Basketball fans with an interest in history will immediately know from the title what a book called “Showtime” is about. For the rest, the subtitle of the book leaves no questions unanswered. It reads “Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s”.
Showtime was the template for the HBO series Winning Time
The book has also recently come back to prominence because the HBO series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty is based on Showtime. This series was controversially discussed and also criticized by some protagonists of the 1980s Lakers. The recently deceased Jerry West, who as general manager played a major role in the success of this dynasty, even sued HBO because he felt the characterization of his own person in the series was completely wrong. Wikipedia says:
On April 19, 2022, Jerry West demanded a retraction from HBO within two weeks for the “cruel” and “deliberately false” depiction of him as a temperamental, foul-mouthed executive prone to angry outbursts and mood swings.
I haven’t seen the series myself, so I can’t comment on it. But in the book, Jerry West is described as someone who liked to drop the usual f-bomb and swore (which shouldn’t be unusual in a sports team environment), but also as someone who radiated a lot of human warmth, never put himself above other people and treated the Lakers’ employees very well. And the author Jeff Pearlman doesn’t mince his words in this book, which is why I wouldn’t accuse him of flattery. Among other things, the excessive sex life (or the non-existent sex life in the case of A.C. Green) or the drug use of Spencer Haywood and other players are reported in detail. It’s also about the inhuman and arrogant way in which former owner Jack Kent Cooke treated his employees, or about the limited mental abilities of former Power Forward Mark Landsberger and other players.
Good overview of the rise and fall of a dynasty
The open nature and the countless quotes from the players of the time make the book even more interesting for me. The only thing that bothered me a little bit was that at various points in the book, Pearlman kept revisiting the dismissive and arrogant way Kareem Abdul-Jabbar treated fans and other people. This character trait is well known about Kareem and even former teammates like Magic Johnson often mentioned that Kareem acted like the ultimate ***hole when dealing with others. But it doesn’t add any value for me to revisit this story again and again in the book.
Otherwise, it’s a very good book. It begins with the draft of Magic Johnson and ends with the press conference in which he announced his positive HIV test. I thought it was very good that Pearlman devoted some time to the man who invented “Showtime”, but who has more or less been forgotten these days. The man in question is Jack McKinney, who became coach in Magic’s rookie season and played the fast style of play that became known as Showtime. McKinney unfortunately only sat on the benchcoached the Lakers for 14 games before he was seriously injured in a bicycle accident and Paul Westhead took over as coach.
Westhead continued to play this offensive and fast style in the first season and won a title with the Lakers. He then tried to change the style of play and gave the players less freedom on the court, which led to a rift between coaches and players. It is well known that Magic Johnson was the driving force behind the sacking and this book makes no secret of this. However, it also describes that the rest of the team was also unhappy with Westhead and wanted another coach.
He was followed by Pat Riley, who is nowadays regarded as the architect of Showtime. The book also vividly describes the changing relationship between Riley and the team. He returned to McKinney’s style of play and led the Lakers to four more titles. However, over the years he became more and more rigid and demanding in his style and made the players go through extremely tough training sessions even before games in the NBA Finals. The book describes well how the mood within the team increasingly changed and how Riley went from being a friend to someone the players ignored at some point.
Overall, this is a good book for fans of NBA history. And you don’t have to be a Lakers fan to like it (I’m not one myself).