[In 1979, a change was coming. A change in how the NBA was seen.
How black stars were celebrated. And how America’s race problem
would be televised under the bright lights of the NBA.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WINNING TIME ‘THE SWAN’ A REVIEW  
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Lee Escobedo
March 5, 2022
Deadspin
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_ In 1979, a change was coming. A change in how the NBA was seen. How
black stars were celebrated. And how America’s race problem would be
televised under the bright lights of the NBA. _

John C. Reilly as Jerry Buss, bottle in hand lays on the for of the
Forum, Image: HBO

 

For Americans, but specifically African-Americans, 1991 was a hell of
a year.

A refresher: Rodney King was brutally beaten by a gang of white police
thugs. Operation Desert Storm began with American airstrikes against
Iraq. Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested after the remains of eleven men and
boys, primarily African-American, were found in his apartment. Anita
Hill, an African-American woman alleged Supreme Court candidate
Clarence Thomas, a Black man, sexually harassed her while working for
him.

And to top it off, Los Angeles Lakers point guard Magic Johnson
announced he’d contracted HIV
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signaling the end of a storied career.

And while HBO’s _Winning Time_ pilot, “The Swan,” which
debut’s Sunday, opens on this faithful year — showing Magic and a
weepy Lakers assistant receiving the tragic medical news, luckily the
episode takes place mostly earlier, in 1979. And in 1979, a change was
coming. A change in how the NBA was seen. How black stars were
celebrated. And how America’s race problem would be televised under
the bright lights of the NBA.

As entertainment, _Winning Time, _co-created by Max Borenstein and
Jim Hecht, challenges the perception of how our most-storied NBA epics
came to be. The series takes cues from multiple sources since just
about everyone from the Showtime Lakers era has written a book or two.
But, mostly it pulls from sports reporter and Deadspin contributor,
Jeff Pearlman’s book _Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, And The Los
Angeles Lakers Dynasty Of The 1980s_. By merging all of these varied
interests, and subjective truths, _Winning Time_ reveals a story
about race, sex, greed, and class as much as it is about basketball.
Sounds like the perfect story to be produced by Adam McKay, who
directed the pilot episode.

At the heart of this epic are two pillars, Jerry Buss, played with
con-man charm by John C. Reilly, and Magic, portrayed by newcomer
Quincy Isaiah. Each was instrumental for what the Lakers would become.
Under Buss’ stewardship, the Lakers, and eventually the NBA, would
become an essential epoch of pop culture. Buss integrated sex and
Hollywood into the sport, with Earvin “Magic” Johnson as his
avatar for all things excess. On the court, Magic would dominate every
player, including his teammates, with one exception — his binary
opposition Larry Bird. The contrast of the way Bird and Magic played
is mirrored in how the media spoke about each.

Off the court, all of Magic’s charisma and skill earned him the
attention of every sin his Seventh Day Adventist mother warned him
about. This excess would lead to the situation Magic finds himself in
the series-opening scene: in a waiting room of a doctor’s office,
staring at the supposedly pristine marriage of the NBA’s next big
star — Michael Jordan. But before the darkness of 1991, Magic has a
whole life to live, on and off the court.

Part of that life was his job, playing basketball better than anyone
else on the planet. The league Magic entered was rife with drug
addiction, low ratings, and apparently too many black faces and names
for white advertisers and fans to give a damn about. The Association
had yet to reckon with its racism. Buss, never afraid of a gamble,
bought low to sell high. And once he drafted Magic with the first
overall pick in ’79, he had the genuine article, one that sold
itself.

Buss is portrayed as a man-child searching for something between the
meaning of life and a get-rich scheme. He’s kind of a pervert’s
poet. Buss was an eternal bachelor who enjoys orgies as much as he
enjoys waxing philosophical on basketball, being what Roland Barthes
called — the perfect bastard — a spectacle of excess. Buss saw
basketball stars as gods. And he set out to convince fans to buy in
and suspend belief, at least for four quarters.

The pilot follows Magic as he navigates the white waters of the draft,
like eating exotic fish with old white men who call him boy. He also
schmoozes at cocaine-filled parties hosted by SOB and future Clippers
owner Donald Sterling. But most importantly, he gets to meet his
teammates, including incumbent Lakers point guard and All-Star, Norm
Nixon, whom he battles in a game of one-on-one at Sterling’s house,
while Nixon wears a mink coat and mocks Magic’s humble Michigan
roots. After beating Magic, he walks away, but not before looking down
at a wide-eyed Magic and calling him “boy.”

This is followed by a montage of a young Magic and his father, Earvin
Sr. — played by a scene-stealing Rob Morgan — driving around in
the elder’s garbage truck in Lansing. It’s a poignant and poetic
reminder of what Magic is trying to escape. It peels back the layers
of charm and facade the young point god oozes to reveal a boy who is
just trying to do better than his dad. “I don’t want to be
Lansing’s tallest garbage man,” the son tells the father. Just
like a young Jeannie Buss, who would go on to become the current owner
of the Lakers, who wants to not only impress her father but become a
better version of him, by being the female version of him.

The show’s sepia-tinged coloring and old-school aesthetic mix
strangely with the fourth-wall breaking and handheld zooms, two
penchants of anything with McKay’s name on it. After only one
episode, it’s hard to say whether it works or not, but it does
invoke a hallucinogenic feeling. The whole episode feels like an ode
to surrealist comedy, _8 ½_. Fellini’s masterpiece also deals with
a man in a mid-life malaise, trying to find a muse for his creativity.
For Buss, his “ideal woman” is turning basketball into a fusion of
flash and fake-it-till-you-make-it panache. As Buss describes
basketball in his introduction, “it’s sexy!” By the end of the
episode, when Magic comes to Buss’ office to reveal his doubts about
making it in the league, Buss wisely let’s the mystical halls and
shiny floor of the Forum do the talking.

Toward the end of the episode, when Magic stands in the middle of The
Forum and stares up at the rafters, he’s not just looking at his
future, he’s looking at the future of the NBA, too.

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