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

by Pearlman, Jeff

  Lost in all the talk about Johnson the basketball player and Johnson the celebrity was that, at his core, he was a hometown kid. Though he lived full-time in Los Angeles, Johnson returned to Lansing for long stretches every summer. He would knock on the doors of old neighbors, stroll down to the nearby park for softball games with his lifelong chums, eat at local dives and stay up late into the night talking about the good ol’ days. He had an unusually close relationship with his parents and nine siblings. They spoke regularly, and visited as often as possible. Johnson quoted his father’s doses of wisdom on a regular basis. The most cited words usually came from a time when, as a teenager, he joined his dad, Earvin Sr., doing sanitation work. It was an icy day, and young Earvin rushed to empty a can, then jumped back into the warm truck. His father sent a glare his way. “If you do this job halfway, then you’ll be a halfway basketball player, you’ll be a halfway student,” he told him. “You have to do things the right way.”

  Mary Johnson had shared this philosophy. Work hard. Give your best. Be prideful. On the night she passed, Johnson called his mom, Christine. She was handling things well, but her husband was a wreck. The Lakers were scheduled to play at Dallas the following day. “What should I do?” Johnson asked. “Come home and be with Daddy, or play the game?”

  “Go ahead and stay,” Mary said. “It’ll give him something to do. I think he’d like that.”

  Against Dallas, Johnson totaled 25 points and 12 assists. The Lakers lost; his concentration was zilch—and nobody much cared. That night Johnson returned home for the funeral. He dedicated the rest of the season to Mary’s memory and played with an unusually heavy heart. He could take losses, poor shooting nights, media criticism. The death of a sister, though, was too much to bear.

  It also didn’t help that, when he wasn’t back home in Lansing, Johnson was dealing with the heartache on his own. Much is made of the glorious life of the professional athlete, yet little is uttered of the accompanying loneliness. For all the splendor of a $350 hotel suite, it is a suite that usually goes unshared. For all the palatial luxury of Johnson’s eighteen-room mansion, they were eighteen rooms often lacking life.

  It was well known in Los Angeles that Johnson had a longtime girlfriend, Earleatha “Cookie” Kelly. The two had met back at Michigan State in 1977, and she graduated four years later with a degree in retailing, clothing and textiles from Cornell’s College of Human Ecology. When asked, Johnson spoke giddily of her beauty and poise. “In high school, I was dating all over—you know, basketball player and stuff—just going crazy,” he said. “Then I met this great young lady, a super girl. She brought me down to being a one-woman man.” Every so often, Kelly would be seen out and about with Johnson, and a blurb might follow in one of the Los Angeles newspapers about their long-standing romance. To the shock of thousands of Southern California–based women, during training camp in 1985, Johnson announced that he had finally popped the question.

  Less than a year later, he called it off.

  When asked, Johnson explained it thusly: “Well, I’m so into this—basketball and my work—that I felt it would be better if I got married after I’m done. Because I think I can be just as good a husband during that time as I am in basketball. I’d hate to send a lady through what I go through now. It would be unfair and I realize that. Take now, for example. During the playoffs, I’m so intense. Every day I’m intense and I’m moody and I need to be by myself. . . . I know just dating that it’s hard on a date because I’m just snapping. Just think—if it was my wife, I’d probably just go off, and I don’t want that to happen.”

  The truth—as many members of the Lakers organization suspected—was that Johnson broke off the engagement not out of some moral fortitude, but because he liked sex with women not named Earleatha. So he told Kelly the wedding wouldn’t be happening, and she was crushed.

  On occasion, so was Johnson. The women were gorgeous and experimental, but, to Johnson, mere disposable items. They came, they went. Jerry Buss had similar relations, only he liked to take his young dates under his wing, provide them with opportunities, guide them through life, even keep in touch. Johnson, for the most part, simply relished the conquest. He spotted a hottie at a game, he had a note delivered her way, they met in a closet, they, ahem, mingled, they departed. Was it fun? Sure. Exciting? Absolutely. Fulfilling? No.

  “I think, in Los Angeles at that time, with the Lakers, with stardom, maybe it was hard not to be that way,” said Brickowski. “I remember one day walking through the office, and I go to make a phone call in one of the rooms, and Mike Tyson is in there fucking a girl on the desk. He looks at me, says, ‘Hold on one minute,’ and continues fucking. I’m not making fun of Mike Tyson, but that sort of thing was in the air at the Forum. It just was.”

  Perhaps. But when his sister died, and Johnson had no one to be with . . . no one to embrace, well, it hurt. He was the most popular man in Los Angeles, yet all alone. “I’ve been talking to my folks every day,” Johnson told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “I had a woman who I was involved with for the last few years. But we’re not seeing each other anymore. She wanted to get married.

  “I guess I’m not ready for that yet.”

  • • •

  Though the Lakers could be—at times—inconsistent, the highs remained incredibly high. On February 4, the pathetic Sacramento Kings, sporting a 14-31 record, came to the Forum. This was, in Hollywood speak, a giveaway game. Meaning, if one were a season ticket holder, and an irksome friend or relative was always pining for a visit to the Forum, here was the game to skip.

  Or, if one enjoys watching an ant being crushed by a bulldozer, perhaps not.

  The Lakers jumped out to a 29–0 lead.

  They were up 40–4 at the end of the first quarter.

  The Kings—who lost to the Lakers for the twenty-second-straight time—missed their first twenty-one shots.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Michael Cooper of the 128–92 flogging. “I’m just glad to be part of it.”

  Even with such an overwhelming victory, Jerry West knew his team was flawed. For the past few years, he had desperately attempted to acquire another skilled big body, but to no avail. Earl Jones—bust. Chuck Nevitt—useless. Petur Gudmundsson . . . Jerome Henderson . . . Mike Smrek—no, no, no. At one point he even tried landing Bill Walton from the Clippers, but when the oft-injured center failed a physical, West passed. (To the Lakers’ great dismay, Walton then went to Boston and helped the Celtics win the 1986 championship.)

  Beginning in late January, Los Angeles kicked off a crusade to (money and difficulty be damned) finally acquire frontcourt depth. At the time, Riley was using the six-foot-eight Rambis as Abdul-Jabbar’s primary reinforcement—an idea as laughable as it was ineffective. At long last, he pulled off a deal for a legitimate backup center to assist Abdul-Jabbar. Los Angeles surrendered Gudmundsson, Brickowski, two draft picks and cash to San Antonio for Mychal Thompson.

  Back in 1978, the Portland Trail Blazers had used the first pick in the draft to take Thompson, a long, athletic 6-foot-10 force from the University of Minnesota. The selection was a no-brainer—Thompson was an All-American who averaged 22 points and 10.9 rebounds as a senior Gopher. “We don’t have anybody who can contain Mychal Thompson,” said Lute Olson, Iowa’s coach, during his senior season. “Nobody has someone who can contain Mychal Thompson.”

  Though far from a bust as a pro, Thompson never met expectations. He was a good, solid complementary player damned by the most sideways of compliments: “Mychal,” said Otis Birdsong, the longtime NBA guard, “is an exceptionally nice guy. Maybe too nice.”

  Thompson was born in the Bahamas, and as a boy his primary sport was soccer. He never touched a basketball until age sixteen, when he began playing in a league sponsored by his church, the Central Gospel Chapel in Nassau. With his size (he was 6-foot-9 by his seventeenth birthday) and freakish athleticism
, the games turned into farce. In one, he grabbed 61 rebounds. In another, he blocked 22 shots. His older brother, Colin Thompson, urged him to try playing in the United States. A couple of years earlier, Colin had been a power-hitting outfield prospect in the Los Angeles Dodgers’ minor league system. Following his first spring training, though, he grew frustrated, quit and returned home. The regret would forever gnaw at him. Colin stressed to his little brother the value of taking on challenges and making the most of opportunities. “People would say I should get off the island and pursue a career,” Mychal said. “I didn’t know much about it, but I really loved playing.” The Thompson family used to vacation in Miami, and when his son turned seventeen, Dewitt Thompson sent him to the city. Mychal was placed with a family friend named Maude Tappan. For fifty dollars per month, he was provided a bed, food and, at Jackson High School, real competition. “I was raw,” he said. “I had never played in front of a crowd before in my life, and even though I was only a half-hour flight from Nassau, I felt like I was in another world. I was so nervous before my first game I almost passed out.”

  Behind its new center, Jackson finished 33-0 and won the state Class 4A championship. Thompson went on to Minnesota, where he teamed with forward Kevin McHale to form one of America’s best frontcourt duos.

  Yet throughout his high school, college and professional careers, Thompson was always something of a goofball. While at Jackson he attached tassels and bells to the laces of his sneakers. “That’s how I got the nickname Bells,” he said. “It became Sweet Bells after people saw some of my moves on the court.” In college he changed the spelling of his name from Michael in an effort to generate media attention. He wore a necklace on the court, and explained it away as his “voodoo necklace.” He told the media he was cousins with David Thompson, the high-flying Denver Nuggets star. (He wasn’t.) In his bestselling book The Breaks of the Game, David Halberstam wrote of Thompson sneaking two women onto the team bus after a Portland loss. He was a happy, friendly, cheerful man who would greet opponents not with a scowl but with a wide smile. Jack Ramsay, his coach with the Trail Blazers, used to bemoan Thompson’s lack of seriousness. “A lot of times, if I didn’t show a lot of sadness or remorse after a loss, [Ramsay] would really yell at me,” Thompson said. “I wouldn’t be laughing and joking in the locker room after a loss, but the next day in practice the game’s over with . . . so I’d forget it. Maybe I had a little problem with that as far as my attitude was concerned.”

  The Trail Blazers finally tired of Thompson’s act, and in June 1986 dumped him on San Antonio for Steve Johnson, an unspectacular center. It was a low moment, and he wondered whether his NBA career was dwindling toward the end. On the afternoon of February 13, Thompson drove to the HemisFair Arena for a game against the visiting Clippers. The Spurs were 18-31, and Thompson was averaging 12.3 points as Artis Gilmore’s backup. He entered the locker room, greeted teammate Alvin Robertson, changed into athletic garb and went to the training table. “What are you doing here?” asked John Henderson, the Spurs’ trainer.

  Henderson was a known kidder—Thompson never took him seriously.

  “You’ve been traded to the Lakers,” he said.

  Ha.

  “Really, you’ve been traded to the Lakers.”

  Yeah, right.

  “Mychal, you don’t play for us any longer. I’m not joking.”

  Thompson remained skeptical. Back in the Bahamas, when he was able to catch the NBA every so often on television, the Lakers were his team. “Wilt, Jerry, Goodrich—I knew the Lakers backward and forward,” he said. “I dreamed of coming to Los Angeles to play.”

  Finally, another San Antonio employee confirmed the news. “I was a Laker!” Thompson said. “A Laker! It was like going from the spare bedroom to the master bedroom. Oh, my goodness.”

  Around this same time, Mitch Kupchak, now an assistant general manager, was trying to locate Brickowski. He finally reached him—at the home of actor Charlie Sheen. “Charlie and I were close friends, so I was hanging with him,” Brickowski said. “The trade was a good opportunity for me to get playing time, but it was a real kick in the nuts. I was young, single and living in L.A. Now I was going to Texas.”

  Thompson flew to Los Angeles on the night of Saturday, February 14. The following afternoon, the Lakers were hosting the Celtics, who were once again dominating the Eastern Conference, with a 37-12 record (the same mark held by Los Angeles). Boston had won 10 of 11 games, and was 24-5 since losing to Los Angeles at the Boston Garden on December 12. “With them beating us in the Garden, that puts them one up,” K. C. Jones, the Celtics coach, said. “Now they want to win in L.A. to establish they’re the best team in the league. Yeah, it’s important. It’s going to be a wild-west shootout in the Forum. They’ll all be pumped up, same as us.”

  When asked twenty-four hours before tip-off how much time he’d need to adjust to the Lakers, Thompson said, “Give me a game. I’d say after a game and a practice, I’ll be comfortable.”

  While tying up his laces in the locker room, Thompson looked at Johnson on one side and Abdul-Jabbar on the other. He tapped A. C. Green on the shoulder and said, “I feel like I’m with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.” Green nodded, but failed to respond. This wasn’t a time to joke. It was business. “Why is everyone so serious around here?” Thompson said to Scott.

  “Because,” he said, “we hate Boston.”

  In the most electric game of the season, the Lakers outlasted the Celtics, 106–103. The star, as usual, was Johnson, who scored 39 points in forty-five minutes—including a forty-six-foot, one-handed push-from-the-chest shot to close out the third quarter. Thompson’s debut was equally jolting. He stepped onto the court with 1:13 left in the first quarter to a standing ovation from the sellout crowd, and even though the Forum scoreboard spelled his name Michael, there was nothing confusing about his performance. His first shot, a jump hook over center Robert Parish, swished through the hoop, and moments later he hit Worthy with a perfect bounce pass for a layup. Thompson scored 10 points in twenty-nine minutes, but the key contributions came defensively. Entering the game, the Celtics’ hottest player had been McHale, who was averaging 26.7 points and 10 rebounds while shooting a league-best 61 percent. There were a fair number of Mychal Thompson detractors throughout the league, but no one questioned his ability to match up with his old college teammate. When they stood side by side, McHale and Thompson could be mistaken—body type–wise—for clones. They both had long torsos and elastic arms that dangled down toward their knees. Thompson knew McHale’s game as an interrogator knows his subject, and even when an irritated Bird told the Los Angeles media, “There isn’t anybody we know about in the league that they could pick up who can stop Kevin McHale,” he was concealing genuine concern: Thompson was the closest thing McHale had to a human shadow.

  Through much of the fourth quarter, Riley kept A. C. Green on the bench and went with Thompson. Wherever McHale went, he went—and it worked. McHale scored 16 points against Green in the first half. In the second, he was held to 7. Afterward, Bird was dumbfounded. “Why would San Antonio do something like that?” he said. “If they wanted money, we would’ve been glad to keep them in business. Maybe they’ll lend us Artis Gilmore for a while.”

  It was, he knew, wishful thinking.

  • • •

  In what would ultimately become a twenty-three-year career as an NBA general manager, Jerry West made some magnificent trades. Few, however, matched the impact of Thompson’s arrival in Los Angeles.

  It’s not that the newest Laker was a dynamic scorer or even a magnificent rebounder or such an outstanding locker room presence.

  No, what Thompson did was make Abdul-Jabbar’s increasingly painful decline more digestible.

  Although he still posted passable numbers (17.5 points, 6.7 rebounds per game), the soon-to-be-forty-year-old Laker was a liability. Were his last name Smith or Jones, and wer
e he lacking the pedigree of a seventeen-time All-Star, Riley would have benched Abdul-Jabbar long ago. Why, even before Thompson’s arrival, there were those inside the organization who believed Mike Smrek, the plodding but athletic reserve, would be a greater overall help to the team. In an off-the-record conversation that made its way into the column of New York Post basketball insider Peter Vecsey, West tore into Abdul-Jabbar. “For the most part,” he said, “he’s not hustling, showing any motivation or leadership.”

  When he heard about the quotation, West flipped, denying the words had been spoken. Of course, they were spoken—those who covered the team knew West was good for at least 12,471 off-the-cuff quotations per year, and that he would later deny uttering the very words he uttered. In this case, the anti-Kareem sentiment had been repeated by West many times. Abdul-Jabbar was playing lazily, and his defense was awful, and his attitude was iffy, and none of the other Laker players (with the quirky exception of Matthews, who looked at Abdul-Jabbar as one would a spiritual guru) had much to do with him. “I remember seeing him blow off a kid in an airport who wanted his autograph,” said Billy Thompson. “The child said, ‘Mr. Kareem, can you sign this?’ and he said no. I asked Magic, ‘Is that how he always is?’ He said—‘Yup. Kareem assumes that, by now, everyone in the world has his autograph.’”

  In his defense, Abdul-Jabbar had reason to lose focus. Widely regarded as one of the league’s most intelligent players, the Lakers captain’s smarts didn’t translate to financial security. The previous summer he filed a $55 million lawsuit against his former agent, Tom Collins, for mismanagement. More recently, he placed his four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath, four-fireplace Bel Air mansion on the market for $4.3 million. Abdul-Jabbar denied the sale had anything to do with losing much of his fortune, but that was hard to believe. In his lawsuit, Abdul-Jabbar said he had been reduced to “borrowing money” from Collins to meet basic living expenses. (When writer Gordon Edes reported his difficulties in the Los Angeles Times, Abdul-Jabbar cut him off from future interviews.) Around this same time, Alex English, the Denver Nuggets’ star forward, sued Abdul-Jabbar for $155,000 for “failure/refusal” to repay a loan. Abdul-Jabbar responded by making English a defendant in his lawsuit against Collins, who once represented both players. When the Nuggets and Lakers met at the Forum on March 10, Johnson took Abdul-Jabbar’s place in the pre-game meeting of captains and referees. Los Angeles’s center didn’t want to shake English’s hand.