Showtime is Back! : Led by Shaquille O'Neal, the Orlando Magic is the Future of the NBA--a Glittering Entertainment Enterprise That Just Happens to Know How to Play Basketball

By Charles P. Pierce

April 23, 1995 12 AM PT

<i> Charles P. Pierce is a writer-at-large for GQ. His last article for this magazine was about the children's TV wars. </i>

The young ladies could be 15. On the other hand, they could be 35. They have been riding an elevator in a Houston hotel for nearly a hour. They hit all the buttons, and the elevator stops at all the floors. This does not please the businessmen who have just staggered off the 9:58 p.m. Continental from God-knows-where and who are interested only in a bed, some mini-bar Scotch and Whoever From Sweden is playing on the in-room movie. They do not appreciate that the elevator takes 20 minutes and as many stops to get them to their American Businessman’s paradise evening. They also do not appreciate that the young ladies peer out onto every floor and giggle.

The young ladies are looking for the Orlando Magic, a very fine professional basketball team that arrived some hours earlier, throwing the Houston hotel into chaos. Long after the various Magics have been locked away on the hotel’s Concierge Level, the hotel’s driveway is awash with people thrusting pens at any motorist who navigates through them and then dismissing the drivers insultingly.

“Not him. He’s nobody.”

Well, really!

The elevator does not stop automatically at the Concierge Level, which is why the young ladies can’t find the Orlando Magic. It is also why the Orlando Magic players are staying on the Concierge Level. (In other cities, the team refuses to stay in atrium-style hotels because the glass elevators make the players too easy to track.) One of the young ladies accosts a gentleman who has just arrived on the 9:58 Continental.

“Do you know the Orlando Magic are here?”

Yes.

“Do you know Shaquille O’Neal is staying in this hotel?”

Yes, again.

“Are you staying on the Concierge Level?”

Well, no.

Faces fall. The young ladies stay on the elevator. Outside, people are still huddled in the yellow light of the doorway to the parking garage. They stay there for a long time, looking up at the hotel, blue wonder glowing brightly from them in the pelting winter rain.

Over the past three years, in which the Orlando Magic has gone from being a struggling expansion team to having the league’s best record, the team also has become a stunning entertainment enterprise. Along Route 4, the highway that runs through Disney World into Orlando, where billboards for large-scale entertainment attractions hang the way apples hang in Oregon, Shaquille O’Neal is bigger than Shamu, Anfernee Hardaway is more thrilling than the rides at Universal Studios, and the whole Magic team is a match for Mickey. More than most NBA teams, the Magic is of its place and time.

“We’ve tried to have a show,” says general manager Pat Williams. When he was general manager for the Philadelphia 76ers, in the days that some NBA teams were still playing in dingy armories, Williams once put on a bear-wrestling exhibition at halftime. “We’re sitting here in the entertainment capital of the world. We have to entertain you. If we don’t operate at that high level, and I mean Disney’s standards, we are in trouble.”

Orlando was granted its franchise in 1987. The Magic began to play in 1989 and stumbled, the way all expansion teams do. All expansion teams, however, do not face the same competition for the discretionary dollar that confronted the Magic. “When we started, we had several immediate objectives,” says Cari Coats, the Magic’s vice president of marketing. “One, which we couldn’t realistically attain, was to be a competitive basketball team.” So, the team put together the cheerleaders (the Magic Dancers), and the mascot (Stuff) and trumped that by adding laser beams and smoke machines. If the organization couldn’t sing, it would dance faster.

This all changed in 1992, when Orlando won the NBA Draft lottery and selected center Shaquille O’Neal, who became not only one of the league’s preeminent players but also what his agent, Leonard Armato, calls “a one-man entertainment conglomerate.” It was Shaq’s arrival that caused the lobbies to be clogged.

“We were in Minneapolis,” says veteran guard Nick Anderson, “and I took Shaq and Penny (Hardaway) to Mall of America, and people stopped shopping and just followed us around.”

It doesn’t end after the game, either. “One night in Philadelphia, the cars followed the bus to the airport,” recalls San Antonio Spurs head coach Bob Hill, an Orlando assistant coach last year. “And we got to the runway, and they didn’t stop there. They followed us right out onto the Tarmac. I mean, hey, that’s a federal offense, but they did it.”

Forward Horace Grant joined the Magic this season as a free agent. As part of the Chicago Bulls’ three championship teams, Grant witnessed the lunacy that attended Michael Jordan’s passages through the league. “It’s not bigger than traveling with Michael yet,” Grant says. “With time, it’ll definitely get bigger. It’s going to get a lot bigger.”

The mere presence of O’Neal improved the Magic’s record by 20 games. (Only David Robinson’s arrival in San Antonio was responsible for a greater one-season turnaround.) Improbably, at the end of the 1992-93 season, the Magic once again drew the first pick in the draft, having obtained a first-round selection from the woebegone Los Angeles Clippers. The Magic picked University of Michigan forward Chris Webber and immediately traded him to the Golden State Warriors for the rights to Hardaway, a flossy, gifted 6-foot-7 guard from Memphis State. The NBA wise guys howled, but the move changed the Magic from a good NBA team into a lethal one.

“That day, everyone in the league was laughing at us,” says Orlando Coach Brian Hill. “Now, you poll them and every one will say they’d have done the same thing.” Going into mid-April, the Magic has a glittering 54-21 record and has played the season’s biggest matchups at a level that belies a team that has never won a playoff game.

For example, on March 24 they went into Chicago to face the Bulls on the occasion of Michael Jordan’s first home game since his return. Chicago was losing its mind, and the event owed more to the Ringling Brothers than it did to James Naismith. The Magic, which had lost eight of its previous 10 road games, coolly ignored the hullabaloo and beat the Bulls easily, 106-99. Suddenly, the Magic is a basketball team driving for the NBA championship, not just show biz.

“These days, we’re trying to enhance the game’s value as entertainment itself,” says Cari Coats. The cheerleaders and Stuff are still part of the show, and the overlay of celebrity onto vivid athletic performance has turned the Magic into a talisman of the modern NBA.

Despite having posted record revenues of $2.8 billion last year, and despite its burgeoning worldwide popularity, the NBA has spent this season fending off criticism that suddenly, somehow, it is selling a cheaper product. In the 1980s, the league’s success was personality-driven, largely because it had two compelling characters to sell in Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, who ultimately were joined by Charles Barkley and, most spectacularly, Jordan. Today, the league is beset by the perception that its present stars have failed to carry on that legacy. The younger players are said to be spoiled, undignified and uncoachable. In January, Sports Illustrated, playing its newly acquired role as the sports world’s maiden aunt, put recalcitrant New Jersey Net Derrick Coleman on its cover with the simple headline, “WAAAAAAAH!”

Of course, this perception ignores history. For one thing, that earlier, more noble generation had its own problems. Bird brawled in a saloon, and Johnson got his coach fired (and that was before he contracted the HIV virus through what, he now acknowledges, was his robust sexual congress across the land). Barkley spit on little girls and Jordan gambled on almost anything that moved. By comparison, Coleman, who simply is unlikable, looks rather tame.

The 1992 Olympic “Dream Team”--composed largely of those 1980s stars--has come to symbolize the age that is now looked back upon, fondly if inaccurately, as a golden era of genteel, polite superstars. The revisionist case has it that the stars of that team, and of that era, “earned” their celebrity, as opposed to younger, undeserving stars who have had it handed to them. Celebrity, though, is not a reward like a salary; celebrity accrues according to its own dynamic, virtue or vice be damned. To say that Magic Johnson “earned” his celebrity while Derrick Coleman has not is to deal in windy irrelevancy.

The crisis allegedly afflicting the NBA has more to do with the league’s audience than its performers. In almost all of its marketing and promotion, the NBA has adopted a pale version of the prevailing urban black style. However, just as the mildest rapper can set off alarms in suburbia, the league now makes both both its predominantly white audience and the predominantly white media nervous. In short, the NBA once again is being criticized for being “too black.” In the 1970s, the criticism was couched in terms of drug use around the league. Today, the argument has become more subtle and general, aimed at the league’s rather tepid embrace of hip-hop culture.

“I thought the issue in the 1970s was the result of a population that was brought up on a white sport having difficulty dealing with the transition (to a largely African American sport),” says NBA commissioner David J. Stern. “Now we’re dealing with the kids of that transition who grew up on MTV, ‘In Living Color,’ so I don’t believe it’s an issue anymore.”

If Stern and the NBA are culpable, it is in adopting the style and vocabulary of hip-hop without acknowledging the violence that informs part of that aesthetic. However, the Magic has been touched by social realities of which hip-hop is the most vivid artistic expression: One player, while in college, was held at gunpoint as he lay on the pavement; another, in high school, watched a friend bleeding to death after he’d been shot for bumping into another kid on the sidewalk. But there’s hardly time to account for any of this in a sports industry that gets unnerved at the presence of Hammer.

In fact, the Magic represents only a cautious assimilation of hip-hop culture into the distinctly corporate world of mass entertainment. Even O’Neal’s rap recordings are located squarely in the softer end of the genre; there is nothing Public Enemy about him--much less Tupac Shakur or Slick Rick. The Magic’s popularity comes straight out of the pop-culture mainstream.

Pat Williams, who was born to be a Route 4 showman, understands this much better than most of the critics. “We’re a rock show, sure,” he says. “There’s great clamor and great commotion, but this one would be a highly organized rock show, very Michael Bolton-ish. That group I had in Philly in the 1970s, with (Julius) Erving and George McGinnis, plus Darryl Dawkins and World B. Free, now that might have been the Sex Pistols. Compared to that, these guys are predictable.”

He has always waited patiently for the game to come to him. Anfernee Hardaway--”Penny,” because his grandmother thought he smiled as brightly as one--is on the Orlando Arena floor, sitting back on defense against the Chicago Bulls. The game is winding down, the arena is steaming and a national television audience has been riveted by the sight of the Magic’s playing the game without O’Neal, who has been suspended by the NBA for throwing an ungainly haymaker at Boston Celtic rookie Eric Montross two nights earlier. With seven seconds left, Chicago forward Toni Kukoc spins toward the free-throw line. Orlando’s Nick Anderson, a stone-tough small guard, beats Kukoc to the spot. At that moment, a flash in the game’s peripheral vision, Hardaway breaks for the Orlando basket. Anderson flicks away the ball and finds Hardaway. You can see Penny rise toward the rim as the fans in the seats behind it rise with him. With a dunk, his 38th and 39th points, he wins the game, 105-103.

“I knew I had enough time,” he says later. “I knew I was under control.”

He has always been that way, ever since he attended Treadwell High School in Memphis, where people hung The Next Magic Johnson around his neck. He stayed home at Memphis State, lost a year of eligibility under the NCAA’s Proposition 48 guidelines and became an all-American as soon as he was eligible. However, one April night in 1991, his life changed on him. “It was close,” he says now. “I was that close to being a statistic.”

He was headed home to his grandmother’s house on Forest Avenue in Memphis. He turned a corner and walked into a robbery. The gunman fired at Hardaway, and the bullet hit him in the foot, breaking three of his metatarsal bones. Then the attacker forced Hardaway to lie on the pavement, holding the pistol to his neck while rifling his pockets. “Of course, I think about it,” he says. “Look at where I am. I could’ve lost it all.”

He left Memphis State after two seasons and made himself available for the 1993 draft. At the time, the consensus was that Orlando desperately needed a big forward like Chris Webber of Michigan to take some of the load off O’Neal inside. That wisdom was conventional even within the Orlando front office. The Magic flew in all the numerous players before the draft. Hardaway got the impression that his workout was perfunctory, that the Magic was going to take Webber. In his last meeting, he told John Gabriel, Orlando’s vice president of player personnel: “If you don’t take me, y’all are making the biggest mistake you’ve ever made.”

It gave Gabriel pause, and the team decided to work Hardaway out once more, this time in secret. The Magic smuggled him into town and put him on a pickup team at a tiny north Orlando gym that was owned by a Baptist church. “We got some of our players, and we got some kids from Rollins College,” recalls Gabriel. “We put Penny with the college kids. First game, he wins it by drilling one off the board. The second game, he’s falling down, and he throws a wraparound pass from midcourt and hits one of the Rollins kids in the chest. He almost took his head off. Last game, down two, he drills a three. Pat (Williams) comes flying after me and says, ‘Gabe, we got to get back to work.’ ” Everyone left happily except Hardaway, who nearly didn’t leave at all. The Magic brass unintentionally left him behind, and he had to find his own way back to the airport.

The deal was made on draft day. Orlando took Webber, then traded him to the Golden State Warriors for Hardaway and three No. 1 draft picks. As a result of that deal, the Magic probably will be in the lottery again this year. Although Hardaway signed a $70-million deal before this season, it is said he still harbors a sliver of doubt as to whether the team ever actually wanted him. “I don’t dwell on it,” he says. “I know what I can do. I know what this team can do. It can set the standards for the NBA of the 1990s.”

But there seems little doubt that his teammates appreciate him. “Playing with him is a jump-shooter’s dream,” says Dennis Scott, a portly guard with a deadly shooting touch. “All I have to do is run the floor, spot up and wave my hand. Hey, I can do that.”

But the most formidable connection is between Hardaway and O’Neal. They already have been compared to the pairing of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, most regularly by O’Neal himself. “They say you build a baseball team up the middle,” says Coach Brian Hill. “Well, I believe you build a basketball team with a center and a point guard.”

Hardaway is preternaturally gifted at delivering the ball to an individual’s best shooting spots, and since O’Neal is developing several more of those, Hardaway is uniquely suited to the development of the big center’s game. “I understand Penny,” says O’Neal, “and he understands me.” The two have worked so well together that before Michael Jordan’s return, there was a substantial body of opinion that Hardaway might be the best all-around player in the league. “If he’s not, he’s awfully close,” says San Antonio’s Robinson. “I mean, the man can make some plays that only a few people can see, let alone make.”

“Young players have to learn how important it is to come to play every night in this league,” says Spurs Coach Bob Hill, who worked with Hardaway last season in Orlando. “It takes some of them three or four years. I mean every night, you have to go out there and deal with the shadow of expectations. Penny’s that far away from being the best.”

Hardaway shrugs all this off, letting life come to him at its own pace, the way the game always has. He remains private, as untroubled by praise as he has been by everything else. And besides, there already is one big noise on this team--a resounding brass band of a fellow with a hoop in one ear and his own music ringing in his ears. “That’s not Penny’s style,” says Cari Coats. “He’s the strong, silent type. Shaq, though, he has such a strong sense of entertainment. It’s very natural and very instinctual. Let’s face it. The man is a walking and talking marketing machine.”

In the Orlando Magic offices, there is a mural of children--happy, smiling children--playing ball in what is clearly an urban playground. Shaquille O’Neal believes the mural to be inaccurate. “Look, bruh,” he says. “See that grass? That’s wrong. No grass in the ‘hood, man.” And then he walks away, rumbling with laughter.

Actually, O’Neal has little more in common with the mythical ‘hood than do the millions of white suburban kids who buy his records. He lived in the Newark projects only briefly, then spent his youth in another distinctive form of federal housing--the United States Army base. Nevertheless, O’Neal knows what sells. His innate gift for cultural touchstones is both sharp and deft. He performs his rap without falling into the kind of phony menace that is little more than Tomming with your hat turned backward. There is a wink and a grin in everything he does. He is a walking amanuensis of American popular culture, and he is only 23 years old.

“It’s just been an opportunity that came my way,” he says. “That first time I went on Arsenio Hall, and I didn’t want to be just another athlete sitting there in a nice suit, talk to Arsenio and then leave. I wanted to do something different, so I rapped with my favorite group. It all started with that one appearance, and that was for fun.”

Still, over his first two seasons, a backlash occurred. The 1993 Rookie of the Year was accused of shirking his development as a player in favor of his proven gifts as a performer. He was compared unfavorably to his contemporary, Charlotte Hornets center Alonzo Mourning. In their first season, O’Neal accounted for more points, rebounds, assists and blocked shots than Mourning, and various NBA observers maintained that Mourning nonetheless was a better scorer, rebounder, passer and defender. At this date, with O’Neal posting the league in scoring with a 29-plus average and with Orlando alternating with San Antonio for the league’s best record,one wonders how much of the backlash was discomfort with O’Neal’s chosen musical milieu and the pose that went with it.

What is easily overlooked is how swiftly O’Neal has improved since his arrival at Louisiana State University in 1989, the first time he burst onto the national stage. As a freshman, he could do little more than dunk, and he couldn’t hit the side of the arena with any kind of pass. By the following season, he was dropping blind passes to teammates cutting to the basket.

He also was criticized for being one-dimensional when he came to the NBA. But it was significant that his first professional play had him taking the ball at midcourt, dribbling like a guard and passing to a teammate for a layup. Since then, he has worked on a variety of offensive moves, all of them startling for a man 7-foot-1 and 303 pounds. But the most impressive aspect about O’Neal is that he doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the limits of his abilities. There are still things he can learn, and he learns very quickly.

During one memorable week, as February turned into March, he took on Patrick Ewing and the Knicks, Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets, and Robinson and the Spurs. He dueled all of them to a standstill--”Legends Lane,” he called it--and the Magic won two of the three games, losing only to San Antonio when O’Neal forgot to box out Dennis Rodman, who won the game with a tip-in.

It was that game, however, that demonstrated how far behind O’Neal had left all the old criticisms. With the Magic trailing by 17 points in the fourth quarter, O’Neal brought them back single-handed. He spun into the lane for jump hooks, and he spun away to the baseline for fall-away jump shots. He tied the game at 109 on a fadeaway jump shot from the left of the basket, feathering the shot over Robinson’s fingertips.

“The criticism of Shaq has been very unfair,” says Orlando’s Coach Hill. “I’ve been with him every day of his professional career, and he does not miss practice for outside things. We are talking about a very bright young man.”

“Shaq’s good people,” says San Antonio’s Bob Hill. “He’s going to redefine that position before he’s through.”

No one doubts is that O’Neal is the NBA’s greatest gate attraction. “Traveling with Shaq,” says the Magic’s backup center, Wayne (Tree) Rollins, “you see people gazing at him. It’s like traveling with Jesus Christ.” O’Neal has created a persona that is both durable and oddly kind, just enough of both to get him through the circus that his life has become. He gets very young when he smiles, and he smiles a great deal. “I’m big and I’m silly,” he says. “I’m real big and strong, but I have a little-kid voice. People can relate to silliness.” He has a great sense of his own cartoon, but an ever greater one of who he really is. One night in Cleveland, when the Magic got to the hotel late, a woman carrying a baby approached him. She wanted him to autograph the baby’s blanket. O’Neal told her to take the baby home. What was she thinking of? The baby might get sick.

At 27, he is the old bones of the team. Nick Anderson was the first player the Orlando Magic drafted, then a 6-foot-6 guard and forward from Illinois who played his game mainly on the inside. Since then, he has crafted himself into a versatile, irreplaceable cog in the impressive Orlando machine. “I am going to be an all-star, and I am going to earn it,” he says. And Anderson is to be believed, because he is the reality beneath all the flash and style that the Magic is vigorously marketing and selling.

“I could’ve gotten away (into gangs),” he says. “I know I could have. But, there was my Moms. I couldn’t hurt my Moms. I meant so much to her.”

He grew up in Chicago, on both the south and west sides of the city, a dangerous parlay. One day, he got on a city bus, and somebody opened fire randomly with a pistol; Anderson ducked under the seats. One of his best friends, a kid named Del Carter, was murdered for a pair of silver chains. And Anderson’s favorite cousin died from an asthmatic attack; ambulance service was not prompt on the west side of Chicago. “The last thing he said,” Anderson recalls, “was, ‘Dad, I want to see Nick.’ Then, he died. I think about him every time I see his dad.”

Then came Nov. 20, 1984, the worst day of Anderson’s life. He was walking near Neal F. Simeon Vocational High School with teammate Ben Wilson, who everybody said was the best high school player in the country. Anderson went into a store to buy some candy. When he came out, Wilson was down, bleeding to death from a gunshot wound to his heart. He had knocked into another kid, who shot him down. Anderson was so traumatized that he had to be hospitalized for 15 days. “Every day, I think of him,” says Anderson, who wears Wilson’s No. 25 as a tribute. “I’ll see a player, like that Joe Smith at Maryland, 6-foot-10 and slender, and I’ll say, ‘Damn, that’s Ben.’ ”

Anderson can look at the team that he is a part of, and he can understand it more than most. “I can appreciate the pandemonium,” he says. “I might not have a look on my face like I do, but I can. Deep down, I appreciate it. I was here for teams that won 18 games a year.”

Anderson has matured into a reliable three-point shooter as well as a sturdy defensive player. More especially, for a team that doesn’t lack for flair on the court and celebrity off it, he is a steadying influence. “We would never trade Nick Anderson,” says John Gabriel. “He’s too much a part of what we’ve built here.”

They are so very young; that’s the wonder of it as they enter the playoffs, shrouded with heavier expectations than ever before. None of the starters is over 30, and only Horace Grant is older than 27. “I keep reiterating about time,” Grant says. “Give our guys time to grow up and we’ll handle it. Being 29, being the old man on the team, it keeps me young in mind and in spirit, I’m telling you. I come to work, got my top down and my shades on, listening to music. Life is good.”

They are growing into the knowledge of what is genuine and what is not, of what is for show and what is for real, of the pose that is Shaquille O’Neal’s mythical ‘hood and the cold facts of Nick Anderson’s life. That is the terrain they navigate now, more certain of it than they have ever been. They move through the league, and the league moves toward another century. The bus shakes and rocks, and the cars follow it until they can’t follow it anymore, and even beyond that, until the team takes to the air and is gone. And in another place, another Milwaukee or Atlanta, other cars wait and the lobby begins to fill. The future is coming to town. Millennium approaches, and it can play.