Three-Ring Circus: Kobe, Shaq, Phil, and the Crazy Years of the Lakers Dynasty

To Gary Miller

Whose selfish need to be Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley nearly ruined a friendship

(Some 40 years ago)

First Mariner Books edition 2021

Copyright © 2020 by Jeff Pearlman

All rights reserved

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

marinerbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pearlman, Jeff, author.

Title: Three-ring circus : Kobe, Shaq, Phil, and the crazy years of the Lakers dynasty / Jeff Pearlman.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019057830 (print) | LCCN 2019057831 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328530004 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781328530660 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358627968 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Los Angeles Lakers (Basketball team)—History. | Basketball teams—California—Los Angeles—History. | Basketball players—United States—Biography.

Classification: LCC GV885.52.L67 Pff 2020 (print) | LCC GV885.52.L67 (ebook) | DDC 796.323/640979494—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057830

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057831

Cover design by Brian Moore

Cover photographs: © David Sherman / NBAE / Getty Images (Shaq); © Steve Grayson / Getty Images (Phil); © Jeff Gross / Allsport / Getty Images (Kobe)

Author photograph © Catherine Pearlman

v4.1221

To men and women who want to do things, there is nothing quite so driving as the force of an imprisoned ego. All genius comes from this class.

—MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

Author’s Note

On the morning of January 26, 2020, I was sitting inside the Corner Bakery in Irvine, California. My laptop was open. A hot bowl of oatmeal rested before me, alongside one of those sugary crisp biscuits and a cup of coffee.

At exactly 11:37 a.m., my iPhone made a noise. Ping. I lifted the device from the table. The text was from my friend Amy Bass . . .

News reports that Kobe Bryant is dead

Wait.

Wait.

Wait.

What?

Kobe Bryant couldn’t be dead. There are things in this world that are possible, and things that are impossible. This was impossible.

Kobe Bryant was just 41 years old. He was a husband, a father of four, an entrepreneur, a youth coach, a regular church parishioner, an active and involved Orange County resident. His videos were all over social media. Kobe shooting hoops with Gigi, his 13-year-old daughter. Kobe snuggling with his wife, Vanessa, and their newborn. More than 15 million followers hung on @kobebryant’s latest tweets, and with good reason. His was a simultaneously comforting and electrifying presence.

Kobe Bryant couldn’t be dead.

He just couldn’t.

Over the previous two years, I had worked nonstop on this book, Three-Ring Circus. And while this is a chronicling of the 1996 to 2004 Los Angeles Lakers, it is also—in a sense—the story of Kobe Bryant’s development as both a professional basketball player and a fully functioning human being.

Upon joining the franchise at age 17 in 1996, Bryant was a typically overconfident, largely insufferable teenager. Like most of us emerging from high school, he believed all the answers resided inside his head, and that his elders were both misguided and out of touch. He thought he could average 30 ppg as a rookie. He thought Shaquille O’Neal was lazy and Eddie Jones underwhelming and Nick Van Exel overrated. He thought he should be starting from Day One, and that Del Harris—the veteran head coach—knew not whereof he spoke.

Through the eight years that followed, Bryant was as beloved as he was disliked. He could do magical things on the court while behaving as a selfish child off of it. He treated many fans like his closest friends while treating many teammates (especially undrafted rookies) like empty soda cans resting alongside a gutter. He had little use for some coaches and overwhelming respect for others. He was dour and peppy; intense and playful; cruel and loving. He was accused of raping a woman, proclaiming his innocence even as he came very close to serving time.

Jerry Buss, the Lakers’ owner, viewed him as a son, in the way he also viewed an earlier Lakers star, Magic Johnson, as a son. Jeanie Buss, Jerry’s daughter, considered Kobe a brother. Shaquille O’Neal eyed him skeptically, wearily. Other teammates didn’t know Bryant beyond the court. Hi, Bye. Little more.

You never knew where you stood with Kobe, I was told.

You always knew where you stood with Kobe, I was also told.

When the reality of Kobe Bryant’s death finally hit—when we learned that a fiery helicopter crash had not only taken his life, but that of Gigi and seven others—I found myself thinking long and hard about the fragility of existence, about the end of an icon’s being.

About a person’s legacy.

I am fortunate to count several tremendous sportswriters as friends, and this concept—legacy—is something we’ve broached at length. It’s actually (in a way) one of the flaws of the medium. When one writes the story of an era, he is charged not with dishing out hagiography, but an honest, sincere, detailed recollection of a period. In doing so, however, an author asks the reader to understand that a sliver of time is not an eternity.

Or, put differently: A book freezes people.

This is my clumsy way of saying that the Kobe Bryant of 1996 to 2004 is not the Kobe Bryant of 2005 to January 26, 2020. He was not then the contemplative adult who raved of having four daughters. He was not then the doting husband. He was not then the Academy Award winner.

He was not yet comfortable in his skin.

What I hope to supply here—for good or bad—are not merely the highs and lows of a dynastic basketball team, but the early steps and missteps of a player who arrived in professional sports as a child and, tragically, died days ago as a fully formed human. Just as you cannot explain Albert Einstein’s brilliance without first examining his days as a youthful Bern patent clerk, and just as you cannot know Amelia Earhart without grasping her time as a homeschooled child in Des Moines, it is hard, if not impossible, to love the richness of Kobe Bryant’s life without observing his days of stubbornness and social experimentation and development.

When a legend dies, we feel lost.

Sometimes, I hope, it eases that grief to know how he began.

To celebrate it.

Jeff Pearlman

February 10, 2020

Prologue

It’s February 21, 2002. We are in Cleveland. Only this is pre-LeBron Cleveland, a ceaselessly pewter-skyed city that provides the razzle of an armpit. There is nothing of particular note to do here, so when NBA players come to town, they do—largely—nothing. Sit in the hotel room. Flick around the remote control. Eat. Sleep.

That’s why Samaki Walker, Lakers power forward and a man who stands 6-foot-9 and weighs 240 pounds, is in his room at the Ritz-Carlton. Sitting. Flicking. Eating. Sleeping.

Then something catches his eye. It’s the red blinking light atop the phone on his night table.

Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

Walker assumes it’s rote road-trip insignificance. Housekeeping, maybe. A left-behind message for a departed guest. But then, out of curiosity, he presses the VOICEMAIL button and holds the receiver to his ear.

Yo [sob] Samaki . . .

Is that . . . ?

Maki [sob], look, you’re [sob] my boy [sob]  . . .

Could that be . . . ?

I [sob] just . . . I just [sob]  . . .

That sounds like . . .

Man [sob]  . . . I’m so [sob] sorry . . .

Kobe Bryant?

Maki [sob], really, I’m [sob]  . . .

And is he crying?

Walker is in his sixth NBA season, and while the onetime Louisville star has never quite lived up to the potential that made him the ninth overall pick of the 1996 draft, he has seen a lot. In no particular order: Walker’s father spent 13 years in prison for aggravated robbery. His mother battled severe alcoholism. He skipped his senior year of basketball at Whitehall-Yearling (Ohio) High because he hated the coach. He left Louisville early after being accused of using a Honda Accord given to his father by a booster. He was once arrested for driving a motorcycle more than 100 miles per hour through the streets of Columbus, Ohio. All those nuggets in time and space were jarring.

But this . . . this is something Samaki Walker can’t wrap his head around.

He continues to listen.

Yo, Samaki . . . [sob] I don’t know what [sob] I was [sob] thinking. You’re a friend, man [sob]. A good [sob] friend. I’m so [sob] sorry. I’m so [sob], so sorry. Really, just . . .

Click.

As he marinates within the silence of his room, Walker replays the events of the past 24 hours—a string of happenings that, weirdness-wise, rivals anything he has experienced through his first 26 years of existence.

It’s the previous day, and the Lakers are holding a morning shoot­around at Gund Arena in Cleveland. Toward the end of the session, as ritual dictates, the members of the team line up to launch half-court shots, with the winner collecting $100 from each participant.

As befits an organization coming off two straight NBA championships, the enlistees form a Who’s Who of modern basketball achievement. There’s Robert Horry, the dead-eye three-point gunner whose penchant for late-game heroics is legend. There’s Rick Fox, the savvy small forward whose cinematic appearances and marriage to Vanessa Williams make him Tinseltown royalty. There’s Brian Shaw, the cerebral point guard and locker room sage. There’s Derek Fisher, the fast-talking spark plug from tiny Arkansas–Little Rock. There’s Shaquille O’Neal, the larger-than-life’s-largest-life 7-foot-1, 325-pound center. There’s Kobe Bryant, the sixth-year straight-out-of-high-school superstar many consider to be the second coming of Michael Jordan.

The men line up to shoot. And miss. And shoot. And miss. And shoot. And miss. Familiar trash talk serves as the soundtrack. Slang barbs. Surface insults. Finally Bryant—6-foot-6, 212 pounds of long, sinewy muscle—picks up a ball, takes a bunch of steps behind the half-court line, trots four long paces forward, elongates his arms, pushes forward, and . . . and . . . and . . .

Swish.

Fuuuuck.

Gimme my money! Bryant barks toward his teammates.

Gimme my fucking money!

The Lakers are paying Bryant $12.3 million for the season, and he’ll land an additional $20 million in endorsements with such companies as McDonald’s and Sprite. The $1,200 in half-court-shot winnings is chump change. But that’s not the point. It’s pride. Status. Strike or be struck—that’s been Bryant’s modus operandi since entering the league. Nobody was going to make Kobe Bryant his bitch. To some, these contests are mere game. O’Neal participates, sideways grin glued to his face, knowing he can’t possibly win. The same goes for Mark Madsen, the lumbering 6-foot-9 forward out of Stanford. But in Kobe Bryant’s world, nothing is a game. Ever. Not checkers, not chess, not Connect Four, certainly not a half-court shot with $1,200 on the line. That’s why, when the practice ends, he marches from teammate to teammate, palm extended. He takes the $100 from O’Neal, the $100 from Fox, the $100 from Shaw, the $100 from Horry.

Bryant looks Walker over. My money? he commands.

I gotta get it to you later, Walker replies. I don’t have it on me.

Bryant flashes an agitated look but walks off. Within the Lakers organization, there’s an understood 48-hour window for debts to be paid. Bryant is young and rich and averaging 25.2 points per game for a team expected to win yet another NBA crown. What’s a delayed $100 in the grand scheme?

Now, however, it’s the following morning—around 10 a.m. on February 21. The Laker players file onto the chartered team bus to make their way back to the facility for a brief practice run before the night’s matchup against the lowly Cavaliers. Befitting their status as two of the team’s key veterans, O’Neal and Fox head toward the vehicle’s rear, which they lovingly refer to as the Ghetto. They plop down into seats behind Jelani McCoy, a reserve center. Walker follows, settling into his regular spot. They are all listening to individual CD players, nodding their heads to the beats.

Then Bryant boards the bus.

He marches toward Walker, glares downward. Yo Maki, he says, you gonna give me my fucking money?

Walker pretends not to hear, so Bryant gets louder. Maki, where the fuck is my fucking money?

This time Walker doesn’t merely ignore him.

This time, Walker doesn’t merely laugh at him.

No, this time Walker waves him off like an errant gnat. I’ll give you your money, he says, when I have it.

To Walker, it’s all a joke. He and Bryant entered the league together, and the majority of players on the roster view Kobe’s latest efforts not unlike MC Hammer’s forever lampooned 1994 attempt at gangsta rap.* Bryant is a Thank you and You’re very welcome type of guy—polite, suburban, cultured, well-heeled. Truth be told, he’s always been a clumsy fit for this league of superstars with well-earned street cred—the Allen Iversons and Stephon Marburys. The cursing is the latest addition to Bryant’s paint-by-numbers approach to sounding hardened, and it’s as authentic as $5 mink.

It was his Beanie Sigel phase, says McCoy. Really fake.

Now, if one looks closely enough, he can see the steam rising from Bryant’s ears. The four-time All-Star leans past Fox, draws back his right fist, lunges across Walker’s head, and—pop!—punches him in the right eye.

For a moment, everyone on the bus freezes. Just for a moment.

Walker, 28 pounds heavier than Bryant, gazes toward McCoy, his closest friend on the roster. Did this fucker just hit me? he says. "Did he just hit me?"

McCoy nods.

Walker rises, clenches a fist, and—whoosh! Jerome Crawford, O’Neal’s King Kong Bundy-esque bodyguard and constant companion, charges from five rows up. He wraps Walker in a bear hug, but not before Walker launches his Discman at Bryant’s head. Not surprisingly, the career 63 percent free throw shooter misses. The device hits the floor and cracks apart. Walker is screaming at Bryant. Fuck you, bitch! Bryant is screaming at Walker. No, fuck you! O’Neal, whose relationship with the young guard is both well chronicled and chronically awful, looks Walker in the face. You’ve gotta fuck him up! he says in his deep baritone. Fuck. Him. Up.

Walker nods, then gazes toward Phil Jackson, the veteran head coach, whose ability to grasp (and manipulate) the psyches of his players is a longtime calling card. Phil, Walker says, can you please stop the bus?

In his two and a half seasons with Los Angeles, Jackson has endured some absolutely crazy moments. He’s watched awful Shaq movies and heard Bryant’s ear-melting attempts at hip-hop. He’s had a player turn up with a PLEASE EXCUSE HIS ABSENCE FROM PRACTICE note from a hotel clerk and wondered whether certain men were performing under the in­fluence.

Now, the Lakers are somewhere in downtown Cleveland. Jackson has no great desire to have his two-time defending champions pull to the side of a road in downtown Cleveland. However, he sees what his players also see in Kobe Bryant—a selfish, entitled, me-first human whose social skills lag far behind his athletic gifts. Hey, he says to the driver, pull over when you can.

The bus stops. Walker, his voice emotionless, looks at Bryant, who gazes toward the floor.

Well? he says. You wanna step off and take care of this?

Bryant ignores his teammate. The silence is palpable.

That’s what I thought, Walker says.

A pause.

You little bitch.

With that, NBA life seems to continue as normal. The bus arrives at the arena, the Lakers practice (without Walker, who is told by Jackson to remain in a side room and calm down), the men return to the hotel to rest before the night’s game. In his mind, Walker imagines a scenario in which he yanks Bryant aside and beats the snot out of him. He pictures ramming his fist through his face. He pictures elbowing him in the gut. He doesn’t merely want to hit Kobe Bryant. He wants to hurt him. Walker is a product of the inner city, a man whose time in Columbus taught him how to handle business. I’m gonna fuck that boy up, he tells O’Neal at one point. There’s gonna be nothing left of him.

This is what Walker is pondering when he notices the light blinking on his hotel room phone; when he listens to a sobbing Kobe Bryant; when he realizes his teammate isn’t exactly a model of emotional stability.

Later in the evening, shortly before tipoff against the Cavs, Walker is on the treadmill at Gund Arena. He is still angry, though the rage has subsided. This is what it is to be a professional athlete. You set distractions aside. You move on. You march forward. You focus on the task at hand. You . . .

Hey, Samaki.

It’s Crawford, O’Neal’s bodyguard.

I’ve got this fucker outside, he says. He wants to talk to you.

Moments later, Bryant approaches. His voice is unusually soft. His shoulders are hunched. He looks wounded, as if he’s about to once again weep.

Maki, he says, I’m really sorry. That’s on me.

The forward stops jogging and steps from the treadmill. He actually feels surprising pangs of sympathy for the kid. Walker—100-mile-an-hour motorcycle roadster—knows what it is to mess up.

Listen, he says, we’re good. Seriously, we’re good. But you can’t go around hitting another man. There are some issues you’ve gotta work out. You can’t live life this way.

That night, the Lakers take down the Cavs, 104–97. Kobe Bryant scores a team-high 32 points on 13-of-24 shooting. He plays like a man possessed.

Kobe, Walker would say, was a great basketball player. No doubt. But sometimes you had to wonder whether he was comfortable being himself. Whether he knew who he really was.

1

Magic

The comeback was destined to be remarkable.

How could it not be, if you think about it? On November 7, 1991, four and a half years earlier, Earvin Magic Johnson, transcendent guard for the Los Angeles Lakers, had announced his retirement from basketball after contracting the HIV virus. It was one of those where-were-you-when stoppages in time, not on the Is the world coming to an end? level of the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, but certainly right there with the Challenger explosion for modern holy shit is this really happening? blunt-force trauma.

All these decades later, it’s hard to sit with a millennial and explain the impact of Johnson—the face of the NBA, the face of athletic joy, the face of goodwill, the face of vigor—standing before the media inside the Great Western Forum, leaning into a microphone, and saying, Because of the HIV virus that I have attained, I will have to retire from the Lakers.

Gasp.

Yes, many other celebrities had died before our eyes from AIDS, but this was different. Freddie Mercury, Liberace, Anthony Perkins, Gia Carangi—they were people who shared our dimensions and gravitational limitations. Plus, we had our own built-in excuses. They were gay. They were drug addicts. They screwed around. They lived lives of ill repute. They asked for it.

The idea of bearing witness to a superhero like Magic Johnson developing lesions, losing most of his weight, needing a walker, fading to dust before our eyes . . . well, it was too much to handle. Wrote Gary Nuhn of the Dayton Daily News, I guess we’re going to watch Magic Johnson die just as my father’s generation watched Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth die. Slowly. Painfully. Irreversibly.

So when Magic Johnson didn’t develop lesions and lose most of his weight, when he didn’t need a walker or fade to dust before our eyes—it felt almost biblical. And as the years passed and Johnson opened movie theaters and coffee shops and shook 10 million hands and hugged 10 million babies and smiled that 10-million-megawatt smile, there was this growing idea that if anyone could accomplish the unaccomplishable, it was Magic.

Especially on the basketball court.

Not that the Los Angeles Lakers were uniquely unsalvageable. It’s just that, in the years following Johnson’s departure from the National Basketball Association, the franchise had morphed from a tulip glass of perfectly chilled Cristal to a Dixie cup half filled with some flat, lukewarm 7-Up. Gone were the days of Magic tossing a no-look pass to Michael Cooper on the break. Gone were the days of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skyhooks over Jack Sikma. Between Johnson’s rookie year of 1979 and his retirement, the Showtime Lakers not only hung five championship banners inside the Forum, but they did so with style and panache and unbridled zest.

But with Johnson’s absence, that changed. The 1990–91 Lakers went 58-24 and reached the NBA Finals under Magic’s leadership, but one year later, minus their retired star, they fell to 43-39 before exiting the season with a listless first-round playoff defeat to Portland. The next year was even worse (a punchless 39-43 mark), and the one after that (33-49) all the more limp and pathetic. These were the listless Lakers of Sedale Threatt. Of marginal placeholders who felt like purple-and-gold basketball impostors.

When the highly regarded Del Harris was hired as coach before the 1994–95 season, and his team went a surprising 48-34, some optimism returned to Los Angeles. There was talk of a youth movement, what with the emergence of a feisty point guard, Nick Van Exel, out of Cincinnati, and a sleek shooting guard, Eddie Jones, from Temple. The 1995–96 campaign got off to an okay start—through mid-January the team was hanging around .500, seeking that spark; that jolt; that energy; that . . .

Return.

To be honest, Magic Johnson was bored. Really bored. If there is nothing more exciting than running the point of a well-oiled NBA juggernaut, there are few things more dispiriting than having run the point of a well-oiled NBA juggernaut. Especially when, deep down, you know you’re better than the people out there. And that was how Johnson felt in the winter of 1996, kissing babies and opening theaters but watching the mediocre Lakers—his mediocre Lakers—and whispering, I’m better.

So while Van Exel piloted the show aboveground, Johnson found himself in the shadows, lifting weights, running sprints, popping jumpers, thinking that maybe, just maybe, it was time for a comeback. He had toured Asia, Australia, and New Zealand with a Globetrotters-like squad made up of former college and NBA players, and his skills remained sharp. Plus, attitudes about HIV and AIDS changed, hadn’t they? Back before the 1992–93 season, Magic’s first planned return to the league had been stopped dead in its tracks when several players—including Utah Jazz star Karl Malone—expressed trepidation over competing against a man infected with the HIV virus. In the time that had passed, though, much had been learned. Namely, that on-court basketball-player-to-basketball-player transmission was as likely as human-to-rock transmission.

On January 17, 1996, USA Today ran a piece headlined MAGIC: NO PLANS TO RETURN TO LAKERS, in which a writer named Jerry Langdon reported that Johnson was working out with the team, but only to stay in shape. Nine days later, the Associated Press’s Ken Peters caught up with Johnson to ask about reports that he was all but guaranteed to return.

Let’s just say, Johnson told Peters, I haven’t decided.

He had decided.

Jerry West called me in one day and said, ‘So, Magic wants to come back,’ recalled Del Harris of the team’s executive vice president of basketball operations. Jerry told me that Magic thinks he can play, that he’s in really good shape, that he wants to help. But he said it was completely up to me. That it was my decision.

Harris asked to speak to Johnson. They met inside the Lakers’ offices, and the veteran coach told the veteran player that he could not (a) be the point guard (Van Exel was terrific and emotionally fragile), (b) be the shooting guard (Jones was terrific and emotionally fragile), or (c) expect to start. Harris liked the idea of having Magic Johnson on the roster, because, well, who wouldn’t like the idea of Magic Johnson on the roster? But it was important for the coach to stress that times had changed and Pat Riley was no longer running things. Johnson would need to adhere and adjust and, perhaps, accommodate. If that was possible, Harris was all in.

On January 29, 1996, Magic Johnson made it official, signing a one-year, $2.5 million contract, surrendering his 4.5 percent ownership share in the franchise, and rejoining a team that genuinely wanted him. Harris, the headman, said, We’re adding a wonderful piece, a wonderful ele­ment. Jones, the second-year star shooting guard, said, We need him. He’ll make us a better team. Point guard Van Exel said, With Magic back, I think we’re a true contender.

Johnson commenced his heroic second act as a Los Angeles Laker on January 30, 1996, with the visiting Golden State Warriors in town and tickets being scalped outside the Forum for All-Star Game prices. John Black, the team’s media relations director, distributed three hundred press credentials for the game. At 7:20 p.m., with Randy Newman’s I Love L.A. blaring from the speakers, Johnson jogged back onto the court in his purple-and-gold warm-ups. Some things were different: at 36, he looked older; with 27 extra pounds, he looked heavier; with Van Exel at the point, he was now a power forward. The mojo, though, was familiar. It was electric, said John Nadel, who covered the Lakers for the Associated Press. He was the hero, coming in to save the day.

In an effort to show his players that—really, truly, I mean it—not much would change in their lives, Harris had Johnson begin the evening on the bench, a scrub situated alongside George Lynch and Derek Strong. Yet 2:21 into the first quarter, after Elden Campbell picked up his second foul, Harris motioned toward the returnee and said, Let’s go. Johnson walked to the scorer’s table to check in. The capacity crowd of 17,505 rose, and shortly thereafter Johnson scored his first basket, a vintage drive toward the hoop and past an overmatched forward named Joe Smith. The entire night was, truly, a magical buffet of snazzy passes and high fives and standing ovations, and when it ended the Lakers’ new-old-new star had scored 19 points with 10 assists and 8 rebounds in a 128–118 victory.

It’s amazing, Vlade Divac, the Los Angeles center, said afterwards. Having him back is great. I can’t even describe it. Everybody is a better player with him on the team. How can you detract from the chemistry when you make everybody better?

And, for a spell, everything seemed peachy. The Lakers went on an eight-game winning streak as packed crowds greeted the team at home and on the road. Showtime had returned, with Magic Johnson once again leading the way.

Only . . . well . . . um . . . eh . . . it’s sort of unclear whether the other members of the Lakers actually wanted Magic Johnson leading the way. Oh, on the surface they certainly did. You don’t add a 12-time All-Star, with his enlarged jersey literally hanging above you, and not embrace the guidance. But these Lakers weren’t those Lakers, and while Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy were always willing to overlook/accept Johnson’s propensity for the spotlight, now Magic seemed to be more obnoxious uncle than peer. Just two days after his comeback, Johnson explained to the Associated Press’s Wendy E. Lane that he deserved to be considered for the upcoming United States Olympic team (I know I can get out there and do my thing). Then he informed the media that—should the comeback somehow not work out in Southern California—he would love to play the following season for the New York Knicks or the Miami Heat. There was always a microphone, a TV camera, a notepad, and Johnson never bypassed an opportunity to tell his story, share his beliefs, propose his ideas. He also showed little to no interest in his teammates, whom he seemed to deem fortunate to live in his presence. They were props. Nice props. Productive props. But, ultimately, just props, perfectly situated in the locker room when Johnson felt compelled to break out the tired ol’ I got these five rings on my fingers and I don’t know what to do—my hands are getting heavy line. If he spent time with anyone, it was Jerry Buss, the franchise owner, who considered Johnson a son. When he first rejoined the team, Johnson went directly to his old locker—now filled with the belongings of George Lynch, the third-year forward out of North Carolina—and reclaimed it. He didn’t ask, or offer money. He just took it.

By his fourth game back, Johnson was insisting that he needed to be on the court come crunch time. By his fifth game, opposing players were starting to whisper again about whether it was safe to be competing against a man with HIV. When Johnson spoke, it was 99 percent I, 1 percent we. Worst of all, his presence was beginning to adversely impact his teammates. Los Angeles dropped a 98–97 crusher to Orlando on March 17 when the normally cocksure Van Exel bypassed a potential game-winning shot—one he certainly would have taken had Magic not been on the floor. That was unfortunate, but the player who reacted most negatively to Johnson’s presence was Cedric Ceballos, the starting small forward and a man whose minutes were impacted by the roster change.

A sixth-year veteran out of Cal State Fullerton, Ceballos had been a cancerous presence on the team since his arrival via trade from Phoenix in September 1994. He was your classic egomaniacal professional athlete, told far too many times how great, amazing, and awesome he was when, in fact, he was neither great nor amazing nor awesome. Ceballos’s defensive intensity was nonexistent. He passed once or twice a month. What he possessed in droves, however, was chutzpah. Having averaged 21.7 points for the 1994–95 Lakers, he nicknamed himself Chise—short for Franchise, as in franchise player. Perhaps the case could have been made were Ceballos a member of, oh, the hapless (and new) Minnesota Timberwolves. But on the Lakers, whose all-time roster included George Mikan, Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, Gail Goodrich, Jamaal Wilkes, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy, and (ahem) Magic Johnson, it rang preposterous.

We laughed at him, said Eddie Jones. You can’t pick your own nickname. Ever.

He gave himself a nickname, said Corie Blount, a Laker forward. "Think about the arrogance of that. Franchise? Really? You’re our franchise player? Okay, buddy. You ride that one out . . ."

Mark Heisler, the Los Angeles Times’s tremendous basketball writer, referred to Ceballos as a preening peacock, and this was correct. Ceballos won the 1992 NBA Slam Dunk Contest and also made the 1995 All-Star Game. He cut a rap record. All combined, he deemed himself legend. And legends take a back seat to no man.

On March 20, one day after playing a season-low 12 minutes in a home win against the Sonics, then hearing Magic say he believed he should be starting at small forward, Ceballos went AWOL, skipping a team flight to Seattle and failing to show up for the 104–93 loss. Fred Slaughter, Ceballos’s agent, had no new information. Neither did Mitch Kupchak, the Lakers’ general manager. Ceballos was losing $27,378 per game, and because no one on the Lakers cared much for him, no one knew where he happened to be. The only peep in regard to his whereabouts came from Dean Messmer, owner of the Boat Brokers, in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. He’s out water skiing, having a great time, Messmer told a reporter. I just saw him. He rented a SeaDoo and is waiting on repairs on his boat, which we have.*

Finally, five days after he vanished, Ceballos returned, armed with a nonsense excuse (I had some very personal and family problems to deal with) that failed to conceal his frustration with life beneath/alongside Magic Johnson. One teammate after another took a turn berating their missing cohort, and someone even placed a milk carton in his locker stall, with the words WHERE IN THE WORLD IS CEBALLOS? pasted on one side. He was just an all-time phony, said Scott Howard-Cooper of the Los Angeles Times. You’d talk to him and he could call you every name in the book. Then a TV camera turns on and he’s all smiles. No teammates trusted him. The most unlikely and unqualified captain in modern sports history, Ceballos was stripped of his title and given the silent treatment on a four-and-a-half-hour flight from Los Angeles to Orlando. Yet it was only when Johnson ultimately spoke his piece that the tone and texture of the scandal changed. Unlike the other Lakers, who bemoaned what Ceballos had done to the team, Johnson expressed anger over how the affair had impacted him. This was ruining his comeback season. This was taking away from his moment in the spotlight. This is the worst time for all this to happen, he said. I’m really sick and tired of it. Maybe I won’t throw myself back into next season. I don’t know. It’s hard for me to do with all this. I’m too old.

What one month earlier had seemed the happiest revival story in professional sports was turning into mud. Powered by a four-game winning streak, the Lakers clinched a playoff berth on March 28, then two weeks later lost Van Exel when he shoved a referee in Denver and was suspended for seven games. Johnson, being Johnson, wasted no time berating his teammate for failing to keep his cool—then bumped a referee and was suspended three games himself during a win over Phoenix. Ira Berkow, the New York Times’s star columnist, took the NBA to task for letting Johnson off with but a wrist slap, and he was right. The whole thing was preposterous.

It became a circus, Harris said years later. You had Magic criticizing Nick, then doing the same thing on the court that Nick did. You had Ced giving himself his own crazy nickname, leaving, returning, pouting. We had really good players. But it all fell apart at the absolute wrong time.

From behind the scenes, Jerry West was aghast. The legendary Laker could (generally) handle losing if he felt the Lakers were headed in the right direction. One season earlier, for example, he viewed the growth and maturation of Van Exel and Jones as signs that the organization’s future was increasingly bright. Now, though, he concluded that Johnson’s return—while momentarily glorious—had been a mistake. He was the wrong guy in the wrong time period; a clumsy marriage between a pulled-from-the-mothballs 1980s superstar and a bunch of hotheads with 1990s attitudes (and a guy who nicknamed himself Chise). When, on April 18, 1996, the Lakers blew a 21-point third-quarter lead and lost at San Anto­nio, 103–100, it became obvious that this had no shot of working. Two weeks later, the 1995–96 Los Angeles Lakers were put out of their misery with a forgettable three-games-to-one first-round playoff setback to Houston.

Afterwards, Johnson—front and center, as always—was asked about the problems of a lost season. So much has been going on, we never could get on the same page, we never could be as one, he said. I was spending most of [my energy] fighting battles within the team. It seemed like every game we had something else going on, every shootaround, every practice. That’s what was going on here. You guys don’t know the half of it. We couldn’t get it done. The ship had too many holes.

The next day, three players—Van Exel, Threatt, and forward Anthony Miller—skipped their season-ending exit meetings with Harris. Van Exel and Miller didn’t even fly back from Houston with the team.

Is it my last game? Johnson said to the assembled media, sitting before a locker stall inside the Houston Summit. I want to come back. I want to win. We have to get this thing solved in L.A.

On May 14, less than two weeks after the final loss to Houston, Johnson issued a brief statement announcing his this-time-it’s-for-good retirement from professional basketball. I was satisfied with my return to the NBA, although I would have hoped we would have gone further into the playoffs, he wrote. But now I am ready to give it up. It’s time to move on. I am going out on my terms, something I couldn’t say when I aborted a comeback in 1992.

Somewhere in the suburbs of Philadelphia, a high school senior with plans of NBA dominance was wondering what the news meant to him.

Somewhere in the city of Orlando, Florida, a 7-foot-1, 320-pound giant was wondering what the news meant to him.

And somewhere in Los Angeles, pacing back and forth around his office, Jerry West was busy hatching a plan that would alter professional basketball.

Without Magic Johnson.

2

The Chosen One

Following the disappointing conclusion to the 1995–96 NBA season, Jerry West knew things needed to change. The executive vice president of the Los Angeles Lakers liked his coach, the steady if unspectacular Del Harris, and believed the front office personnel (GM Mitch Kupchak, consultant Bill Sharman, scouts Gene Tormohlen and Ronnie Lester) were skilled, wise basketball men capable of rebuilding a dynastic brand. But when he looked at the roster and scanned the names, West saw problems. His favorite player, point guard Nick Van Exel, was gutsy, talented, rugged—and incapable of controlling his hair-trigger temper. You could win with Nick Van Exel. But you wouldn’t win led by Nick Van Exel, be­cause at some point he’d slug a referee or tell your coach to fuck off. Sim­ilar shortcomings applied to Eddie Jones, the silky off guard and the team’s first-round pick in the 1994 draft. A product of the mean streets of Pompano Beach, Florida, then Temple University, Jones was a legitimate third offensive option for any competitive NBA club. He averaged 12.8 points in 1995–96. But, like Van Exel, he wasn’t a front-of-the-pack guy. Not even close.

With Magic Johnson gone, the Lakers’ neon name was Cedric Ceballos, the self-anointed franchise player. There was nothing about Ceballos’s game or approach that appealed to West. In fact, the Lakers’ vice president considered him to be everything that was wrong with the modern basketball player rolled into one figure: selfish, self-absorbed, incapable of passing, unwilling to play defense, who measured the game not by team benchmarks but by his numbers at the conclusion of 48 minutes. The majority of Ceballos’s points were achieved off of junk baskets and roaming the baseline seeking out scraps. Ced was weird, said Kurt Rambis, the 1980s Lakers’ stalwart power forward who had just retired to become an assistant coach. At some point in his career his ego replaced his sanity.

The remainder of the roster? Meh. Vlade Divac was one of the NBA’s better passing centers. Elden Campbell was a limited yet sound power forward. Forward George Lynch and guard Anthony Peeler were okay contributing pieces. But Fred Roberts, Sedale Threatt, Derek Strong, Anthony Miller . . .

It wasn’t ideal.

West was a realist. Mediocre sports executives are known for seeing the best sides of their players, even when a roster is overloaded with misfits and discards. West, on the other hand, was consumed by flaws, shortcomings, warts, potholes. It was his method of survival during an unparalleled 14-year playing career with the Lakers that saw him average 27 points and make 14 All-Star Games, yet rarely (never?) take personal satisfaction. If West shot 13 of 14 from the field, he dwelled on the single miss. If a teammate botched a last-second shot, West beat himself up for delivering a slightly-to-the-left pass. As an executive, he could barely watch his teams play, oftentimes pacing alone in a hallway. It wasn’t that Jerry West was incapable of happiness. It was that he was incapable of creating happiness for himself. There was always something better that could have been done.

So, in reviewing the roster, West blamed himself. The Magic Johnson return, in particular, was something he could have (and should have) done without. It was more gimmick than substance, and the whole carnival set back the franchise’s progress.

As soon as the 1995–96 season came to an end, West—who the columnist Jim Murray once wrote could spot talent through the window of a moving train—began looking ahead. By virtue of their 53-29 record, the Lakers held the 24th pick in the upcoming NBA draft—an unsatisfying slot for an organization that needed an infusion. Dating back to its 1947 inception, the draft had boasted its good years and its bad years. The 1984 edition gifted the world with four future Hall of Famers—Hakeem Olajuwon, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, and John Stockton. The 1986 edition was pocked by criminals, busts, and, in No. 2 selection Len Bias from Maryland, a tragic death from a cocaine overdose. For every Lew Alcindor going first overall (Milwaukee, 1969) you had a LaRue Martin (Portland, 1972) also going No. 1. For every draft that led off with Cazzie Russell and Dave Bing (1966), you had a draft leading off with Joe Barry Carroll and Darrell Griffith (1980). You never truly know, West noted, until the players enter the league.

That said, most scouts agreed that 1996 had the potential to be the deepest collection of new NBA talent in decades. Admittedly, there was no Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Wilt Chamberlain who would, via sheer physical force, change a franchise’s dynamic. But thanks to 18 players declaring early, as well as an influx of foreign stars, one was right to believe that the 10th pick wasn’t decidedly less valuable than the first or second. Among the splashy neon names were a trio of guards—Allen Iverson of Georgetown, Stephon Marbury of Georgia Tech, and Ray Allen of Connecticut—who lit up their respective conferences and were generating most of the pre-draft headlines. The Lakers didn’t so much as bother to work the three out. What was the point? Iverson, Marbury, and Allen would be long gone by the time the 24th slot came along.

However, that didn’t mean West couldn’t get creative.

On April 29, 1996, one day before the Lakers would lose Game 3 of their first-round playoff series against the Houston Rockets, a senior at Lower Merion High School, in suburban Philadelphia, called a preposterous press conference to make a preposterous announcement about an utterly preposterous idea. It was held in the high school gymnasium, only this felt like no ordinary assembly. A reporter for the school newspaper, the Merionite, fought for elbow space with scribes representing the Washington Post and Sports Illustrated. The four members of Boyz II Men, not far removed from releasing one of the biggest-selling albums in history, stood in the back, intrigued over the hometown buzz. The kid—lanky, broad-shouldered, shaved head—entered wearing an oversized suit and a pair of designer sunglasses perched atop his scalp. God, it was so arrogant, said John Smallwood, who covered the event for the Philadelphia Daily News. Just the look alone. Seriously, it was one of the worst things I’d ever seen.

With two dozen (or so) reporters crammed inside, the curiously named Kobe Bean Bryant—aged seventeen—walked to a table at the front of the room, unfolded into his seat, rubbed the scruff along his chin, leaned into a microphone, smiled somewhat apprehensively, and said, Kobe Bryant has decided . . . to skip college and take his talents to the NBA.

Um . . .

"Kobe Bryant" ?

The students in attendance went crazy, screaming, clapping, applauding.

The adults—not so much.

Here was this high school kid, and he came out dressed as if he were a member of the Rat Pack, recalled ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap, who was present. What the heck was going on? He wore sunglasses. Sunglasses! And they may well have been drugstore shades, but they looked Armani on him. It was hard to accept the total lack of humility and the sort of Hollywood quality to it. I’d been around Michael Jordan, I’d been around Charles Barkley, but I’d never seen anything so show-offish.

At 6-foot-6, Bryant boasted the height of an NBA off guard, and his father—Joe (Jellybean) Bryant—had played eight seasons in the NBA before moving to Italy and putting in another eight in various European leagues. Hell, at age five Kobe was bouncing a basketball on a court with Magic Johnson. So there was size and there was pedigree.

Yet, truly, this was insane.

Bryant had averaged 30.8 points, 12 rebounds, 6.5 assists, 4 steals, and 3.8 blocked shots per game while leading Lower Merion to the Class AAAA state title, but he was playing alongside Robby Schwartz and Dave Rosenberg and a gaggle of Joe Schmo suburbanites with terrific futures in law or accounting. Plus, guards did not jump straight from prep hoops to the NBA. It just wasn’t something to be done. In the history of basketball, five other high schoolers had gone direct to the Association, and all five were forwards or centers. The last one to make the move, a Farragut Career Academy senior named Kevin Garnett, stood 6-foot-11 and was a rebounding and shot-blocking machine. Even with his size and strength, he joined the Minnesota Timberwolves in 1995 and averaged but 10.4 points per game. It was, he later said, really hard.

On the surface, nothing about Bryant’s move felt logical. He was a B student with a 1080 SAT score. He was being recruited by everyone, with Duke considered the most probable landing spot. He had yet to work out for a single NBA scout, many of whom had never actually heard of him. He’s kidding himself, Marty Blake, the NBA’s scouting director, told the Los Angeles Times. Sure he’d like to come out. I’d like to be a movie star. He’s not ready.

You watch Kobe Bryant and you don’t see special, said Rob Babcock, Minnesota’s director of player personnel. His game doesn’t say, ‘I’m a very special talent.’

I think it’s a total mistake, said Jon Jennings, the Boston Celtics’ director of basketball development. Kevin Garnett was the best high school player I ever saw, and I wouldn’t have advised him to jump. And Kobe is no Kevin Garnett.

What many failed to understand—couldn’t possibly understand—was that the Kobe-Bryant-to-the-NBA train had left the station long before an announcement in a high school gymnasium. Beginning in the mid- to late 1980s, with the rise of Nike and assorted top-level sports academies and camps, highly skilled American athletes were discovered at infantile ages, developed, coddled, labeled, marked, tagged, stalked, and processed. It was no longer sufficient to let kids be kids, and have Junior progress gradually. No, today’s adept six-year-old dribbler was—maybe, just maybe—tomorrow’s Isiah Thomas, and that had to be developed ASAP. That, in many ways, explains Garnett’s move from high school to the NBA. Enormous at an early age, he was a commodity before he knew the definition of the word.

Bryant, on the other hand, felt more hidden gem, buried somewhere off the radar.

Though Joe Bryant was a former NBA player and a 1975 first-round draft pick of the Golden State Warriors, he was one of those dime-a-dozen guys who comes, plays, then slinks from the spotlight. Over his eight seasons with three organizations, he averaged a pedestrian 8.7 points and 4 rebounds. He appeared in 30 playoff games, never starting one. His greatest professional claim to fame came on May 5, 1976, when Philadelphia police attempted to pull him