When the Game Was Ours (14 page)

"I was hoping for the Celtics," Magic said.

The 1982 Sixers avenged the previous year's playoff loss to the Celtics by clinching the Eastern Conference Championship on the hallowed Boston Garden parquet. As Philadelphia closed out the win, Boston's fans urged Dr. J and his club, "Beat LA! Beat LA!"

Magic, watching on television from Los Angeles, merely smiled. So did Riley, his new coach.

"I just felt, after all we'd been through that season, our guys were ready for anything," Riley said.

The Lakers beat the Sixers to win the 1982 NBA Championship, and Johnson was named the Finals MVP with 13 points, 13 rebounds, and 13 assists in the clincher. Asked which of his two NBA titles was sweeter, Magic slung his arm around Cooper and said, "Any championship is special."

Long after the crowd thinned, Magic recapped the tumultuous events of the 1981–82 season with his father. It had been a grueling year, one that made him realize that winning was fleeting and team chemistry was fragile. He believed the Lakers had the talent to be good for the long haul, but he worried that egos and contracts would get in the way.

There was also the matter of Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics.

"One of these times," Magic said to his father, "you just know we're going to see them."

T
HE 1982 NBA ALL-STAR GAME
seemed to have all the trappings of an entertainment bonanza. The East squad featured three members of the 1981 World Champion Boston Celtics, with forward Larry Bird as the headliner, and the West squad boasted three members of the Los Angeles Lakers, including Magic Johnson, who had spurred his team on to the title in 1980 and would win another for them later that spring.

It should have been an easy sell: Celtics and Lakers! Magic and Larry! East versus West! Come watch the battle of the stars!

Except that, in 1982, nobody was buying it. Although the Lakers-Celtics rivalry had begun percolating again, the two teams had not yet met head-to-head in the Finals, and while Magic and Larry had already become obsessively entrenched in each other's psyche, the public's awareness of their heated rivalry was still evolving.

Then there was the All-Star Game itself, a stand-alone, no-frills event that lacked sponsors, imagination, and national appeal. Three days before the event was held at the Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey (capacity 20,049), league officials, facing the potential public relations disaster of a cavernous arena with empty seats, called an emergency meeting to strategize on how they could boost anemic ticket sales.

David Stern, who was the league's executive vice president at the time, took a proactive approach. He called all of his family ("including some uncles I wasn't sure I had"), then all of his friends, then every acquaintance he could locate in his Rolodex. His solicitations were anything but subtle.

"Would you like some tickets to our All-Star Game?" Stern would ask.

"Sure," they'd answer. "How about six?"

"How about sixty?" he'd reply.

The event was listed as a sellout but should have more appropriately been labeled a handout.

The players provided a spirited competition fueled by the West's objection to the general consensus that the East was the superior conference.

Magic submitted 16 points and 7 assists in a 120–118 West loss. Bird was named MVP of the game with 19 points, 12 rebounds, and 5 assists, but he left with the lingering feeling that Parish, who contributed 21 points and 7 rebounds and held Abdul-Jabbar to 2 points on 1-of-10 shooting, should have been given the trophy. There was one clear reason why Parish didn't: his teammate Bird scored 12 of the final 15 points to win it.

Throughout the weekend, Bird barely acknowledged Magic. His focus was on dismantling the Lakers, not fraternizing with them, even in an All-Star setting. He pointedly ignored his gregarious nemesis, who was omnipresent throughout the proceedings.

Johnson greeted most of his Eastern All-Star opponents by grabbing them, hugging them warmly, then asking, "So how's the season going?" But when he bumped into Bird in the corridor, he nodded silently, then moved on.

"At that point," Magic acknowledged, "there was a real dislike on both sides."

Magic was irritated by the inordinate amount of media attention directed Bird's way. Johnson wasn't allotted the same offensive freedom (or shots) with the Lakers that Bird enjoyed with the Celtics. Magic's primary role was to facilitate others, specifically Kareem. Because Bird scored more and had bigger numbers, he generated more headlines.

"Did I resent the attention he got for that? Of course," Johnson said. "Shoot. I had some game too. But people don't count assists the way they do points. There was nothing I could do about it."

Bird spent All-Star weekend hanging with Boston teammates Parish and Tiny Archibald and lamenting the lost opportunity for some time off. The Celtics traditionally embarked on a West Coast road trip following the All-Star break, and Bird would have preferred to stay home rather than participate in what he felt was a second-rate event.

"To be honest with you, before Stern became commissioner, I thought the All-Star Game was a whole bunch of bull," said Bird.

Each year the All-Stars were feted in an oversized ballroom where they ate dry chicken on a raised dais and were entertained by a series of miscast comedians. In 1983 in Los Angeles, Jonathan Winters left NBA staffers convulsing with laughter in the green room while he was awaiting his introduction, but when Winters hopped up on stage and quickly took stock of the mostly African American athletes staring him down, it occurred to him that he had nothing in common with his audience.

"He kind of froze," Stern recalled. "He got up there and started doing a routine about killing Japs. I wanted to disappear."

Subsequent years proved to be equally uncomfortable. Comedian David Steinberg's monologue about artificial insemination and depositing its contents into a bottle left Stern, who happened to be seated next to Dallas owner (and born-again Christian) Donald Carter, sinking further and further in his seat.

Magic Johnson also slid down low in his chair, but it was boredom, not embarrassment, that altered his posture. He dreaded the entertainment portion of the program and planned once the lights went down to slip discreetly out of the ballroom. His cohorts included Isiah Thomas, George Gervin, Norm Nixon, and Dennis Johnson, and their exodus was done two by two, under the cover of darkness and crude punch lines. By the time the lights came back up, the room was more than half-empty.

In 1984 Bird sat adjacent to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in yet another All-Star ballroom, this time in Denver, perspiring from the white-hot lights bearing down on him.

"This sucks," Bird said.

"These damn lights are giving me a migraine headache," muttered Abdul-Jabbar, who stood up and walked out.

Although the players were unaware of it, their fortunes were about to change. On February 1, 1984, one day after the All-Star Game, David Stern replaced the retiring Larry O'Brien and was sworn in as the new NBA commissioner. Although he was not widely known outside the league, from within Stern was heralded as a bright, innovative attorney who had been tirelessly advocating for change. No matter was too insignificant to escape Stern's notice: whether researching a stipulation of the collective bargaining agreement or choosing the color of the cloth napkins for a staff luncheon, he immersed himself in every detail. He was a marketing master with a portfolio full of new ideas for his struggling league.

He was also an accessible executive who solicited his players' opinions. When Bird said that he abhorred the pregame All-Star banquet format, Stern replaced it with a private room and buffet meal where players could come and go with their families. When Magic complained that the entertainment didn't reflect the interests of the athletes, Stern hired singer Jeffrey Osbourne, who was so dynamic that he had the crowd on their feet pumping their fists and hollering "Woo! Woo!" instead of trying to slink out the back door.

"Overnight the whole feel of the league was different with David Stern," Magic said. "He understood what we needed. He also understood what he had. Larry and I were right there, waiting to take the NBA to the next level."

Although he had watched the 1979 NCAA championship game between Michigan State and Indiana State, David Stern wasn't salivating over Magic and Bird's potential to infuse new life into the NBA. He was more focused on the fact that the announcers were forbidden to mention the NBA during their telecast. The NCAA had no interest in promoting the next landing spot for its stars. The colleges were wrangling with pro basketball for publicity, airtime, and consumer dollars, and they were winning.

The marketability of Larry and Magic simply was not pressing enough to sit atop the to-do list of either Commissioner O'Brien or his chief lieutenant Stern in 1979.

"We were too busy trying to get through the day," Stern said.

O'Brien, a political strategist by trade, had run the senatorial campaign for a young upstart Democrat from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy in 1959, then eventually followed him to the White House. He stayed on as part of Lyndon B. Johnson's team, was named postmaster general, and in the early seventies became chairman of the Democratic National Committee, which led to his office being targeted in the famous Watergate scandal that destroyed the presidency of Richard Nixon. O'Brien's résumé was captivating, but his background in politics did not impress his basketball brethren, who often found the commissioner to be aloof, unapproachable, and indifferent regarding matters of the game.

Financial concerns had left the NBA weighing the possible contraction of its Denver and Utah franchises. League attendance was spotty, the television package was modest, and NBA marketing strategies were rudimentary. The majority of the athletes playing professional basketball were African American, and corporations were openly skeptical that a league of mostly black players would be appealing to their customers, who were overwhelmingly white. The forecast for the NBA in the early eighties was gloomy, with prominent media outlets regularly predicting its demise.

"The only time we ever made
60 Minutes
was when Rudy Tomjanovich got punched by Kermit Washington, or when they showed a bunch of empty seats and Rick Barry sitting on the bench as the only white player," Stern said. "It was always something negative."

In an attempt to capitalize on the anticipated arrival of Magic and Bird in the NBA, the public relations department took the highly unusual step of putting the rookies on the cover of the
NBA
Register and Guide.
The cover was mildly unsettling to Stern, who oversaw the league's marketing department and felt it would be a slight to proven stars such as Abdul-Jabbar, George Gervin, and Julius Erving. He consulted his marketing team, which consisted of one person—himself—and ultimately gave in to the recommendations of the PR staff.

Prior to the arrival of Bird and Magic, securing sponsorships for the league was a daunting challenge. In May 1982, Stern hired Rick Welts to create new marketing partnerships for the NBA. Welts, an avid basketball fan and former ball boy for the Seattle SuperSonics, had been working for Bob Walsh & Associates, one of the first sports marketing firms in the country. Once in the employ of the NBA, he put on his best suit and called on McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and General Motors. He never got past the lobby. He suffered similar indignities when he tried to tap smaller, less prestigious companies.

"Most of them wouldn't even see me," Welts said. "And those who did just laughed at me. The NBA had such a bad reputation in the business community."

As one gifted player after another fell prey to substance abuse in the late seventies and early eighties, the NBA tried to debunk the damaging perception that their league was flush with drug users.

David Thompson, a three-time college All-American with a 44-inch vertical leap, should have been an NBA superstar. Instead, the former North Carolina State star developed drug and alcohol problems and was out of the league by the time he was 30 years old. John Lucas, a superb athlete who played in the U.S. (Tennis) Open when he was 13 years old and was the number-one pick in the 1976 NBA draft, developed cocaine and alcohol problems and entered drug rehabilitation. He later opened his own drug treatment facility in Houston designed specifically to assist troubled athletes like himself. Sly Williams, a promising young talent with the New York Knicks, became notorious for binges of abuse and once called in to say he was going to miss a game because "there was a slight death in the family."

Four participants in the 1980 All-Star Game—Phoenix star Walter Davis, New York guard Micheal Ray Richardson, Atlanta guard John Drew, and Atlanta swingman Eddie "Fast Eddie" Johnson—ended up battling addiction.

Fast Eddie managed to amass more than 10,000 career points in spite of his cocaine habit. His teammate Drew scored more than 15,000 points, even as he started freebasing. Drew entered drug rehab in 1983, returned as the league's Comeback Player of the Year in 1984, then relapsed again two years later and became one of the first players to be banned for life by the NBA.

Coaches and general managers tried to navigate the landscape of the drug culture with few resources and no set guidelines. Former Atlanta Hawks coach Hubie Brown recognized that drug use was rampant, both in professional sports and in the entertainment industry, but the NBA bore the brunt of the criticism because of the high profiles of the players who got caught. Brown tried to educate himself on how to assist his troubled players, including consulting a psychologist, but conceded, "What did I know about cocaine or freeba sing?"

The league's security office reached out to law enforcement officials in each NBA city so they could identify who sold the drugs, then tried to limit the flow of activity between their players and the dealers. Stern invited federal drug enforcement officials to the league meetings so they could brief coaches, general managers, and owners on how to detect a player who was battling a drug or alcohol problem. Counseling was made available to the athletes, yet there were few takers.