The Lakers greeted Lucas warily—because he had probably delivered a hundred blows to Abdul-Jabbar’s kidneys, and because they knew he was there to supplant the beloved Rambis. “It was a bad idea from the very start,” said Gary Vitti, the trainer. “We were a team with great chemistry, and we brought in very bad chemistry.” The Laker players expected newcomers to tread softly and feel things out. Lucas, however, stomped around with the air of a Hall of Famer. During an early-season players-only locker room meeting, Johnson threw out a question for teammates. Abdul-Jabbar answered, then Cooper answered, then Lucas started to answer. “No, no—shut the fuck up,” Johnson said. “Nobody asked you yet.”
The room grew silent, and Lucas stormed out. Shortly thereafter, while waiting in an American Airlines terminal, Vitti, who doubled as the team’s traveling secretary, handed Lucas his boarding pass (the team still traveled commercial). The forward stepped onto the airplane, but returned five minutes later. “You gave me the wrong seat,” he said. Vitti looked at the ticket—“Uh, no. It’s the right seat,” he said.
“But that’s a coach seat,” Lucas said.
“I know,” Vitti responded. “You’re in coach today.”
“But I’ve got seniority,” Lucas said. “I’ve got seniority.”
Under the contract negotiated by the players union, seating priority was designated by experience. Scott, Cooper and Johnson were all placed in first class, despite having significantly less NBA time. “Well, it depends what kind of seniority you’re referring to,” Vitti said. “We have Animal Farm seniority on the Lakers.”
Animal Farm seniority? Lucas marched toward Riley, who was standing a couple of feet away. Though he and West were generally in agreement on personnel moves, Riley hedged on the Lucas addition. He didn’t want him and didn’t need him and didn’t particularly like him. Now Lucas was inches from his face, demanding a first-class seat. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Riley said. “Get on the plane.”
“But I’ve got seniority!” Lucas said. “I’ve got seniority!”
Soon, dozens of travelers were watching as Riley and Lucas exchanged curses and accusations. “Maurice, we have great chemistry on this team,” Riley said. “Are you going to be the guy who messes it up?”
“But I have seniority,” he replied.
“Maurice,” Riley said. “Everybody on this team makes sacrifices. Again—are you going to be the guy who ruins it?”
“But . . . I have seniority,” Lucas said.
“Pat’s starting to turn red,” Vitti said, “and the carotid artery is popping out of his neck. They’re going at it, and it’s getting really heated. They’re volleying back and forth, and nobody’s cracking.” Finally, after five minutes, Lucas snatched his boarding pass back from Vitti and screamed, “You haven’t heard the end of this!” He filed a complaint with the union, and a representative called Riley with a formal complaint.
“Yeah,” the coach replied, “I’ll get right on that.”
Lucas was an outcast from the very start. He possessed an idealized vision of his abilities that failed to match reality. In Los Angeles, Abdul-Jabbar was the first offensive option, Worthy the second, Johnson the third, Scott the fourth. “They were running no plays for Kurt or A.C., and both those guys were accepting of it,” said Vitti. “But not Maurice Lucas. He thought he should have been the second or third option. So when the ball would go to him, he was going to shoot it. This didn’t make the other guys happy.” Lucas had averaged 14.6 points over his career, including 20.4 for the 1978–79 Blazers. But his range was six feet in, and his limited offensive repertoire had deteriorated. In a game against Phoenix on December 12, Lucas went on a rare roll, scoring 17 points in twenty-two minutes against his former team. Midway through the third quarter, however, Johnson glared disgustedly toward the shot-happy Lucas and signaled for a twenty-second time-out. “What’s going on?” Riley said to Vitti. “Is somebody hurt?” Vitti shrugged. The players approached the bench, and Johnson looked Riley in the eye. “I can’t play with this motherfucker,” he said, pointing at Lucas. “Get him out of the fucking game.”
Lucas was pulled. “That was pretty much it for Maurice,” said Vitti. “Any respect was gone.”
It would be a stretch to suggest Los Angeles failed to repeat as NBA champions because of Lucas’s presence. It would not, however, be altogether preposterous. Though the team finished 62-20 during the regular season, the chemistry was damaged. Rambis felt slighted by Lucas’s temporary ascension, and Green wasn’t ready to play a prime role. McAdoo—confident, boastful, hilarious—was terribly missed. “Those years with McAdoo, that team was awfully close,” said Johnson. “We were all so tough-minded. We would go on the road and just say, ‘OK, how many games we got?’ We’d see there were six. ‘We’re gonna win all six.’ And then we’d go and win all six. We would push each other to make sure. Coop would be on me. I would be on Coop. Or we could get on one another. That was the respect we had for one another. That was the sign of a true championship team, that we could get on one another.”
There was the additional matter of Riley. When the coach took over for Westhead, he was a humble listener who sought the team’s input. However, by 1986 he was morphing into a one-man marketing machine. Riley charged ten thousand dollars per motivational speech and had clothing companies knocking down his door. He was rarely named the NBA’s Coach of the Month, but not because he was unworthy. The award was sponsored by Farah pants, and Riley refused to pose in such pedestrian duds (as the recipient was asked to do). He was dashing and handsome and smooth and intelligent—and more than happy to share that information with anyone who asked.
Like Westhead before him, Riley began to start viewing himself as a genius, which was funny to those who realized 70 percent of his basketball strategy came from the pages of Jack McKinney. Whereas once he was agreeable and open, he turned suspicious and grouchy. Riley used to be a beat writer’s best friend, happily sitting down over beers and wings to explain strategy, personnel, Xs and Os. Now, though, he insisted his men be wary of interview requests. He viewed all non-players and coaches as suspicious interlopers, and questioned the loyalty of many. “You were either with Pat or against Pat,” said one employee. “That’s how he saw it.”
Riley was particularly cruel to Josh Rosenfeld, the team’s nebbishy media relations director. Now in his fourth season with the franchise, Rosenfeld could often be found alone in his office at all hours of the morning and night. He was the ultimate workaholic. “My life was the Lakers,” he said. “Nothing else.” Yet Riley seemed to take a bully’s delight in abusing the little guy. “I was a peripheral opponent,” Rosenfeld said. “He told me once, ‘If a bus is scheduled to leave at eleven, you had better be there at ten forty-five, because I’m never going to hold it for you. If all twelve guys are on the bus, we’re leaving.’ It was Pat. My feeling was, whatever Pat was doing was working. So even if I didn’t see the value to it—if he thought it was important, it was important.”
Riley worked Rosenfeld to the bone, even when tasks had nothing to do with the press. Generally, those in Rosenfeld’s shoes attended team practices but paid little attention to the on-court details. “Pat didn’t allow me to read a newspaper at practice,” he said. “He’d say, ‘If you’re gonna be at practice, you’re going to be attentive and you’re going to watch.’” Occasionally, if he wasn’t involved in a drill, Johnson would sit down alongside Rosenfeld to chat. “Oh, Pat would get pissed,” Rosenfeld said. “But never at Magic—just at me.”
On February 20, 1986, the Lakers were in New Jersey for a game against the Nets. Worthy was out with an injury, and during the morning shootaround, Bill Bertka, the assistant coach, needed an extra body for a three-on-three drill. “Josh!” he called. “Get over here.” Rosenfeld, Rambis and Kupchak proceeded to somehow thump Abdul-Jabbar, Lucas and Larry Spriggs. “Just thrilling,” Rosenfeld said. “It’s probably my greatest sporting ac
complishment, because I actually made a couple of shots.” Five days later, the team was in Dallas, and again Bertka required an extra player. “I get out there, and guys are kind of goofing around, Spriggs is trying to block my shot,” Rosenfeld said. “And Riley stops the practice and screams, ‘What the hell are you doing out there?’ I look over at Berkta, and he has his back turned to me and is walking away. He wants no part of it. I said, ‘Pat, you needed an extra guy.’ He says, ‘Get the hell off the court.’ I get off the court and he says, ‘Get off the bench.’ I go two or three rows into the stands and he says, ‘Get the hell out of the gym.’ Now I’ve got to go out. All the writers are waiting there to do interviews, and I’m banished. It was embarrassing.”
“At times Pat was a great guy, and at times he could be a big douchebag,” said Richard Crasnick, the team’s director of promotions. “One time the Lakers were practicing, and Pat had me close the curtains so the other team—the Mavericks—couldn’t watch. I closed them, but not enough for him. He started screaming at me—‘Why the hell are they still opened?’ I had to, literally, get duct tape and tape them closed. Dick Motta was the Mavs coach at the time, and he sees the curtains and says, ‘What the fuck is this?’ Pat looked at me like it was my fault.”
There was also the matter of Riley’s wife, Chris, a psychologist who attached herself to the Laker spouses. Whenever Wanda Cooper and Linda Rambis and Angela Worthy and the other women gathered for events, Chris would attend and, sometimes, organize. She was, by most accounts, friendly—but also a lieutenant in the Pat Riley brigade. Chris Riley insisted the best way the women could help Los Angeles win a title was by mindlessly going along with everything her husband said. Resistence was futile. “We bought into it,” said Linda Rambis. “We made a pact that we, the wives, would do everything we could to help the team. So Kurt would never wake up with the kids in the middle of the night, because he needed sleep. I was OK with that—we had a cause.” If that cause translated into staying away from the Forum and preparing warm meals and sitting by as their husbands fondled stewardesses, hey, so be it. The number of Laker players who didn’t fool around on their wives: “Probably one—A. C. Green,” joked a spouse. “And he was an unmarried virgin.”
There was a Stepford-like approach to it all, a mindless adherence to rules and regulations set forth by the Rileys. “It took me a while to figure those two out,” said Claire Rothman, the Lakers vice president of booking. “And then I got it. Pat would, in a way, be the pleasant one, and then Chris would say what he wanted to say. And I really disliked that. She would come into the offices and say, ‘You know, if you would play different music during the game, we wouldn’t lose.’ And I’d say, ‘Uh, Chris, I have nothing to do with the music. That’s someone else.’ That wasn’t the right answer for her—ever. ‘Well,’ she’d say, ‘something should be done.’ Truth is, that was Pat speaking through her. They were kind of a team.”
Chris Riley wound up handing Richard Krasnick, the team’s promotions director, a song list that needed to be played during time-outs. Krasnick paid it no mind. Chris Riley handed him another list. Krasnick again paid it no mind. Chris Riley handed him another list. This time, Krasnick asked Jerry West what he should do. A meeting was held, ideas were tossed around. A week later, West returned with advice. “Ignore her,” he said. “Just ignore her.”
What saved Pat Riley was that he had emerged as one of the NBA’s elite coaches. Even with Lucas’s damaging presence and with Abdul-Jabbar, now thirty-eight, rebounding like a big shooting guard (6.1 per game), and with moments of desperation creeping forth (at one point, center Petur Gudmundsson, a borderline pro but the pride of Reykjavik, Iceland, received key minutes), the Lakers still won the Pacific Division by 22 games over Portland. In an strange twist, Riley did his best work in the midst of the team’s worst stretch of the season. On January 15, McAdoo—a free agent just waiting to be signed—was presented an offer sheet by the Philadelphia 76ers. He officially joined the team two weeks later. News of the transaction crushed many Lakers players who had hoped, with Lucas’s poutiness and poor play, West would somehow be persuaded to bring McAdoo back into the fold. What ensued (coincidentally or not) was an awful string during which the team dropped nine of nineteen contests. The bottom seemed to fall out on the night of January 24, when the Clippers—in their second season in Los Angeles after moving up the coast—embarrassed the Lakers, 120–109, at the Sports Arena. In the team’s defense, Johnson and Rambis were sidelined with minor injuries. But . . . the Clippers? Since the relocation, the Lakers had gone 9-0 vs. their neighbors. “We’d always get really pumped up to play the Lakers, though they probably could care less about playing us,” said Kurt Nimphius, the forward who scored 19 for the Clippers that night. “On those rare nights we beat them, it felt like Christmas.”
One night later, the Lakers again fell to an inferior opponent, the Denver Nuggets, and followed up with scattered setbacks to the Knicks and Warriors—awful teams with losing records.* Finally, after Los Angeles traveled to East Rutherford, New Jersey, only to endure a 121–106 beating at the hands of the so-so Nets, Riley lost his cool. Following the setback, he bypassed any sort of post-game speech or interviews and took a shower. Players and coaches boarded a bus for the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Philadelphia. Riley remained quiet the entire journey. Not one word was spoken.
His message was clear—I’m pissed. Now stop playing like the Manhattanville College women’s team. If that were not enough, he decided to bench Scott, the Lakers’ best outside marksman, for twelve games. The third-year guard was actually playing well, averaging 15.4 points on 51 percent shooting, but he infuriated Riley by marrying his girlfriend, Anita, on February 8 in Las Vegas during the All-Star break. Along with reporters and hangers-on, the coach filed such events under the “peripheral distraction” category. Instead of sending Scott some nice wineglasses or a bread maker, he punished him by inserting McGee into the lineup. “Pat was both really smart and a little paranoid,” said Anita Scott. “Actually, not paranoid—overprotective. He wanted to limit distractions.”
The Scott benching marked the official kick-off of a new love-hate relationship between Riley and his players and, for the coach, it was brilliant. When he was first hired, Riley sought to foster friendships. However, he came to understand that great coaches were not great friends. Vince Lombardi wasn’t doing shots with Bart Starr. Joe McCarthy and Joe DiMaggio didn’t attend Broadway shows together. Riley had always recoiled at Adolph Rupp’s harshness at Kentucky, but now he understood. Sometimes, one had to be cold. This was about winning, not community.
So if benching Scott for McGee was what it would take to have the Lakers focus, so be it. “Pat was very smart—very, very smart,” said Spriggs. “He understood dynamics, and how people related to situations. He knew what buttons to push. There was an art to it.”
Scott returned to the starting lineup in late February, and the team took off. Beginning with a 127–117 win over Golden State on March 3, the Lakers won 9 straight, and 13 of 14. “It’s time to start driving for the playoffs,” Riley said after the Warrior game. “There are twenty games left, five weeks. Last year we finished 36-6, a forty-two-game drive. We had a purpose. We’d gotten beat in the seventh game of the finals the year before. Our purpose was born of anger. It was born of frustration. We have to kick ourselves to get to that level again. Our purpose is to repeat. Our players can’t be satiated because they won the championship the year before.
“We’ve only had two constructive practices in the last month, because of traveling and all that. But you have to travel and practice. That’s what our job is. You can’t wait for the playoffs to start. If you wait for the playoffs to come up to you, you might not be ready for the first round. Injuries have been a factor. We wouldn’t have had as much trouble without our flurry of injuries the last five weeks. But we’ve still got to kick ourselves into high gear.”
Los Angeles defeated Portland,
120–114, on April 8 for the sixtieth win, and the revival seemed legitimate. Yet even with Riley’s motivational manipulations, something wasn’t working. The Lakers appeared to be sedated. Or, as Blazers guard Clyde Drexler noted after the game, “They looked like they were bored stiff.”
Added Rambis: “We’re kind of like a horse that doesn’t run until it’s behind.”
This was hardly an ideal way to enter the playoffs. The team closed out the season with a listless 127–104 loss to the Dallas Mavericks—in the Lakers’ defense, Gudmundsson started at center against the Mavs, Cooper at point guard—and in the three days until their first-round playoff opener against San Antonio, Riley presented his men with an offer: Either play outstanding basketball, or drastic changes would ensue.
Los Angeles opened the post-season by sweeping the Spurs in three games, then rolled over Dallas, four games to two, in the Western Conference Semifinals. All along, Riley’s greatest concern was the Houston Rockets, the talented, deep number two seed that loomed in the conference finals.
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 35