Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty

For still being dead?

 

I had a high school economics teacher who told our class on several occasions, "Social Security will be gone by the time you people get there. Gone, defunct, bankrupt. None of you will ever get a dime."
He was wrong, but not by much.

 

Too much time on Sally Field. Jamaal Wilkes may or may not be okay with the size of his penis. More Magic orgies.

 

Great monologue performance by Wood Harris.

 

Field, Reilly and Harris knocked it out of the park acting-wise.

After a week of depicting Jerry West as wise and intelligent, now he's made out a sniveling waffler; he chickenshits out of the decision on McKinney only to have Buss make it himself after meeting a discombobulated McKinney on his front porch; a load of concocted drama, every account I have ever seen/heard says that McKinney was quite obviously not ready to return to the bench for the 1980 playoffs, by pretty much any reasonable standards. He was out of bed, but still quite obviously struggling with aftereffects of the accident.

And still Westhead is depicted as a whimpering sissy, constantly on the verge of tears.

 

If that was made a smaller part of his personality, rather than the dominant trait, it would be a better performance. Instead, his only purpose is to be inferior in every way to Riley.

 

Apparently, the vote to kick off Haywood was dramatized, too. It was Westhead's move to suspend him, and it was during the finals.

Though Haywood really did look into hiring a hitman to go after Westhead before ultimately being convinced against it by his dying mom.

 

Westhead was fired because he wanted to discipline Magic Johnson. Westhead has plenty of faults, but being a whimpering sissy is not among them.

And the whole series is essentially based on the premise that it was some kind of revolutionary strategic breakthrough to tell a team with Magic Johnson to run the fast break.

 

Kareem wrote Nixon never played Magic 1 on 1 at a team party before his rookie season

 

OK. If that's the worst offense, that's not bad.

 

Eight Men Out is terrific
It was very faithful to Asinof’s book
I’m sure the final scene was fabricated but that’s OK
Strathairn as Eddie Cicotte was really good

 

Straithairn makes anything better.