The two teams had met five times during the regular season, with Los Angeles losing only once. Yet Riley genuinely worried about Houston and, specifically, the threat of their two seven-footers, Akeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson.
Both West and Riley had been around for years, yet neither had ever seen anything quite like the Rockets’ Twin Towers. Olajuwon, just twenty-three and in his second season, averaged 23.5 points, 11.5 rebounds and 3.4 blocks as the center while Sampson, twenty-five, contributed 18.9 points, 11.1 rebounds and 1.6 blocks at power forward. It was as if Bill Fitch, the team’s coach, possessed matching Bill Russells. They were powerful, quick, dominant. Against the Lakers, the 7-foot-4 Sampson would guard Abdul-Jabbar, forward Rodney McCray—a defensive standout—would stick Worthy, and Olajuwon knew to roam the middle of the free-throw lane and serve as emergency help for whoever needed it. “Bill had a system that took advantage of both our skills and sort of merged us together,” said Sampson. “It wasn’t easy, and it was kind of unprecedented.”
Throughout the season, Riley had repeatedly insisted that McAdoo’s departure was far from a big deal. Now, though, with Olajuwon and Sampson looming, the coach would have surely donated his own salary to have McAdoo back in the purple and gold. He was a man with long arms and a veteran’s court smarts and enough savvy to (partially, at least) exploit two young kids. Though Riley had sometimes been loathe to pair Abdul-Jabbar and McAdoo on one court, the duo would have been a suitable antidote to the Twin Tower puzzle. “Could we have used Mac?” said Cooper. “Absolutely. We missed him terribly.”
For most of the decade, the Rockets had played Joe Perry to the Lakers’ Steven Tyler. They were a model franchise, with high-level stars and deep rosters and sold-out games. Yet, save 1981, they could never get past Los Angeles. “They always had just a little more talent than we did,” said Robert Reid, the veteran guard. “It was close—closer than people might think. But they had the edge.”
Midway through the season, when Sampson was whining about his reduced offensive role, Ray Patterson, the Houston general manager, asked the forward whether he wanted to be traded. Patterson told the press of the discussion, but added, “He’ll never, ever, ever play for the L.A. fucking Lakers. Ever.” Patterson, along with many team executives, found it fishy how the best team in the West always wound up with high draft picks and superstar additions. Yes, the Rockets had landed Sampson and Olajuwon. Not by lopsided trade, though, but via the draft following two awful seasons.
When the Western Conference Finals opened on May 10 at the Forum, all went as planned. The Lakers won, 119–107, with Abdul-Jabbar abusing Sampson for 31 points. Johnson played his best game of the season, scoring 26 points and making one scintillating pass after another (he compiled 18 assists). At one point, the crowd of 17,505 offered a two-minute standing ovation after he bounced a no-look fireball to a slashing Worthy. Johnson nodded sheepishly to the fans before returning to work.
Afterward, the Rockets’ locker room was deathly quiet, and the media pronounced the series a dud. “Out dripped victory,” wrote Chris Jenkins in the San Diego Union-Tribune, “and the distinct impression that Houston is not long for these playoffs.”
“Truth is,” said Reid, “we had them right where we wanted them.” The Lakers played perfectly in the opener, the Rockets played awfully—and the margin was only 12 points. Were Houston’s starting guards, McCray and Lewis Lloyd, going to shoot 6 for 17 again? Was Sampson going to turn the ball over five more times? “It could only get better,” said Reid. “I mean, we couldn’t play any worse.”
Because Sampson was 7-foot-4 and perpetually leaning over Abdul-Jabbar, it was easy to forget that the Rockets’ best player was, in fact, Olajuwon, the Nigerian-born Muslim. Save height and hype, he graded higher than Sampson in all areas. Olajuwon was a lovely man with a child’s smile, and his laugh filled rooms. Yet on the court, he was downright punishing. In 1982, Abdul-Jabbar asked Lynden Rose, the Lakers’ sixth-round draft pick out of the University of Houston, whether the “big African kid” was for real. “Oh, he’ll be your heir apparent,” said Rose. “He’s that good.”
The Rockets shocked the Lakers with a 112–102 victory at the Forum in Game 2, and the initial tone of the series never returned. Fitch had pleaded with his team to attack Los Angeles defensively, to stop allowing Abdul-Jabbar to post up on the blocks and to keep Scott from setting up behind the three-point line and to resist Johnson and Worthy and Cooper when they tried penetrating. Even before stepping onto the court, the Lakers were masters of intimidation. Such mojo came with four-straight appearances in the NBA Finals. “Take it back!” demanded Fitch. “Fight for what’s yours!”
Led by Olajuwon, who blocked six shots, and Sampson, who blocked five, the Rockets refused to back down. They held Los Angeles to 4 points in the first four minutes. “One time, I think they dropped somebody out of the ceiling on me,” said Abdul-Jabbar, who made only 9 of 26 shots and scored 21 points. “It was a tough night.” Even Lucas, the Lakers’ enforcer, looked like a cockapoo alongside the Twin Towers. Riley inserted him into the game to own the paint. It didn’t work. “This gives us a lot of confidence going back to Houston because we can’t lose there,” Olajuwon said. “We’ll do whatever it takes to win.”
Over the course of the next three games, Olajuwon emerged from being merely one of the NBA’s better young players to part of an elite force. There would be no more grouping him with Sampson as “two of the best,” no more flimsy comparisons to peers like Abdul-Jabbar and New York’s Patrick Ewing. No, Akeem Olajuwon was uniquely magnificent. He scored 40 and 35 points in back-to-back wins at the Houston Summit, then another 30 in the 114–112 Game 5 clincher at the Forum before a silent sold-out crowd. Though it was Sampson’s desperation toss from twelve feet out that clinched the triumph (after Olajuwon had been ejected from the game for fighting with Kupchak late in the fourth quarter), the series belonged to Olajuwon. Abdul-Jabbar covered him, Rambis covered him, Lucas covered him. Even Gudmundsson covered him. The only semi-viable Laker who didn’t take a shot was Cooper, the team’s elite defender (though a man with the frame of a Gumby doll). “He was just too good,” said Rambis. “We never knew which way he was going to turn. He had moves in both directions, up-and-under moves. He was tall, he was long, he would fade away, he would block shots. Just too good.”
Not all that long ago, members of the media were talking about the Lakers as one of the great potential dynasties in NBA history. They had won more than 60 games in back-to-back years; had appeared in five of the last seven finals series—winning three of them; had boasted the deepest, most star-studded roster in the league; had featured a deified point guard and a history-making center.
Now, for the first time, Buss and West wondered whether they were headed down the wrong path.
Whether maybe, just maybe, a big change was in order.
CHAPTER 14
WORTHY OF SUPERSTARDOM
Throughout his first four years in Los Angeles, James Worthy often went out of his way to pooh-pooh a city he apparently didn’t much care for.
When anyone asked, Worthy insisted he would—without question—ultimately return to North Carolina, where the grass grew tall and the air was clean and simplicity and humility reigned. “People in Los Angeles are a lot freer,” he said. “They’re good people, but they are different from what I’m accustomed to.” James Worthy was anything but a Hollywood guy, the narrative went, and perhaps he even believed it himself. Give the man a hammock, a warm breeze and an ice-cold lemonade—he was happy.
Sort of.
Coming off of the best season of his professional career, Worthy was now a bona fide NBA elite. He had averaged 20 points and 5.2 rebounds for the Lakers, and was voted to start his first All-Star Game. A growing number of companies requested his appearance at events, endorsement opportunities were mounting and a James Worthy sighting was usually accompanied by squeals and shrieks.
> Though known to be happily married to Angela Wilder, his college girlfriend and a former University of North Carolina cheerleader, Worthy was also earning a reputation within the Forum as something of a dog. “James was quiet, but—like most of us—he had a dark side, too,” said Mark Landsberger, the former forward. “He liked all those women and the titty bars.”
Worthy was twenty-five years old and, in Los Angeles, a superstar. Yet not an ordinary superstar. There was something mysterious in James Worthy, something different from the other Lakers. He lacked Magic Johnson’s magnetism, and Abdul-Jabbar’s stature. He was warm and friendly, but not overly warm and friendly. Bruce Newman, a scribe with Sports Illustrated, nailed it perfectly when he wrote that Worthy “usually looks kind of sad, and vaguely worried, like a porch-climber who has just heard a dog growl. Worthy has the kind of face you might see in an Ingmar Bergman movie, representing something fairly depressing, or pitiful, or both, with subtitles. It is the kind of face that, were you to turn around suddenly during a funeral service, you might very well find standing at the back of the mortuary, counting the house.”
In short, Worthy was impossible to read. Was he happy or sad? Content or jumpy? A hero or a heel? Nobody—not even his teammates—knew for sure.
In the aftermath of the playoff fiasco, however, one thing Jerry Buss did know was that change was in order. Though far from Steinbrennian in his need to punish failure, Buss demanded excellence. And when, for one reason or another, excellence failed to materialize, he sought out reasons and scapegoats.
To the owner’s credit, rare were the times he stuck his nose too far into basketball operations. The most memorable occurrence took place in 1979, when—buying into the local hype and thinking ticket sales over skill set—he strongly encouraged Jack Kent Cooke to use the club’s second first-round pick (after Johnson) on Brad Holland, the undersize UCLA shooting guard. How did that work out? Holland—blessed with the maneuverability of a suitcase—averaged 2.9 points in 79 career games with Los Angeles. One spot later, the Pistons took Michigan’s Phil Hubbard, who enjoyed a productive ten-year career. “Jerry is a genius,” said Lon Rosen. “But he screwed up on that one.”
Now, Buss appeared ready to screw up on another. Ever since the Lakers’ elimination, he had listened intently as Johnson talked up the virtues of Mark Aguirre, Dallas’s star forward and his longtime friend. The first overall pick in the 1981 draft, Aguirre came equipped with long arms, powerful hips and a bevy of below-the-basket moves. Like Johnson, Aguirre was a Midwest kid (from Chicago) with a hard edge masquerading behind a bright smile. When the Lakers lost at Boston in the deciding game of the 1984 Finals, it was Aguirre (and Detroit’s Isiah Thomas) who consoled a sobbing Johnson in his hotel room. He and Magic weren’t simply pals. They were tight.
Hence, in the days before the June 17, 1986, NBA Draft, Buss reached out to Donald Carter, the Mavericks owner, about acquiring Aguirre. The men talked at length and committed themselves to a deal that would involve Worthy relocating from California to Texas. Oddly (but not really oddly), Buss purposefully failed to consult with Jerry West, basketball’s best general manager. Why? Because if Johnson thought Aguirre would be an upgrade, Buss thought Aguirre would be an upgrade, too. He trusted the point guard’s judgment more than anyone else’s—including the GM’s. So what would have been the point of soliciting West, when—in this case—it mattered not? “Earvin, as the vocal leader of the team, came to me with suggestions all the time and I listened,” West wrote. “But he never came to me on this one. My real disappointment, though, was with Jerry, for not talking to me about this and for dealing with Carter directly.”
On the day of the draft, both Buss and Carter believed a deal was in place: Worthy to the Mavericks in exchange for Aguirre and the number seven pick, which would be used on Michigan forward Roy Tarpley. When word inevitably reached West, he went berserk. He called Buss and told him the trade was an enormous blunder and that Aguirre—while talented—was a me-first player who would destroy the Lakers’ chemistry. (West had recently parted ways with Maurice Lucas for this very reason.) Worthy, he explained, could do twenty different things to help a team win. If Aguirre wasn’t receiving the ball and scoring, he was useless. “Jerry and I have kind of developed a lot of rules,” Buss later said. “I can speak my mind and tell him exactly who to play, how to draft, what coach we should have, what style of basketball we should have. And after I finish my speech on all of these things, he then tells me how we’re really going to do it.”
Buss informed West that he and Carter had already finalized the transaction. Had papers been signed? No. Had players been alerted? No. The media? No. “Then,” West said, “it’s not done.” The general manager gave the owner an ultimatum: If this goes through, I quit.
Buss caved.
West called Carter and told him the trade was dead. Dallas’s owner was understandably irate, but acknowledged there was no recourse. He was stuck with Aguirre and Tarpley.*
Worthy had been at a hotel in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, unable to watch the draft on television, when he began receiving calls from friends. They told him that the commentators were speaking of a Lakers-Mavericks swap that had been “approved by Magic Johnson.”
“Hey,” Worthy thought, “we’re making a trade. . . .”
Then he heard the specifics. “I can’t tell you how hurt I was,” Worthy said. “I felt like I was really starting to gel with the team and become a full part of things.” That same day Frank Brady, a reporter with the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, called, seeking comment. There are right times for journalists to reach out to subjects, and wrong times. This was, for Brady, the perfect time. Worthy tended to be an awful interview subject—quiet, deferential, indifferent. “Nice guy,” said John Black, the team’s media relations director beginning in 1989. “But James was a real pain in the ass to work with.” One time, in fact, the two were playing golf at the North Ranch Country Club in Westlake Village, California, when Black stared down a forty-five-foot putt with a ten-foot break. “If you make this,” Worthy said, laughing, “I’ll do every interview you ask of me for the next year.”
“Really?” said Black.
“Really,” said Worthy.
Black pulled back his putter, hit the ball and watched it roll closer and closer and . . . in. “I fall to the ground, laughing my ass off,” said Black. “A couple of months later I asked James to do an interview, and he said, ‘No, I’m not doing it.’”
“Putt!” said Black.
Pause.
“Dammit, that fucking putt,” said Worthy. “That fucking putt.”
“He kept his word and did everything I asked for a year,” said Black. “But he hated every minute of it.”
In the immediate aftermath of hearing about the trade, Worthy was itching to talk. He rambled on to Brady for ten minutes about respect and loyalty and a franchise not appreciating the contributions of a star. He would go to Dallas and make the Lakers pay. Just watch Aguirre try guarding him in the post. Just watch . . .
“I was a young kid and I was really upset,” Worthy said. “Then forty-eight hours passed and I realized that’s just the way it is. The Lakers didn’t have to call me. They could do whatever they wanted.
“I was immature. The first thing I should have done was take a step back and call Jerry West. I didn’t have the experience, and the spin caused me to react before checking it out.” Plus, the more he considered Dallas, the more accepting he became. Worthy’s brother, Danny, lived in the city. His college teammate and friend, Sam Perkins, was on the club, as was one of the game’s best young players, shooting guard Rolando Blackman. Dallas had won forty-four games the previous season without him. “We would have been very good,” he said. “But . . .”
It never happened.
Johnson spent the next several weeks focused on damage control. Five years earlier, he had insisted to Buss that Paul Westhead be fire
d, then denied any involvement when—cough, cough—Paul Westhead was fired. Now, after telling Buss that Worthy-for-Aguirre was a can’t-lose proposition, he told anyone who would listen that Worthy-for-Aguirre was a can’t-win proposition. “Earvin loved Mark Aguirre, but he loved James as a player,” said Rosen. “Winning was the most important thing to him. There’s no way he would have wanted that trade.”
Nonsense.
Because Johnson was the face of the Lakers, criticism of his behavior from other players was, once again, muted. When the team reported to camp in October, however, he and Worthy sat down for a much-needed discussion. Johnson explained that, admittedly, he wasn’t vocally against the trade—but only because Dallas would be surrendering a loaded package. “Plus, he and Mark were really close,” said Worthy. “He obviously would have liked playing with his friend.” Worthy, meanwhile, apologized for jumping the gun. “I felt betrayed,” he said. “But that was no excuse.” When pressed by the assembled media, Worthy expressed relief over still wearing a purple-and-gold singlet. But also confusion. “Wilt Chamberlain got traded,” he said. “So did Kareem. Why should I be any different? I’ve always known, sooner or later, some trade talk would come up. But coming this early in my career, especially after I didn’t have too bad a year last year, it was a shock. It wasn’t even a center involved.”
Though Johnson and Worthy were two of the team’s three superstars, their off-the-court relationship barely existed. The men liked each other well enough. But they were different personalities with different voices who ran in opposite social circles. When Johnson held one of his famous (or infamous) shindigs, Worthy wasn’t an automatic addition to the invite list. “There was tension—anyone could see it,” said Frank Brickowski, a reserve forward. “Magic got all the attention, James wanted some of the attention. There was a battle, to some degree, between those two, to be the man.”
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 36