On the night before Game 7, Thomas held a press conference at the hotel to tell seventy-five assembled reporters that his ankle was awful and terrible and ready for the blender. He arrived on crutches and answered an initial inquiry with “It’s pretty fucked up, I can tell you that.” There were some who, knowing Thomas’s reputation as a con man, dismissed the media session as mere show. Gamesmanship had been a Thomas specialty through the years. Perhaps he wasn’t as hurt as it’d seemed. Perhaps he would perform with the same explosiveness the Lakers had grown accustomed to.
Or, perhaps not. The early narrative of Game 7 belonged to Thomas, who approached the court with a determined gait but a devastated body. The pain, he later admitted, was unlike any he had ever felt. Just standing, just walking. That he somehow played twenty-eight minutes remains one of the more remarkable physical feats in NBA lore. That he limped his way toward 10 points and 7 assists is even more astonishing.
Detroit led 57–52 at halftime, but during the break, Thomas unwisely removed his right Converse Weapon, and the ankle again ballooned. The Pistons were outscored 36–21 in the third period, and the Forum shook with anticipation of yet another crown. Detroit, though, made one last charge. With Thomas watching from the bench, Dumars hit an open jumper with 1:18 remaining to slice the Laker lead to 102–100. Johnson was immediately (and unwisely) fouled by Rodman, but made only one of two free throws, increasing the Los Angeles lead to three. Detroit called a time-out with 1:14 remaining. On the ensuing possession, Laimbeer—one of the NBA’s top-shooting big men—found himself wide open at the top of the three-point line. He took a pass from Vinnie Johnson and launched the shot. Up, up, up—clank. It bounced off the rim and, after a valiant chase, out of bounds. Moments later, Worthy lost the ball on a drive, but Rodman, a dreadful marksman outside of two feet, let loose a medium-range jumper that missed and was rebounded by Scott. (A nation of lip-reading viewers watched Daly mouth, “What the fuck is the matter with Rodman?”) The Laker guard hit two free throws with thirty seconds left, and the victory was secured.
Los Angeles 108
Detroit 105
“It was a nightmare to the very end,” Riley said afterward. “I kept saying, ‘Please don’t let this end in a nightmare.’ We were a great team trying to hold on.”
Worthy, named the series MVP, recorded the first triple-double of his career, finishing with 36 points, 16 rebounds and 10 assists. Though Campbell played but two games and fourteen minutes, he felt fulfilled. His scouting reports had been on point. He also was now the first man in basketball history to win CBA and NBA titles in the same season. “It’s nice to be the only one who can say that,” he said. “Gratifying.”
Afterward, as the Lakers doused one another in bubbly, the drained Pistons returned to their locker room in silence. Some players cried. Others were too tired to cry. The pain was indescribable. After about ten minutes, there was a soft knock on the door. When no one answered, Abdul-Jabbar, who averaged 13.1 points, sheepishly stuck his head through the crack, then entered. He had just endured seven days of abuse courtesy of Laimbeer, Mahorn, Edwards and Rodman. Now he went man to man, shaking each hand.
It was the classiest act many of the Pistons had ever seen.
CHAPTER 18
GOOD-BYE, CAP
In the modern history of the NBA, there has never been a more socially retarded superstar than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
This is, admittedly, harsh. It is also, admittedly, fair. His track record for mistreating people is epic, but not as intentional as one might believe. There is an Asperger’s-type quality to the longtime Laker, an inability to properly read people or situations. Such does not make Kareem Abdul-Jabbar a bad guy. It simply makes him an oft-clueless one.
However, that same lack of awareness could result in great entertainment value. On June 30, 1988, for example, the Los Angeles Lakers visited the White House to meet with President Ronald Reagan. It was old stuff for many of the veterans, who had taken this trip multiple times before and were no longer wowed by the Rose Garden or Oval Office. Abdul-Jabbar, however, was in his element. Josh Rosenfeld, the team’s public relations director, had nicknamed Abdul-Jabbar Cliff Claven after the know-it-all character from the TV show Cheers. “But unlike Cliff Claven,” Rosenfeld said, “you got the sense Kareem actually knew what he was talking about.”
As the Laker players were offered a guided White House tour, Abdul-Jabbar threw out one question after another. By the fourth or fifth room, the tour guide would ask, “Anything anyone wants to know?” while looking directly at the center. At one point, several Lakers noticed Abdul-Jabbar staring intently at a painting. Byron Scott nudged a teammate and whispered, “This is gonna be good.”
“Excuse me,” Abdul-Jabbar said.
“Yes,” the guide wearily replied.
“You said this painting was done in the nineteenth century?”
“That’s right,” he said.
Abdul-Jabbar returned his gaze to the piece of art.
“You’re certain?” he asked.
“Uh . . . yes,” the guide replied.
“I don’t know,” Abdul-Jabbar said. He pointed to a small detail, a certain style of footwear, perhaps—“Because these weren’t invented until 1908.”
Lakers players chuckled aloud. “I’ll get back to you on that,” the guide said. “Now, if we can move on . . .”
Abdul-Jabbar concluded his White House experience by shaking Reagan’s hand and telling him, firmly, that he disagreed with his policies and positions. The president smiled, but was surely happy to see the 7-foot-2 liberal exit the building.
As was, for the most part, the Lakers organization.
At long last, the strange, winding Kareem Abdul-Jabbar roller-coaster ride was nearing an end. The 1988–89 season would be his finale, and to suggest members of the Lakers were ready is no overstatement. In his fourteen years with the team, Abdul-Jabbar had won five titles and three MVP awards. He was the league’s all-time leading scorer, and perhaps the nation’s most recognizable figure. Yet trying to understand his moods and quirks and oddities was as simple as dressing a porcupine in a T-shirt.
From the moment the Lakers reported to training camp at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu (Buss had vacationed there for years, and aspired to make it a base for the team), the number one concern—from Johnson to Riley to Rosenfeld to Jerry West and Jerry Buss—was how to make Abdul-Jabbar’s farewell season productive, comfortable and seamless. This was no easy task. The man was forty-one, and uncertain what the future held. His former agent, Tom Collins, had allegedly robbed him of a large chunk of his fortune, leaving him anxious, uncomfortable and not especially well off. His relationship to his longtime girlfriend, Cheryl Pistono, recently ended. Buoyed by his enthusiastically received cameo in the 1980 film Airplane!, Abdul-Jabbar pondered a career in acting, seemingly unaware that his inability to emote might be a problem. There were dozens of investment opportunities (car dealerships, restaurants, etc.), but little that appealed to him. The best money around was the $3 million he would be paid by Buss for 1988–89. Once that ended . . . well, Abdul-Jabbar didn’t want to talk much about that.
“He reported . . . looking creaky,” wrote George Vecsey in The New York Times, “a step slower. The body forgetting what the mind knew.” There was hope—from Buss, at least—that somehow the warm Hawaii breeze and a tropical night or two might infuse some pep into the big man. For the other Lakers, life was but a dream. When they were inside Klum Gym, the tiny sweatbox of a building in the foothills of the Koolau Range on Oahu, the work was hard. Sprints. More sprints. Scrimmages. Riley was a taskmaster, and he demanded 100 percent effort for the four hours the players were together. “I’ll never forget my first practice with the Lakers,” said Mark McNamara, a journeyman center signed to be Abdul-Jabbar’s latest backup. “There was no air conditioning—which was the way Riley surely wanted it. Practice begins, and we st
art with something called the Easy Run Drills, and there’s nothing easy about it. You’re running around the outside of the court, and Magic leads. He paces. The whole time you have your hands over your head. You run down the length of the court, then slide along the baseline with your back to the court, then you run down backward, then slide, then run. It keeps getting faster and faster. Bill Bertka stood on the baseline, and as you went by, he’d throw you a medicine ball. Magic’s picking up the pace more and more. Then we did the drill—Laker Layups. They were these crazy drills where you have three lines, and you rotate, and the ball starts in the middle but moves around, and you’re sprinting from corner to corner. I mean—brutal. More than brutal. It goes on and on and on and on. I had to say to myself, ‘I’ve never quit a drill in my career and I won’t now.’ But I’d never poured out so much sweat, ever.”
Once the session ended, however, Hawaii belonged to the Lakers. The food. The women. The weather. Players would lounge by the beach, or by the pool, then spend nights out at the hottest bars and clubs. Even here, 2,560 miles away from Los Angeles, the players were kings. “Oh, Hawaii was amazing,” said Tony Campbell. “You felt like basketball royalty. We’d have team dinners, we’d tour the sites, we’d go to the beach, get on a boat or a raft. It was just another reminder that you were with the first-class organization.”
Yet Abdul-Jabbar wasn’t part of the crowd. When he signed his final contract shortly before the 1987–88 season, it was stipulated that he had to practice only once during two-a-day drills in training camp. Riley struggled with the idea, and insisted the center show up for the second session, even if he were to merely sit and watch. Abdul-Jabbar was not pleased. His Hawaii time was spent at practice, then eating at a Thai restaurant, then reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Generation of Swine at the team hotel, then at practice, then more of the same. He had nearly two decades on several teammates, and struggled to relate. “All the guys who broke in with me are now gone,” he wrote in a diary he kept during the season. “I can remember, very keenly, being a rookie and wondering what guys did after playing professional ball. . . .”
On the first night in Hawaii, the team congregated in a private room at the hotel for the official welcoming dinner. Though the core stars remained, three familiar faces were no longer part of the team. Billy Thompson, the absentminded former first-round pick, had been taken by the Miami Heat in the expansion draft. (“Once I left,” Thompson memorably said, “it was hard for them to keep winning.”) Kurt Rambis, the beloved power forward whose playing time went to A. C. Green, was now a Charlotte Hornet. And Wes Matthews, insanity personified, wasn’t offered a new contract. (He would spend much of the year with the CBA’s Tulsa Fast Breakers.) After everyone arrived, West stood, tapped his glass with a fork and asked for attention. “This is Cap’s last year,” he said, and his voice cracked. West gathered himself, and paid homage to the most remarkable career in NBA history. He described a player who changed the league; a player unafraid to stand up for righteousness; a player who altered the trajectory of the Los Angeles Lakers. It was a beautiful moment—whether the players liked Abdul-Jabbar or not, they were sitting alongside a legend. At the start of every season, Riley picked the team’s theme song. This year it would be the Shirelles’ “Dedicated to the One I Love”—in honor of Abdul-Jabbar.
That said, everything was now complicated. Two years earlier, when Julius Erving played his final season with the Philadelphia 76ers, the NBA and its twenty-three teams spared no expense honoring the man known as Dr. J. His arrival in rival cities was celebrated as if a reigning king were in town, and rightly so. Few players had ever been so revered.
Abdul-Jabbar, however, was not revered. He had spared no city’s fans in refusing autograph requests; rarely made quality time for road reporters; never met an opposing center he hadn’t hit in the larynx with an elbow. “Nobody liked him, because he’s an asshole,” said Danny Schayes, the Denver Nuggets center. “He did the retirement tour right on the heels of Dr. J’s. When he came to Denver, Julius couldn’t have been more gracious—he talked about what a great ABA city it had been, how he would have loved to have played for us. Well, Kareem comes and no one on our team wants to do the ceremony. Not one guy. We gave him a ski trip to Vail as a present and we all hoped he would break his leg.
“Kareem instilled venom in people. Not indifference—venom. He once wrote a book, and when he came through Denver to promote it, none of the local reporters gave him the time of day. It was, ‘Fuck you. You never gave us any help in fifteen years and now you want a blowjob? No fucking way.’”
This is what the Lakers had to deal with—a faded superstar with a large ego wanting to be feted, a public and league largely indifferent. Save New York (where Abdul-Jabbar had been born and raised) and Los Angeles, the nation’s passion for Kareem could be surmised with a stifled yawn. Yes, he had been a transcendental player, and when he came to town, fans showed up to watch. Yet the man who once desired privacy over all else now possessed an inexplicable need for a last hurrah. He signed on as a sneaker pitchman with a second-rate apparel company named LA Gear. He agreed to a deal with Warner Books to keep a season-long diary. He told Rosenfeld that he would conduct a press conference wherever the team went. “When you think about it, anybody would be overwhelmed with the idea of arena after arena full of people honoring you,” Lorin Pullman, Abdul-Jabbar’s personal assistant, said at the time. “It’s overwhelming for anybody. Knowing him, he’s never been one to look for all that. Kareem’s very touched, that’s my feeling. He’s very flattered. Every time I tell him about another ceremony or another honor, he’s like, ‘My goodness.’”
The Lakers and the NBA spent much of the pre-season making certain everyone was on board. This couldn’t be a halfway effort, where some teams presented him with cars and vacation packages while other teams treated him like a bag stuffed with dead cats. New Jersey governor Thomas Kean agreed to hold a day in his honor. New York arranged for a ceremony involving old high school teammates. The Washington Bullets decided to give him a jukebox, the Milwaukee Bucks a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, the Mavericks a Verdite sculpture of an elephant and the Spurs a self-portrait and a $10,000 check to be used for two charities. It was nice and lovely and terribly uncomfortable. Read an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Everyone is trying to keep up with the Joneses when it comes to saying goodbye, and there’s more than a little awkwardness in the whole situation. It’s as if people are embarrassed that they don’t know him better after twenty years in the NBA, an unprecedented six MVP awards and more than 38,000 points. ‘Your Texas hospitality has been warm and generous,’ Abdul-Jabbar said at the presentation. ‘You don’t play around with your feelings, you let them show.’ Ah, if only the same could have been said of Abdul-Jabbar throughout the years.”
Far worse than the farewells was that Abdul-Jabbar wasn’t faring particularly well. Were he a so-so NBA player in 1987–88, he was now nothing short of a bad one. The Lakers could see it in camp, when he either sat to the side during drills and scrimmages or had his lunch served to him by McNamara.
Once the regular season began, his fall-off was even more notable. Abdul-Jabbar’s NBA-record 787-game double-figure scoring streak was snapped during the 1987–88 campaign, and now he could barely find the bucket. In one embarrassing episode, Johnson waved Abdul-Jabbar out of the post—a first in their decade together. Riley immediately called a time-out and, looking squarely at his point guard, said, “I don’t ever want you to do that again.” Yet Riley, too, was frustrated, and regularly pleaded to Rosenfeld—the on-again, off-again buffer between West and him—“Where’s my big man?” Through the Lakers’ first eight games, Abdul-Jabbar scored in double figures one time. Following a 106–97 road loss to the dreadful Sacramento Kings, in which he totaled 4 points and 3 rebounds in seventeen minutes, Abdul-Jabbar approached Johnson in the shower and asked, “Buck, what’s wrong with me?”
“Cap,” Johnson replied, �
��you just ain’t been aggressive. You’re not hungry like you used to be. You’re not attacking. You don’t go after the ball. You don’t go after your shot. You’re not yourself.”
The media criticism was harsh. Bill Conlin, the Philadelphia Daily News’s well-known columnist, called Abdul-Jabbar “worthless, totally worthless . . . a zero on defense, like a barber pole.” Mike Lupica of New York’s Daily News was only slightly less harsh. “This guy,” he wrote, “has stayed too long at the dance.” The public criticism was even worse. Abdul-Jabbar had often been heckled on the road. Now, however, crowds at the Forum were losing patience. There were smatterings of boos and, even worse, modest applause when he retreated to the bench. Against the Houston Rockets on January 16, Abdul-Jabbar scored on a skyhook over Akeem Olajuwon to open the game. Moments later, Olajuwon posted, received a pass and wheeled around Abdul-Jabbar for a layup. “Quit while you’re even!” a courtsider screamed.
When interviewed, Riley expressed his support for the big man. In private, he was feeling the strain of having a 7-foot-2 anchor pulling his team toward the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Though Los Angeles led the division for most of the season, nothing came easily. Through thirty-three games, the Lakers were 13-0 at home and 9-11 on the road. Riley was forced to call a meeting with his players to silence their internal griping over who should—and shouldn’t—be starting at center. “I want to make it clear right now,” Riley said. “This is our team. Kareem’s on it. He’s here. He’s gonna stay here. He’s still a force, and I believe in him. The guy has carried us for fourteen years. Fourteen years! We’re all wearing rings because of him. The way I figure it, we’ve gotta back him up. We owe him that. We owe him respect.” Shortly thereafter, during a shootaround before a game against the visiting Cavaliers, Riley told Abdul-Jabbar that, were he to continue to stink, he would be benched midway through the glorious farewell tour. At the time, he ranked twenty-third among NBA centers in rebounding and reached double figures in scoring just ten times in twenty-seven games.
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 44