Series about 1980s Lakers portrays the time when the NBA became pop

When asked to describe the Los Angeles Lakers of the 1980s, actor DeVaughn Nixon, 38, paused briefly. “Stylized,” he said. And then fired new responses. “Fast. Cool. Fun. Sexy.”

The Lakers were known at the time by the nickname “Showtime” and set a new benchmark for how professional basketball came to be viewed, on and off the court. The team bridged the gap between sport and pop culture in a way that no NBA team had before.

It sparked discussions about money, race, celebrities and sex in sport. Its brazen owner, a nouveau riche named Jerry Buss, led the Lakers to challenge what was until then the status quo — which included low audiences in gyms and even smaller television ratings. The team helped save the league.

And it was also a great subject for television both in the 1980s and now. The Los Angeles team is the subject of a new fact-based fiction series produced by HBO, “Lakers: Breakthrough,” in which Nixon plays his father, point guard Norm Nixon. The first episode of the ten-episode miniseries premiered on Sunday (6) and is available on the HBO Max platform.

Created by Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht, the series is based on the book “Showtime” by journalist Jeff Pearlman. But the show’s loquacious, fast-paced style, in which characters sometimes speak directly to viewers, is characteristic of producer Adam McKay (“The Big Short,” “Don’t Look Up”), who also directed the first episode.

“It was a story that I thought I knew the basics of,” said McKay, a basketball fan since childhood and host of an NBA podcast. “I thought the story mostly revolved around Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Dr. Buss. I had no idea, before reading the book, how complicated, multifaceted the story was. It was like ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ , but about basketball.”

“Time to Win” is not the first narrative about the NBA of the 1980s, a seminal period for the sport and the subject of numerous books and documentaries. Based on the eight episodes journalists were able to watch before the premiere, the series tells the story in a tone worthy of Lakers teams at the time.

The cuts are frantic, the accent is strong, and the characters often speak directly to the camera, narrating situations. There is a mixture of low quality film footage and poor video with archival material, real and fake, to reinforce the “vintage” mood.

Much like the Magic Johnson-era Lakers, the series is far from conventional, and no pretensions to subtlety.

The legend

The Showtime Lakers’ accomplishments have become legends. They won five NBA titles between 1980 and 1988, one of the most successful periods for any team in league history. The team’s main rival, the Boston Celtics, led on the court by Larry Bird, took three titles in the same period. Together, the two teams produced some of the greatest basketball players of all time.

DeVaughn Nixon said he didn’t know the importance of the Lakers of that era before a trip to Positano, Italy, long after his father retired.

“I came out of the bathroom, and there was Michael Jordan sitting at our table, chatting excitedly with my dad,” Nixon said. He remembers Jordan calling his father “a bad boy on the court”. “And I was like, ‘Okay, very good, cool,'” Nixon said. “My father was part of something.”

Jordan was not alone in his admiration. Basketball in the 1980s, especially the Lakers, had a cultural and political poignancy that has influenced both the sport and the wider world since then.

It would be possible to draw a direct line, for example, between the political activism of Abdul-Jabbar, who played for the Lakers from 1975 to 1989, and that of LeBron James. (Something that has not survived from that time: the “skyhook,” a deadly throw that Abdul-Jabbar used and is not seen much in this century.)

And the fashion shows, sexy dancers and raucous team appearances we see today at the start of every game — with pyrotechnics, laser shows and cannons that fire off T-shirts — owe a lot to Buss (played in the series by John C. Reilly). ), the transformative owner who acquired the Lakers in 1979.

Buss helped usher in an era that brought celebrities to the stands and expanded fan experiences. Celebrities have always had connections to the Los Angeles sport — Doris Day and Jack Nicholson were already seen in the Lakers crowd before Showtime — but Buss reinforced their presence, a dynamic that continues to exist.

Solomon Hughes, who plays Abdul-Jabbar, said, “The uniqueness of that professional sports team against the backdrop of Hollywood really changed the way everyone saw and sees sport.”

The Lakers earned the Showtime moniker from a nightclub called The Horn, which Buss frequented. There, a singer began her show by saying that “showtime has arrived,” and Buss adopted the phrase to describe his approach to the Lakers.

A frequent guest at the Playboy Mansion and holder of a doctorate in chemistry, always dressed in disco-era style suits and sporting a hairstyle that piled hair on top of his head to help him hide baldness, he was determined to match the glamour. from Hollywood to high-end basketball — a significant distinction from the way NBA teams operated up until then.

the rivalry

The prevailing pattern was heavily influenced by the Celtics, which dominated the NBA in the two decades prior to Buss’ acquisition of the Lakers. Red Auerbach (played by Michael Chiklis), who had been coach and later general manager of the team, hated the idea of ​​cheerleading at games; the Celtics didn’t have them until 2006. Buss behaved like an outsider bent on demolishing the sanctity of basketball.

But Buss wanted more than creating a flashy experience around the game. He wanted basketball itself to be flashy. This made Johnson’s availability in the 1979 NBA draft even more timely. Johnson was always on the lookout for opportunities to show off his acrobatic talent, shooting frequent passes behind his back to teammates as if he had eyes in the back of his head.

“He wanted to do his show,” said Quincy Isaiah, 26, who plays Johnson on the series. “But he definitely wanted everyone who was present at the gym to have fun, which included his teammates.”

Not everyone had as much fun, especially outside of Los Angeles. Chiklis, who was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, grew up a fan of the Celtics, a team with a diametrically opposite view of what basketball should be.

“I had as much hate and anger for them as I did for the Yankees,” Chiklis said, referring to the New York baseball team. “It was impossible to live in Boston back then and not be dragged into the vortex of that rivalry.”

The rivalry also had a racial component. Bird was as transcendent a player as Johnson, but there are those who wonder if he would have received the same attention if he had been black.

Dennis Rodman, one of the great rebounders in basketball history, said in 1987 that Bird had won three consecutive MVP awards “because he was white”, adding that no one gave Magic Johnson credit. Isaiah Thomas, Rodman’s Detroit Pistons teammate, agreed, adding that “if Bird were black, he’d be just another player,” which caused a stir.

As the rivalry between the Lakers and Celtics evolved, interest in the league grew and games were shown live on television. (The rise of ESPN, which was created in 1979, also helped.) Johnson’s name became famous far and wide, especially as the Lakers kept winning.

the celebrity

Prior to the 1980s, the NBA was a troubled league, low ratings, and not present on prime-time network TV. A game of the 1977 Finals began at noon Pacific Time. Many of the games were only broadcast on videotape after they were over.

The Lakers helped transform the NBA from a minor sports league into a giant, laying the groundwork for Michael Jordan and later Kobe Bryant, who helped make basketball a worldwide phenomenon. In McKay’s words, the Lakers “changed the music, the fashion, the way people behaved, the way they talked.”

“It was an explosion that rarely happens in any culture,” he continued. “Even more in sport.”

Alongside Bird, Johnson has become a bigger star than any basketball player of the past. He and Bird did TV commercials together, and the two signed major sponsorship deals. When Johnson – a straight athlete who averaged 12.5 assists and 19.4 points per game – announced that he was HIV positive in 1994 and would retire, it shocked the world.

Spaniard Pau Gasol said Johnson’s press conference about his retirement, which he saw as a child, had moved him so much that he promised he would find a cure for HIV. Instead, Gasol became an NBA star and helped lead the Lakers to multiple titles.

Some of the key figures in the story have publicly stated that they are not satisfied with the series, including Johnson. (None of the key players nor the Lakers organization participated in the production.)

A spokesperson for Abdul-Jabbar described the series in an email as “a fictional account taken from a book” written by “an outsider”, adding that Abdul-Jabbar had not watched the series and that “the best thing is that the story be told by those who lived it”.

Jeanie Buss, the controlling owner of the Lakers and daughter of Jerry Buss, who died in 2013, is the executive producer of a documentary about the team for the streaming service Hulu, which is expected to debut this year. Johnson is developing a documentary about his life for Apple. (Speakers for Johnson and the Lakers declined to comment.)

“If I were Kareem or Magic or any of those guys and I was taking this situation personally, seeing someone tell my story, I would probably find it weird too,” said Rodney Barnes, the show’s executive producer and writer. But the creative team wanted to tell a story about everything the period encompassed — about not just the Lakers but “the United States as a whole.”

And the story they tell is unlikely to be the final version of the Showtime Lakers, Barnes acknowledged.