As the story goes, Spencer Haywood discovered cocaine while playing for the New York Knicks in the late 70s. He became addicted to it by the time he arrived in L.A. to play for the Los Angeles Lakers during the 1979-80 season.
But it wasn’t a surprise then because he wasn’t the only player doing cocaine in the league. During that period, drugs were a big issue in the NBA, and Haywood was just one of the many players addicted to drugs. Unfortunately for Spencer, things came to a head for him in L.A., and it was the beginning of the end of his NBA career.
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As he told during his recent appearance on the “All the Smoke” podcast, his performance in Los Angeles suffered badly as he struggled with cocaine addiction. Still, he was part of a Lakers team that advanced to the 1980 NBA Finals.
But Haywood never got to play in that championship series because, as the Lakers were preparing to play the Sixers, he fell asleep in one of their practices and head coach Paul Westhead dismissed him from the team because he had the potential to be a distraction in the series.
“One day I was on my way to practice,” he recalled. “I had a real crazy night. We were in the playoffs for the Finals. I had, I got to have one more shot. I got to have one more hit, so I stayed up, just kept going. I was piping. So I’m driving along, I get up to the thing and all of a sudden I fall asleep, and I’m hearing cars banging, people banging my door. I’m like, “What the hell are y’all doing hitting my Rolls Royce like this?”Â
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He fell asleep during practice and got sent home
With Game 1 of the 1980 NBA Finals scheduled for May 4, 1980, a Sunday, Westhead scheduled serious practice sessions on Thursday and Friday, per Jeff Pearlman’s book “Showtime”, via Silver Screen and Roll. Haywood, who had promised to stay off drugs in the championship series, was a full participant in the Thursday session.
But when he got home that day, he went back to his old habits and piped cocaine until 3 a.m. When he realized what he had just done, Haywood took two Quaalude pills to calm himself down. It didn’t work. But he still came to work despite feeling very sleepy. That’s when the incident happened, and Westhead ended up sending him home, thus ending his tenure in Los Angeles.
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“From that, Iman was like, ‘Well, I know what you can do, because they told me, you need to get out of wet places and wet faces.’I said, “I’ll go back to New York with the Knicks, I’ll go back to Utah. I can be clean in Utah. And everybody put the word out, and David Stern has said, ‘Man, I need you to take the fall for the league,’ so I went to Italy.”Â
He was forced to retire in 1983 after his wife was involved in an automobile accident
And so, at only 31 years old, Haywood took his talents to Europe and played for Carrera Reyer Venezia in the Italian League for one year. He played well enough to earn a return to the NBA via the Washington Bullets. In his words, he was “killing it again”, although stats say he averaged 11.6 points and 5.3 rebounds per game in 114 total games played across two seasons.
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However, his wife, the supermodel Iman, was involved in a car accident in 1983 that left her with serious injuries. Haywood said that he retired to go back to New York and take care of her and her family, who were staying with them. Although Iman eventually recovered, Spencer never got another chance in the NBA. He was only 33 years old when he played his last NBA game.
Spencer will always be remembered for changing the NBA’s eligibility rules, allowing underclassmen and high school players to enter the league. But he could have been more than that, too. He was on a trajectory to become one of the all-time greats when cocaine destroyed his NBA career.
This story was originally reported by Basketball Network on Oct 4, 2025, where it first appeared in the Off The Court section. Add Basketball Network as a Preferred Source by clicking here.