HBO’s ‘Winning Time’: Keep Jerry West alive
“I have a hole in my heart, a hole that can never be filled.”
— Jerry West, “West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life” Nov. 7, 1991, was a Thursday; it was my fourth day working as an investigative reporter for Phoenix New Times. I had known my boss — the editor and co-owner of the newspaper, Michael Lacey — for a couple of years and we were still making the transition from a friendly peer relationship to an employer-employee one.
One of the things Mike thought I might do at his newspaper was occasionally write about sports, specifically about the local pro basketball team, the Suns. That was the reason he called me to his office that afternoon to watch a press conference their NBA Western Conference rivals, the Los Angeles Lakers, had called.
We were watching when 32-year-old Earvin “Magic” Johnson, one of the greatest to ever play the game, stepped up to the microphone and read a short statement.
“Because of the HIV virus I have attained, I will, uh, have to announce my retirement from the Lakers today,” he said.
“He’s going to die,” Mike said. I thought he was too.
I thought that when Johnson and Lakers team physician Dr. Michael Mellman stressed that Johnson didn’t actually have AIDS, only the virus that leads to it, they were making a distinction without a difference. My understanding at the time — and I had written about the AIDS epidemic in some depth — was that HIV inevitably led to AIDS, and that while there were certain drugs that were prolonging the lives of AIDS survivors, there was no cure, and the diagnosis was almost certainly a death sentence.
“I’m going to go on, I’m going to beat it and I’m going to have fun,” Johnson said.
That he ended up doing that still seems nearly miraculous to me.
RETELLING OF AN ERA
HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” begins two days before that announcement, the presumptive end of the series, with Johnson (played by newcomer Quincy Isaiah) receiving the grim diagnosis at Cedars-Sinai hospital. We don’t hear the words spoken; everything is implied by the freighted eyes of the health-care workers looking on as “Earvin” walks the hospital hall.
As they begin to pull out of the hospital parking lot, Earvin’s driver — Lakers’ director of promotions Lon Rosen (Joey Brook) — breaks down crying. Then an opening-credits sequence set to the Coup’s “My Favorite Mutiny,” intentionally or not, echoes the intro to “Ballers,” the 2015-19 HBO series that stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a retired NFL player turned financial manager of other athletes.
The clock rewinds to 1979, with prospective Lakers owner Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly) lounging in bed with a naked blonde as he
unspools to the audience his theories about basketball. For some people, that might be enough. Michael Shannon reportedly turned down a role in “Winning Time” because he thought it over the top, with a little too much fourthwall breaking.
Add to that it often looks like it’s been shot through Instagram filters designed to mimic Kodak Super 8mm film and old Betamax video tapes. (The idea is that all this footage has been captured by home movie enthusiasts and/or a downmarket documentary film crew.)
But, thinking about the NBA in 1979, when pro basketball seemed a low-rent spectacle — before it was “saved” by the arrival of Magic and Larry Bird and, a few years later, Michael Jordan — the grainy, saturated look feels right. Buss is preparing to buy the Lakers from Jack Kent Cooke (Michael O’Keefe — Danny Noonan from “Caddyshack”), who’s being forced to divest some of his properties to pay what was then the largest divorce settlement in history: $42 million.
Cooke ended up selling Buss the Forum, the NHL hockey team the L.A. Kings, and the Lakers for a then-record $67.5 million ($241 million in current dollar terms); half of the payment was in cash and half was in real estate, including New York’s Chrysler Building. So Buss can begin to impose his theories on the sport.
Mainly, Buss believes basketball should be exciting, and to that end he wants to draft Johnson, a dazzling 6-foot-9 inch point guard, with the first pick in the 1979 NBA draft. Johnson had, as a sophomore, led Michigan State to the college basketball championship over Indiana State, and over Bird (who had been selected by the Boston Celtics in the 1978 draft but chose to return to Indiana State for his senior year; Bird finally signed with the Celtics a couple of weeks before the 1979 draft — this led to a rule that prevented owners from drafting players before they declared for the draft and were ready to sign). But the basketball brains in the Laker organization, general manager Bill Sharman (Brett Cullen) and head coach Jerry West (Jason Clarke) are reluctant to go with Johnson.
Johnson’s size, they believe, might work against him as a ball handling guard — most guards in the NBA at the time were no taller than 6’2” or 6’3.” Players Johnson’s size generally played in the front court. There was a real question as to whether Johnson had the quickness to play against smaller men with NBA-level skills. Compounding this, the Lakers already had one of the league’s best point guards in Norm Nixon (played in “Winning Time” by his son DeVaughn Nixon).
In the series, West is especially opposed to drafting Johnson; he feels that University of Arkansas guard Sidney Moncrief is a can’t-miss prospect. (Arkansas had come within a bucket of taking down Bird and Indiana State that season).
But Buss wants Johnson, in part because of his flashy passes and electrifying smile. He’ll do anything to get him, including paying him more than $400,000 as a rookie (technically Johnson’s contract was negotiated by Cooke, but Buss was standing by waiting to take over the team’s reins). And, to make Sharman and West feel better, Buss is willing to write a check for whatever they think the team needs. If West wants power forward Spencer Hayward (he did, but never got him), Buss is willing to write the check.
BASED ON BESTSELLER
“Winning Time” is based on the well-reported bestseller — “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s” — by veteran sportswriter Jeff Pearlman (the name was changed to avoid the awkwardness of having “Showtime” play on HBO), but it shouldn’t be taken as anything but a subjective and impressionistic history of the team that found five NBA titles during the ’80s and how it changed the league into a global power.
It might not play as fast and loose with the known facts as, say, Hulu’s “The Great,” which gleefully deconstructs the myth of Russian Empress Catherine the Great, or HBOMax’s “Our Flag Means Death” (which is probably more faithful to the real story of 18th-century Barbadian pirate Stede Bonnet than most realize), but it’s not journalism either.
Reilly effortlessly evokes the public image of Jerry Buss as a freewheeling playboy, affirming the correctness of producer Adam McKay’s casting decision. (Reportedly, longtime McKay collaborator Will Ferrell wanted the role and stopped speaking to McKay after he wasn’t given right of first refusal of the part; Reilly was left in the uncomfortable position of breaking the news of the casting to his “Stepbrothers” co-star and best friend because McKay and Ferrell no longer speak.)
Isaiah and Nixon present their characters in vibrant, not necessarily naturalistic strokes. Hadley Robinson, whose role as Jeanie (Jerry’s daughter) Buss is likely to get larger as the series rolls through the ’80s, provides some of the basketball-savvy viewers with prescient moments. Solomon Hughes — genuinely tall at 6’9” — lends the appropriate dignity and intellectual ballast to his portrayal of Kareen Abdul-Jabbar (Jabbar has expressed some doubts about the series, though so far, his character has remained above the fray).
But two episodes in — the third aired while I was on deadline — several important characters, such as Adrien Brody’s Pat Riley, have yet to make an appearance. And the way Jerry West is being portrayed makes me wonder if McKay doesn’t have a personal grievance against him.
MY MICHAEL JORDAN
Jerry West was my Michael Jordan. He and Henry Aaron were the only idols I ever had.
It was a fact of geography that made me a fan of West’s Los Angeles Lakers teams; my family relocated to Southern California from North Carolina in the mid-’60s, just as I was becoming aware of the games that grown men played.
The Dodgers and the Lakers and UCLA all had local TV contracts; I went from an environment where the only games available were those broadcast nationally to one where every basketball game played by the Lakers or the Bruins was televised (although the home games were only shown on a tape-delay basis, typically beginning after the late local news).
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, I probably saw upwards of 90% of Lakers basketball; I watched every game of the team’s 33-game winning streak in 1971 that coincidentally began immediately after the retirement of then great Elgin Baylor.
And West seemed to be the ultimate competitor; a genuinely great performer under pressure (hence his nickname “Mr. Clutch”) who exhibited all the corny virtues of sportsmanship, even as he seemed to perpetually come in second. (They finally won the NBA championship in 1972, though West didn’t play particularly well in the finals — “I was playing so poorly the team overcame me,” he said years later. “Maybe that’s what a team is all about.”)
West was a magnificent player; even as I dreamed of basketball glory as a junior high schooler I didn’t dare think I could match him. I remember thinking that I was more like his backcourt mate Gail Goodrich (also a Hall of Fame player, who outscored West by a 10th of a point per game — 25.9 to 25.8 — over that 1971-72 season). I always thought of him as a mensch, a serious and dutiful guy who enjoyed a second career as one of the greatest executives ever in professional basketball. (He brought Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant together on the Lakers. He turned the Memphis Grizzlies into a reliable playoff contender.)
“Winning Time” has so far portrayed him as a dark, day-drinking psycho incapable of enjoying anything. It’s hard to accept my childhood idol as that, though I can understand how, dramatically, the character makes sense. No one’s perfect, and if you can’t satirize the guy whose silhouette provides the NBA logo, whose cape can you pull on?
Never mind that the real West didn’t drink often and couldn’t have thrown a trophy through the window of his office in the Forum because his office in the Forum didn’t have a window and he didn’t keep his trophies there; there is a real and acknowledged darkness to West.
It’s there in his autobiography, “West By West: My Charmed, Tormented Life” (written with Jonathan Coleman), which I picked up on the advice of a friend who agreed the “Winning Time” portrayal was over the top. West had a rough, abusive childhood, and admits that he was never happy as a coach — he was “a yeller” who had no real sense of how to communicate with his players.
I emerged from his strange, self-deprecating book with an even greater admiration for West, and a real insight into the kind of person he might be. The Jerry West on the screen is, at best, a rough caricature.
It’s odd only because West is still around to watch it, if he wants. I remember James Ellroy, explaining that he only works real people into his books after they’ve died. That way he doesn’t have to worry — he can portray Paul Newman as a punk if it suits his narrative. I just wonder if this Jerry West will get some redemptive beats.
STYLISH, FUNNY
Meanness aside, “Winning Time” is, so far at least, stylish and funny enough to hold our attention. Wisely, there has not been much basketball action, and what there has been has not been terrible. There’s no way to replicate the up-tempo, clockwork precise execution of the runand-gun Lakers. You couldn’t do it with real pro basketball players; you’re not going to be able to do it with a bunch of gym-fit actors.
Off the court, we can appreciate that it doesn’t condescend to casual fans. It’s loud and very much in the vein of previous McKay products like “The Big Short” and “Vice,” though those unfamiliar with the real Jerry Buss might think Reilly’s performance more of the “Talladega Nights”/“Anchorman”-era. (It’s actually pretty much a spot-on impression.)
The style suits the subject matter, though there’s probably enough material here to fill out several series — Johnson’s arc, which extends at least two acts beyond the end that’s depicted in the series’ opening scenes, could be one; the Buss family story (which continues to this day, with Jeanie now heading the Lakers) would make a “Sucession”-type soap, and the rise of the NBA from near-extinction to worldwide cultural player would be a third.
But what I’d really like to see is a Jerry West movie, an empathetic and honest look at the man, his sadness and his persistence. Walker Percy talked about the need to identify with a “Quentin Compson who did not commit suicide.” West seems to me that hero. Email: