ran and ran, turning rebounds from Abdul-Jabbar and Rambis into repeated fast-break opportunities. Were a basketball newcomer watching his first game, he’d assume Los Angeles was far superior in both talent and operation.

  Then, everything changed.

  With six minutes, fifty-three seconds remaining in the third quarter, Dennis Johnson shot an eighteen-footer that clanked off the front of the rim. Abdul-Jabbar collected the rebound and fired off a one-handed baseball pitch to Worthy, who was streaking down the left side of the court. As soon as he caught the ball, Worthy—guarded by Henderson—zipped a perfect chest pass to Rambis, charging along the right side toward the basket. It was, in the moment, Showtime basketball at its most beautiful—one lightning-quick outlet pass, four gold-and-purple uniforms bolting at full speed.

  As he went in for the layup, however, Rambis was clotheslined by McHale, who extended his left arm and jerked the Laker forward to the floor. Rambis immediately bounced to his feet, spun, and charged McHale. Worthy, a peaceful sort, stepped between the two men and accidentally pushed his teammate backward over a cameraman and onto the hardwood. Both benches cleared, with Cooper flying into the middle of the gold-and-green sea, anxious to hit anyone wearing Celtic colors. “You knew this was going to happen,” Stockton said. “You could see it coming.”

  Amazingly, no one was ejected. A flagrant foul was called on McHale, and Rambis sank one of two free throws. Yet, in that singular moment, the mood shifted. Not just in the game, but in the series. One day earlier, while talking with Ainge, McHale said, “We’ve got to foul someone hard.” Ainge had dismissed the words as jest—his friend was the last Celtic to get nasty. Now McHale was in the heat of it all. “Pat pulled the team aside and said, ‘No layups! Absolutely no layups! If they go in for one, hit ’em hard!’” said Spriggs. “Pat was a New York guy. He was hardened. A football player. He told us that if they were going in for a layup, put them on the free-throw line. ‘If they’re gonna throw our guy down, we’ll do the same thing to them.’”

  The Lakers, however, weren’t particularly tough. They liked to think of themselves as rugged. But, truth be told, there is a softening element to playing in Los Angeles, living in the warm sun, having Jack Nicholson and Penny Marshall sitting courtside. The Lakers were faster than the Celtics, more talented than the Celtics, better-coached than the Celtics. But once the series went from flash to fists, the momentum changed.

  The Celtics spent the rest of regulation manhandling the Lakers. Criticized thr
ough three games for soft play, Parish had his way with Abdul-Jabbar, scoring 25 points and adding 12 rebounds. Bird, meanwhile, was transcendent, with 29 points and 21 rebounds. With sixteen seconds left, he calmly hit two free throws to tie the game at 113. Riley called his team’s final time-out and designed a play for Johnson to locate Worthy for the last shot. Just as he had done two games earlier, Johnson dribbled the time away. The crowd began to make noise when the clock hit ten seconds, and with each tick the apprehension grew. Inexplicably, Johnson dribbled. Then dribbled some more. He moved nowhere—just dribbled.

  Finally, with three seconds remaining, he sent the ball to Worthy, who was posting up Parish. The pass was both lazy and awful, and Boston’s center stepped in for the steal. The game was heading for overtime.

  “They weren’t going to win,” said Carr. “I really believed that. Once you don’t put away a team in regulation, as they should have, it’s awfully hard to do it in overtime.”

  By most standards, Carr was a bit player in the Celtic-Laker rivalry. One of only four Guilford College products to ever reach the NBA, Carr had enjoyed modest success early in his career, averaging a career-high 18.7 points for the Detroit Pistons in the 1978–79 season. Yet now, at age thirty-three, he was a glorified towel waver, cheering on teammates, riling up the fans and talking huge heapings of trash from the bench.

  Most of the Laker players either never thought of Carr or hated him. In a league of jabberers, he was the worst offender. Jog past Boston’s bench, you were guaranteed to be socked with every name in the book. Throughout the series, he repeatedly taunted Johnson with cries of “Cheese-o”—in honor of his ubiquitous smile.* Yet for Worthy, Carr maintained a certain soft spot. Upon entering the NBA, the Laker was signed to a shoe endorsement deal by New Balance—at Carr’s urging. “I was a New Balance guy, and I told them Worthy was the real deal and worth going after,” Carr said. “So whatever James thinks of me—and I consider him a friend—he can thank me for an eight-year contract that paid him $1.2 million.”