Quote of the Day (Molly McCloskey, on How the Detroit Pistons Became ‘The Bad Boys’)

“The moniker [“The Bad Boys”] had gained traction after CBS used it during a 1988 halftime feature about the [Detroit] Pistons and it got picked up by the league for its end-of-the-season video on the team. The players embraced it. Detroiters loved the Bad Boys with a crazy love, but just about everywhere else they were reviled. I still meet men who, when they learn of my connection, hiss, ‘I hated that team.’ The Bad Boys were extremely physical—some say dirty, not averse to provoking hard fouls or provoking brawls—and were viewed by many as undeserving upstarts who brought something ugly to the sport. It wasn't just the will to win but the way the won, the emphasis on grind over dazzle….My father’s [Pistons general manager Jack McCloskey] truculence and competitiveness clearly set a tone. Years earlier, when Pat Riley accidentally broke the coach Stan Albeck’s nose during a casual three-on-three game in L.A., my father had wanted to fight him over it. At sixty-two, my father went one-on-one with [Pistons power forward Rick] Mahorn, to see if Mahorn was ready to come back after an injury. ‘I was like, this old m-r? I’ kicked his ass,’ Mahorn told me recently, laughing. ‘But he was out there playing hard.’”—Novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Molly McCloskey, “My Father’s Court,” The New Yorker, June 3, 2024

Thirty-five years ago today, hampered by injuries to Magic Johnson and Byron Scott and with 42-year-old center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar playing what proved to be his final game, the “Showtime” era, for all intents and purposes, came to an end, as the Los Angeles Lakers were swept in the NBA finals.

The upstarts who dethroned them, the Detroit Pistons, were genuinely talented, with stars like Isaiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, and Dennis Rodman displaying enough skill to end up in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, Molly McCloskey insists in her short New Yorker memoir of her father, Jack McCloskey. 

But I admit that I am among the tribe who would have told the author, “I hated that team,” for its on-court mayhem.

I had no idea of the role played by “Trader Jack” McCloskey (he got the nickname through 30 transactions in 13 years that built the team’s nucleus) in creating the two-time champions until I read his daughter’s article. I had even less idea of the cost to his and her personal lives—a sense of distance and ambivalence surely shared by other children of sports legends whose attention is continually diverted from their homes.

Mark Kreidler of ESPN.com has estimated that the divorce rate among professional athletes ranges from 60 to 80 percent. I imagine that it’s similarly high for sports executives, many of whom are, like Jack McCloskey, former pro athletes themselves.

Extensive time away from families and infidelity loom as major dangers in these marriages. Children end up collateral damage in these situations.

Jack McCloskey (who died seven years ago, at age 91, of Alzheimer’s Disease) was an absentee father during, and especially after, his divorce, Molly makes plain. On the infrequent occasions when he did appear in her life post-divorce, what he told her tended to be more gruff exhortations to fix her own basketball game than expressions of love.

Understandably, then, Molly was bewildered by, even resented, the tight bond that her father developed with the players he built into champions. The online version of this article states that the Pistons were Jack’s “Second Family,” but I couldn’t help feeling that they were his substitute family.

Only after Jack left professional sports, and as he gradually descended into the mental darkness of Alzheimer’s, did he and Molly draw closer.

With her clear-eyed, unsentimental reminiscence, the daughter shows that she is as expert in assembling the pieces of a complicated relationship into a fascinating whole as her father was in putting together disparate athletes like Thomas, Dumars, Rodman, Mahorn, and Bill Laimbeer into a rough-and-tumble band of brothers.