Dunleavy called Kupchak and told him it’d probably be best if he not show up at the Forum. The Lakers assistant general manager agreed. That night, Los Angeles was eliminated by the Suns, and Emily joked, “We should have just extended our trip to start looking for houses.”
They returned to Milwaukee, and in the coming days Dunleavy received two head-coaching offers—one from the Bucks, one from the Pistons. West also called, though only to gauge his interest. “Jerry, I’m flattered, and I’d love to coach the Lakers,” he said. “But I can’t turn down two offers for the possibility of an offer.” Dunleavy, in fact, had just finished dining with Herbert Kohl, the Wisconsin senator who owned the Bucks.
“Well, we want you,” West said.
Dunleavy was exultant. He also, however, was a stubborn New Yorker who stuck to his guns. He agreed to a four-year, $500,000 contract, but demanded a real estate clause so that, if the Lakers were to fire him, they would be responsible for his home. West called Buss, who signed off on the deal.
Although he was told Riley was out, Dunleavy knew few of the intricacies. Fired? Resigned? What difference did it make? The two spoke briefly before the press conference, shook hands, exchanged phone numbers, then Riley took the podium. It was only hours later, when Dunleavy was resting in his hotel room, that the phone rang. “Hey, Mike, it’s Pat.”
Well, this was a surprise.
“Mike,” Riley said, “I wanted to see if I could ask you a favor.”
One of Riley’s assistant coaches, Randy Pfund, had interviewed for the head position. He was crushed when he failed to land the job. “Mike, I’d like for you to hire Randy as a person on your staff,” Riley said. “It would mean a great deal.”
This was a test. Dunleavy could tell Riley to bug off and establish himself as his own man. He could hire Pfund and risk employing a malcontent. “I met Randy, and I liked him a lot,” Dunleavy said. “But everyone in the whole world is telling me not to hire a guy who was an assistant . . . he has bonds with the players you don’t . . . it can’t work out.” Dunleavy sat down with Pfund and made an offer: “Here’s the deal,” he said, “if I give you this job, and you say anything or do anything to undermine me, you’re gone. Even if I just get spooked, you’re gone. I know it’s unfair, but it’s the way it has to be. Is that something you can agree to?”
Randy Pfund became one of Dunleavy’s most trusted confidants.
• • •
It took the new coach little time to establish himself as the perfect replacement for Riley. Well before the start of the franchise’s third Hawaiian training camp, Dunleavy reached out to all the returning players, promising them fair shakes and universal open-mindedness. Any past prejudices were gone. They would be treated with respect.
Though the Lakers were coming off of a 63-win run that would have satisfied other owner-executive tandems, Buss and West used the off-season to reevaluate, reassess and remove. The biggest change—but perhaps the least-surprising change—came with the subtraction of Michael Cooper, who had worn a Laker uniform since 1978. From ownership to players to fans, there was universal acknowledgment the defensive specialist was, at age thirty-four, a horse with one leg in the glue plant. For years, Cooper had dazzled Forum regulars by finishing off spectacular alley-oop dunks. (Passes from Johnson to a soaring Cooper came to be affectionately known as Coop-a-loops.)
Now, though, Cooper, who averaged just 6.4 points in 1989–90, needed to let go. Shortly after Dunleavy had been hired, Buss took Cooper out to dinner. “I have two options for you, Coop,” he said. “We can either release or trade you, and you can try and play elsewhere. Or I’ve got a five-year deal for you to work in the front office. Jerry [West] will give you a title and a position, and you’ll contribute to the organization. I don’t want to trade you—you’re a Laker. But I want you to do what’s best for you. . . .”
Cooper was touched. He’d been told hundreds of times that professional basketball was strictly business, and that most organizations viewed their players as mere chips. “But here was Dr. Buss, a man who genuinely cared,” Cooper said. “They didn’t make them any better than him.”
Still itching to play, he signed a three-year, $5-million offer from Il Messaggero Roma of the Italian League, moved his family to Europe and, for thirteen months, had the time of his life. “But basketball became a job,” he said. “So I came home, called Dr. Buss and asked if the offer still existed. He told me to come right in. Dr. Buss was a great owner, a great man, a great person, a great friend. A great provider. He provided something for all of us.”
Along with Cooper, the Lakers ridded themselves of Orlando Woolridge and Mark McNamara, elevated Divac to the starting lineup and signed free-agent forward Sam Perkins, a former Dallas Maverick who had been college teammates with James Worthy at North Carolina. West almost pulled the trigger on a bold trade that would have sent Byron Scott and A. C. Green to Cleveland for guard Craig Ehlo and forward John Williams, then thought otherwise. It was one of the shrewdest deals he never made.
Like Riley and Westhead before him, Dunleavy was smart enough to take a step back and let things unfold naturally. The new coach had been warned that Riley’s greatest sin was overbearingness, and the last thing these players wanted was a leader who was always on. As training camp began at Honoulu’s Otto Klum Gymnasium, Dunleavy wisely went out of his way to observe as much as instruct, to let things play out in a minimalist approach. His first priority was not to walk in Pat Riley’s footsteps. “Mike made it fun from the get-go, and it wasn’t that way the year before,” said Divac. “If you were late for practice, Mike would say, ‘OK, shoot three-pointers for double or nothing. Make ’em, you’re forgiven. Miss, you run.’ It was so much fun. With Riley, if you were late, you were in trouble.
“He would challenge you to these games of H-O-R-S-E,” said Jason Matthews, a rookie guard out of Pittsburgh who was invited to training camp. “He was still a phenomenal shooter. If I lost to him, I had to do five suicides. If he lost to me, he had to shake my hand. It was funny. He was a coach you knew was in your corner. I’ll never forget that when Mike cut me, he was very compassionate about it. He said, ‘You can play overseas, but you don’t have to. You’re going to be more successful as a businessman than as a pro athlete. That’s a good thing—you’re intelligent.’”
Dunleavy told the players their wives were welcome to travel on the road—an enormous policy shift. He told the players their input was not only acceptable but desired—another huge change. One day, while sitting on the bench, he turned to Pfund and Bill Bertka, the longtime assistants, and said, “Don’t you guys have anything to fucking add?”
Pfund fumbled for words. “What the hell?” said Dunleavy.
“Well,” Pfund explained, “Pat didn’t like us to talk during the games.”
“What the fuck is that?” Dunleavy said. “I mean, what are you here for?”
“To coach,” said Pfund.
“Well,” said Dunleavy, “start fucking coaching.”
“He understood the game really well, but he also understood people,” said Jim Eyen, an assistant coach. “To me, he seemed like a regular guy who loved the game and would have been happier putting on a uniform and playing. Unfortunately, he was stuck in a suit. There was a running joke for us that he probably had a jersey on beneath his jacket. Just in case.”
Throughout training camp, the most intriguing development was the forging of the Magic Johnson-Mike Dunleavy partnership. No matter how he felt toward Riley near the end, Johnson had become an NBA megastar under his former coach. Riley trusted Johnson and confided in Johnson, and viewed him as an on-the-court extension of himself. Ultimately, Riley behaved as if there were the Lakers players and then, on a higher perch, sat the superstar point guard.
Yet the Johnson who arrived in Hawaii for training camp wasn’t the Johnson of ten (or even five) years ago. He was bigger and more powerful, but a
lso slower and less quick. At age thirty-one, he was now the league’s third-oldest starting point guard. He was relying more on guile, less on physicality. “It was never a matter of having people accept they were getting older,” said Dunleavy. “It wasn’t even about running less. It was more about running efficiently, and balancing it with our defense. Earvin was still a great, elite player. You just had to be aware of when to run, when not to. We talked about it. He understood.”
Dunleavy had to tread lightly, and he knew it. There’s no easier way to marginalize oneself than to lose your best player. So instead of barging in with a new offense, a new defense and an “I’m the coach, dammit!” swagger, he let the Lakers play their game. Throughout training camp, Johnson ran the show as he always had—with little input from the sideline. “To be honest, from the very beginning Magic was the coach of the team,” said Tony Smith. “Mike might call a play, but if Magic didn’t like it, he’d just wave it off. You had that going on about 50 percent of the time, but it wasn’t awkward. I think, for a new coach, it made things easier. There was someone to rely on.”
The Lakers were scheduled to make their pre-season debut against the Portland Trail Blazers (who also held camp in Hawaii) on October 12 at the University of Hawaii’s Blaisdell Arena. Dunleavy arrived for the game wearing one of those goofy lime-green floral-print Hawaiian shirts, and the smile plastered across his face suggested a laid-back, happy man. Yet in the hours before tip-off, Dunleavy told his players that this was no ordinary exhibition, against no ordinary opponent. The Lakers had spent the past decade owning the Pacific Division, but in 1989–90 they outlasted Portland by only four games, then watched their rivals reach the NBA Finals (where they lost to the Pistons). The Blazers spent the off-season talking trash about Los Angeles, telling those who would listen that their time had arrived. Mychal Thompson, the ex-Portland standout, usually spent his summers working out with a handful of Blazer players at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center in Portland. For the first time ever, none of the team’s stars—Clyde Drexler, Jerome Kersey, Terry Porter or Kevin Duckworth—reached out. “I wasn’t invited,” he said. “I’m not blaming them. I guess I wasn’t in their plans this year.”
Translation: Go to hell—you’re the enemy now.
Dunleavy rolled with it. “I made a decision,” he said. “It wasn’t an exhibition game—it was a statement game. I would take my starters out only when [Blazers coach Rick Adelman] took his starters out. I would only stop when he stopped. I wanted to convey to my guys that, no matter how much the Trail Blazers talked, they couldn’t beat you. You’re better than they are, you’re smarter than they are. They might be more athletic, but you’ve got the brain power and the know-how.”
What followed was a game fueled by finals-like intensity. With Portland leading by 11 points early in the third, Johnson—who played an exhausting forty-three minutes—took over, scoring 19 second-half points and repeatedly slamming his body into Kersey and Porter. His final statistical line—28 points, 10 assists, 8 rebounds, 6 steals—told the story of a man who understood the significance of an insignificant game. Los Angeles won, 119–115, and afterward the players were drained. “There wasn’t anyone from Maryland State out there,” Thompson said in the locker room. “I can’t remember that sort of playoff atmosphere in an exhibition before.”
The Laker players quickly came to love Dunleavy. Even when the team opened by losing four of its first five games (the worst start for the franchise in twelve years), he maintained a sense of calm Riley had lacked. There were adjustments to be made and assignments to understand and new teammates getting to know one another. “I could sense a little bit of a black cloud over the locker room,” Dunleavy said. “I told them to be patient, that I was 100 percent confident in their ability and that we’d get it right. We were close—we just needed a few adjustments. One or two breaks . . .”
Breaks can be good and breaks can also be bad. On the afternoon of Thursday, November 15, the team received an awful one. According to police reports, James Worthy, perceived to be the ultimate NBA family man, was arrested at three P.M. at the Stouffer Hotel in Houston on charges of solicitation of sexual services. Ralph Gonzales, a police sergeant with the city, told reporters Worthy had contacted an escort service and requested that two women meet him in his hotel room. What the five-time All-Star didn’t know was that the business—shut down long ago—was being run by the police department, and the hookers sent to his room were undercover officers. Worthy was arrested after telling the women what he wanted (a blowjob) and how much he would pay ($150). He was released on $500 bail, and actually played in much of his team’s 108–103 overtime win over the Rockets later that night.
The days to come were awful for Worthy, but enlightening for the wives and girlfriends of many NBA players. Less than a week after the arrest, the Associated Press reported that Worthy’s name appeared on the log of a Portland-based escort service, Allstar Model and Escorts, that was linked to prostitution. Police confirmed with the local Marriott that Worthy had stayed in the room listed on the log on the night of a transaction.
Even though professional athletes could often procure the women of their choice, a large number regularly solicited prostitutes and escorts. Somehow, it was less like infidelity, more like a business transaction. Or so the thinking went.
Inside the Lakers locker room, Worthy was an enigma. He was well liked, but quiet and distant. Whereas Johnson looked at his teammates as family, Worthy looked at his teammates as coworkers. There was a sense, among many, that Worthy resided on a higher plateau, that he was blessed with a character and moral fortitude too often lacking in professional athletes. A. C. Green, the virginal power forward, felt a brotherhood with Worthy based upon their upbringings in religious households. “There was a moral similarity,” Green said. “We shared that.” Just seven months earlier, Worthy’s wife, Angela, had given birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter named Sable. The new father was ecstatic.
With Worthy’s arrest, it was as if the invisible fourth wall had come crashing down. If James Worthy was sleeping with call girls, lord only knows who else was. In particular, the news came as a punch to the ribs of Angela, James’s college sweetheart. Stunningly beautiful, with cocoa skin and high cheekbones, Angela endured a three-year long-distance relationship with James before—while eating at a T.G.I. Friday’s in Los Angeles in 1983—he plopped down on one knee and said, “I think it’s time we go shopping for a size six.”
What ensued was a marriage that, on the outside, appeared storybook, but was crippled by clichéd roles and one-sided giving. Like most of her Laker wife peers, Angela followed the Pat Riley diagram and devoted herself to being the perfectly pieced-together athlete bride. When, on August 15, 1984, James handed Angela a one-page typed prenuptial agreement, she swallowed her hurt feelings and signed. She even purchased a license plate frame for her Mercedes-Benz that read, I AM WORTHY OF JAMES. As she later wrote: “For all intents and purposes my vows might as well have read, ‘I, Angela, take you, James, to be my superior. I promise to support your dreams and goals. I will stand by you through good times and bad. I plan to become as inconspicuous as possible, to suppress my dreams and goals, to look the other way when I see things that I don’t agree with, and to keep up the appearance of “happily ever after” until death us do part.’”
Such was the modus operandi for Laker wives throughout the 1980s. Don’t ask too many questions. Make sure dinner is hot and the diapers are changed. Come to the Forum on time, and look as pretty as possible. Only now, a seismic shift had taken place. Mike Dunleavy was the coach, James Worthy was in jail and Magic Johnson was newly engaged to his longtime on-again, off-again girlfriend, Cookie Kelly. There were no excuses to be made for Worthy’s behavior, and Chris Riley—departed self-appointed mother hen of the lemming Laker wives—would not (at Pat’s urging) encourage Angela to turn the other cheek and take back her man. “I no longer love my husband in a wa
y that makes me want to have more children with him,” Angela wrote in her diary. “I . . . wanted to always be in love with James. To realize that part of our relationship is no longer alive is truly a depressing loss for me. It seems that, with the exception of . . . the material things we’ve acquired, the theme of our marriage is loss.”
Shortly after her husband’s arrest, Angela left. She made it clear to all who listened that she did not want her daughter thinking it OK to stand by an unfaithful man. “I’ve always admired that,” said Wanda Cooper, Michael’s spouse. “Angela wasn’t a follower or an enabler. When James embarrassed her, she walked away and never returned. That’s self-empowerment.”
This was not how Dunleavy anticipated the season beginning—a shoddy record, a humiliated superstar, a fan base pining for Riley or Westhead or any sort of competent coach. After the Lakers dropped to 2-5, Dunleavy eavesdropped as his players moped about awkward new defensive rotations, necessary because of Divac’s inability to stop opposing centers. “After one month I’ve learned one thing,” Dunleavy told Mark Heisler of the Los Angeles Times. “Pat Riley was a defensive genius.” Dunleavy spent hours at home in front of the living room television, rewinding and fast-forwarding game tapes. He urged his players to keep the faith, and in an impassioned locker room speech begged them to stay the course. “Look, if you don’t think I work my ass off, if you don’t think I know what I’m talking about, if you don’t believe in me—you can blow me up to the press,” he said. “You can push it all on me—‘Hey, young coach, first year, whatever.’ You can do that. And I’m telling you, if you think that, you should do that. But hopefully you see me standing here, and you know I know what the fuck I’m talking about. And I can see where we’re going and I’m totally confident.”
Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty ofthe 1980s Page 50