OF SPENCER
New book takes look at highs and lows of NBA icon Haywood
“Wile I’m there, the Devil came in,” he said of his time in Los Angeles. “In the form of coke.”
Spencer was not new to cocaine. It was in abundance in the 1970s, especially at some of those ritzy parties he frequented in New York. He snorted a couple of lines, took a shot of bourbon, and kept it moving. It didn’t have that type of effect on him.
“I never liked it,” he said. “The thing I liked was weed. I don’t like no s—t out of the process. That was the rule, you didn’t take s—t that was processed. But here I am in L.A. and some of the guys who had retired, they were in this thing to the max, and I’m hanging out with some of my Motown people [from] back in the day. S—t yeah, man, I was like, ‘ How did I get tricked into this s—t?’”
But Spencer wasn’t alone. Cocaine use plagued the NBA in the late ’70s. Players such as Marvin Barnes, Micheal Ray Richardson, and John Lucas were riddled with drug issues. Cocaine had become the vogue drug in the disco-and-party-influenced ’70s and many NBA players indulged, before the league had any real drug policy.
With players earning in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and cocaine promising a better and more intense high than weed, the NBA had a real problem.
“We had an 80 percent crisis in the NBA with cocaine that year,” Spencer said. “Why pick me?”
Spencer said he tried cocaine before but his use after he moved to Los Angeles became a concern. The Lakers were a team with championship aspirations.
Magic was the prized rookie and seized the vocal leadership role. Abdul-Jabbar was the fivetime MVP and backbone, but he didn’t engage in the Los Angeles party life. He would play games and then head right up to his Bel Air mansion, smoke a joint, and read the Quran.
He said he wasn’t the only one using.
On the floor, Spencer cemented himself as a reliable scoring option off the bench. At age 30, and coming off a knee injury, Spencer wasn’t the dynamic scorer of the past, but he could score in spurts. The Lakers were such a deep team with Johnson, Abdul-Jabbar, rookie guard Michael Cooper, veteran Jamaal Wilkes, and scoring guard Norm Nixon.
A few weeks after the Lakers acquired Spencer from the Jazz, they added another seasoned veteran in burly forward Jim Chones, who became Abdul-Jabbar’s protector and the team’s enforcer. The Lakers were ready for a title run.
And despite the best chance for team success in his career, a chance to be a champion, Spencer spent most of that year in a cocaine-induced haze.
The drug had him by the balls.
“That was like my missing year in life,” he said. “It really was. My family being out there and I had Iman with me and my young daughter. I played all right. I came there with 24 and 10 and I had my s—t right. And this thing got in my life.
“Well I’ll just do it like my mom would say — the Devil. The Devil got in there, man, and it was controlling me completely and I wasn’t myself. Those players never got a chance to see who Spencer Haywood is and was. Players who knew me on that team, they know me. This ain’t fair.”
Spencer said his cocaine use was pretty open. But there was no intervention. Spencer continued to descend without interference.
“I didn’t get no help,” he said. “I didn’t get nobody to encourage me to, like ‘ Hey, man, will you stop?’ It was like, ‘Where you gonna be tonight, man? I’ll come by late.’ I thought somebody would say if you’re off the rocker, ‘C’mon dude.’”
Spencer said staying in Utah would have kept him off cocaine. But Los Angeles was the sinner’s paradise in 1979. Folks who felt they’d achieved a certain level of success were seeking a new hobby, and there was a glamour attached to cocaine, to going to the vogue club.
“It was happening in L.A.,” he said. “Everybody was doing this new thing. And it wasn’t like crack, where you see the addicts on the street. Cocaine was supposed to be the clean way of not clogging up your nose.
“But I knew it was messed up the first time I really got involved in it. I knew something was really very wrong from the first night. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.”
Spencer describes scenes with his L.A. buddies where those who cooked the cocaine would walk around with chef hats on, whipping up another potent dose of nose candy. A generation before, musicians Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Frankie Lymon were killing themselves with heroin use, stabbing needles into their veins to get high. Cocaine addiction hadn’t overtaken the country like it would in the mid-1980s. Getting hooked wasn’t a major fear. Those who did cocaine could afford it. And soon snorting was replaced by freebasing, which was considered a cleaner way to get the high.
Once freebasing replaced snorting, and the high became more profound, Spencer was hooked.
“All of the impurities fall to the bottom and the rock floats up to the top,” Spencer’s cocaine-cooking buddies would tell him. “That’s the purity. That’s the beauty of it. It’s almost like organic, man.”
“Hell nah, I didn’t believe that s—t,” Spencer said. “But I don’t know what got into me. It was like this Devil and being from down South and being in the church all of my life, even though I had my time with Islam, I knew that was the Devil. So when I sit there and I smoke and I smoke and it was something about it that I couldn’t leave.
“It was like four in the morning and I got practice and that’s when I left. And it continued on that flight. Damn, what kind of s—t is this?”
Cocaine use became Spencer’s No. 1 hobby, and he pushed aside basketball and began ignoring his family.
“Iman is complaining because I’m not home,” he said. “And then when I got to practice — I would get to practice on time but not really in time.”
Spencer had been just happy to be on the Lakers when the season started, but the constant drug use turned him into a dark and bitter man. And the lack of practice, the drug’s effect on his body, and the late nights were taking away from his game.
A night after some hard partying, an exhausted Spencer dozed off during a routine stretching exercise during the Lakers was a series of misdoings: calling Westhead a “liar,” complaining about playing time, an argument with Chones and little-used reserved Brad Holland during practice, and showing up late to another practice during the playoffs.
Spencer still thought he was a star, but with the Lakers he was just another aging athlete who was now an addict. And he was the only one who didn’t realize that.
“The low point was when I was expelled from the Lakers with three games to go [in the Finals],” he said. “I was trying to get back because at least I’ll go to the ring ceremony and participate in the parade, but when they snatched that away from me and I was like, ‘Wow, s—t.’”
The Lakers played hardball with Spencer. Not only was he banned from participating in the parade after the Lakers beat the 76ers in six games — punctuated by Johnson’s 42-point, 15-rebound, seven-assist masterpiece in Game 6 — he was given only a third of the playoff share.
What’s more, the Lakers essentially played six players during the last four games of the Finals, meaning there would have been a possible role for Spencer.
The Lakers also denied Spencer a championship ring (he got one years later). It was like the organization tried its best to remove any memory of him from the Lakers’ first championship in eight years. He had brought embarrassment to the franchise, and he paid a dear price.
“They were giving championship rings to [actor] Lou Gossett,” he said. “They were giving playoff shares to Jack Curran, the trainer. Is this a low blow or what? It was a hostile environment. Everybody wanted to get [my issues] off their shoulders, not just the Lakers. The league wanted to get it off, so we can wrap it around one person, expel them from the league.”