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

by Pearlman, Jeff

  Despite the drama, on March 26, the Lakers clinched their sixth-straight Pacific Division title, beating Detroit 128–111 at the Forum. The post-game celebration was muted. “They only want to drink champagne when they win it all,” Riley said. “They’re aware they won it and they’re not taking it for granted. But our goals are a lot loftier than they’ve been in past years. This is just one level. The last time we popped a cork for a Pacific Division title was in 1981–82, my first year. But we were in a race that year.”

  Though Riley’s results could not be questioned, some Laker players wondered whether this was, in fact, a healthy way to exist. Byron Scott wanted his wife, Anita, to be able to join the celebration—no. Worthy thought maybe it’d be OK to show some happiness—no. “Pat was too controlling at times,” said Matthews. “You play hard, you deserve to feel good about it.” Paul Westhead may not have been the greatest NBA coach, but he allowed his men to be human beings. When they won, they laughed. When they lost, they sulked. Riley, on the other hand, didn’t merely have athletic expectations—he had emotional ones, too. The team wouldn’t celebrate until he said it was time to celebrate. There was little satisfaction in day-to-day achievements, and no acknowledgment of success until the absolute end. Riley’s motto for the season was YOUR PERSONAL BEST, and he repeated it ad nauseum. Only your best was acceptable. Nothing less. If the Lakers won a championship, the season was an unqualified success. If they didn’t, the year was a waste.

  “Riley was intense—that’s the way to put it,” said Rambis. “Basketball was my job, and I took it seriously. For Pat, it was more than that. It was life.”

  Having experienced the devastating playoff loss to Houston in 1986, Los Angeles’s players saw the upcoming post-season as a chance at redemption. This had been, in the minds of many, the Lakers’ greatest team. They posted the second-best record in franchise history (65-17), and took the Pacific Division by (ho-hum) 16 games. In a way, Abdul-Jabbar’s decline made others better. At age twenty-seven, Johnson enjoyed the top season of his career, winning his first MVP trophy by averaging 23.9 points, 12.2 assists, 6.3 rebounds and 1.7 steals. Worthy chipped in 19.4 points, and five other players (Abdul-Jabbar, Scott, Green, Cooper and Mychal Thompson) averaged in double figures. The pressure to hurry up and wait for the big man to arrive near the basket was mostly gone. The Lakers ran like greyhounds, and if you failed to hang, you were a goner.

  Somewhat predictably, the playoffs were a joke. The Lakers swept past the Nuggets in three games, routed the Warriors in five and blitzed the Seattle SuperSonics in the Western Conference Finals, winning in four straight. “It was never about those teams or those games,” said Matthews. “We wanted to prove that, once again, we were the best team in the NBA.

  “We wanted the Boston Celtics.”

  CHAPTER 15

  BRING IT

  Michael Cooper remembers the first time he was ever asked to guard Larry Bird one-on-one for a prolonged stretch.

  The date was January 18, 1981, and the Lakers traveled to the Boston Garden to face the hated Celtics. At the time, Cooper was feeling awfully good about himself. With Magic Johnson sidelined with an injury, he was a fixture in the starting lineup, right alongside stars like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Jamaal Wilkes and Norm Nixon. Cooper stood as a key cog on basketball’s best team and, he says, “I was as cocky and confident as I’d ever been.”

  To Cooper, Larry Bird was still merely larry bird (lowercase intended)—an overrated Great White Hype who captured a nation’s imagination more for his pigmentation than his playing ability. Cooper had seen it all before. Doug Collins. Mike Dunleavy. Tom McMillen. Mike O’Koren. White guys came, white guys went. Larry Bird? Who the hell was scared of Lar—

  “I’m getting ready to wear your fucking ass out.”

  The words were uttered softly. Almost in a whisper. Had the white boy just spoken in such a manner to Michael Cooper? Had he really said such a thing? Barely two minutes had passed in the opening quarter and Bird was already slinging yang.

  “Bring it, motherfucker,” replied Cooper, hardly a linguistic wallflower. “Bring it.”

  Larry Bird brought it.

  Celtics guard Nate Archibald dribbled the ball down the court. Cooper followed Bird toward the top of the key—“Larry’s standing there talking to me, talking to me. Nonstop talking”—then shadowed him as he walked down the lane and circled around a Robert Parish pick. “About to wear your ass out,” Bird said. “Wear . . . it . . . out . . .” Bird pushed off Cooper. Cooper pushed off Bird. “Bring it,” the Laker said. “C’mon, fucker. . . .” Bird jumped back, caught a pass from Johnson. “I’m still here, motherfucker,” Cooper said, grabbing a handful of Bird’s green-and-white jersey. “I’m still here.” Abdul-Jabbar, guarding Parish, stepped off his man to help. Bird jumped to shoot, and Cooper lunged toward him—certain he was about to block the shot. Then, quick as a dragonfly, Bird somehow brought the ball down and wrapped it around to a wide-open Parish. “I still have no idea how he got the ball to him,” said Cooper, “because my hands are up in the air, Kareem is coming out—and the only way he could have gotten it to him was to lob it over the top. But he didn’t lob it over the top. I’m still confused.” Cooper spun, just in time to see Parish slam the basketball through the hoop.

  He looked back toward Bird, who smirked. “Wearing your ass out, motherfucker,” he said. “Wearing it out. . . .”

  Those words stuck with Michael Cooper. That moment stuck with Michael Cooper. Throughout his first eight-plus NBA seasons, he had been assigned to guard players of all shapes, sizes and builds. One night he might find himself standing before Utah’s Rickey Green, the league’s fastest point guard. The next night, it could be Denver center Dan Issel. Or Milwaukee small forward Junior Bridgeman. Or Knicks shooting guard Michael Ray Richardson. “He was worthy of Defensive Player of the Year every year,” said Greg Ballard, the Golden State forward. “He was long, fast, stronger than you’d think. Coop was made for defense.”

  Although the Magic Johnson–Larry Bird connection was forever discussed and hyped, it was Cooper who felt tied to the Celtics star. He obsessed over Bird’s moves, over his thinking, over his patterns and tendencies. If a Celtic game was televised, Cooper watched, his eyes glued to number 33. He looked toward nights against Boston as one would a wedding. It was Michael Cooper’s moment.

  “Covering Larry—that meant everything to me,” he said. “People said he was overrated . . . fuck, no. If anything, he was underrated. What made him so good was you didn’t just have to worry about his scoring. You had to worry about this guy’s defense, his passing, his ability to save balls from going out of bounds, his ability to set picks and get people open. Larry could beat you in many ways. And he was the hardest player for me to play against, because you had to guard against all those things. Most players are one- or two-dimensional. Larry was ten-dimensional.”

  When people praised Cooper’s defensive ability, what went unspoken was that, beyond foot speed and quickness and intelligence, he was driven by the power of paranoia.

  Michael Cooper was the NBA’s most paranoid player.

  Paranoia can lead to unjustified suspicion; to constant worries; to fear that someone bigger, stronger, better will inevitably come along and ruin a good thing. For Cooper, however, paranoia made him who he was. From the very day he joined the Lakers, Cooper was looking over his shoulder. “He was the biggest character they had, because he was totally paranoid, totally insecure and always thinking he was about to be traded,” said Steve Springer, the longtime beat writer. “We were in the Midwest once on a road trip, and Coop really screwed up his ankle. Riley told him to sit out a couple of games and heal.

  “Well, Coop comes up to me during a game and sits down. He’s in street clothes. And he says, ‘You’ve been good to me, so I just want to let you know I’m out of here.’”

  Springer was shocked. He was usually on top of thing
s but had heard nothing of a trade. “Coop,” he said, “what are you talking about?”

  “It’s done—I’m gone,” he replied. “I’m not fucking stupid. You don’t think I know they want to get rid of me? It’s already done. There’s a deal. Well, fuck them. Fuck the Lakers. I will come back and kick their fucking asses. I’m sick of this shit. They’ve been waiting to get rid of me for a long time. Fuck them.”

  When the game ended, Springer approached Cooper in the locker room and kindly said, “Coop, are you sure you want me to print that?”

  The Laker laughed. “Nah,” he said. “You know I’m . . .” Cooper turned to Jack Curran, the trainer, who was walking past. “Jack,” he said, “what’s the word I’m looking for?”

  “You’re paranoid,” Curran snarled. “Fucking paranoid.”

  Magic Johnson—not even remotely paranoid—occasionally played defense as if he were missing a leg. Abdul-Jabbar—not even remotely paranoid—didn’t seem to mind if someone like Golden State’s Joe Barry Carroll lit him up for 25 points and 10 rebounds (as he did in a December 4 Warriors win). Cooper, however, played every possession as if his career depended on it. When someone scored a basket over him, he didn’t merely get upset. No, he took it personally, and wondered whether the next stop in action would result in his inevitable benching. “I never relaxed,” Cooper said. “Never. Not once. My agent once told me I was always the first name other teams brought up in trades. Well, that scared the hell out of me. I wanted to be a Laker, and only a Laker.” Whenever he would run into Jerry West, Cooper made certain to irritate him.

  Cooper: Jerry, just checking if I’m being traded.

  West: Shut the fuck up. We’re not trading you.

  Cooper: But I heard . . .

  West: Shut the fuck up.

  Cooper: Are you su—

  West: OK, we’re trading you.

  Cooper: Fuck. Forget I even asked.

  “Coop was always one step away from food stamps,” said Lon Rosen. “All through his career he thought it was over.”

  As the Lakers prepared for their third finals matchup with the Celtics in four years, Cooper was as paranoid as ever. He was coming off the best season of his career, one during which he had not only made a seventh-straight appearance on the NBA’s all-defensive team, but sank 89 three-pointers to rank second in the league (one behind, of all people, Bird). With Abdul-Jabbar’s decline, it was Cooper’s assistance in widening the court that helped Scott (17 points per game) find open looks and Worthy (19.4 points per game) streak through the lane uncontested. He was a gunner to be reckoned with.

  Yet his own personal fear remained. For the first time since West’s playing days, Los Angeles was an overwhelming favorite to defeat Boston. “This is their year,” Doug Moe, Denver’s coach, said after his team was swept in the Western Conference’s first round. “Everything is popping right for them. Everything is flowing their way. They’ve had no injuries, no problems. They’ve come together. It’s just one of those years. A dream year.” Unlike the Lakers, the Celtics—battered, increasingly geriatric—barely survived the East. They got past the Detroit Pistons in a classic seven-game series, and only after a 117–114 Game 7 triumph that included 13 ties and 22 lead changes. Though they had won fifty-nine regular-season games, K. C. Jones’s club appeared to be a cheap imitation of past renditions. Fringe NBA players like Jerry Sichting, Fred Roberts, Greg Kite, Darren Daye and Conner Henry were logging major minutes. Parish, at age thirty-three the third-oldest of the Celtics, hobbled through the Pistons series, barely making it up and down the court. McHale, meanwhile, had yet to fully recover from a broken bone in his right foot. Bird’s back—forever a problem—was throbbing in pain. Bill Walton, thirty-four, the team’s savior a season earlier, hurt himself every other step and played only ten regular-season games because of a stress fracture in his right foot. “Physically, after all those playoff games, we were destroyed,” said Henry, who grew up in Claremont, California, rooting for the Lakers. “The starters had logged a lot of minutes, and the legs were sort of dead.”

  Were the Lakers to prevail, Cooper was certain all credit would go to Johnson, the league’s hands-down Most Valuable Player. It would go to Abdul-Jabbar, and to Worthy, and even to Scott and A. C. Green and Mychal Thompson and Wes Matthews and Billy Thompson and the towel boy. Should they fail, however, everyone in the world would look at images of Cooper being smoked by Bird and think, “His fault.” He would be exiled to western Ukraine. Or, even worse, to the Clippers. “Coop drove himself crazy,” said Josh Rosenfeld. “Always. There’s a story we all love—one day the team was walking through the airport, and Rich Levin [a beat writer with the Herald-Examiner] found a screw on the ground, picked it up and told Coop, ‘Mike, I found it.’”

  “What did you find?” Cooper replied.

  “The screw you lost,” said Levin.

  If 100 percent healthy, the Celtics could—on a very good day—match up with the Lakers. Injured as they were, however, they had little hope. Wrote Bob Rubin of the Miami Herald: “The shamrocks, leprechauns, parquet, mystique and mirrors that enabled Boston to get this far are not going to frighten a poised, veteran Laker team that has clearly been best in the league all year. The Lakers are as healthy, rested and deep as the Celts are not, and after eight days off, they are going to come out at 900 miles per hour in tonight’s opener at the Forum.”

  Everyone seemed to know this, including Bird, who in private expressed some doubt over a repeat title. If the Celtics had any chance, they would have to play physically and angrily. They would have to abuse Los Angeles and hope to expose its soft California-tanned underbelly. “We know our turn is coming,” Mychal Thompson said after watching the Celtics survive the Pistons. “I think Mike Tyson and Hulk Hogan will be the first two picks in the draft this year.”

  The series opened at the Forum on June 2, and the game was as lopsided as many had predicted. The Lakers jumped out to a 9–0 lead, holding Boston scoreless until McHale hit a fade-away jumper nearly three minutes in. Los Angeles enjoyed a 39–8 advantage in fast-break points and on four different occasions had streaks where they scored at least eight unanswered points. The Lakers were a blur—pass, pass, pass, layup, steal, pass, layup. The Celtics were an assisted living community. “If this were a championship fight,” CBS’s Dick Stockton said, “they’d stop it.” Worthy scored a game-high 33 points (along with 10 assists and 9 rebounds), Johnson chipped in 29 points, 13 assists and 8 rebounds and Scott went for 20 points. “This was one of those scrimmages they had in Santa Barbara,” K. C. Jones said afterward, referring to the Lakers’ practices as they waited for the Boston-Detroit winner. “They totally blew us out. What you saw out there was totally spectacular. It took both teams some time to get started, but that was when Magic and James said: ‘Enough of this. Let’s get out and run, and get this thing over with.’ After that, it was a romp.”

  One Laker, though, was less than satisfied. When he returned to the locker room after the 126–113 triumph, Cooper walked past Bruce Willis and Don Johnson (both actors were allowed in for a visit), stared at the score sheet and cursed himself out. McHale had been held to 15 points, Parish to 16 and Danny Ainge, the pesky shooting guard, to 11. Yet there, in what seemed to be bold, red letters, were Bird’s statistics: THIRTY-TWO POINTS ON 14 OF 25 SHOOTING.

  “I took pride in being a defensive stopper,” said Cooper, who scored 10 points in twenty-three minutes. “When I didn’t do my job well—even in a win—it really grated me. I had to come back strong.”

  If the opening game was heartache for the Celtics, the follow-up was a full-blown coronary explosion. This time, Boston actually jumped out to a 19–14 lead midway through the first quarter. Then—whoosh! Come the second quarter, Los Angeles took off, outscoring Boston 37–22 with a buffet of layups, jumpers and dunks. Cooper, still upset, played the game of his life, scoring 21 points and hitting 6 of 7 three-pointers. Bird,
meanwhile, was stifled. His 23 points were empty calories, and came on 9 of 17 shooting. Cooper talked his regular brand of trash, and Bird—in the rarest of circumstances—had little to say. When time expired, Los Angeles owned an easy 141–122 triumph and a 2-0 series lead.

  “We’ve got a bunch of gutsy human beings here, and we can’t bail out now,” Bird said. “We’ve got to make some major adjustments, and I think we will—especially getting back on defense and hitting the boards and pushing some bodies around. Never, ever, ever count us out.”

  The words sounded empty.

  “They were over,” said Matthews. “That wasn’t their year. It was ours.”

  The series shifted to Boston, which always put Riley in a particularly awful mood. The team stayed at the Boston Sheraton, and that first night, at three A.M., the fire alarms were predictably set off. When the team gathered at the Boston Garden for a practice, the players and coaches were greeted by a filthy locker room, a broken video monitor, no towels, drinks or blackboards. “That’s Boston Garden,” Gary Vitti, the trainer, said. “No cooperation. No class.”