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

by Pearlman, Jeff

  West, however, was the lone dissenter. The men entered the restaurant, sat down, ordered their meals. When West’s steak arrived, it was undercooked. “This isn’t right,” he told the waiter. “Can you take it back and cook it some more?” The server shuffled off, and West urged the others to eat. His steak returned five minutes later, now overcooked. “Mr. West,” the waiter asked, “is it OK?”

  “Goddamn it,” West said, “it’s overcooked. The steak is overcooked.”

  “Oh, my,” the waiter replied, “let me get you another one.”

  “No, no, no,” West said. “I don’t want another one.”

  “Please, Mr. West . . .”

  “No, really,” he said. “I don’t want another one. I’m not even hungry now.”

  A moment later, the manager arrived at the table. “Mr. West, I’m so sorry,” he said. “Please let us make you another one. We’ll comp you it.”

  West had had enough. “I told the waiter I don’t want another one,” he said. “I don’t want another one, and I don’t want you to comp it. Keep it on the bill.”

  “But, Mr. West, we could never charge you for—”

  “I said keep it on the bill,” he said. “I want you to charge me for it.”

  The attendees laughed hysterically, and went around the table asking one another about their steaks. “Mine’s great—how about yours?”

  “Oh, fantastic! Yours?”

  “Amazing! Best steak I’ve ever had!”

  “So the meal ends, and we’re brought the check,” said Black. “And Jerry always picked up the tab—always. And we’re standing there waiting for the car at valet parking. And he looks down at the check and he says, ‘Can you believe the nerve of those motherfuckers? They charged me for the goddamned steak!’ When I tell you tears were rolling down my face, it’s no exaggeration.

  “But that was Jerry. He was crass and hard, but giving and funny. He knows that he’s a celebrity, but he fights not wanting to be one. He just wants to be a regular guy. People would approach him all the time for autographs and he’d say, ‘Really, I’m nothing special.’ That wasn’t false modesty—it’s how he felt. Ordinary.”

  Immediately after the Lakers cut Jamaal Wilkes in 1985, West choked up during a televised interview and excused himself. Josh Rosenfeld found him in the men’s room, crying. “I guess,” West said, “you’re seeing a side of me few people see. My wife works with Jamaal’s, and he’s going to have to go home tonight and tell her he lost his job.” When Kurt Rambis left for Charlotte in 1988, West was heartbroken. When Abdul-Jabbar finally retired, he felt as if he had retired, too. When Rosenfeld was stressed and overworked during his final summer with the team, West entered his office with an order. “I’m sending you to Hawaii for a week,” he said. “Tell Jerry Buss you’re going there to make training camp preparations. Just go over, relax, have fun, get laid. I’ve taken care of the arrangements.”

  West wanted his coach to display similar empathy, to recall what it was to be a player and take some weight off the accelerator. Yet Riley refused. Or, perhaps, simply couldn’t. “Ego killed the old Pat,” said Scott Carmichael, who ran the Lakers’ speakers bureau. “The same guy who used to laugh and joke would pass you in the hallway and no longer say hello. There were many times I loathed him.” Riley was obsessed with winning at all costs and, perhaps, obsessed at proving he could win without depending upon a 7-foot-2 iconic center. Before long, his yelling, berating, screaming ways had worn down the entire team. This included his final defender—Johnson. “Riles changed,” Johnson said. “With that much success and what was coming to him off the court, yeah, you have to change. He changed, but so did we. He became a coach. Yeah, it happened. He became a coach and he thought his way was the way.

  “He wore his losses. I’m a guy who took mine home. I’d turn off all the lights—where he wore his on his face. And you knew what was coming. Some mornings at airports, he didn’t speak to anybody. I don’t think he could bring himself to say anything. And we knew all hell’s gonna break loose at practice.”

  Riley and his players were no longer on the same page. There was open hostility and decaying trust. If the team had any hope of succeeding, it needed an ice breaker; a distraction; a cuddly plush toy.

  It needed Vlade Divac.

  • • •

  He was an uncommon draft choice and an uncommon Laker. For the first time in his seven years as a general manager, West gave the green light to spend a first-round pick on a player he had never before met or seen in person. This, of course, caused the man great discomfort. West was a creature of habit and a slave to order. Using the twenty-sixth selection in the 1989 NBA Draft—then surrendering big money—to a shadow figure from a bunch of grainy game tapes wasn’t exactly comfortable. Especially when all he really hoped for was solid frontcourt depth.

  The University of Missouri had set forth toward the pros a senior center, Gary Leonard, who seemed to perfectly suit the team’s needs. He stood 7-foot-1, and possessed the requisite skills to ably serve as an OK yet unspectacular backup lug for the next half decade. When West asked his top scouts—Ronnie Lester and Gene Tormohlen—whether the team should go with Leonard or this Yugoslavian Divac person, both picked the safety of the known American. Mitch Kupchak, the assistant general manager, agreed. “I told Jerry I was scared,” Tormohlen said. “The bottom line is, if every team knew how good Vlade Divac was, why was he still there [late in the Draft]?”

  But how could West allow himself to pass on this one? The Lakers were stuck in the Land of Center Abyss—Abdul-Jabbar retired, Mychal Thompson aging, Mark McNamara not especially good. The world wasn’t exactly crawling with athletic giants, especially twenty-one-year-old 7-foot-1 centers with pillow-soft hands and a ballerina’s footwork (who, by the way, had just started on the silver medal–winning Yugoslav Olympic team). Sure, no one with the Lakers had actually witnessed Divac on a court. And, OK, it was a bit alarming to watch a projected Top 15 pick slip down, down, down the board, beneath such future luminaries as Jeff Sanders and Anthony Cook. And, eh, yeah, he did have that little Yugoslavian military commitment thing hanging over him.

  With five minutes remaining before the Lakers had to submit their selection, West called Jerry Buss, who was vacationing in Hawaii. “Early on with the Lakers, I made a strong suggestion about a draft choice in the first round,” Buss said, referring to the Brad Holland disaster. “It was the last time I stepped out of line. So when [Jerry] told me about this seven-foot Yugoslavian and said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘Go ahead. In our position, we should gamble.’”

  Los Angeles gambled.

  Decked out in the only suit he owned (“I came to this country wearing jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers,” he said. “I went to pick up a suit, but you can’t pick up a seven-foot suit just like that. So I was looking not good”), Divac sat inside Madison Square Garden, waiting for someone to call his strange name. “They told me I would go pretty high,” he said. “So I was very disappointed. Then the Lakers picked me and I was like, ‘Wow! It can be no better!’”

  A native of Belgrade and the small Serbian town of Prijepolje, Divac left his parents when he was twelve so he could play basketball for a cadet team, KK Partizan, 114 miles away in Kraljevo. Four years later, he was 6-foot-9 and excelling at his nation’s highest professional level. By seventeen, he led the Yugoslav Junior Olympic team to a gold medal at the World University Games. By twenty, he was an Olympian and the pride of a sports-infatuated people. His July 1, 1989, wedding was televised nationally.

  Yet throughout his rise, Divac feared for Yugoslavia, which sat on the threshold of civil war. He didn’t know who to trust and who not to trust, what was safe and what wasn’t. He played basketball with national pride, but wasn’t always certain what that even meant. Yugoslavia was about to be torn asunder and here he was, a Serbian, playing alongside his best friends who, as Croatians, were morp
hing into enemies. “It was all very confusing and difficult,” he said. “And then I was handed a dream. . . .”

  West arranged for Divac’s military obligation to (poof!) be deferred, paid his old club (Partizan) a fee for his rights, and—like that—he was a Laker. He agreed to a three-year contract on August 7 and, along with his new wife, Snezana, was immediately enrolled in daily two-and-a-half-hour English courses to learn a language he neither spoke nor understood. Divac was presented with a home in Marina del Rey, a car and a sixty-nine-year-old interpreter named Alex Omalev (the former head basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton and the language coordinator for basketball venues during the L.A. Olympics in 1984) to tell him the difference between a haircut and a hedgehog. When he was assigned uniform number 12, reporters asked if it was a homage to Riley, who wore the number during his career. “Yes,” said Divac—and the media carried the story. “Truthfully, I had no idea,” he said years later. “That was my number as a kid.”

  Readers of the Los Angeles newspapers were frequently reminded that the name was pronounced VLAH-day Dee-VATZ-ay, and West and the Lakers did everything they could to lower expectations. Divac, they made clear, wasn’t here to replace Abdul-Jabbar or fight Thompson for a job or even contribute much. He was young and inexperienced, and—with good fortune—might one day develop into a player.

  On August 8, he joined the Lakers’ team in the Summer Pro League.

  He was a player.

  Facing real competition for the first time since June’s European Championships, Divac dominated a Denver-Sacramento hybrid team with 20 points, 18 rebounds and 3 blocked shots in a 125–121 win at Loyola Marymount’s gymnasium. For Riley, who watched from the stands, the sight was surreal: Divac, inexplicably donning a number 32 singlet, oftentimes ignoring his team’s guards, gathering rebounds, dribbling down the court and either dishing or driving. The five hundred fans in attendance oohed collectively when he shoveled a no-look pass to Eric McLaughlin, a rookie free agent out of Akron. Afterward, Riley reached for Divac’s hand and called him “Big Magic.”

  “His passing skills surprised me,” Riley said. “The fact that he can handle the ball means we have to change some things. We have to play around his skills.”

  Divac met up with his new teammates in Hawaii, and he was relatively unchanged. His English remained dreadful (tucked in Riley’s pocket was a list of thirty common basketball terms written in Serbo-Croatian), his concern for his homeland painfully real. Expectations were as low as they could be—in the era before the European influx, foreign players were presumed to be soft and unathletic. When the veteran Lakers saw Divac, they could barely contain their chuckles. He was gangly and pale and walked with a slight hiccup to his step. With his scratchy dark beard and arched eyebrows, he looked to be a cross between Yakov Smirnoff, the Russian comedian, and Raffi, the Egyptian-born Canadian children’s singer. He chain-smoked cigarettes and chugged Coca-Colas as if they were glasses of water. In restaurants, he ordered hamburgers—a word he grasped.

  “Everyone stopped laughing at him as soon as they played him,” said Jim Eyen, a first-year assistant coach. “I think guys were shocked by how good he was. He’s six-foot-ten and doing guard drills. He’s dribbling with both hands. Some guys with that length and passing ability might be light in the ass and won’t play low. Well, Vlade could guard in the post and do it big and strong. He combined physicality and mobility.” Divac shot with either hand, and his funky low-post moves were a little bit James Worthy, a little bit A. C. Green. Though nobody dared say so aloud, Divac was already superior to Thompson, the twelve-year veteran.

  For Los Angeles players, Divac was a Godiva gift basket. First, he became the perfect distraction. Whenever he ran the wrong way, or bungled a play, or failed to pass to a guard, Riley went berserk. If the coach was busy teeing off on the rookie, he wasn’t teeing off on them. Second, he was goofiness personified. Divac mangled words and phrases and paragraphs, but never seemed deterred. He would explain the plots of movies like Field of Dreams or Dead Poets Society and have onlookers rolling on the floor. “There is this man, you see, and he has this hat. . . .”

  Once, someone asked Divac to try and tell a joke in English. “Did you hear of baby in Belgrade,” he said, “born with more eyes than teeth?”

  Tap tap. Is this thing on?

  “We had a flight during training camp,” said McNamara, the backup center. “I’m sleeping and all of a sudden Bill Bertka screams, ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ He smelled a cigarette. It was Vlade, smoking in the bathroom. A federal offense. Everyone laughed.”

  “As a trainer, his smoking shocked me,” said Gary Vitti. “I told him how stupid it was. We once even got a bill from a hotel for smoking in a room. I screamed at him—‘Vlade, $250 for smoking in a room!’ He told me it was my fault.”

  “How is that my fault?” Vitti asked.

  “Why,” replied Divac, “did you put me in a nonsmoking room?”

  Because he had spent a spell playing professionally in Italy, McNamara communicated with Divac via broken Italian. They bonded, and before long Riley would turn to McNamara and ask him to explain a concept to his new teammate. “After I made the team, Riley told me, ‘Don’t think we didn’t notice how willing you were to help a guy fighting for your job,’” McNamara said. “That meant a lot.”

  Conveniently, Divac always understood compliments but rarely grasped criticisms. He seemed to smile during 95 percent of a day, flashing a carefree look that irritated Johnson. The veteran guard zeroed in on Divac, making him both project and scapegoat. Divac’s soft hands were inviting bull’s-eyes. Divac’s casual gallop was infuriating. He showed up on time—but just on time. Johnson took every possible opportunity to scream at Divac, to bark at Divac, to insult and disparage Divac. “Oh, Earvin was hard on Vlade,” said Vitti. “Really hard.” It was the ol’ Earl Jones treatment—only Divac rarely had a ball hit him in the head and never appeared rattled. Johnson yelled—Divac responded with a friendly nod. “I think Vlade’s a good player but he has a tendency to be a little lazy,” Johnson said during camp. “Maybe over there [in Europe] he was so talented that he could get away with coming at a different speed than what we’re accustomed to. But Riley wants you to do things quick, because he wants you playing quick. So he’s got to get used to that.

  “[But] he can do a lot of things. He can run and he can catch the ball [well] for a big man. He can play.”

  • • •

  Coming off of the finals sweep at the hands of Detroit, and having lost Abdul-Jabbar, the Lakers were supposed to take a few more steps back toward the rest of the NBA pack.

  Instead, the opposite occurred. For the first time in franchise history, Los Angeles went undefeated in eight exhibition games, then opened the regular season by winning ten of eleven. Everything was going swimmingly—Thompson and Divac were teaming to average more than 18 points and 12 rebounds per night, Johnson and Worthy were (as always) playing at All-Star levels and A. C. Green had continued his emergence as one of the league’s three or four best power forwards. The bench—led by Divac, Drew and Cooper—was its deepest in years. “We were unbelievable,” said Drew, Johnson’s backup. “From the day I arrived, I felt a focus and determination I’d never seen before. I’ll never forget when I first got there, and Magic educated me on each player—where they liked the ball, how to use them most effectively, who was the first option, who was the fourth. The whole team worked so hard in practice and off the court, when the games started, it was a breeze.”

  But, for too many Lakers, it was no longer fun. Save for Divac’s quirky antics and scattered moments of levity, Riley and Johnson were sapping the joy from the franchise. The star point guard would win his third MVP award in four seasons, but devoted too much time to berating and screaming. Having played so long for Riley, he was now becoming Riley. His practice comments no longer included soothing touches. If you messed up, Johnson rode you hard.
With Abdul-Jabbar’s departure came a certain behavioral liberation. Johnson’s inner-dictator was emerging. This was not a good thing. “He was really pushing us in practice, telling us, ‘Hey, you got to do this better, you got to do that better,’” said Cooper, his closest friend on the team.

  Riley was no better. “Shootarounds turned from forty minutes to one and a half hours with a lot of video,” Cooper said. “It was mentally fatiguing more than anything else. Coach Riley had changed a little bit. He wasn’t as open as he used to be. If you had a suggestion, he didn’t take it wrong. He just didn’t take it. He heard you. Then it was like, ‘OK, you gave it to me, fine, but we’re going to do it this way.’ Where in the past, he really would listen to you and kind of compromise with you. Just the aura he started putting out that year. You felt, don’t invade his space today, not now, not the time. So ‘Not now, not the time’ turned into the whole season. We were kind of hesitant. We were looking at each other out on the court. It was the first time I can remember players making a mistake and glancing over at the bench for a second. We never had done that before.”

  Unhappiness and discomfort replaced peace and tranquility. Riley behaved more like a schoolmaster than a coach. Little unimportant details now held tremendous importance. Riley didn’t like how, come the fourth quarter at the Forum, the crowds paid more attention to the Laker Girls than the game. Consequently, he forced the cheering squad to sit during the period. Thanks to Buss’s generosity, the Lakers traveled on the luxurious MGM Grand plane, which featured individual staterooms. Riley, for a reason no player understood, insisted everyone be relegated to the seats he assigned. “He’s just like that,” Johnson told Mark Heisler of the Los Angeles Times. “What happened, he wanted to control everything. . . . He tried to control the whole arena. He wanted to control the locker room, the band, the Laker Girls. He tried to control everything and he got away from what he was there to do.”