Jack McKinney

Fact-checking the latest episode of HBO's "Winning Time," from that shocking ending with Jack McKinney, to Jerry Buss and the Forum Club, and those Paula ...

Everyone and their mama was trying to get in, trying to get with the Laker Girls. They could have opened that place alone, just as a club.” “I’m gonna get you.” A few weeks later, while Cooper was sleeping on a Northwest Airlines flight from Detroit, Abdul-Jabbar tiptoed up to his seat and placed a dollop of Nair atop his miniature Afro. “All of a sudden Coop wakes up, screaming from the burn,” said Gary Vitti, the Lakers’ trainer. “His head is burning, and he has a nickel-size hole in his hair, where he was bald. He was unafraid of confronting the big man.” A lot of the players will tell you they couldn’t even concentrate, they wanted the game to end ASAP so they could go upstairs. “We’d rush to the locker room, change and rush into the Forum Club,” said Clay Johnson, a backup guard. “The Forum Club? Unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable,” said Wes Matthews, who visited as a journeyman guard, then joined the Lakers in the late 1980s. It is still unknown if this was due to a brake failure itself as portrayed in the show, but the end result was the same: McKinney flew over the handlebars and face-first into the pavement. What wasn’t shown in the episode is how much of a destination the Forum Club became AFTER games, let alone before them. When the game began, Buss sat far off the court, in a section near the top of the building. And his wife was using the car for a human and personal relationships class with Cassie Westhead, wife of assistant coach Paul, so Jack and Paul himself opted to play tennis together. The situation was dire enough that only close family was allowed to see him in the hospital, with even Dr. Jerry Buss and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar being turned away.