Thomas later insisted he was speaking in jest, and begged detractors to listen to the audio tape. Indeed, his words were followed by a slight chuckle. “Anyone who knows me well,” he told Brent Musburger, “knows I tease a lot.” Johnson knew Thomas well. Johnson knew Thomas teased a lot. Johnson did not find the line funny. On the day after the comments, with the backlash mounting, John Black, who worked in the Lakers’ media relations office, called Johnson. “Your boy Isiah has done it,” Black said. “What do you want me to tell people?”
“Leave me out of it,” Johnson replied.
Throughout their careers, Johnson and Thomas had always been there for each other. When Johnson sat inconsolable in a Boston hotel room after the 1984 Finals, Thomas arrived to comfort him. When Thomas’s pass was intercepted by Bird, Johnson was immediately on the phone. Yet while the two considered themselves tight, what Johnson felt for Bird was more profound. They weren’t especially close, and spoke only on occasion. Yet they were fused by brotherhood. Instead of phoning Thomas, Johnson found himself dialing Bird’s number. “Isiah doesn’t speak for me,” he told the Celtic.
“It doesn’t mean anything to me,” Bird said. “Really, I could care less.”
To Johnson, however, Thomas’s behavior drove a wedge in their relationship. He was no longer 100 percent certain what this man stood for. It was as if, with the words “If he were black . . . ,” Johnson was snapped out of a spell and forced to see the real Isiah Thomas.
On January 8, 1988, the Lakers traveled to Detroit bolstered by a 12-game winning streak and, at 23-6, the NBA’s best record. The Pistons’ 19-8 mark had them second in the Central Division. In the lead-up, Johnson insisted he and Thomas remained pals. No, they hadn’t seen each other in four months, and no, they didn’t talk quite so often, but, well, uh, eh, yeah.
Before the game, Riley reminded his players that the Pistons were similar in style to the Celtics—only dirtier. The NBA’s largest crowd of the season, 40,278 spectators, packed the Pontiac Silverdome, hoping to witness the first stage in a changing of the league’s power structure. “This,” Mychal Thompson said afterward, “was a preview of what World War III will look like.”
Thanks to Scott’s 35 points and a missed jumper from Laimbeer with two seconds remaining, Los Angeles—which trailed by 11 at the half—held on for a riveting 106–104 victory. The contest featured multiple technicals and a stream of vulgar trash talk. The most interesting exchange, though, came fifteen minutes after the final buzzer. A member of the Detroit scoring crew interrupted Riley’s session with the media to ask whether he harassed the referees at halftime in order to seek better calls. Not one to lose his temper before the cameras, the coach went ballistic. Just as he had suspected Red Auerbach of playing puppet master in the Boston Garden, he had little trust for the Pistons. “I’ve never gone to the officials’ room and fucking begged for anything in my life!” he growled. He edged closer to the inquisitor. “That is absolute bullshit,” he said. “Where did you come up with something like that? That came from your fucking asshole. That’s it. Period. We won this game, fair and square. It’s an absolute insult to ask me a question like that.” Riley stormed off and slammed the dressing room door behind him.
The outburst was, to a small degree, about the question. It also likely reflected a genuine fear manifesting within Riley. The Detroit Pistons were not only exceptionally good, but also exceptionally smart when it came to playing the Lakers. On too many occasions, the Celtics had caught themselves running up and down the court at breakneck speed, trying to match Showtime. It used to frustrate Bird, and he’d implore his teammates to calm themselves. Detroit, on the other hand, played a consistently steady pace. Their personnel were designed to bang and bruise, and the team stuck to the script.
When, five weeks later, the Pistons came to Los Angeles for a rematch, they again faced a juggernaut on a roll. The Lakers had won six straight games over eight exhausting days, including batterings of the Celtics (115–106) and Rockets (111–96) and a magnificent overtime road win against the high-flying Atlanta Hawks (126–119). “No team is this good,” Scott Ostler wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “So many things could happen to derail the Lakers. If Pat Riley runs for president, as suggested by actress Teri Garr on a recent David Letterman show in a flash of lucid inspiration, it might interfere with Riley’s concentration and adversely affect the Lakers’ delicate chemistry.”
As was the case in Michigan, the Pistons jumped out to an early lead, holding a 12-point advantage at halftime. Once again the game was bestial. Only a few days earlier Al Davis, owner of the Los Angeles Raiders, sent the Pistons a box filled with silver-and-black sweaters—a symbolic bonding of blood-and-bone franchises. Mark Heisler of the Times called Daly’s squad “basketball’s answer to a herd of stampeding rhinos.” He was dead-on.
“Nobody has attacked us that way in a long time,” a sweat-drenched Riley said after Los Angeles came back to snag a 117–110 triumph. “Nobody.” A moment from the first half perfectly encapsulated the new rivalry. Abdul-Jabbar connected on a hook shot in the lane as Laimbeer swatted him below the ear with a forearm. The Lakers captain pointed and growled, “Don’t hit me in the head.”
“Get out of my face,” Laimbeer replied, “and keep on playing.”
Though Thomas tallied 42 points and 10 assists, the Lakers remained a half step ahead. Worthy scored 24, Scott 23, Abdul-Jabbar 20 and Johnson added 19 points and 13 assists. Riley also turned to the one member of the team who seemed to know what it was to perform angrily. Wes Matthews, normally a deep reserve, had often been compared to Thomas when he starred collegiately at Wisconsin—and it always irked him. “Shit, I was a better player,” Matthews said. “We’d go head to head in college, and I never had problems with him. He couldn’t stop me.” Now, late in the game, Riley asked Matthews to guard Thomas. With thirty-eight seconds remaining and the Lakers up 112–110, Detroit’s star drove to the lane, where he was met by Thompson, Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar. The ball was knocked from his hands and retrieved by Matthews. He calmly sank two free throws to finish with 14 points and finish off Detroit.
“We all knew we’d see those guys again,” Matthews said. “It was a lock.”
• • •
Perhaps it was the Wes Matthews influence.
Perhaps it was the Detroit Pistons influence.
Perhaps it was the influence of an increasingly popular genre of music known as gangsta rap; the influence of the Raiders; the influence of violent movies and violent television programs and a coach who could scream his head off. Whatever the case, as the Lakers pieced together one of the best seasons in franchise history, life grew increasingly violent.
It began with the Wes Matthews-Xavier McDaniel scuffle, but didn’t end. There was the bench-clearing brawl at the Forum on January 22, during which Pat Cummings, the Knicks veteran forward, slapped A. C. Green across the face and, as punishment, was sucker-punched by a hard-charging Cooper. The two exchanged blows and tumbled over the courtside seats. “I knew I had to keep my head down,” Cummings recalled years later. “Because in a fight with Michael, I’d be the one to get knocked out.”
“The message has to be out that this stuff about ‘Beat the Lakers up and you beat the Lakers’ has no meaning,” Cooper said. “It’s bullshit and we won’t stand for it.”
The most eye-catching incident occurred on the afternoon of April 21, and involved Abdul-Jabbar, an Italian tourist, a Phoenix shopping mall and a ridiculously large video camera.
The season was going surprisingly well for the Lakers center, who averaged less than thirty minutes per game for the first time in his career and, as a result, felt fresh as the playoffs approached. He decided, after much debate, to put off retiring yet again, meaning Johnson, Cooper, Scott and Co. wouldn’t be all-out running anytime soon. “What people forget is that, even at forty and forty-one, Kareem was better than most centers,” said Bill Bertka
, the assistant coach. “No, he wasn’t what he was at twenty-five. But he was still good.”
In town to play the Suns in the penultimate game of the regular season, Abdul-Jabbar headed to the Metrocenter, a shopping mall within walking distance of the team’s hotel. While cruising from store to store, he noticed a bulky camcorder pointed in his direction. Abdul-Jabbar said he asked the man to stop taping, and—when the request was refused—pushed the device aside in order to pass. “I didn’t touch him,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “All I did was brush the camera out of my way. If he didn’t push the camera in my way, I probably wouldn’t have taken any notice of him. I was just in a hurry and didn’t feel like having the guy following me with a camera.”
Fernando Nicola, the forty-year-old owner of a chain of foreign language schools in Frosinone, Italy, saw things differently. In town visiting his brother, Christian, he told police he was videotaping the mall itself—“He thought it was just fabulous, and not like anything he had back home,” said Stephen Leshner, his attorney. “We watched the tape, and when Kareem walks by in the distance you can hear [Nicola] say, in Italian, ‘Look at that long black man.’” Nicola said Abdul-Jabbar aggressively charged forward. “He straight-armed the guy, knocked the camera into him and knocked the camera down,” Leshner said decades later. “I have nothing to gain from saying this—it was a long time ago. But it was obvious that Kareem was in the wrong here.”
Abdul-Jabbar and Nicola wound up settling out of court, but, for Leshner, the lasting memory had nothing to do with the amount. “I took Kareem’s deposition, and he was just an incredible jerk,” he said. “I used an office space in L.A., and Kareem told us no one in the building was allowed to talk to him, or even look at him. He was very specific—no eye contact allowed. Ever. By anyone.”
Abdul-Jabbar skipped all but eight minutes of the final two games (both victories), and Los Angeles completed a 62-20 season that marked the franchise’s fourth straight with at least 60 wins. They had survived an injury-plagued campaign during which Cooper and Johnson missed considerable time. They had endured the pressure of Riley’s guarantee and the inevitability of Abdul-Jabbar’s decline. When Sports Illustrated featured the entire Lakers roster on its April 18 cover, alongside the headline HOW GOOD?, the answer was obvious but unspoken: Really friggin’ good.
The Western Conference playoffs, presumed to be child’s play for the best team in basketball, were anything but. The Lakers swept the Spurs in the opening round, then struggled against Utah and Dallas, respectively, needing all seven games against both clubs. When his team finally vanquished the Mavericks, 117–102, in Game 7 at the Forum, a relieved Riley took a deep breath, stared down a bushel of microphones and displayed all the modesty of Napoleon.
“We’ve got a chance of being the greatest team ever,” he said. “I really do believe that. Whether people want to believe me or not, whether they think I’m crazy or not, we now have a chance to be something very special.”
A mere 2,283 miles away, members of the Detroit Pistons had gathered at the team’s practice facility to see who they would be meeting in the NBA Finals. One day earlier, they had eliminated the Celtics in a gutsy Game 6, and their collective confidence was as high as it’d ever been.
“It is,” said Thomas, “our time.”
CHAPTER 17
MOTOWN
In the early months of 1988, Tony Campbell was—without much debate—the happiest professional basketball player to not be on an NBA roster.
For three years, he had been a guard with the Detroit Pistons, the team that selected him out of Ohio State with the twentieth overall pick in the 1984 NBA Draft. It was supposed to be a wonderful time for the kid from Teaneck, New Jersey, who was raised by a single mother and dreamed of one day becoming a prime-time baller. Yet life at the top wasn’t all it was chalked up to be. Campbell entered the league having averaged 18.6 points per game as a senior with the Buckeyes, and on draft night Lou Carnesecca, the St. John’s coach who was helping with USA Network’s coverage, raved. “I think the Detroit team is the team of the future,” he said. “Tony Campbell is an excellent scorer. He’s aggressive—he can shoot well, can run well, can rebound.”
Campbell, however, was never given much of a chance. Chuck Daly, the Pistons coach, found his defense to be lacking and his shot-selection to be dreadful, and Campbell was relegated to the deepest depths of the bench. When he played, he played moderately well. But the opportunities were scarce. “It was disappointing,” he said. “The whole experience put a very bad taste in my mouth.”
As a result, when the Pistons let him walk after the 1986–87 season, Campbell felt an odd sense of relief. He attended training camp with the Washington Bullets, played six pre-season games, broke his nose and failed to make the team, then signed with the Albany Patroons of the Continental Basketball Association. It was there, in the last spot he ever wanted to be, that Tony Campbell rediscovered his mojo. “I thought I’d be miserable,” he said, “but it was just the opposite.” To his great surprise, Campbell loved everything about the Albany experience. The Patroons played in the Washington Avenue Armory, and regularly filled all 3,500 seats. Though the team certainly wouldn’t compete in the upper echelons of the NBA, its roster was loaded with players (Campbell, Sidney Lowe, Rick Carlisle, Tod Murphy, Scott Brooks) who would one day contribute in the league. “We were all very tight,” said Murphy. “Tony was a dominant scorer in Albany, on a team that owned the CBA. He was probably the best player there. He also happened to be a great guy.”
Campbell was so enamored of Albany that, as NBA teams began to call with contract offers, he turned them down. The last thing he wanted to do was surrender a good thing (Campbell earned four thousand dollars per month in Albany, was granted a free hotel suite and paid only for food) for a ten-day deal in Cleveland or Atlanta. Even when Mitch Kupchak, the Lakers assistant general manager, reached out in March, Campbell was dismissive. “We have a ten-day contract waiting for you. . . .” Kupchak said.
“No,” replied Campbell. “I can’t do that.”
One week later, Kupchak tried again. “We’re fighting for another NBA championship,” he said. “You’re in the CBA. We have a ten-day deal with your name. . . .”
“Sorry,” Campbell said. “I can’t do that.”
Finally, in late March, Jerry West called—this time with an offer Campbell couldn’t refuse. Billy Thompson, Los Angeles’s scatterbrained forward, was placed on the injured list with a knee problem, and the team needed a replacement. Should Campbell come to the Forum, he would be handed a guaranteed contract for the remainder of the season, as well as the following year. “If Jerry West calls, you listen,” Campbell said. “Jerry West called. I listened.”
On March 30, Campbell officially became a Laker. When he arrived for his first day of practice, he anticipated the same standoffishness that had been a trademark of the moody Pistons. “Instead, everyone treated me as if I’d been there for ten years,” he said. “It freaked me out, because that wasn’t the way I’d seen things in the past.” Campbell did not play a big role for the team. He appeared in thirteen regular-season games, started once and scored 28 points in a meaningless matchup with the Warriors. Mostly, he sat alongside Mike Smrek, Milt Wagner and Wes Matthews on the bench, clapping and drinking water. “My job was limited,” he said. “But I was happy.”
When the Lakers and Pistons were cemented as the finals matchup, Campbell rose from spare part to CIA informant. Although Johnson knew Thomas the person, Campbell knew Thomas’s game. He’d practiced against him for three years, understood his strengths and weaknesses, how he thought while looking over a defense and what rattled him. The same went for Joe Dumars, Detroit’s young shooting guard. And Adrian Dantley, the veteran forward. Campbell could write a five-hundred-page dissertation on the Pistons. “The main thing was defense,” he said. “When I was there, Chuck incorporated a system that emphasized tough defense over all el
se. I knew it, I understood it. That doesn’t mean I could make a difference between winning and losing. But I definitely had insight.”
In the three days between the win against Dallas and the June 7 opener against the Pistons at the Forum, Campbell was as much coach as player. He filled Cooper’s head with a man-by-man breakdown, and advised Abdul-Jabbar on all of Laimbeer’s tricks and gimmicks. He warned against Mahorn and Rodman, who reveled in dirtiness. By the time the two teams dug in for the opening tip-off, the Lakers—heavily favored by nearly all prognosticators—felt as ready as they’d ever been for any finals series.
Glub.
Perhaps Riley should have seen this coming. As Jack McCallum noted in Sports Illustrated, the Lakers “have looked a little faded in recent weeks, often seeming to show up in pallid lavender and yellow rather than regal purple and gold.” They had struggled against the Jazz, then against the Mavericks. Many of the key players (Johnson, Cooper, Worthy) were battling nagging injuries, and Johnson was fighting off early signs of the flu. He was experiencing mild fever and sweats, but kept details out of the media—no need to give the Pistons an extra incentive to forearm his ribs.
Meanwhile, Detroit entered the series on a high. It was the franchise’s first appearance in the NBA Finals since relocating from Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1957, and any expected pressure or nervousness proved nonexistent. As they sat in the Forum’s visiting locker room before the opening game, Thomas and Dumars talked feelings.
“Are you even remotely nervous?” Thomas asked Dumars.
“Nope,” he said. “You?”
“Not even a little,” Thomas replied. “Zero.”
“I said to Isiah, ‘I wonder how you’re supposed to feel,’” Dumars said. “Maybe it was good that we didn’t know.”
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 42