When the Game Was War, page 1
Copyright © 2023 by Tough Jews, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cohen, Rich, author.
Title: When the game was war: the NBA’s greatest season / Rich Cohen.
Description: First edition. | New York, N.Y. : Random House, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022042514 (print) | LCCN 2022042515 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593229545 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593229569 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: National Basketball Association—History. | Basketball—United States—History. | Boston Celtics (Basketball team)—History. | Los Angeles Lakers (Basketball team)—History. | Detroit Pistons (Basketball team)—History. | Chicago Bulls (Basketball team)—History. | Bird, Larry, 1956- | Johnson, Earvin, 1959- | Thomas, Isiah, 1961- | Jordan, Michael, 1963-
Classification: LCC GV885.515.N37 C65 2023 (print) | LCC GV885.515.N37 (ebook) | DDC 796.323/64—dc23/eng/20220930
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042514
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042515
Ebook ISBN 9780593229569
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Alexis Capitini, adapted for ebook
Cover design: David G. Stevenson
Cover illustration: Ian Keltie, based on photographs © Getty Images (Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas), and © Alamy (Michael Jordan)
ep_prh_6.1_144834031_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Pre-Game
The Players
The Season
The Playoffs
The Finals
Post-Game
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Note on Sources
Bibliography
Index
By Rich Cohen
About the Author
_144834031_
All matadors are gored dangerously, painfully and very close to fatally, sooner or later, in their careers, and until a matador has undergone this first severe wound you cannot tell what his permanent value will be.
—Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
PRE-GAME
You wouldn’t think a single basketball game could turn a person into a fanatic, but that’s what happened. Of course, it wasn’t just any game. It was Game 6 of the 1988 NBA Finals. I was nineteen years old, and the Los Angeles Lakers, the great and godly Showtime Lakers of Kareem and Magic and Worthy, were trying to deliver on their coach Pat Riley’s promise, made twelve months earlier in a champagne-filled locker room, to repeat as NBA champions. But it was looking like Riley was about to make a fool of himself: By Game 6, the Detroit Pistons, the so-called Bad Boys made up of Isiah, Laimbeer, and Rodman, were threatening to spoil the Lakers’ dreams of a repeat.
It was clear the oddsmakers had underestimated Detroit, a team that had thwarted two dynasties, one of the past (the Celtics) and one of the future (the Bulls) on their way to the finals. The Pistons, up three games to two in the best-of-seven series, were looking to finish off the Lakers in their own arena, the “Fabulous Forum,” in front of their own celebrity fans, which in this world is akin to getting stomped in front of your parents.
I spent the afternoon preparing for the game by playing one-on-one, twenty-one, and HORSE in the driveway with my father, a Brooklyn-born basketball coach and the man who taught me to admire the Pistons. “L.A. is class and flash,” he explained, “but Detroit knows how to win.”
Having spent his childhood on outdoor courts in Bensonhurst and Coney Island, he recognized in the Pistons what he called the “playground” or “Brooklyn” style. He demonstrated this style during our driveway contests by moving me around with his butt, hitting from the same spot again and again, and getting into my head by spewing a series of not-very-nice comments about my mother and my manhood. “Hey, Mama’s boy. I think you’ve got a little drool on your collar. Want me to get Mama to wipe it up?”
He recognized the same ethos in the Pistons, and that’s what he admired. There were no easy layups against Detroit. That team made certain that, when morning came, you’d remember you’d been in a fight. They lived by the Avenue X maxim: “If we ain’t gonna beat you, we’re at least gonna beat you up.”
It did not hurt that the Pistons were led by 27-year-old Isiah (Zeke) Thomas, who was not only great-looking and charismatic but was also, in the relative terms of the NBA, small. Five-ten in shoes, Isiah was a short man in a tall man’s game, which meant, my father explained, he did not have to be merely as good as the others; he had to be better. Most fans today don’t remember Isiah as he was in the late 1980s, when he was the best player on the best team. Say what you want about Michael and LeBron, but, pound for pound, inch for inch, grading on a curve, Isiah was the GOAT.
And he was local, a Chicago-area product just like me, and so, though my home team wasn’t in the finals that year, Isiah—a short, underestimated, baby-faced Chicagoan—became my avatar. The Pistons were looking to close out the defending champions in six games, eager to inaugurate their own dynasty (they would go on to win in 1989 and 1990). Pat Riley trademarked the term “three-peat” for the Lakers, but the Pistons would have used it first had they also won in 1988, putting them among the all-time greats instead of the not-quites. Today, the Bad Boys are remembered mostly as a foil—what, in the world of pro wrestling, they call a “heel.”
That night, Isiah and the Pistons were hanging in midway through the second half, when, on what looked like an otherwise routine play, Isiah ran over the foot of L.A. guard Michael Cooper, turning his ankle ninety degrees. Isiah fell to the floor, reached for his foot, and screamed.
The Forum got quiet—it was the kind of uncanny silence only a crowd can make. Jack Nicholson was on his feet. Barbra Streisand looked concerned.
A trainer helped Isiah to the bench, where he sat, leg extended, as trainers and doctors worked all around him. The injury capped off what had been a punishing postseason for Zeke, who had been cut, tripped, banged, and knocked out over the course of the last seven weeks. The game continued. The announcer said Zeke was probably done for the night; my father—we were watching on the Magnavox in the family room—agreed. “You roll an ankle like that,” he said, “it blows up, then you can’t put any weight on it.”
Isiah, who seemingly had the same thought—I’ve got to do what I can while I can still walk!—somehow got his busted self back onto the floor. It was as if, knowing his ankle would soon triple in size, he decided that this was his best chance to push his team across the finish line.
He took an inbound pass, then went to work. Though hobbled—he moved like a supermarket cart with a punk wheel—he set up plays, delivered pinpoint passes, hit shots from all over the floor, and now and then, in that third quarter that seemed to stretch into a lifetime, even drove the basket, going one-on-one with players who were a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier, including Magic Johnson, who had been (but would soon no longer be) one of Isiah’s best friends.
The Detroit Free Press later ran a list of all the shots Isiah hit in the third quarter.
11:01
2 free throws
Lakers 56–50
10:31
Follow up 5 footer
Lakers 56–52
10:06
18 foot jumper from the key
Lakers 58–54
9:37
12 footer from the right side off drive
Lakers 62–56
8:14
14 foot bank shot from left side
Lakers 64–58
7:38
12 foot jumper on left side, from Dumars
Lakers 64–60
6:22
Breakaway lay-up, from Dumars
Lakers 66–62
3:29
12 foot jumper on left baseline from Dantley
Lakers 74–68
2:59
14 foot bank shot from [Vinnie Johnson], Cooper fouled on play—Zeke missed free throw
Lakers 76–70
1:13
26 foot 3 pointer, from Vinnie Johnson
ties score at 77
0:46
Breakaway lay-up from Rodman
tied 79–79
0:02
Pistons 81–79
Isiah’s 25-point third quarter remains a postseason record. But it wasn’t just the numbers that dazzled. It was the grit, the determination, the way this small man at play in a world of giants put his team on his back and nearly delivered them: The Pistons came up just short, and many believed they were hosed by the refs with a bad call at the end.
Isiah became a symbol in those twelve minutes, an embodiment of everything that a person who wants to live ecstatically should be. He played with fury and joy. He loved his teammates and his opponents—you could see it in every move. He never gave up, never stopped trying. He did this not in spite of his injury but because of it. As a professional athlete, he knew it would only get worse, that it was now or never, that the pain did not matter if he did not notice it, that, in this league, there is only today, this quarter, right now. He was like a protagonist out of a Camus novel—I’d taken existentialism in college that year—who is free because he knows he will die.
That’s the night I fell in love with the NBA.
* * *
For a Chicago sports fan in the early 1980s, life was pain. The Cubs had not won a World Series since 1908. The White Sox had not won since 1917, and, what’s worse, the last time they should’ve won, in 1919, they took money to throw the games instead, shrouding the entire city in shame. The Blackhawks had not won the Stanley Cup since 1961—seven years before I was born. True, the Bears won the Super Bowl in 1986, which was incredible—but only for a moment, as, over the next few years, we had to sit on our hands and watch as the McCaskeys, the family that owns the Bears, dismantled the team, possibly because they’d realized losing can be more profitable than winning.
And so, for much of my childhood, I focused my attention on amateur basketball. DePaul had a great team in the 1980s, a team stacked with future NBA stars. The Loyola Ramblers were good. Even the Northwestern Wildcats were interesting. But the best games were played at the high school level—not my high school, New Trier, which was constantly being outjumped and outmuscled, but the great downtown public and Catholic school teams of the era.
There were dozens of basketball powerhouses in the city: Westinghouse, where Mark Aguirre and Hersey Hawkins played; Simeon, the alma mater of Derrick Rose and Ben Wilson; Carver, which had been put on the map by Cazzie Russell. There were also far-flung Catholic schools, such as St. Joseph’s in Westchester, Illinois, where coach Gene Pingatore built a state champion around the teenage Isiah Thomas in 1978.
My father would drive us to gyms across the state to watch the best teams compete. Dull fluorescent light, linoleum, flickering numbers on rickety scoreboards, cheerleaders and uniforms and freaked-out parents, my father instructing, whispering in my ear—“See how he boxes the man out? Notice how he always goes to his right? The kid can’t play with his left hand”—top prospects showing off for the scouts, who, even if you couldn’t see them, were always there. That’s what I remember.
I saw Isiah play against Westinghouse in December 1978. It was dark at 5:00 p.m. and bitterly cold. Even then, amid high school teammates and opponents, most of whom would go on to lead ordinary adult lives, Isiah looked small, fragile. On many plays, he was shadowed by two or three defenders who hung over him like oak trees, which did not matter when Isiah decided he was going to the basket. His height, or lack of, made him a lodestar for every undersized would-be in Chicagoland. He was electric that evening, scoring from inside and out, securing the win on the last shot. The smooth efficiency of his style made you want to find something, anything, you could do half as well.
Though everyone in Northern Illinois knew about Isiah, he did not yet exist to the rest of the world. He was a secret we knew we’d have only for a little while, and it made us proud. A memory of the adolescent Isiah is also a memory of childhood, which is what made it so painful when Michael Jordan turned Zeke into a foil, and when Zeke, who’d been Daniel in the lions’ den, went from hero to antihero.
You could watch Isiah and a dozen other local standouts mix it up on the city playgrounds most weekend afternoons. The courts were gritty, the neighborhoods run-down, but the games, the quality of talent, were unreal. In 1970s and 1980s Chicago, the playground standouts pushed each other toward greatness, until, in the way of a local music scene—Liverpool in the 1960s, say; Seattle in the 1990s—they all seemed to emerge on the national map at once. You recognized them by their style. It was a Chicago style, created by the realities of the city. It was, according to Isiah, characterized by hard, physical play—not because Chicago is tough, but because the weather is so nasty. They played all winter on the West Side, which meant wind and snow. Even the prettiest shot won’t fall when the gale-force wind is blowing off the plains. Even the most eagle-eyed playmaker won’t deliver when the flurries swirl. To be effective in February, you learned to keep opponents off-balance and take the ball to the hoop; the wind can’t spoil a dunk. It was a stingy style that could be seen across the NBA. The 1987 All-Star Game featured a half dozen players who’d grown up on the West Side courts, including Mark Aguirre, Mo Cheeks, Doc Rivers, and Isiah Thomas.
Of course, Chicagoans, though happy to serve as a talent pool, wanted a great NBA team of their own. The city had had a star-crossed relationship with the pro game. Several teams had come and gone since the first professional league was founded in 1898. There’d been the Chicago Bruins of the American Basketball League, the American Gears of the National Basketball League, and the Chicago Zephyrs of the National Association. The Bulls, a 1966 expansion club, were meant to fill a hole left by the Zephyrs, who moved first to Baltimore, then to Washington, where they still play as the Wizards.
The Bulls posted a few decent seasons in the 1970s, then collapsed. They were a joke by the early 1980s, known mostly for blown draft picks and head-case flameouts. Quintin Dailey, drafted in the first round in 1982, is remembered less for how he played than for something he did on the road in 1985. Pulled from a game early, he sent a ball boy for a slice of pizza, nachos, popcorn, and a soda, which he ate on the bench.
This finally began to change in 1984, with the coming of Michael Jordan. Watching Jordan, especially when he was young and seemingly made of springs, was amazing, but just as amazing was watching Jerry Krause, the dumpy general manager—Jordan called him “Crumbs”—rebuild the team around its star. 1985. 1986. 1987. 1988. Krause experimented with players and coaches, searching for just the right combination, the mix that would best support Michael Jordan. Once the ingredients were in place, you watched the players develop, alone and together, season after season. You followed them as you might follow a talented group of freshmen as they make their way through college. You got to see them learn how to work together, cooperate, sacrifice, share. You got to see them learn how to lose and learn how to win. It was not mere happiness you felt when they finally figured out how to overcome an obstacle like the Detroit Pistons. It was pride, a satisfaction unknown in a time of nearly unlimited free agency. These days, when buying a Bulls jersey, I ask the guy to put the name of the owner on the back; everyone else will soon be gone.
* * *
As the years went by, as I moved away from Chicago and into the world, as I watched the rise and fall of political leaders, political parties, and even ideologies, I found myself thinking not less but more about the Bulls and the great NBA teams of the late 1980s. In them, I recognized the same historical process I was seeing in the news. In the 1980s, NBA teams took time to build, to adapt—draft by draft and trade by trade—in order to defeat their most dangerous rivals. The Pistons were built to overcome the Celtics just as America was built to overcome Russia. Get bigger, faster, and better or end up on the ash heap of history.
In an attempt to relive and understand that era, which for me began the night Isiah scored 25 points in one quarter on one leg, I’ve read every book and every memoir about every team and by every player from that decade. I have watched all the old games, read all the old articles and stories. I have tracked down and interviewed all the old players, coaches, executives, writers, and broadcasters, or as many as I could find. I’ve had hundreds of conversations about everything from the nature of Bill Laimbeer (“Pussy! Guy’d jump on you just like you were a piece of bubble wrap!”) to the trouble a tall man faces when flying coach (“They folded me up like an accordion!”).
