A review of this week’s Winning Time, “Who the F**k is Jack McKinney,” coming up just as soon as we kill the duck…
If not for the unfortunate fact of HBO’s longtime pay-cable rival having the same name, Winning Time would have come into this world known as Showtime. That’s the title of the Jeff Pearlman book from which the series is adapted, derived from the nickname that was bestowed upon this entire Lakers era of Magic and Kareem, the Jerrys Buss and West, Pat Riley, and so on. “Showtime” would have a double meaning throughout this golden moment for the franchise. First, the team’s style of play was thrilling to watch in a way no NBA franchise had quite managed to be before. And perhaps almost as importantly, the atmosphere that management would create around the on-court product signified glitz, glamour, and everything else associated with being Hollywood’s local team. (Give or take the 11-mile drive from Hollywood Boulevard to the Forum.)
“Who the F**k is Jack McKinney” presents the birth of both halves of the Showtime era. In Palm Springs, the episode’s title character installs the fast-break offense that would make the Lakers a dynasty and transform the face of professional basketball. And back in Inglewood, Jeanie Buss convinces Claire Rothman to revamp all the Forum entertainment options to better reflect Jerry Buss’s larger-than-life persona and appetites.
This is by far the liveliest episode of the series so far, and perhaps not coincidentally the one with the most actual basketball in our basketball show. The first three installments had to introduce the major players and set up the pressures facing Buss, Magic, and company heading into this pivotal NBA season. But the sale of the team, the draft, Jerry West’s resignation, and the coaching search arguably could have been compressed into two episodes (one might have been pushing it) so we could get more quickly to the reason this team is worth the HBO prestige drama treatment in the first place. But as Jack McKinney — inheriting the job after a grieving Jerry Tarkanian decides to stay in Vegas — begins presenting his vision for how much more excitingly the Lakers can play, Winning Time blossoms in a similar way.
It’s not all suddenly smooth and perfect. Much of the Forum B-story involves Jeanie’s conflicted feelings about her father’s oversexed lifestyle. In a late-Sixties flashback, the Buss kids and Jerry’s ex-wife Joann run into Jerry and his latest much-younger girlfriend Ginger at a restaurant, and Jeanie lingers long enough to witness Jerry and Ginger fooling around under the table. It is the kind of moment that can scar a kid, and in the 1979 scenes, we can see Jeanie torn between the understanding that a Jerry Buss fantasy camp approach will make the Forum into a local hotspot, and her queasiness at making said fantasy a part of the Lakers’ brand. This is complicated, fascinating material, and ties in well with Jessie Buss’ plan to have Jerry sell the team on paper to Joann as a way to skirt an upcoming balloon loan payment on the Forum. Jerry barrels through life without thinking much about the consequences for the people around him — his family most of all — and now Jeanie is about to make his personality into an aspirational part of the team’s public foundation. But while Winning Time is unpacking this, you can also see the show reveling in the abundant flesh on display at the Ocotillo Lodge, Jerry’s getaway spot in Palm Springs, where the team is holding training camp. It’s a very narrow line for so many of these antihero shows to walk, and most stumble over it at some point (even The Sopranos did this on occasion). But it often feels as if Winning Time as a whole doesn’t want to let go of its nostalgic view of Jerry’s boys-will-be-boys approach to the world, even as it periodically tries to interrogate it.
And some of the show’s other stylistic excesses are still working too hard. We get a “fresh meat” chyron, for instance, as our introduction to second-year Lakers defensive specialist Michael Cooper. Later, Pat Riley is tagged “loser!” when Magic recalls Riley’s Kentucky team losing to Texas Western’s legendary all-Black lineup in 1966 (subject of the movie Glory Road). But that’s largely it for the device, which either should have applied to everyone at training camp or no one.
But for the most part, the episode is one where the style and substance of Winning Time are working hand in hand to establish Jack McKinney as the forgotten genius behind Showtime.
McKinney did not invent the concept of the fast break. The motion offense he talks about here is credited to various college basketball coaches long before McKinney came to L.A. But NBA teams of this era for the most part played a very deliberate brand of basketball — teams with dominant centers like Kareem most of all. As McKinney illustrates in his first film session with his new club, the Lakers under Jerry West deployed one of the slowest and most predictable offenses in the league. When your best player has the most unstoppable shot in the history of the NBA, you can get away with that to a point, but it’s not aesthetically pleasing, and it also wasn’t getting the Lakers anywhere in the playoffs. McKinney instead proposes an offense where the Lakers attempt to run on every possession, whether their opponents make or miss a shot, and to constantly move the ball even in the half court. Kareem the stoic low-post master dismisses this notion as chaos, but chaos is exactly what McKinney wants to bring to this team, and this league.
Tracy Letts is having a real moment as an actor right now (I haven’t even seen him in Deep Water yet, but all the memes make me feel as if I have), and the conviction he brings to this role is vital. Jack has to come across as confident but not arrogant, passionate but not full of bluster. Letts does that, and grounds the character enough that the writers and director Damian Marcano can deploy big flourishes around Jack and his attempt to remake the team in his own image. We get the classical-versus-jazz montage early on, and later, when Jack is diagramming plays at night in his room, we see the X’s and O’s flowing all around him, as if he is seeing the game on a deeper level. Even the R-rated parody of Seventies kids’-TV animation where Magic runs the fast break and fools around with naked women doesn’t feel like overindulgence in this context. (Well, maybe the naked cartoon women do, especially given what’s going on in the Buss family story.)
Warrick Page/HBO
On the whole, the episode does a nice job juggling the new coach with various interpersonal conflicts on the team. Norm Nixon turns out to be one veteran among many who resents the favored-nation status of Magic the rookie, and Magic’s cause is not helped when some of his early no-look passes go painfully awry. Kareem hazes his new point guard with daily demands for orange juice and a newspaper; Magic eventually gets the former right, but doesn’t understand that a snob like Kareem wants the New York Times and not its local competition. Cooper fears getting cut, not realizing that he’s the perfect role player for his new coach. The players threaten a mutiny, Jerry West demands entree to Jack’s closed practices, and all appears on the verge of collapse. And then Jack has one final brainstorm: playing Norm and Magic together to get twice as much passing and ball-handling in the starting unit. Suddenly, his vision becomes a reality.
Things will not proceed without complications from here — there is a reason McKinney does not get talked about much when people reminisce about Showtime — but it is an extremely promising start for his coaching tenure, and the moment when it feels like Winning Time is finally coming into its own.
Some other thoughts:
* With McKinney’s hire comes a name that will be more familiar to many basketball fans of a certain age: Shakespeare-loving Paul Westhead, who’s toiling away at La Salle University in Philadelphia when his old mentor Jack recruits him to be an assistant coach. Jason Segel was a pretty good high school basketball player — Freaks and Geeks made his character an ex-jock after Segel was cast — and, like Adrien Brody, is the rare established Hollywood actor who looks like he belongs in an NBA setting.
* Finally, after Claire explains to Jerry Buss how hard it will be to make the amount of revenue he needs to pay off the balloon loan, we get an homage to the famous underwater shot from The Graduate, but this time involving a floating combover and an onscreen “FUCK!” chyron.