Turning back the clock Wilkins amused by 1988 Slam Dunk conspiracy theories
he 1988 All-Star Weekend holds a special place in NBA history. Bulls great Michael Jordan won the Slam Dunk contest and All-Star Game MVP, and if that didn’t constitute his coming-out party, it at least served as one of his career highlights and the cherry on top of his first NBA MVP season. That year’s All-Star Game was special for a variety of reasons, particularly for those players who were voted for the honor. Here are 10 facts and recollections about the 1988 midseason showcase.
1. Isiah Thomas was booed during player introductions — but try telling that to Thomas.
Native Chicagoan or not, Thomas wore the enemy uniform of the Pistons, the fierce and physical rival of the Bulls in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.
And there was the rumored conspiracy of the 1985 All-Star Game “freeze-out” of Michael Jordan — allegedly led by Thomas — to humiliate the cocky rookie. Thomas has since flatly denied the rumor, but it certainly played a role in his reception at Chicago Stadium in 1988.
However, when asked about the catcalls this week, Thomas told the Tribune: “Only thing I recall is family and friends, and that’s what I remember.”
2. ‘It was cold in Chicago that weekend. Really cold.’
That was former Hawks coach Mike Fratello’s recollection when he arrived to coach the Eastern Conference team.
Fratello isn’t in town as Chicago hosts All-Star Weekend for the first time in 32 years. He’s coaching Team USA in preparation for the FIBA AmeriCup qualifying opener against Puerto Rico in Washington. He’s missing out on this week’s snow and freezing temperatures, though it “heats” up to a high of 37 degrees and a low of 31 on Sunday. The 1988 All-Star Weekend was no day at the beach, dipping to minus-2.
3. Larry Bird flashed some legendary humor.
Mike Fratello said the Eastern Conference players, including Bird, Michael Jordan, Isiah Thomas, Moses Malone and Dominique Wilkins, all agreed to hold practice, which wasn’t a given at All-Star Games.
“Magic (Johnson) and Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar) were setting pick-and-roll screens,” Fratello said. “I remember how we were (going over) how we were going to defend that and play that, so we went over all of that stuff.”
They also did shooting drills, not that Bird needed the extra work.
But after Bird rallied to win the 3-Point Contest on a buzzer-beater, Fratello recalled how Bird walked past him and quipped: “I guess it must have been the shooting drills.”
4. NBA rivalries were fierce, but players kept it classy at All-Star Weekend.
The 1980s and ’90s were marked by fierce rivalries between teams and individuals, but heated exchanges during the season didn’t cross over into the All-Star Game, at least according to Isiah Thomas.
“You never got into any of that,” he said. “I guess all of us really took our cues early on when we made the All-Star team from Larry Bird and Julius Erving. If you can remember Dr. J and Bird, they would fight like cats and dogs, but then when the All-Star Game came around and they were walking to the locker room, it was all about East as a team versus the West as a team.
“Those rivalries during the course of a season, they honestly never came into play. You never really thought about it. I think we all took cues from Philadelphia and Boston, who were great rivals and the biggest rivalry in the league at that time.” 5. Michael Jordan led the voting.
Fans put up a then-record 3.35 million votes, topping the previous year’s record of 3.2 million.
It’s probably no surprise around these parts, but Jordan led all players with 1,121,285 votes, followed by the Lakers’ Magic Johnson with 1,022,112.
Jordan’s performance that weekend, of course, was legendary. In addition to winning the dunk contest with an iconic jam from the free-throw line, Jordan put up a whopping 40 points in the game, leading all scorers.
6. The late Charlie Murphy might appreciate Dominique Wilkins’ true Hollywood stories.
These days it seems you can’t have an All-Star event without an actor, singer or comedian taking center stage as the pregame or halftime act or filling some other official capacity. In 1988, celebrities occupied less oxygen at the event, but they certainly had a presence.
“I will tell you we had a lot of celebrities sitting in the audience,” Wilkins said. “We had quite a few, from the Will Smiths to the Jack Nicholsons. … We had a celebrity row there.”
Wilkins said plenty of singers and actors were in his orbit in those days, so he wasn’t starstruck. It’s the adage: Entertainers want to be athletes and athletes want to be entertainers, he said.
“We all knew each other,” Wilkins said. “I knew Eddie Murphy and Prince, all of us (were) friends in those days.
“I knew Prince for many years. The Jackson family, I was close to Jermaine. We even had business things together early in my career. It was a rapport.”
7. The NBA was not on TNT — yet.
Turner Network Television didn’t launch until October 1988. But TNT’s sister channel, TBS, aired the three Saturday All-Star competitions in a three-hour special for just the second time. CBS broadcast the All-Star Game live that Sunday.
This weekend, the Celebrity Game airs Friday on ESPN, and NBA TV broadcasts Saturday morning’s practice. TNT has Friday’s Rising Stars game, All-Star Saturday Night and Sunday’s All-Star Game.
8. Corporate branding paled by today’s measure.
For the 2020 event, the league has 10 marketing partners — even the Celebrity Game (Ruffles) and All-Star MVP (Kia) are sponsored.
Add in current and retired players’ partnerships — 2K, Beats by Dre and Mountain Dew are among the 12 major partners — and you have brand ambassadors at various league and private events tied to All-Star Weekend.
Back in 1988, there were just four brands that involved All-Star events — and the All-Star Game wasn’t one of them: Gatorade sponsored the Slam Dunk contest, Schick the NBA Legends Game, Miller Lite the All-Star balloting and American Airlines and Sheraton the Long Distance Shootout (now named the 3-Point Contest).
“The game has evolved into a media bonanza and branding phenomenon,” Dominique Wilkins said. “I wish we had it, to tell you the truth.”
9. Mike Fratello and the Hawks coaching staff came close to missing the game.
Fratello and the Celtics’ K.C. Jones were in a race to the wire to represent the East, and it came down to one weekend.
“It’s one of the greatest weekends of my life, the fact that our team needed a little bit of help to make it from a coaching standpoint,” Fratello said. “We had to win that game going into the cutoff date. Boston had to beat Cleveland (for the Celtics staff to go). … If that happened, I wouldn’t have become the All-Star coach based on record.”
But the Cavaliers upset the Celtics 119-100 on Jan. 23.
The next day, the host Hawks took care of business against the Nets, who had been winless on the road, to ensure their coaching staff ’s trip to Chicago.
It was “kind of like a reality check — like, wow, this is really happening,” Fratello said.
He added that he appreciated having his family with him in Chicago.
It was a chance for the late Vince Fratello, a New York Golden Gloves middleweight boxer known as “The Hackensack Hurricane,” to see his son in action.
“My father sitting right there next to me during the interviews and all that stuff … I know how proud he was,” Fratello said.
10. Maurice Cheeks took a back seat.
Cheeks was one of four Chicagoarea natives, along with Isiah Thomas, Mark Aguirre and Doc Rivers, who played in the 1988 All-Star Game, but Cheeks wasn’t looking for the spotlight, according to East coach Mike Fratello.
Fratello said Cheeks recognized the coach had to perform a juggling act to give stars such as Michael Jordan, Dominique Wilkins and Larry Bird enough time to shine.
“I remember Maurice coming up to me and saying, ‘Coach, don’t worry about me and minutes. I got a bad back,’ or whatever it was,” Fratello said.
Cheeks played a scoreless four minutes and had two rebounds and one assist.
Count Dominique Wilkins among the fans disappointed that Bulls guard Zach LaVine won’t be participating in Saturday’s Slam Dunk contest at the United Center.
“I thought LaVine and (Magic forward Aaron) Gordon brought the dunk contest back in Toronto” in 2016, said Wilkins, a co-star with Michael Jordan in 1988 in what is regarded as the greatest showdown in dunk contest history. “What a beautiful contest and show that they put on. I enjoyed it.
“It would be great to see that type of dunk again in Chicago this weekend.”
But Wilkins said he understands why LaVine, the Slam Dunk winner in 2015 and ’16, opted not to compete for a third time, citing the demands on players’ time during All-Star Weekend. LaVine is scheduled to participate in the 3-Point Contest instead Saturday night.
“Gordon is definitely going to be one of the favorites to win that (dunk contest), but don’t look past that kid (Derrick) Jones out of Miami,” Wilkins said. “Oh, man, he’s a high flyer. He’ll get off the floor.”
Bucks guard Pat Connaughton and Lakers center Dwight Howard will join Gordon and Jones in the Slam Dunk field.
Wilkins lamented that many of the NBA’s top players avoid the contest, though he acknowledged the pressure to invent ever more creative dunks.
“This is the thing,” Wilkins said, “it’s nothing you do differently, you just put some flair on the same dunks. That’s all. … When I see guys do my windmill, they put their own style on it. It’s all about being a showman.”
It’s for that reason the former Hawks star doesn’t begrudge losing to Jordan in 1988 at Chicago Stadium, a classic showdown that remains the subject of debate.
“No matter what, the fans got their money’s worth,” Wilkins said. “It was all about laying it on the line. We went at it step for step.”
Wilkins said his favorite part of the ’88 contest was the buildup to it. He won the first matchup in 1985 in Indianapolis, and each player missed one of the next two contests because of injuries — Jordan in 1986 and Wilkins in ’87.
This time Jordan was on his home floor. “It was electric,” Wilkins said. “I know he felt it, too, because we brought out the best in each other.
“Michael, man, was a mother. That’s how I’m going to put it. He was nothing short of amazing the way he performed.”
Despite their resumes, Wilkins insists neither player had an inkling what the other had in store with each successive dunk.
“People don’t believe (us) when we tell them, Mike and I have never worked on our dunks before the contest,” Wilkins said. “All the dunks we did were game-time dunks. We didn’t have to go practice. It was stuff we were already doing in games.”
Greg Anderson, Clyde Drexler, the late Jerome Kersey, Otis Smith and Spud Webb also competed that year, “but we knew we (were) going to be in the finals,” Wilkins said. “It made for, in my opinion, the greatest dunk contest ever. The fact we’re still talking about it 32 years later, that tells you in itself what it was.”
Part of the mystique is the controversial final round, in which Wilkins received a score of 45 for his final dunk, a two-handed windmill jam. Wilkins needed a 48 to clinch victory.
Even Jordan at the time said: “I was shocked. I would have given him a 49 or a 50.”
Jordan declined to comment this week through a spokesman.
For Jordan’s final attempt, he followed Julius Erving’s advice and executed the now-iconic free-throw-line dunk that got a perfect score of 50 for the win.
The five-man panel consisted of former Bears running back Gale Sayers, former NBA players Gail Goodrich, Johnny Green and Randy Smith and Dodgers vice president Tom Hawkins.
Since then, fans have invented a variety of explanations and conspiracy theories, questioning everything from the judges’ impartiality to the coin flip that forced Wilkins to go first.
It all amuses the “Human Highlight Film.”
“It’s just crazy the things people come up and reason why and who did this and why they did the structure this way,” Wilkins said with a laugh. “It’s so many things. At the end of day, it was going to happen the way it happened, with two guys laying it all out on the line, giving the best that they had and entertaining the crowd.”
Former Hawks coach Mike Fratello, who coached the Eastern Conference All-Star team in ’88, said he can’t be unbiased when it comes to this debate.
“When it’s that close, who am I to say?” he told the Tribune this month. “I’ve heard the barbershop arguments, the barroom discussions of, ‘Well, ‘Nique really won that,’ or ‘ ‘Nique got cheated.’ That’s somebody who’s a ‘Nique fan versus somebody who’s an MJ fan.
“It was a pretty damn good competition that day.”
And it’s one that, despite losing to his rival, Wilkins cherishes as much as any moment in his career.
“We are forever joined at the hip because of that contest,” he said.