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.

Quote of the Day (Shaquille O'Neal, on Halle Berry)

"So when I was young, I used to stutter. She's the only woman that makes my stuttering come back."—Basketball Hall of Famer Shaquille O'Neal, on his reaction to seeing Halle Berry coming down the stairs during a Los Angeles Lakers-New York Knicks game, quoted in Antoinette Bueno‍, “Shaquille O'Neal Recalls When Halle Berry's Beauty Completely Stunned Him at the Free Throw Line,” ETOnline, Sept. 22, 2021

Well, that’s not the end of the story. At the free-throw line, Shaq turned Coach Phil Jackson apoplectic at something other than a referee when he called a completely unnecessary timeout in this game to urge teammates to get him the ball, as Ms. Berry would be watching him.

But, in the end, the Lakers coach couldn’t have minded too much. O’Neal, whose 52% career free-throw percentage made him one of the worst shooters from the line in NBA history, managed to make his this time as he felt himself watched by the actress.

I burst out laughing when I heard this anecdote on my car radio last week. It was such a typical Shaq thing to say and do, wasn’t it?

Speaking of Ms. Berry and sports…congratulations are due on her directorial debut, Bruised—a movie in which she also stars as a single mom who works as a mixed martial arts fighter. If the film is good, let’s hope the Oscar-winning actress gets another shot behind the camera in her future.

(The image accompanying this post was taken of Ms. Berry in Hamburg, Germany, on Aug. 5, 2004—right around the time she left such a vivid impression on Shaq.)

This Day in NBA History (Chamberlain Deal Shifts Balance of Power West)

July 8, 1968—With the dominant player in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the last half-dozen years deciding to pull up stakes from his Eastern team, the competitive balance in the league shifted decisively in the direction of the Los Angeles Lakers. 

But check that dateline again. It’s not 2008, but 1968. LeBron James wasn’t even born then. No, it’s Wilt Chamberlain I’m talking about. 

Two blockbuster trades occurred in the league in 1968. The one pulled off by the Knicks in December, bringing Dave DeBusschere over from the Pistons, was one of chemistry, as several players (notably Willis Reed) assumed different positions and roles. 

But the Chamberlain trade, sending him away from the Philadelphia 76ers, was more akin to the one bringing Kevin Durant to the Golden State Warriors, creating a supernova of talent on a team already blessed with All-Stars--and foreshadowing an era when the game's greatest talents had more of a say in both their futures and the fortunes of the major teams. 

The Lakers hadn’t won the NBA finals since the 1953-54 season, when they had been in Minneapolis rather than the City of Angels. They had come agonizingly close with five finals appearances since their move to the coast in 1961, but, even with the likes of All-Stars like Jerry West and Elgin Baylor, had never made it to the promised land. But the old order was about to change with the arrival of Wilt the Stilt.

How he hated that nickname! It was as if it referred only to his athleticism, he claimed, while discounting his court sense. And while he was at it, when were people going to start crediting him as a team player?

By rights, that latter recognition should have come at the end of the 1966-67 season, when—agreeing to focus less on the scoring that had made his reputation and more on rebounding and defense—Chamberlain led the Philadelphia 76ers to an NBA championship, with a thrilling victory in the Eastern Division finals that ended the Boston Celtics’ skein of eight straight championships. 

Chamberlain had enjoyed great rapport with coach Alex Hannum, who, as he had done while with the San Francisco Warriors, convinced “The Big Dipper” to buy into an egalitarian style of offense in which he was used as the passing focal point rather than the principal offensive weapon. 

But the next year, when the 76ers lost to the Celtics in the playoffs, Hannum jumped to the upstart American Basketball Association (ABA), and Chamberlain’s relationship with Philadelphia’s front office deteriorated. 

Years later, General Manager Jack Ramsey recalled that Chamberlain had taken an active interest in Hannum’s replacement when, out of the blue, he tossed his own hat into the ring. The idea of a player-manager was not uncommon in the 1960s (indeed, the last one in the NBA, Dave Cowens, filled the role in 1979 for the Celtics), but this request caught Ramsey and owner Irv Kosloff by surprise.

After he had had a week to consider, Ramsey decided such a move could work, and was ready to talk about it with Chamberlain. But now, the big man told the front office that he had changed his mind. Not only did he not want to be a player-coach, but he did not want to play in Philadelphia anymore. If the front office could not arrange a trade to a West Coast team—Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles—he was ready to jump to the ABA.

Ramsey and Kosloff might have been angry, but they could hardly have been surprised. In 1965, after his trade to the Warriors, Sports Illustrated’s Frank DeFord had noted that this was the fifth time that Chamberlain had used a threat to quit as a bargaining chip. In this pre-free agent era, that—and now, the presence of the ABA—represented the only available bargaining chips for a player.

But Chamberlain wasn’t really “a player.” In 1960s basketball, he was an outsized figure who, like baseball’s Babe Ruth, wrought, like Babe Ruth, a revolution in how his sport was played. In 1962, he had not only scored 100 points against the unfortunate New York Knicks but also averaged more than 50 points per game for the entire season. With no nagging injuries at this point, he was not beyond going on a similar scoring binge again. 

Rather than simply lose their most valuable player to the ABA with nothing to show for it, Ramsey and Kosloff decided to try to obtain as much value in return as they could. The deal they worked out—three players (in this case, Jerry Chambers, Archie Clark and Darrall Imhoff) for Chamberlain--resembled the magnitude of the transaction that brought The Big Dipper to Philly in the first place. 

AJ Neuharth-Keusch of USA Today, in an article two years ago, listed it among the most lopsided trades in NBA history. Metaphorically, one can liken the trade’s impact on the Western Division to an earthquake. But you begin to run out of adequate descriptions for this event when you recall that this was the first time that the reigning league Most Valuable Player—the winner of that honor for the fourth time, no less—had ended up getting traded.

Philadelphia would not win an NBA championship again until Julius Erving and Moses Malone ended the heartache in 1983. The Lakers, while experiencing initial growing pains involving Chamberlain (the Big Dipper was far less jovial than new teammate Elgin Baylor, and disagreed with the game plans of coach Butch van Breda Kolff), still had a quicker payoff: four finals appearances in five seasons, including a title in 1972 season, when he was named most valuable player of the finals.