Entertaining, competently-written history of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, a time that, today, feels like a joyous, long-lost era of glitz.
You'll also see in this book how it takes just a couple people to change the culture of a company: the Lakers had a total rebirth once Jerry Buss took over as the new owner, and once he brought in Magic Johnson to take over as the team's floor general. You could perhaps extend this example to the entire pro basketball industry as Larry Bird and Magic Johnson together drove much of the NBA's renaissance in the 1980s. Within a decade, the entire economics of professional basketball changed.
Notes:
1) Coach Paul Westhead takes over from coach Jack McKinney after McKinney's near fatal biking accident, wins the championship in 1979-1980 using his McKinney's system... then, Westhead starts to believe in his own "genius" and installs a sclerotic offense totally unsuited to his players. A guy who's too academic and too ludic for his players to stand. See for example the weird and hilarious story where Westhead, speaking to Magic late in a close game, quotes Macbeth: "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly." Johnson replies, "You want me to get it into the big fella?"
2) Pat Riley takes over for Westhead an yet another incredible stroke of career luck. At first Riley stays humble, grows and develops, incorporates input from his players... but then in the years to come evolves into a dictatorial, egomaniacal coach playing mind-games with his players. Success breeds failure.
3) Interesting (actually sad) to see Sports Illustrated with such significant cultural influence in those days: everybody read it and everybody talked about what was in it and who was on the cover. Today, SI is a pathetic broken brand acquired for a firesale price by a near-bankrupt media company.
4) Before he turned psycho, Pat Riley used some interesting psychological tools:
* his phrase "peripheral opponents" (anything beyond the team's focus)
* his NLP-like concept of (metaphorically) putting those off-course distractions in a small cardboard box and sliding it "beneath the bed until the season ended."
It's interesting to ask oneself: "what are my peripheral opponents?" It's a sort of metaquestion that helps you identify your real focus and brings you back to it.
5) Jerry West (famous Laker guard from the 60s and 70s but working as team general manager during the Showtime era) seems like a disaster: depressive, over-emotional, he hires private investigators to tail his players, etc.
6) Interesting also to see the radical changes in the economics of professional basketball: in the late 60s the highest paid players earned six figures a year, and even by the late 70s a million dollars a year was a huge contract. Compare to today, where the highest paid player on the Lakers last season was Russell Westbrook, with $44 million of comp for the year.
7) There are plenty of stories about groupies, etc: suffice it to say that Magic Johnson's nickname on the team wasn't "Magic." It was "Buck": a slavery-era term referring to the alpha slave the master would use to breed all his female slaves. (!!!!)
8) On Kareem Abdul-Jabbar being an absolute douche: petty, condescending, superior, disinterested in and disrespectful towards fans. He once tells a young kid asking for his autograph to "go f*** yourself." "'Nobody liked him, because he's an asshole,' said Danny Schayes, the Denver Nuggets center.' To me, it's always fascinating to compare a person's public face and public facade to that person's actual character and personality. The latter can be a lot harder to know, and an athlete with an ugly personality will always be wanting to supplant it with a more palatable facade in ads, movies, media appearances, etc.
9) It's interesting to see Kareem appear far more in the media now that is playing days are long over, presenting himself as a knowledgeable, open-minded and highly intelligent expert on various important issues of the day. So where's the real truth--with him or any other public figure? Almost certainly it's not in whatever facade we see as outsiders. And sometimes you only need one brief glimpse behind the facade to get a good sense of what a person is really like. Again, thanks to Danny Schayes, we get just such a glimpse in this quote: "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 [who Kareem always ignored] 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."
10) For sports geeks there are some fun random/obscure sports references in this book. See for example the author's description of Magic Johnson's play during the 1990 NBA finals: "watching him try to play was akin to seeing Ruffian hobble around the bend in her final race at Belmont." That one sent me straight to YouTube to learn all about Ruffian and his awful, ill-fated match race against Foolish Pleasure.
Reading list:
Larry Bird and Magic Johnson: When the Game Was Ours
David Halberstam: The Breaks of the Game
Jerry West: My Charmed, Tormented Life
Jeanie Buss: Laker Girl
Angela Wilder (James Worthy's ex-wife): Powerful Mate Syndrome