“You can always find a distraction if you’re looking for one.”
—Tom Kite
Whether it’s celebrating early or being distracted by the competition, success can be thrown off by one false move. The key is making sure you learn from your mistakes and walk away better for having had the experience.
Right from my rookie year I was on a team that was built to win, with Magic, Kareem, Coop, and James Worthy. There were also guys like Bob McAdoo, Kurt Rambis, and Mitch Kupchak, who all had long NBA careers as players and then coaches or general managers. I was the second youngest guy on the team (Worthy had me beat by a month) and the lone rookie, so I had to act like a winner from day one. That came naturally to me, because I had been winning all my life, but never at this level and never in the purple and gold.
We finished the regular season 54–28 and were the number one seed in the Western Conference. We cruised to the NBA Finals, beating the then–Kansas City Kings, the Dallas Mavericks, and Phoenix Suns along the way.
When I walked into the locker room after closing out the Phoenix Suns in game six, I was happy as hell. We were going to the Finals, which seemed like a big deal. But when you’re a Laker, getting to the Finals is not a cause for celebration. I looked around the locker room, and it was business as usual. Magic was the orchestrator of that. We looked to him, and when he wasn’t celebrating, we knew we shouldn’t be celebrating either. Nobody was saying anything, so I sat down and just chilled out for a minute, and then showered, dressed, and went back to Los Angeles.
In the 1990–91 season we beat the Portland Trail Blazers to go back to the Finals, and Sam Perkins, who had joined the team after six seasons in Dallas, came running into the locker room jumping around, ready to party. Everyone just kind of looked at him, and someone pulled him aside and said, “Sam, we don’t celebrate winning the Western Conference here. We only celebrate championships.”
It was funny because he apologized, and then we apologized to him. At that point we had forgotten what it was like to get there for the first time. There’s no pleasure in second place, so we just never celebrated until there were rings on our fingers, but there should be some joy in the journey.
That’s how it was my first year too. The day after winning the Western Conference Finals, we went to practice and started looking at video of Boston, and I was just like, OK, I guess this is normal.
That’s the kind of focus we had as a team. We didn’t have time for emotions.
A lot of young people now look at the opportunity to see the world as a bridge between completing their education and starting in their careers. When I was coming out of school, people didn’t normally do that. Most people just went right to work, which I wanted to do, but I also wanted to expand my horizons.
Scott Paper Company was considered one of the best consumer packaged goods companies in the United States, and after graduate school, it offered me a job. I could have gotten a traditional packaged goods background, but I wanted to see the world. Part of that wanderlust may have come from my dad, who grew up in Poland, was a Zionist who wanted to end up in Palestine, went to the University of Algiers as an undergraduate to study winemaking, and then went to the University of Copenhagen for graduate school, where he studied both milk and cheese making and traveled quite extensively. He spoke seven languages and was truly a global person.
Consciously or not, I followed in his footsteps by working for Rank Hovis McDougall for two years in London and then for Nestlé, which was headquartered in Switzerland. I moved from a large Boston suburb to the giant city of London to a village of 1,200 people above the thriving metropolis of Vevey, where Nestlé’s global headquarters were located—a city that was all of twenty thousand people in its own right. It was a big adjustment.
At Nestlé I was responsible for soy protein development on the culinary side globally. We could reconstitute soy in different forms and could make products that actually resembled chicken strips, beef chunks, and ground beef.
My job was to pick prime mover countries and work with local Nestlé companies to determine what form of soy product we should be making, packaging, and selling there.
I had to learn the different culinary habits of each target country and figure out in what form my soy-based products would be best received, so I moved around from country to country developing these products. My first assignment brought me back to the UK, where I produced a successful ground beef soy product called Mince-Saver during a time in the seventies when beef prices had gone through the roof. It was named the third most successful product launch in the UK that year. It was my first launch, and we got it right.
To me that felt like a cause for celebration. Third best isn’t the best but it’s pretty great. I’d never experienced this level of success before and, much like Sam Perkins, I was pretty damn happy. So was the head of Nestlé in Japan, who wanted me to ride the wave of success and create a version of this product in Asia. So just like that I was off to Japan.
At that time every Japanese woman had to know how to make six or eight basic dishes in order to be considered eligible for marriage. Many of them went to cooking school, while those who couldn’t afford it watched cooking programs on TV.
So I went to cooking schools to observe and worked with a market research firm founded by George Fields, who wrote many of the early books on how to do business in Japan. We were trying to bring a soy-based product to a country that was just moving out of soy-based products. They were proud of the fact that they were eating meat, and Kobe beef had become important, so selling them on putting soy back into their diets was not easy. What we had done easily in the UK was very difficult to translate to the culinary structure of Japan.
After rigorous research and working with George, we ended up developing ingredients that when added to ground beef made a Western-style hamburger. We used different spices that gave the meat and soy a certain Western flavor. We were downplaying the meat-extension angle and playing up that it was an old-fashioned American burger.
In the seventies Japanese businesses took a much longer time to evaluate an idea, but once they got it they moved much faster. We put this product in a test market and it did extremely well. Ajinomoto, which was much larger than Nestlé on the culinary side in Japan, saw what we were doing, copied it, and went national while we were still in a test market. Being number two wasn’t going to be profitable behind a giant like Ajinomoto, even though we had developed the product and we were doing incredibly well in test. This for me was a punch in the gut, and it really riled me up.
You can never assume you are doing anything in isolation. You always have to assume that there will be a reaction from the competition. And in this case the competition got the best of us, which adversely affected my next decision.
Before the series started we felt we were the better team. They were tough, with Larry Bird, Robert Parish, Kevin McHale, Dennis Johnson, and Danny Ainge. They were fighters, but we felt our skills were better in every category.
We took game one on the road and game three at home to put us up 2–1 in the series. With game four at home, we felt we had a huge advantage. But the Celtics had different ideas. They knew they weren’t going to outshoot us, so instead they decided to push us around. It started small, but escalated during a key play that would change the momentum of the series.
Kareem passed the ball halfway down the court to James Worthy, who sent it across to Kurt Rambis, who was set for an easy layup until Kevin McHale, who was running to catch up, came in and clotheslined him. Kurt hit the floor hard—headfirst—and his goggles went flying. It was nasty looking. He shot up to go after him, the benches cleared, and all hell broke loose. James tried to stop Kurt, but he wanted McHale’s head.
Back then there were no ejections or suspensions or even technical fouls for this kind of thing. The referees got everyone back to the benches, and Kurt shot two free throws. It was just a regular foul, but because of it, they got in our heads.
We lost all focus after that. We became so angry as individuals that instead of just trying to win the game, each of us was focused on trying to take McHale out to get back at the Celtics. Kareem got into it with Larry Bird, and James had a thing with Cedric Maxwell. I remember just wanting to kill Danny Ainge and Gerald Henderson.
All of a sudden we weren’t even thinking about basketball. But if you notice, after that first fight, Kurt ended up back on his butt for a second time and Bird actually helped him up off the floor. He wasn’t doing it to be a nice guy. He was showing that he wasn’t fazed. He didn’t lose his cool. We were all in the same fight, but the Celtics won the chess match and eventually the game in overtime after we blew a lead.
We didn’t talk about it after the game, but subconsciously I think each one of us had a new game plan moving forward: revenge. It was a bad plan. The Celtics always looked at us as tuxedo-wearing Hollywood boys and saw themselves as hard-hat East Coast tough guys. What was dirty to us was normal to them, so once they started a brawl, we were all of a sudden trying to play their game instead of focusing on Lakers basketball, which is getting up and down the court, executing on offense, and getting easy buckets.
Because of it, we lost the series in a game seven in Boston. The fans stormed the court in celebration and were pushing us and trying to rip our jerseys off. I walked to the locker room behind Kareem, who was just punching people left and right to clear a lane. He had his fist cocked and was just knocking people out.
Afterward I don’t remember what Pat Riley said or what Magic said. I just remember taking a shower and just sitting by my locker in shock. We were better than they. I knew we were. Yet somehow we were left sitting in the locker room, listening to the partying going on outside the Boston Garden. Normally we spend about forty-five minutes in the locker room. That night we sat for about two hours before Riles said we had to go.
I moved on to Nigeria to test the expansion of our soy products in that region. As I had in Japan, I had to learn the culture of the country and not just what products the people appreciate, but why they appreciate them.
Nigeria is a country of storytelling, and a lot of it happens around the stew pot, which is cooking all the time. In the stew pot were beef bouillon cubes (Nestlé Maggi cubes) along with vegetables if the people had some money and meat if they were wealthy. It would cook for hours. For those who couldn’t afford meat, the company created a high-protein, soy-based meatlike cube called Maggi Metex, but it took years to make a product that could withstand the hours of cooking the Nigerians did.
Once we thought the product was ready, we brought it into the community. I helped supervise the training of managers and salespeople. Market women (who were the businesspeople of the community) carried baskets of the product through the villages on their heads, and boys on bicycles distributed the product all over town. We wanted everyone around to know how to sell it and how to cook it—specifically that it had to be rehydrated before entering the stew pot.
We projected forty tons of sales in our first year in greater Lagos, and unlike in Japan we moved quickly to get it out there and be number one in the market. By sheer coincidence, the day we launched the product the butchers went on strike, and we ended up selling forty tons in two weeks. Very briefly it felt like a huge win.
Due to rapid sales because of the strike, we failed with our education system and people were eating the product directly out of the box, which, as you can imagine, did not taste good at all.
The demand was so great that there was no time to explain to buyers, many of whom were illiterate, how to prepare the product. Also, one of the most popular local delicacies was a dried beef jerky, and the locals confused our product with that. People bought it in droves, calling it Maggi meat, and there was no time to explain to them what they were eating. After that there were no repeat purchases. It was boom to bust overnight—a total failure. It was the biggest failure of my career.
But I’ve learned that there are small victories within every failure, including the reward of simply having taken the risk in the first place. Throughout my career I’ve come to realize that you don’t want to chop someone’s head off for taking a risk; instead you want to encourage it. If you fail from time to time, and you learn from your mistakes, then you are better prepared the next time.
Failure isn’t just a stepping-stone; it’s a milestone on the road to future success. At Rank Hovis McDougall and Nestlé International I learned that I can get thrown into a foreign situation and find my way. It was really important to discover that I had enough mental and physical fortitude that I could do well in a situation that was foreign to me.
Traveling around the world and seeing different cultures was also invaluable to my future success. It forced me to have active listening skills, think outside the box regularly, work with people who had different needs, desires, and visions for success, and realize that I can either be someone who just does a job or a person who, while doing a job, is constantly figuring out how to achieve even more.
A lot of people won’t be able to fly because they don’t know how to fly. This part of my life taught me how to fly and how to maximize my talents. By the time I came back to the United States to work for Nestlé, I had a reputation of being good at what I was doing. It was the first time I arrived at a job with any kind of street cred, and to me that was a huge success.
That loss sparked a fire in us. Normally when the season was over, whether we’d won a championship or not, you wouldn’t see anyone in the gym for at least a month. The weight room, the basketball court, and the track outside UCLA would all be empty as guys focused on rest. In 1984, when this series against Boston was over, the guys were back working out a week later.
Every Monday through Thursday from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., we were working out and playing ball in the gym at UCLA. It wasn’t a mandatory workout. It was just who we were. All our guys would be in there, and we’d play against whatever other pros were there—guys like Reggie Theus and LaSalle Thompson. There was a rotating group of about twenty pros and we’d play until we lost, then come back the next day and do it all again for the rest of the summer.
Everybody came to training camp in great shape and looking in midseason form. Four months after we lost in the NBA Finals, we were still angry and poised to work our butts off to get ready for the season. We decided right then and there that this season, if teams wanted to run with us, we’d run. If they wanted to be physical, we were going to be physical. But no matter what, we were going to play Lakers basketball.
That whole 1985 season, we had a different level of focus. It was basically the same team, but everyone’s intensity, conditioning, and drive was sky-high. Most seasons you’re not really at your best until after the all-star break, but this season we were there from opening day. We finished the season 62–20—ten games above the next-best team in the conference. It was special. That’s really the only way to put it. We were playing on a different level.
We lost only two games in the early rounds of the playoffs before once again meeting the Boston Celtics in the Finals. This time we came out swinging, but we played our game. It was us lifting them off the floor every time we knocked them down. By the end of that series, a lot of their players were talking about how we were dirty and taking cheap shots. Us? The team from Hollywood? What were they talking about? We’re a finesse team. We don’t play a dirty brand of basketball. We play winning basketball, and that’s exactly what we did, beating the Celtics in six and walking away NBA champions on their home court. We didn’t hear any celebration that night on the streets outside the Garden, only the sweet sounds of victory in our locker room.
Winning that ring to me was the ultimate because I’d heard all the stories. Eight times the Celtics beat the Lakers in the Finals before we finally beat them in 1985. This wasn’t a win only for us, it was also a win for Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain and all those guys who wanted to get the monkey off their backs. And it was a huge win not just for the players but also for the organization and Lakers fans everywhere. A lot of the other guys had won before, but not like this.
My dad would drive me to the airport for the road games during the playoffs, and when he drove me before game six, he just asked, “So, what do you think?”
“About what?” I asked, with my chick magnet cocker spaniel Roscoe on my lap.
“Games six and seven in Boston.”
“Nah, we’re gonna win it in six,” I said. “It ain’t going seven.”
After we won, we had a big party that night, and when I came back to Los Angeles the next day, my dad picked me up and stood there looking at me and shaking his head.
“What’s wrong, Pops?” I asked.
“You knew you were going to win in six. You said it with so much confidence. How did you know?”
“We were still pissed off from last year, Pop. We weren’t going to let it go to seven.”
We set our goal and we were focused on a level that we hadn’t been able to find the year before—the same players, but with a newfound desire for success. Yes, we were NBA champions in 1985, but only because that championship run began a week after the 1984 season ended.