This week’s review Gain time“The Good Life” comes only as soon as we premiere it The fish that saved Pittsburgh…
Midway through “The Good Life,” Magic Johnson leads the rest of the Lakers to the world premiere of The fish that saved Pittsburgh, a 1979 basketball comedy starring some of his new teammates in small roles. Before we can talk more about this episode, we must first discuss a few things about one of the most famous sports movies ever made:
1) The fish that saved Pittsburgh Stars Julius “Dr. J” Erving – aka Magic’s favorite player growing up – as Moses Guthrie, the frustrating star of a fast-paced pro basketball team. To rejuvenate the club’s assets, Teamballboy – with the help of an astrologer from, of course, Stockard Channing – convinces the management to keep open temptations for a whole new roster around Moses, alone from other people with the same astrological background. Shield, fish. This is the actual premise of the film. As Rick James said, cocaine is a hell of a drug.
2) Even though the plot is awful, and most of the comedy attempts are even worse, the scripted basketball footage is hilarious, as you would expect from a fictional team, whose members include both Dr. J and the legendary Harlem Globetrotter trickster Meadowlark Lemon contained. (The roster as a whole, however, is a nasty Village People Pastiche: Lemon plays a minister who finds a new reputation at Hardwood, while other players include a former DJ, an Indian who lets out war cries as he walks into the basket, and a Muslim man who wears a keffiyeh as part of his uniform.)
3) Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Norm Nixon, and a few other Lakers play themselves – although as we saw in this episode, Norm was mostly cut from the movie. But because the film did not have the rights to use an NBA property, they are not members of the Lakers. And since the film is largely influenced by ideas, they are introduced
for the championship game against the Pittsburgh Pisces as “the Los Angeles … Team!” Nobody even tried to think of a wrong name! It could have been something alliterative (Los Angeles Leopards?), A game with the real name (Los Angeles Rivers?), Or literally anything at all. Not difficult. And yet. Again, cocaine is a hell of a drug. Because I will never have another place to discuss
[Editor’s note: This Sepin-rant has now gone wildly off-topic, even by the author’s standards, so we’ll just jump ahead to the point that’s relevant here.]
The fish that saved Pittsburgh
, I have to note that while the Los Angeles team gets short written name, they actually get a cooler intro in the championship game than the hometown of Pittsburgh Pisces do! Which would you rather do: run to the courtyard through a tunnel of lasers while playing ominous music, or descend verrrrryyyyy sloooooowwwwlyyy from the sky in a hot air balloon where no one will see you until after you get out? Also, how much time had to elapse between the balloon landing and the actual tip of the game? Did they collapse the balloon and pull it out? Does anyone have to fly through the retractable roof of the arena again? And another thing about this move-
4) Perhaps most importantly when we’re on the subject of “The Good Life” – and surprisingly, a fact not underlined during the course of the episode – the coach for the Los Angeles team is none other than Jerry Tarkanian, who played Jerry Buss spends most of the hour replacing Jerry West
.
As I warned you last week, this show has far too many Jerrys. And I say that as the son of a Jerry. Our story ends amusingly five minutes after the end of the previous episode, and suddenly the roles between Bus and West are reversed as he sits quietly while the former rattles and rattles with him. The logo left the team high and dry, the bus exclaimed, while West insisted he was doing the team a favor by resigning from a job he felt was unsuitable. It’s a great gag, though, as we discussed last week, the real bus was expecting to replace his coach when he bought the team. And the scene sets us up for an hour over three potential Lakers coaches for whom the forum seems more promising than their current circumstances: college basketball flashback Tarkanian (played by an unrecognizable Rory Cochrane), longtime NBA assistant Jack McKinney (Tracy Letts), and Jerry West’s former Laker teammate Pat Riley (Adrien Brody under floppy hair and a floppy mustache).
Well, at the moment, only Tarkanian and McKinney are in the lead for a while, while Riley spends the episode getting a job as Chick Hearn’s new partner on the Laker Broadcast Team. . But the story is no spoiler, and we know that Pat Riley would eventually become the famous and celebrated coach of the Showtime Lakers. And it does not feel like a coincidence that his story is presented alongside the Tarkanian to be pursued as head coach of the bus, while West realizes that McKinney – the tactician who played a large part in the 1977 Portland Trail Blazers’ underdog NBA Finals victory was over. Dr J’s loaded Philadelphia 76ers squad – should be her husband.
In real life, Riley and Hearn started working together a few years before this season’s events, but dramatizations often expand into contract timelines like these. (Look and
: The Ricardos are
cramming events that have happened over several years and a single hectic week for Lucy and Desi.)
Riley was no big shakes as an NBA player. He spent most of his nine seasons off the bench, and not just because he supported guys like West and Elgin Baylor. But he was durable as hell, and he won a championship ring alongside West, Wilt Chamberlain and company in 1972. Overall, he surpassed the athletic career of his baseball player dad, who spent decades in the minor leagues in just four . Days on a Big League roster (during one of World War II seasons where MLB was desperate for anyone who could play and did not fight abroad). If we stop Riley here, he should enjoy the good life of the title of the episode: living close to the beach, playing volleyball and basking in the company of his therapist wife Chris. (She is played by Gillian Jacobs, who to “Is
each other in Hollywood and this show sometime? Feeling.) But that good life is an unfulfilling one for a pathological competitor, leaving him an exposed nerve permanently in trouble. He wanders into one of Chris’ sessions with a client, notes obsessive audition tapes for Chick – who is skeptical that Pat’s “faggy” voice is appropriate for television – and finally tears his garage apart out of frustration at his inability to pull out the weeds that grow around. The real Riley is currently one of the most prominent people fictionalized on this show, and the boring, directionless, slightly deferential man we see here feels very far back in the way of the guy he later became famous for. . Brody is not the most obvious choice for the part (apart from being a rare big actor in Hollywood), but he is immediately convincing here. Rory Cochrane as Jerry Tarkanian. Warrick Page / HBO Jerry Tarkanian, meanwhile, had been coaching for nearly a quarter of a century when Jerry Buss called, and the former half-dozen as head of the UNLV Runnin ‘Rebels. He was among the most successful coaches the university rankings have ever seen, and among the most controversial. As “The Good Life” says, Tark the Shark was constantly under investigation by the NCAA for various infractions. In that sense, a move to a league where everyone expects players to be paid would make a lot of sense. But Jerry Buss’ charm does not seem capable of capturing Tarkanian’s no-frills personality. Buss insists that you can apply math to any problem, and in this case it is about presenting a large enough figure – $ 750,000 per year, a fortune for a coach in 1979
– to calm Tark and his sketchy advisor, Vic Weiss (played by Broadway actor Danny Burstein). Vic takes over the narration duty for a few moments in the last burst of the show’s hyperactive style, and he seems particularly anxious to get his buddy a big paycheck – while also somehow not angering the local Wiseguys, who apparently invest in Tark at UNLV remain.
If inflation is taken into account, that would be about $ 3 million in today’s money. Because of the boom in what coaches are paid now – a boom created in part by none other than Pat Riley – that would make Tarkanian one of the lowest paid NBA coaches today.
The conclusion of the episode provides clues as to why he was so nervous, as Vic’s body was found in the trunk of a car, Jerry Buss’ business card on his face. This is not really a case of
Gain time
Sensationalize the details: as told in Jeff Pearlman
Now let’s go, the real white man was killed and left in a trunk, and he had $ 38,000 in cash from him from a meeting with bus and Jack Kent Cooke, who in reality was still involved in team operations at this stage of things . It’s also not close to the strangest thing to happen to the team this season, though it’s very much about the plan to hire the Tarkanian here. But Tark also does not seem particularly keen on going to the pros at all, despite his endless struggles with the NCAA powers. As for McKinney, he seems to be finishing the episode again on the bridesmaid’s duties. But his situation is complicated. In modern sports, the number two guy on an upstart champion like the ’77 Blazers team would have been absolutely hired to be a coach elsewhere – especially one that was credited by his boss, Jack Ramsay, for many of the X’s – and -O the brilliance that allowed Bill Walton and friends to flourish. The version we see here, however, is a clumsy man who suddenly seems super confident in his abilities and acutely aware that your ability will only get you so far when you get into a bad situation. He avoided taking other jobs, he suggests to Jerry West, because he was waiting for the right team at the time he applied his new schemes. With Magic Johnson available to carry the insult, and with another very big big man in Kareem to operate from the low post, these Lakers seem to be taking this opportunity, and even the skeptical Jerry West is converted after studying a lot has. Portland Games Movie. Jerry Buss, however, is chasing the stars instead of genius, and he understandably does not want to listen to the advice of the former coach, who just left him high and dry. Bus and Magic are not exactly in the background this week, but “The Good Life” recognizes that the story of this Lakers team is much bigger than these two men. The expanded focus on three potentially new Laker Hire turns out to be very satisfying on a narrative level, even though none of the characters seem to quite get what they want at the end of the hour. The fish saves Pittsburgh, but it does not seem as if Tark will be the Shark the Lakers savior.Sheaun McKinney, left, as Zastro, with Quincy Isaiah as Magic Johnson.Warrick Page / HBOE some other thoughts: * Instead of the movie premiere as another link between the Lakers and Tarkanian to use, the episode takes it instead in the final step on the Magic Journey through the more indulgent possibilities that open him up as a big star in Los Angeles. Outside the theater, he is approached by a sharp character named Zastro, and ignores teammate Jamal Wilkes’ warnings about the guy, slipping off the screen (can not blame him there) for attending one of Zastro’s debauched house parties in Crenshaw. Later, we cut between Magic on the Phone with Cookies, Magic with Enthusiastic Sex at Zastro’s place, and the young Magic makes play-by-play for himself …
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