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

by Pearlman, Jeff

  “Thank God Kareem was my teammate, because I used to cringe at the way he treated people,” Johnson said. “There was a way to say no. You could say, ‘I’m busy right now’ or ‘Sorry, not today.’ But Kareem didn’t do it in a very kind way. Sometimes he’d have people in tears.”

  As he aged, Abdul-Jabbar turned into a hindrance during training camp and practices. From the day the players reported, Riley made it clear that his goal was to repeat—and only to repeat. Before the start of every season, Riley insisted every player have his body fat measured, then partake in a stress test—where one would sprint on a treadmill with electrodes attached to the body. “You felt like you were going to die,” said one player. “Your lungs feel like they’re going to explode, sweat everywhere. Riley wanted to see what you were made of.” The Lakers were known for their intense workouts, but Riley upped it to a new level of tenacity. “I never saw anything like it,” said Jeff Lamp, a fourth-year guard who beat out Glass for the final roster spot. “I went to high school in Louisville, Kentucky, where basketball is everything and all you do is play, play, play. But the Lakers—man. Pat was so demanding. You had to do it right, or you didn’t bother doing it. And Magic set this tone of all-out intensity. Wind sprints, little drills—everything you did, you did to win. I was on the second team, and we’d always scrimmage the starters in practice. In other places I’d been, the reserves beat the starters every so often. I mean, we’re all NBA players. But with the Lakers—not once. Literally, not one time did we beat them. There was a core group of guys who refused to lose. That’s awfully powerful.”

  Abdul-Jabbar was, once upon a time, among the core. Now he couldn’t keep up. He skipped scrimmages and sometimes full workouts. Mychal Thompson and Mike Smrek would fill in, and the team often played better. Many Lakers thought (actually, knew) Thompson should have been starting in the middle. Abdul-Jabbar was, simply, too slow to partake in Showtime. But, even for powerful men like Riley, some moves are impossible to make. The Lakers would have to win with Abdul-Jabbar and, often, in spite of him. “The scrimmages were better when Kareem wasn’t playing,” Johnson said. “We’d run up and down and up and down with no big man to slow us down.” Johnson urged the center to get his rest—half because he genuinely wanted Abdul-Jabbar to take it easy, half because Showtime basketball alongside Thompson was bliss.

  Luckily, the Lakers boasted a new deadly weapon in their arsenal. Not that Byron Scott was new, per se. Now in his fifth NBA season, the shooting guard was twenty-six years old and firmly entrenched as a part of the core. But something had snapped in Scott, something the Lakers had been waiting for since acquiring him in the controversial Norm Nixon trade. The change began during the previous season’s finals, when Scott rendered himself invisible at the Boston Garden. He shot 2-for-9 in Game 3, then 3-for-10 in Game 4. After scoring a mere 7 points on 3-for-10 shooting in the fifth game, Scott experienced a miniature meltdown. On the flight back to California, he wallowed in self-pity, questioning his ability to perform in hostile environments. “The Boston mystique, the crowds, what they were writing in the papers—I let myself get to the point where I thought maybe I couldn’t get the job done,” he said. “I was thinking about my shots, and how I wasn’t taking them. That stuff pretty much took over me. I pretty much was listening to what everybody was saying. I thought maybe they had lost confidence in me. That hurt more than anything, that my two best friends on the team—Magic and Coop—might have lost a little confidence in me.”

  Though Johnson and Cooper insisted it was nonsense, Scott was shaken. Johnson went so far as to ask Riley to invite Scott into his office for a one-on-one meeting. The point guard did so assuming Riley would offer up one of his famed pep talks about Scott’s value and ability. Instead, the coach told Scott that, indeed, he was blowing it. “I used Kareem, James and [Magic] as examples,” Riley said. “If you want to walk in their shoes, you have to learn to take the criticism and perform.”

  The words sunk in. Scott hated being thought of as a peashooter in the Showtime weaponry. He had been a star in high school, a star at Arizona State. The Lakers surrendered one of their best players to acquire him, and the results were mixed. Scott averaged a career-high 17 points in 1986–87, but rarely hit a key shot in a crucial moment. “We almost never called a big play for him when it counted,” Riley said.

  As the Lakers spent the off-season having their attentions diverted in 1,001 different directions (Jerry Buss fought a $25 million palimony suit against a woman named Puppi; Cooper and his wife took a tropical vacation; Johnson attended a 4-H rally in Michigan, appeared at a camp in Kentucky, attended Pacer center Herb Williams’s wedding in Indiana, ran clinics in Thousand Oaks and San Diego), Scott focused on basketball. He spent mornings, evenings and nights either with his wife and two children, or at the gym—lifting weights, popping jumpers, running wind sprints. “Byron is very strong in his beliefs,” said Anita Scott, his wife. “When he decides he wants to do something, he does it well. He goes after it with purpose and intensity.”

  The Byron Scott who reported to training camp was an upgraded model. Instead of settling for long jumpers, he drove to the basket. In the past, Cooper knew Scott would go toward the right 95 percent of the time. Now he was mixing things up. On defense, meanwhile, Scott’s intensity was unlike ever before. He had always admired Cooper’s approach to being a shutdown player. He was suddenly one, too. “Now I know that whoever’s guarding me is in for a rough night, and they’d better be ready to give me forty-eight minutes of strong, aggressive defense,” he said. “Because I’m going to give them forty-eight minutes of strong, aggressive offense and defense. They’re going to have their work cut out for them.”

  Featuring an improved Scott, the Lakers soared. In the immediate aftermath of the finals, Riley had irked many of the players by guaranteeing Los Angeles would become the first team to repeat as champions in nineteen years. It was the sort of pressure few wanted or needed. “Just when we thought we’d done everything we could do, Riles makes this guarantee,” Scott said. “I thought he was crazy. [But] guaranteeing a championship was the best thing Pat ever did. It set the stage in our mind. Work harder, be better. That’s the only way we could repeat. We came into camp with the idea we were going to win it again.”

  Los Angeles set a franchise record by winning the first eight games of the season, and—with the exception of the opener, during which he shot 1-for-9—Scott was brilliant. In the second game of the season, a 101–92 bettering of the Rockets, he hit five of his first six shots and led the team with 23 points. Six days later, he lit up Golden State for 27 points on 12-for-20 shooting. Scott was neither the strongest nor quickest guard around. But his catch-and-release motion was instantaneous, and his confidence was peaking. “When you play on a team of superstars, it’s easy to get overlooked—and Byron probably did,” said Lamp, Scott’s backup. “But he really did everything well. He could go full speed, stop and hit the jumper, which is really hard to do. He also defended opposing point guards, and he did so well. He would lock guys down.”

  Once again, the Lakers were the talk of the league. And the league—as represented by the Seattle SuperSonics—decided to respond. On November 24, the two Pacific Division rivals met for a game at the Seattle Center Coliseum. Under the guidance of Bernie Bickerstaff, their combative third-year coach, the Sonics believed they were legitimate challengers to Los Angeles’s dominance. In forward Tom Chambers and shooting guard Dale Ellis, the team featured two of the league’s most explosive scorers. More important, despite their somewhat effeminate green-and-yellow uniforms, the Sonics were tough. Veteran center Alton Lister was a 7-foot, 240-pound steel vault, rookie center Olden Polynice was built like a Zeus statue—and then there was Xavier McDaniel, the 6-foor-7, 205-pound second-year forward from Wichita State. Featuring a shaved head and Manson-esque scowl, McDaniel was the NBA’s answer to a hockey goon. If anyone messed with Seattle, they messed with the X Man.

&nbs
p; Playing their third game in five days, Los Angeles came out listless. Seattle led 25–22 after one quarter, and 55–40 at the half. The Lakers had lost their first game of the season to Milwaukee two days earlier, and Riley wasn’t happy. During the halftime break, he questioned his team’s collective manhood and wondered aloud whether they would simply allow the Sonics to steal both a game and their air of invincibility. Many of the players tuned Riley out—they’d heard this before, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. One man, however, received the message.

  Midway through the third quarter, shortly after he was sent in to replace Johnson, Wes Matthews was the recipient of an unusually hard pick by McDaniel. On Seattle’s following possession, Matthews stole the ball from point guard Nate McMillan and promptly dribbled it off his right foot. Matthews dove for the ball while intentionally kicking McDaniel in the face. Without pause, McDaniel lunged for Matthews, wrapping his meaty hands around a bony neck. “My first reaction,” McDaniel said, “was I wasn’t going to take any crap from him.”

  Cooper stepped in and separated the two, though the bad blood had only just begun. After the game, Riley praised Matthews’ toughness. His team played meekly in the 103–85 defeat, but the diminutive guard heeded his words. Why, the Lakers even went on a 22–4 run in the altercation’s aftermath. Asked about the skirmish, Riley snarled, “We should have done it earlier.”

  When reporters approached Matthews for comment, they presumed bygones were bygones. Though thought to be mildly insane, Matthews was also a warm and gregarious character who relished signing autographs and chatting with young fans. His smile was inviting, and teammates came to love him. Gordon Edes of the Los Angeles Times asked whether he was still upset over the fight.

  “I’ve got nothing to say,” Matthews said.

  OK, then . . .

  “Except,” Matthews continued, “that he’s a fucking faggot. And when he comes to L.A., he’s mine.”

  Uh, Wes. He’s a half foot taller than you are. He outweighs you by thirty-five pounds.

  “He should have been thrown out of the game for grabbing my neck,” Matthews said. “I can’t wait to play him again, because his bald head is mine.”

  Matthews was not laughing. Matthews was not kidding. Matthews knew he would one day cave in Xavier McDaniel’s skull with a brick. “He was a bum,” Matthews said years later. “He was a bum then, he’s a bum now. If he walked in where I was sitting right now, I’d bust him in his face. I’d just bust him.”

  David Stern, the NBA’s commissioner, watched the tape of the altercation and issued no fines. He expected the participants to move forward and forget the whole thing. Stern didn’t know Wes Matthews.

  One week after the Laker game, the Sonics traveled to New York to play the Knicks. According to Matthews, two friends from Bridgeport, Connecticut, visited Madison Square Garden to “chat” with McDaniel. They met him in a tunnel beneath the arena after shootaround and, Matthews said, told him that if he played, he would receive a post-game beating either at the arena or via a visit to the team’s hotel. “They called me later,” Matthews said, “and told me, ‘Yo, you don’t have to worry about X no more.’”

  “What’d you do?” Matthews said he asked.

  “Don’t worry,” he was told. “X might not even play tonight.”

  Several days later, Matthews was contacted by the NBA. “I was fined ten thousand dollars for threatening another player,” he said. “I said, ‘What are you talking about? I’m in L.A. I didn’t threaten nobody.’ They didn’t believe me.”

  Is Matthews’ account truthful? Hard to say. McDaniel never spoke of the incident. A durable player, he missed but four games that season.

  One was against the Knicks.

  • • •

  As the Lakers cruised through yet another regular season, a new threat was emerging in the East. Though nothing was officially written, the Boston Celtics were no longer the class of the region or the concern of Los Angeles fans. Larry Bird and Co. would go on to win 57 games and reach the conference finals, but an element of past dominance had vanished. A small part of this was due to the listless way they fell to the Lakers in the ’87 Finals. A big part of this was due to the rise of a new breed.

  The Detroit Pistons were, after years of steady improvement, on the verge of arriving. Or, in the opinion of many NBA players, on the verge of establishing the league’s first thug academy. Under the guidance of Jack McCloskey, the team’s widely respected general manager and a former Lakers assistant, the Pistons had constructed a deep and talented roster. Detroit specialized in taking cast-offs from elsewhere and—with coach Chuck Daly’s Zen-like tutelage—cobbling the pieces into a cohesive unit. The team’s starting center, Bill Laimbeer (who Tony Kornheiser of The Washington Post once nicknamed Bill “Would It Be Terribly Inconvenient if I Jammed My Fist Into Your Kidney on This Possession” Laimbeer), had been an underwhelming goon with Cleveland before the Pistons got him for a package of players and picks. Power forward Rick Mahorn played five relatively nondescript years in Washington when the Bullets happily dealt him for Dan Roundfield. From shooting guard Vinnie Johnson (acquired from Seattle for Greg Kelser) to backup center James Edwards (nabbed from the Suns for forward Ron Moore and a pick) to Joe Dumars, a first-round pick out of McNeese State two years earlier who had yet to distinguish himself, the Pistons roster was a Who’s Who of Who’s That?

  With one notable exception. When Detroit used the second overall spot in the 1981 NBA Draft to select an Indiana University sophomore guard named Isiah Thomas, it wasn’t merely adding a quick, instinctive court general from Chicago’s rough-and-tumble West Side. No, in Thomas, the Pistons were getting their very own gnat. Were Thomas a teammate, you loved him. Were Thomas an opponent, you wanted to hurt him. Blessed with the fastest first step anyone had ever seen, Thomas’s ball-handling ability was straight from the Pete Maravich playbook. Coming out of college, Thomas was compared by Sports Illustrated’s William F. Reed to a certain Laker, noting that, “When Isiah Thomas smiles, when his eyes light up and his teeth flash and those huge dimples appear, you can’t help but think of the last sophomore guard who took a Big Ten team to the NCAA basketball championship—Earvin (Magic) Johnson.”

  Yet in his first six seasons, Thomas’s on-court excellence (20.7 points, 10.2 assists per game) was coupled by the mounting reputation as an arrogant, me-first fraud, one who smiled for the cameras and fans but would steal your wallet or break your heart if it helped his cause. He was, in professional wrestling speak, the heel, jabbing your ribs, kicking your shins, wrapping his hand around your wrist in a fight for a rebound. In public, he played the cuddly teddy bear. On the hardwood, he was Roddy Piper.

  Just as the Lakers fed off of Johnson, the Pistons absorbed Thomas’s demeanor. What they lacked in the transcendent skill of a James Worthy or Byron Scott, they made up for with borderline-criminal play. It was Mahorn, a 6-foot-10, 240-pound bus, who said that a physical game for the Pistons was when every opponent was bleeding from the mouth. “The way I saw it, we would be like the old Oakland Raiders,” Thomas once wrote. “They had all the characters on their team, they were a bunch of misfit guys just grouped together. That’s the same portrait that had been painted of our team: a bunch of crazies all assembled on one basketball team. The implication was that none of us really belonged, that our locker room was a padded cell, and that Chuck Daly was coaching in an insane asylum.”

  Together, Thomas and his teammates lifted a line from Scarface, the beloved Al Pacino film, and adopted it as their own—“Say hello to the bad guy, because you’ll never see another bad guy like me.” The words served as a rallying cry for thuggery and aggressiveness. “Toughest team I’ve ever seen,” said Chuck Nevitt, the former Laker center who spent a brief spell with the Pistons. “They wouldn’t take anything from anyone.”

  Although Thomas was among the NBA’s least-liked players, Johnson loved him. The two first me
t in 1979, introduced by Mark Aguirre, a mutual friend who, at the time, was starring at DePaul University. They bonded over the game they owned and the desire to play at the highest level. When Thomas declared eligible for the NBA Draft, Johnson invited him to his home in Lansing, Michigan, to train. Through the years, whenever he visited Los Angeles, Thomas stayed in Johnson’s house, in quarters referred to as the Isiah Room. (When people would ask about the spare bedroom, Johnson would say, “Oh, that’s Isiah’s.”) The stars would dine the night before a game, laughing about old times. In the off-seasons, Thomas, Johnson and Aguirre took twice-a-summer Hawaiian vacations together—one to relax with wives/girlfriends, the other to train on the sandy beaches. The three men would also annually rent a bus in Detroit and travel to Sandusky, Ohio, home of the Cedar Point amusement park. “Every time Detroit lost in the East, Isiah would come out to Los Angeles,” said Gary Vitti, the Lakers trainer. “And Magic would let Isiah come into the locker room and training room and show him all the things it took to succeed. Isiah absorbed it.”

  Johnson had heard all the Isiah bashing through the years, and he passionately defended his friend. “You don’t understand,” he said on multiple occasions. “Inside, Isiah is a beautiful soul. You just don’t understand. . . .”

  The dynamic shifted, however, with Detroit’s loss to Boston in the 1987 Eastern Conference Finals. Thomas had helped blow the series with an errant inbounds pass that was intercepted by Larry Bird at the end of Game 5. After the Celtics wrapped things up two games later, the Pistons—led by Thomas—behaved as infants. Dennis Rodman, the team’s rookie power forward, suggested that Bird was vastly overrated. Then, in a moment that would forever scar his career, Thomas was asked what he thought of his teammate’s assessment. “Larry Bird is a very good player,” Thomas said. “An exceptional talent. But I’d have to agree with Rodman that if he were black, he’d be just another good guy.”