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Towards the end of the 1970s, the NBA he was still on the quest to find the best version of the league. Despite having great figures, such as Kareem Abdul Jabbar o Julius Ervingbetter known as the Doctor Jthe news that went viral had more to do with conflicts on campus or abuses off the pitch than with brilliant performances.
At that time, one of the names that revolutionized the world of basketball and sports in the United States was Spencer Haywood. The one born in Mississippi in 1949, who grew up in the midst of poverty and extreme racism that plagued the countryand at the age of 13 he was the breadwinner for his family earning four dollars a day after collecting more than 90 kilos of cotton, shortly after he became one of the stars of the team that participated in the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico and won the gold medal for the USA
On Aztec soil, he watched on television from the Olympic Village how the athletes Tommy Smith y john charles stood on the medal podium with fists clenched and arms raised in the famous message called Black Power in protest against civil rights in his country. That gesture moved him and motivated him to fight for his community.
That impulse served him to leave his mark in a conflict that went around the world when took the NBA to the Supreme Court of Justice to enable him to be part of the competition despite not having played the four years required at the time in college basketball: he asked to jump straight from high school to the elite.
thus was born The Hardship Rule, or the Rule of Necessity in ’71, which led Haywood to leave the old ABA, where he was already a star, to play for the Seattle Supersonics. Until the 79-80 season, after going through the New York Knicks and the New Orleans Jazz, Spencer received the call from the Lakers to join the team owned by the eccentric Jerry Buss.
Precisely, the name of the billionaire who bought the Los Angeles franchise, that of a certain Magic Johnson and the rest of the team that launched the winning dynasty, joined the player in question in the successful TV series “Winning Time”which was produced by HBO and that already announced a second season. In fiction, Haywood appears in perhaps the worst moment of her career. And of his private life, of course.
The series reflects the drug addiction that brought the Lakers’ No. 31 to hell in the middle of the championship-ending campaign. The images shown in the television work are explicit. Spencer in a deplorable state, in the care of his little daughter, while succumbing to cocaine and other drugs. The same thing that happened in the locker room, under the watchful eye of Jabbar, team captain and top figure. “I would say that 95 percent of the interpretation was real,” added the member of the Basketball Hall of Fame in dialogue with the Boston Globe.
The suffering that Haywood went through in LA was so clear that the numbers of his performance showed it: he went from scoring an average of 24 points to less than 10, which was what the coach had recruited him for. Jack McKinneythat I can only train in the first 13 games, since then he suffered a serious accident on a bicycle that left him in a coma and took him out of his position due to the consequences he suffered.
He went from being a starter alongside Abdul Jabbar to entering as a substitute. This is how Wood recalled it in an interview he gave to the magazine People in 1988. “I felt without hands, as if I no longer had fingers. Magic gave me good passes, and I couldn’t catch them. I refused to believe it was the drugs, even though I was using Quaalude, Valium, alcohol and other things to suppress the cocaine rush. I thought maybe I was taking too many spins on the passes, maybe even to make myself look bad.he explained.
When Paul Westhead took the reins of the Lakers with Pat Riley, who joined as an assistant after leaving his post as a commentator, Spencer’s situation worsened on the way to the playoffs. Despite the fact that the power forward was an important piece for Los Angeles to overcome Seattle in the Western Conference finals (4-0), the definitive warning signal for the squad came in the middle of the NBA definition against Philadelphia.
“Everything fell apart during the 1980 Finals against the Sixers. After burning my brain out in a bar, I went to practice. In the warm-up, I lay down and they noticed that I wasn’t moving. My classmates yelled at me: ‘Wood! Wake up’. And nothing. They shook me and nothing. The whole team gathered around me, imagining that I was dead.. They finally got me out of there and Westhead sent me home,” recalled who was introduced among basketball legends in 2015.
After a tough clash with two teammates (Brad Holland and Jim Chones), the then coach made the decision to separate him from the team during the finals. That provoked Haywood’s anger, which, as the series showed, hatched a plan to assassinate the man who was leading the Lakers to their first league title in three years.
“My career was fading, along with my friends, my self-esteem, everything. I told Westhead that he needed help. But that confrontation was the excuse he needed to expel me. He went to see Jerry Buss and in two hours I stopped being a Laker”, he confessed in an extensive letter that he published in 2014, in which he recounted the steps he followed to try to end the life of the coach of the Laker. equipment.
“I directed all my anger at Westhead. I left the Forum. I drove my Rolls all night and my only thought was that Westhead must die. I planned how to finish him off. In the rage and after doing cocaine I called a friend in Detroit, a guy named Gregory, a certified genuine gangster, and I said: ‘Come on, I need you to take care of someone’. He said: ‘No problem, Wood. I love doing that for you.’ The next day, Greg and his partner flew to Los Angeles, ready to work. We sat down and planned to sabotage the brakes on his car. We got his address: Westhead lived in Palos Verdes ”, he recounted his diabolical plan in great detail, as he himself took charge of the headline.
“Before I went ahead with the plan, I began to see things a little more clearly. He was very angry, but was he a murderer? I called my mother in Mississippi. She was dying of cancer at the time. I didn’t tell him what she was planning, just that I was angry. She said to me, ‘You’re doing something that’s not good, right? If you do something wrong, I’ll hand you over myself. I didn’t raise a fool.’ She started calling me every 15 minutes, and we talked a lot. She talked some sense into me,” Haywood added.
Once she stopped talking to her mom on the phone, Spencer made a life-changing decision. “I thought: What the hell was she up to? I never tried but my intentions were diabolical. God was watching me.” With that thought, she contacted her friends in Detroit and deactivated the project to kill Westhead.
After a brief stint in basketball in Italy, Wood returned to the NBA to finish his career with the then Washington Bullets. The dismissal of the sport allowed him to detox. She entered a rehabilitation center to get rid of drugs definitively and became an extremely important character for the African-American community in her latitudes.
Three decades later, this amazing series that was based on how the Lakers of the Showtime proposed by Magic, popularized the story of Spencer Haywood. A couple of years ago, players like LeBron James y Russell Westbrook They had already shown their affection to the former player and marked him as an inspiration to fight for their ideals.
“I was nervous when I first heard about the series because they were going to expose all my mistakes. I prayed for that and said that this could be an opportunity for the players to know what I did and who I am. I decided to let it fly and God would do it for me, “Wood said a few weeks ago in a note with the newspaper Seattle Times.
And apparently it was. He found the redemption he had been looking for for years and, in the podcast he has, he invited several of the protagonists of the TV show along with its creator to give even more publicity to a look at the story that showed him, at least him, as it was in reality.
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