Dream Team by Jack McCallum Read Free Book Online Page A

and a football-coach mentality in the NBA.
    The broad strokes used to define the teams—the Lakers franchise as Entertainment Central, the stodgy Celtics as the
MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour
—were simply wrong. Celtics practices at Hellenic College in suburban Boston were entertaining affairs, a kind of basketball vaudeville. Coach K. C. Jones was rather like a substitute teacher winging it without a lesson plan. McHale zinged one-liners at Walton, Bird stuck it to anyone and everyone, and Danny Ainge performed daily in the role of a Mormon Beaver Cleaver. Walton, never averse to hyperbole, called the intrasquad scrimmages “spiritual,” filled as they were with what he considered the essence of basketball—the unbridled joy of competition.
    Something funny always seemed to happen when you hung around the Celtics. Such was the case one night in L.A. during the ’87 Finals when I opened my hotel room door to find Celtics reserve forward Darren Daye sticking a bare foot into my Portabubble, an unwieldy portable computer terminal with huge couplers on which I wrote and transmitted my stories.
    “Darren, what the hell are you doing?” I asked.
    “Uh, what’s your last name?” he said. “McCallum? Oh, see, I asked for McHale’s room key at the front desk and they gave me this one. I thought this was the foot-stimulator machine Kevin was using.”
    Without a McHale, an Ainge, and a Walton, the Lakers were not so outwardly comical. They had their moments—karate-chopping a teammate’s newspaper while he was reading in an airport loungeor in the locker room was a team obsession for a while—but the Lakers, so flashy on the court, were more about outward propriety.
    There was always Magic, of course, and the man could talk the shell off a hard-boiled egg. But the idea that he was the eternal Mr. Sunshine, at least during his playing days, is overblown. After his exquisite junior-skyhook/MVP season of 1986–87, the game became a little less fun for him, the result of the Lakers’ enervating crusade to repeat as champions in 1987–88. Riley, who had “guaranteed” a repeat after the ’87 Finals, pushed them endlessly. I went out to L.A. before the playoffs and Riley pulled out a computer printout showing that the performances of Magic, Worthy, and Abdul-Jabbar had all gone down from the season before. Riley then put Magic in the context of Jordan and Bird, hauling out another stat sheet to reveal that Johnson’s plus-minus rating was third in the league, below the metrics of the other two. Coaches and players hate when journalists make comparisons based on statistics, but they do exactly the same thing.
    “Last season Earvin was a driven player,” Riley told me. “He was driven to win the MVP award and finally get his due. He did it by constantly pushing himself to shoot, to penetrate, to take over a game. This year, for whatever reason, he hasn’t done it.” Riley couldn’t have been any more obvious that he was sending a message if he pulled out an envelope and a stamp.
    Those comments forced Magic to don the mantle of victim. He sighed heavily when presented with Riley’s opinions and stats. “I think it’s just going back to the same way it was before, to taking me for granted,” he said. “ ‘Magic? He’s
supposed
to get a triple-double. He’s
supposed
to have all those assists. He’s
supposed
to be leading the best team in basketball.’ Does it bother me? Yes, a little. It hurts my chances for recognition as an individual, no doubt about it.”
    You never got sighs and I’m-a-victim from Bird. You might’ve gotten a fuck-you-I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it. But not sighs and I’m-a-victim.
    The Lakers did indeed repeat that season, the first team in two decades to go back-to-back. But the strain cleaved the relationshipbetween Riley, who subsequently left after the 1989–90 season, and Magic, who was no longer so much the Sunshine Warrior.
    Magic’s effulgent personality was a bit