Lakernoise

My biography, “Jerry West, The LIfe And Legend Of A Basketball Icon,” is due out this coming week from ESPN Books. It has received a lot of publicity recently because of a short section in the last chapter that deals with the Los Angeles Lakers organization learning in 1991 that Magic Johnson was HIV positive.

The passage from the book says: “That November, as a new season was set to open, Magic Johnson announced to the world that he was HIV positive, a stunning event that brought revelations about the climate of sexual frivolity around the Lakers. Johnson admitted he had been sleeping with 300-500 people a year. The team’s locker room, and its sauna, had been a place where the star and other players had entertained women, even right after games. Johnson would retire to the sauna after a game, have sex, then put on a robe and return to the locker room for his post-game media interviews. How far had the team gone in condoning such questionable behavior? ‘I cared,’ West said in his interviews for this book. ‘I did things for those guys. It was ridiculous, some of the things I did for those guys. If the public knew they’d be outraged. It was a pretty crazy period for us.’”
The West bio doesn’t deal all that much with sex, so I was surprised that the media picked up on the passage.
In retrospect, it makes some sense. Tiger Woods has been vilified for his recent troubles and admissions about his sex life.
And the typical blunt honesty from Jerry West makes it seem like he stands out as some sort of perverse element in the universe of pro sports.
Actually, that’s not the case. History has shown to me that while West may have looked the other way perhaps and allowed the situation to go on in the locker room, his approach was simply business as usual as it has been for most of the history of pro sports.
Let’s consider a few facts.
Babe Ruth’s debauchery is well-documented, and it required the collaboration of both New York Yankees management and the media to enable that.
That same approach was taken by sports management and media for decades in virtually every sport. And it’s understandable why they did.
Sex and athletic performance have long been key factors in the philosophy and practice of coaching. From the early twentieth century, high school and college coaches had their players sit in ice water and pursue other practices so that they would avoid masturbating before games.
On the pro level, coaches simply didn’t have the same power over their players. Yet pro coaches have always dealt with huge pressures. They were unceremoniously fired if their teams failed to win.
It’s little wonder that they have long made efforts to deal with the sexual appetites of their players, long before the Lakers ever moved to L.A.
Hot Rod Hundley, a noted partier and ladies man, was the number one overall pick in the 1957 NBA draft, when he was selected by the Minnieapolis Lakers.
Team owner Bob Short soon realized he had a real rounder on his hands. Hundley would head out to the bars almost every night to carouse and enjoy the secretaries and professional ladies of Minnesota.
Short watched as Hundley’s off-court activities sapped the young star’s strength and hurt his performances. Finally the owner went to Hundley, begged him to stay in his room after games and even offered to bring prostitutes to his room so that he could “take care of his business” and then get the proper rest.
Hundley refused the owner’s prostitute offer. “The thrill is in the chase, baby,” the player told the owner.
Truth be told, such exchanges were common in the rowdy early days of all pro sports. Owners, GMs, coaches, all simply felt they were dealing with the realities.
Still, there’s no question that, as Johnson’s plight revealed, once the city of Los Angeles joined the world of pro sports in the 1950s, the influence of groupies escalated in the business.
To offer a little more insight, I’m including the following excerpt of another of my books, “The Show,” an oral history of the Lakers that explains the circumstances.

SEX AND THE CITY

It was just before World War II that the English writer Aldous Huxley took a stroll on the beaches southwest of Los Angeles with his good friend, the German writer Thomas Mann, and their lady friends. As they strolled in the sunlight talking of Shakespeare, it was the women who first noticed the small white creatures. There were millions of them, strewn across the sand as far as the eye could see, strange diaphanous creatures. What were they?
Upon closer examination, the couples discovered in surprise that they were used condoms, millions of them, which helped explain why the lovely beach was so deserted.
From there it was just a short distance to the conclusion that, first, the city was dumping literally tons of untreated sewage daily right into the ocean, and second, that the natives certainly seemed possessed of healthy and active libidos.
The distinguished visitors probably shouldn’t have been surprised, at least not about the libidos. As Jessica Hundley and Jon Guzik wrote in the introduction to their guidebook, Horny? Los Angeles, “From the very beginning, Los Angeles was built on a history of scandal and intrigue, feats of sexual perversion, prowess, and seduction that would make your mama blush.”
Hollywood and its stars, of course, had been on the Coast but a short time in the early 20th century before they began wallowing in sexual excess and scandal. Film legend Mae West in the early days of the industry was known for an immense sexual appetite that drove her to bed a wide array of male stars, including Cary Grant and George Raft. Lusty as she was, West was just one of dozens of Hollywood stars caught up in enjoying the Southern California climate over the years.
Clara Bow, another sexually liberated starlet, was rumored to have exceeded even West’s dalliances by taking on the entire University of Southern California football team. Many Hollywood historians scoff at that claim. Regardless, the tendency toward frivolity —not to mention statistics—was well established before the Los Angeles Lakers ever arrived on the scene.
As the decades rolled by, the city’s circumstances only leant edginess to the climate. Millions of residents crammed into the small Los Angeles Basin, which, in turn, sat upon one of the world’s most violently active seismic zones. Earthquake, anyone? What better way for Los Angelenos to take their minds off the impending doom?
There’s little wonder then that California led the charge into the American sexual revolution. As fate would have it, Minneapolis Lakers owner Bob Short moved his team into the midst of this stirring pot in 1960 just as that revolution was surging over the ramparts. No one, it seems, had to mention the phrase “free love” more than once around the Lakers in the early days.
Let’s see. Hollywood, the world’s casting couch? Movie stars? The porn industry? And basketball players?
In all fairness, it should be pointed out that hypersexuality evidenced itself in other sports and pastimes, in other cities. Hot Rod Hundley (now what was the genesis of that nickname?) freely admitted to doing his best to bed the female population of Minneapolis/St. Paul before the Lakers ever made their move west.
Los Angeles, though, clearly provided the opportunity for the team’s stars to explore an array of sexual options, with decidedly mixed results, evidenced by more than a bit of heartbreak. From Wilt Chamberlain’s claim of making love to 20,000 women, to Magic Johnson’s surprise announcement that he was HIV positive to the prostitution solicitation charge against James Worthy to the 2003 rape case against Kobe Bryant that garnered international attention, the Lakers have made scandal a persistent part of their image. Did we mention that Jeanie Buss, the daughter of Laker owner Jerry Buss, posed nude for Playboy magazine in the team offices in 1994? Buss himself has long been known for serially dating literally hundreds of beautiful young women (and proudly keeping a photo collection of each). True to his Playboy image, Buss has even fathered two children with younger women.
It’s no wonder then, that despite his early determination to avoid trouble, that Bryant went to Los Angeles as a 17-year-old high school player and eventually wound up in trouble.
It didn’t take Magic Johnson (now we know the true meaning of the nickname) long after he arrived in Los Angeles in 1979 as a 19-year-old to learn that he had taken up residence at the prime end of the world’s casting couch. Hollywood offered an abundant supply of beauties, many of whom were eager to get to know a basketball star. Back then Norm Nixon was the reigning ladies’ man, and Johnson was an inexperienced understudy. Butch Carter came to the Lakers as a rookie in 1980 and found Johnson marveling at Nixon’s popularity. One day Johnson walked through a hotel lobby and three women gave him their phone numbers—to take up to Nixon’s room.
Butch Carter, former Laker: “At the time, Norm Nixon was the king of LA. When we’d go out somewhere, the women would ask, ‘Where’s Norm? Where’s Norm?’”
It wasn’t too long, however, before Johnson was making his own time. Taking the Lakers to championship after championship, he lit the incandescent lamps of his own stardom. Captivated by his smile, by the career shortcut that an association with him might offer, those Hollywood ladies began asking, “Where’s Magic?”
It wasn’t long before Johnson’s excesses became the stuff of legend around the Lakers. He would later estimate that he had sexual relations with 300 to 500 women annually. Even more amazing was the discretion with which he rang up these numbers. Outside of a small inner circle of Laker staffers and players, few people knew exactly what he was doing.
Rudy Garciduenas, longtime Lakers equipment manager: “When I first started with the team, it was astounding. But it was an existence, a way of life with Earvin. I came to understand Earvin and the way he did things, his love for women, females in general. That’s the way it was. When you’re a person of that stature, it’s almost expected. All the movie stars get the same attention. It’s part of the business.”
As it had for generations of Lakers before him, the club life in Los Angeles posed an irresistible playground for Johnson. After all, there were thousands of beautiful young women, and there was only one Magic Johnson.
Rudy Garciduenas: “You’d just have to shake your head. Every male wants to be that way, or dreams of being that way for just one night. But with Earvin, it was reality. . . .”
Actually, the tales of his exploits had to struggle to keep up with the reality. There was a series of rumored liaisons in public places with a prominent TV newscaster. There was sex in a movie theater. Sex in an elevator. Sex in a corporate boardroom. Sex in a thousand hotel rooms.
But the Great Western Forum itself had been the lair for Laker players for years. The team’s veterans would entertain women in the team saunas and weight rooms after games. And Johnson eventually inherited the privileges, allowing him to have sex with one or more women in the team’s training rooms or sauna just moments after a game. Then, according to routine, he would put on a robe and step out to hold post-game interviews for waiting reporters.
Rudy Garciduenas: “It’s difficult to imagine, but Earvin was used to doing anything he wanted, really. And people loved Earvin so much that nothing he did was wrong. It was never really hidden from anybody, what Earvin did. He was always pretty up-front with it. That was part of him. You had to learn to accept it.”
Joe McDonnell, longtime L.A. radio personality: “It was amazing when Jerry Buss took over (in 1979) and Magic showed up, it became Showtime. There were women. You would go to the end of the tunnel, and the women would be handing their phone numbers to the ball boy, or Magic would have seen somebody that he liked. ‘Bring her in, and bring her in.’ The women were just ridiculous.”
This phenomenon, of course, wasn’t exclusive to Johnson or the Lakers. The modern professional athlete in all major sports has discovered that physical prowess, fame, and fortune attract large numbers of women.
Joe McDonnell: “I could tell you Dodger stories for a year and tomorrow about stuff going on down in little rooms at the club house before the games. It’s prevalent in all sports. In baseball, it can happen during a game. In basketball, it always happens after a game.”
One longtime NBA coach went so far as to suggest that the reason the Lakers had become the NBA’s dominant team over the years was the women.
“That’s why the best players wanted to play there because of all the women,” he said. It’s not the first time that a connection between the two has been made.
J.A. Adande, L.A. Times: “How come the Clippers aren’t great then?”
Such a theory deserves to be met with skepticism. Still, there’s no denying the Lakers’ lusty history has shaped how middle America perceives Hollywood’s team.
Rick Telander, Chicago Sun-Times: “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Magic Johnson ran into his trouble being in L.A.”
Mike Monroe, San Antonio Express News sports columnist: “You know what Laker mystique is? It’s an owner whose daughter has appeared nude in Playboy.”
Steve Bullpet, Boston Herald sportswriter: “Celtic mystique is, you know, championships and black sneakers and the parquet floor. Laker mystique is Jerry West and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson and women with boob jobs lining the front row. Their history of success follows the whole idea of the West Coast lifestyle.”
The Laker image itself soon translated into expectations.
Ron Carter, former Laker: “When we were in college and our teams played each other in the NCAA tournament, Norm Nixon and I went out after the game. And we couldn’t get a date. Couldn’t get in a club. Two years later we were laughing because two women were fighting in a nightclub over Norm one night. I said, ‘Norm, what happened?’ He said, ‘You know, Ron. It’s an amazing thing, but when you sign a Laker contract you become awfully good looking.’”
Doug Krikorian, longtime L.A. sportswriter: “Even back in ‘68 and ‘69, we’d get off the bus and go in the hotel lobby, and there’d be a bunch of women in there looking at (Laker guard) Johnny Egan, who was a straight Catholic boy who would never play around on his wife, straight as a string. Even then these guys would be besieged with women.”
Nixon and Carter came to the Lakers in the late seventies when the climate around the team had been stewing for more than a decade. The sixties may have unleashed the sexual revolution, but the seventies turned it into a fest, especially for the Lakers, which left the team’s front office struggling to deal with blatant sexual frivolity.
Pete Newell, former Laker GM: “We were reluctant to get involved, although we were all appalled by the women who just flaunted themselves. The players just kind of passed these gals around. There was no deterrence about AIDS and sex in those days. The players just didn’t have as much to lose.”
As Lakers GM, Newell even retained off-duty LAPD vice officers to keep track of Lakers players and the company they kept.
Ron Carter: “The women were very aggressive. Very aggressive. We were very promiscuous. That was the pre-AIDS era. The big thing then was herpes. You might contract herpes. Other than that, unprotected sex was very, very common. We were coming right off of the free love era.”
Looking back on the times in his 1990 book, “A View From Above,” Chamberlain claimed to have slept with better than 20,000 women during his career. His claim was designed to sell copies of his book, but Chamberlain very quickly came to regret it.
Rick Telander: “Wilt’s was a body of work that transcended L.A., but he probably did 80 percent of his work right there in L.A., yeah, under the big retractable roof in the circular bed or whatever he had.”
Kelly Tripucka, former NBA player: “Thank you, Wilt. We can all tip our hat to Wilt. He paved the way, not only on the court, but off the court as well. It was a 10-lane highway for Wilt.”
Part of the reason for Chamberlain’s regret was that he felt his claim led people to view him differently. Suddenly his off-court activities overshadowed his real accomplishments. However, there was another reason as well. Some of his associates doubted his claims.
Doug Krikorian: “Complete hyperbole. Trust me. I spent many a Saturday night where Wilt would call me and say, ‘Let’s go out and have dinner together.’ He was the worst guy I’ve ever seen trying to hustle women. I’m serious. That thing should be debunked. Trust me. I saw firsthand. Yes, he might have had his share of women, but as a slick hustler, please. No. I saw too many nights where he was alone. I was with him. There were nights he’d call me up. I was like his valet at times. I’m sure he had hookers come up to his room and stuff like that. He scored on some women, but as a regular Lothario? I know bartenders that scored way more than Wilt. Please. He was playing basketball. How could a real guy be a Lothario? What did he say, 20,000? It’s ridiculous. It’s farcical. Why would he even claim that?”
Lou Hudson, former Laker: “I didn’t see that. That’s an exaggeration on Wilt’s part. That’s like one and a half to two people per day, every day. There are days you travel all day, days you play, days you spend time with your family. I do know some people who came close for maybe a year or a month, but you don’t do that for like 12 years, every year. Nobody does. If they do, they’ve got a problem. That’s beyond the realm of fun. That’s the realm of a nymphomaniac, the same for men as for women. If somebody does that, he has a sexual disorder. It just wasn’t that way. We did things, but not to that extent.”
Doug Krikorian: “There’s married Laker players who had a lot more sex than Wilt did. I don’t want to go further than that. There was one, I won’t name him, who made Wilt look like an amateur.”
While some observers have implied the scale of NBA sexual activity was related to ethnicity, that’s hardly the case. The women absolutely loved Jerry West, according to team sources from that era. And Gail Goodrich also enjoyed immense popularity as did other Caucasian players. Clearly the 70s presented an equal-opportunity environment.
Ron Carter recalled coming to the team in 1978 and being stunned by the veterans’ attitudes and sexual habits.
Ron Carter: “All the old school guys, these guys were like sex addicts. They were crazy with it. It was there and it was available. Actually, it was a part of the mentality that the veteran players would teach you how to manage the women. Kobe could have used some of that.”
Understandably, the circumstances made players from other teams eager to visit Los Angeles. Some observers said it was the Lakers’ true homecourt advantage.
Fred Carter, former NBA player: “The Forum was kicking in the seventies too. It was just a different time. The hype wasn’t there. But the feeling, the enthusiasm was still there. We had our East Coast clothes and our West Coast clothes. And when you’re married, all of a sudden your wife wonders, ‘Why are you wearing that out there?’ Some things you had to hide. You didn’t let your wife pack your clothes.”
Kelly Tripucka: “That was a big distraction for teams. You’re going out to L.A. and coaches worried about that. Not only is the weather warm, especially after the snow in Detroit and those other East Coast cities, you wonder if you’re going to have the guys there. But now you go in the game and you’re so hyped up to be into it and to play against Showtime, and you’re sitting over there looking at whoever may be walking by, and your head’s doing a little swivel. You know what? You’re not concentrating. You’re not into the game. You really had to have blinders on like those horses at the track across the street. As far as coaches, they really sweat it, playing the Lakers in that particular environment. Especially if you weren’t a very good team. That was just an automatic loss. If you didn’t have your team’s entire concentration for 48 minutes, you could get embarrassed out there.”
Likewise, the Lakers would go on the road and find the female populations of other cities more than eager to welcome them.
Ron Carter: “These women would come to the hotel. First of all, it always amazed me that they could figure out where we’re staying. But they’d be there when we got there. They’d have the team roster. ‘Can I speak to Magic Johnson?’ ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, that line is busy.’ ‘Can I speak to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?’ ‘Sorry, that line is busy.’ ‘Can I speak to Jamaal Wilkes?’ They’re reading down the roster. They are there to get a Laker. I used to get down. I was the eleventh call. Every other guy would go in the room and take their phone off the hook, so it rings busy. I’d keep a phone on the hook. I’m waiting for the overflow. I know it’s coming, especially if we’re in New York or Philadelphia. I remember we were in Boston. I met a cute girl, and I was trying to get her to go out with me. I said, ‘Look, I’ll get you tickets to the game, and after the game we’re gonna be here overnight. You can stick around. We’ll go out.’ She said, ‘Well, I don’t know. Can you introduce me to Kareem?’ I asked the girl, ‘What you want to talk to him for?’ Actually, this is what I said to her. I said, ‘Give me your arm. Put it on the table. Is that what you want?’ She started laughing. I said, ‘Come over here with me.’ We went over to the house phone. I said, ‘If he’s busy, you’re gonna hang out with me.’ She said, ‘Okay, deal.’ I phoned him up and said, ‘Cap, you busy? I got a young lady who wants to hang out with you.’ He said, ‘I got company.’ I said, ‘Say hello and tell her you got company.’ I hand her the phone and he tells her he’s busy, so she hangs out with me. There are a million stories like that.”
The team’s sexuality quotient took a huge jump in 1979 when Jerry Buss bought the team. He wanted to revolutionize basketball marketing by dressing pretty young girls in skimpy outfits so that they could perform sexy dance routines during timeouts.
Joe McDonnell, longtime L.A. sports radio personality: “Jerry Buss, if you look, never did any marketing. His marketing was all on the floor. He used sex to sell the Lakers. Buss built them that way. He wanted the Laker girls and the uniforms and Showtime and having a guy like Magic with a great infectious personality as the main guy. Buss wanted to be that way. That’s where the Laker girls came from. Was it a novel idea to have cheerleaders? No. But to dress them like that and make them an important part? A very novel idea.”
Jerry Colangelo, former Phoenix Suns owner: “I remember when Jerry Buss came into the league. He was a newcomer to say the least without any background whatsoever in basketball. But he had his own M.O. He had his own style. He has made great contributions. He’s a very innovative guy from a marketing standpoint. He’s made great contributions to the game in Los Angeles and on a national scope as well. His record speaks for itself. Showtime worked well in the Los Angeles marketplace. It’s tough to say that would have been the same script in another market. Certainly it was the appropriate script in L.A. I think Jerry hit a grand slam.”