SA: It’s true. Your shooting percentage kept going up, but your attempts dropped.

MJ: I didn’t make a stink about it with Nellie. But what I tried to do was become in the playoffs the scorer I was meant to be. That was always my chance to be -- not a ball hog or steal the glory -- but a little more aggressive shooting the ball. That’s why my playoff numbers are a little ahead of my regular season numbers.

SA: Those ‘80s Bucks are considered some of the best teams to never reach The Finals. It was just too much to be powerful Philadelphia and Boston teams in the same postseasons.

MJ: One of my bigger regrets was not even winning a championship but not getting to The Finals. In hindsight, though -- and this hit me about 20 years ago -- I started thinking the quality of the players we were going against. I was being guarded by Bobby Jones and having to guard Dr. J at the other end. I’m going against Kevin McHale with his size and reach, and then I’m guarding Larry Bird. I think of all the talent that these teams possessed, and they were just better than us.

I always thought, though, and still feel if we had been able to get a center like Bob Lanier two or three years earlier, that would have made a huge difference. He was still good when we got him, about 15 points, eight rebounds, but a couple years earlier might have changed things. We just couldn’t beat teams that were better than us.

Behind Marques Johnson, the Bucks regularly challenged for the top spot in the East.

SA: You got traded to the Clippers in 1984, got back to the All-Star Game in 1986 -- and then had the opposite of a farewell tour when your career ended abruptly. What happened?

MJ: I hurt my neck Nov. 20, 1986. We played the Dallas Mavericks, and my jump shot was clicking, I had like 10 points in the first quarter. I went up for one rebound and a friend of mine heard them say it on radio, “That’s the highest Marques Johnson has jumped since he’s been a Clipper.” Everything was great. But I got one rebound and went to push the ball up the floor, and my teammate Benoit Benjamin was standing right there at the free throw line. My forehead barreled into his big chest. The last thing I remember seeing was two big zeroes -- he was “00.” It was too late to change direction, and it snapped my neck back. I lost the feeling in my upper body for a few minutes. I went down in a heap, couldn’t move, scared out of my mind thinking I was paralyzed.

They carried me out on a stretcher. The feeling came back but I went to a lot of specialists who wanted to do a spinal fusion. There were questions whether I’d be able to play again if I got the surgery or play again if I didn’t get the surgery. I had a protruding disc and there was talk if I took another hit, it could cause some paralysis. So I sat out two years.

SA: That sounds miserable.

MJ: Things got worse. In the interim, I lost a son [Marques Jr., 15 months old] in a drowning accident in our pool that following year, 1987. You can imagine, my head was all messed up. It was the darkest time in my life. Alcohol, all that … Every summer I’d work out and think about trying to come back. But I’d always chicken out, “Nah, I don’t want to risk this neck thing.” Finally, in 1989, I got into my workout routine again. Started going up UCLA and playing with some of the Lakers, Vlade Divac, Magic [Johnson]. This one day, Magic came up to me and was like, “What’s goin’ on? You gonna play or what?” I wasn’t sure I still had the ability but he was like, “You got it man. Get back out there.”

So I called up Nellie, he was at Golden State, and told he I wanted to come up there. He had Chris Mullin, Mitch Richmond, Tim Hardaway, that crew, and have him take a look at me. I did well and he told me he wanted to bring me to training camp. But after I got to Golden State, they had some injuries -- Alton Lister went down, Manute Bol went down -- and we lost a lot of size. Nellie told me they had to get somebody bigger and younger who could play some long minutes. But he had arranged through [agent] Warren LeGarie for me to be able to play in Italy if I wanted to. I was disappointed but I told him, “That’s cool.” [Johnson played 10 games for the Warriors before being waived on Nov. 29, 1989.]

SA: How did you like playing overseas?

MJ: I played in a small town, Udine, Italy. Was scoring about 25 a game, but I knew -- based on playing maybe twice a week but practicing sometimes twice a day -- that I was done. I just didn’t have the motivation. Bob McAdoo was over there, Micheal Ray Richardson, and they kept telling me, “You can play till you’re 40 over here.” But after that first season, I was like, nah, I’m good. Gotta get back to the States and get on with my life.

But I always appreciated what Nellie did. At that point in life, bouncing back from what I’d been going through, I needed that carrot dangled in front of me, reaching out and helping me out from what I was going through emotionally. [Johnson has seven children now, five boys and two girls, from son Kris, 43, to 9-year-old daughter Shiloh.]

SA: You played for two coaching legends -- Wooden late in his career and Nelson near the start of his. What were they like?

MJ: Let me correct you on that. I actually played for three. Willie West is a Hall of Fame nominee. My high school coach at Crenshaw has about 16 city championships, about 10 state championships. I was fortunate -- his second year was my first year. We went undefeated for two years.

By the time I got to UCLA, Coach Wooden had won nine national champipmships. So you knew what you were getting into with that. That was a highlight, being around him every day and learning some of the life lessons that didn’t resonate with me while I was there but kind of kicked in when I became an adult. Ten years, 12 years later, when going through adversity.

SA: And Nellie?

MJ: One thing I appreciated about him -- and it’s the same thing I see with Budenholzer and his staff -- Nellie had this way of approaching me as if I was an empty vessel, and he was going to pour in this NBA basketball knowledge that he had gained in the Boston Celtics organization. He went in with the attitude that you didn’t know the footwork needed coming off screens or anything. And Nellie would tell you, “I was one of the slowest guys in the league, but I was one of the best guys in transition because I knew when to run and how to get a head start on the break.” He was the perfect coach for me.

Nellie would ask me in particular, if I’d go out there and try to split two guys and turn the ball over, during the timeout he’d say, “What did you see out there?” Well, I thought I could beat this one guy to the right, split the two and, if I could draw the third defender, I could flip it to Brian Winters for an open 20-foot jumper on the left wing. And Nellie’d be like, “OK, man. That’s nothing I could ever speak about doing. But you’ve got that kind of talent, I can buy that. OK, I like that.” As long as you had a plan that fit into what he was trying to do, he was OK with whatever mistake you would make.

SA: We’ve talked before about him using you as a point forward. He and Del Harris, among others, had used frontcourt players to initiate offense. But you claim to have coined the term.

MJ: It was my terminology. It’s funny, I came across on the Internet, Game 6 against the New Jersey Nets in 1984, that was the series where it was created. You could see plays in that game where I’m looking over to the bench, getting the calls from Nellie, bringing the ball up the floor, setting the offense, drawing Bob Lanier’s man and throwing dimes. There’s even one play where [Paul] Pressey and me are coming up the court, and he won’t give me the ball … Remember, Paul out of Tulsa was a point guard and he played point guard for us the year or so before I left. He was great with the ball in his hands. I was always a small forward who would catch it on the wing and scored. He was used to initiating.

SA: These days we hear about positionless basketball. How do you think your game would have translated -- I notice your career stats are 14-for-92 from 3-point range.

MJ: I was taking end of quarter, end of half, end of shot clock too. If I took 15 3-point attempts in a year, probably 10 or 11 were desperation-type shots.

SA: So flings. The kind of shots guys often don’t quite release in time today, so their shooting percentages don’t suffer.

MJ: The other part is, I worked on what I needed to work on to become a great player back in those days. That was the mid-range to 20-foot jump shot. I got that down pat. If a coach would have said or I would have felt, “You need to work on this 3-point shot,” I believe in all honesty I could have shot 36, 37 percent. But there was no reason to focus on shooting long-ass 25-foot jumpers when I could get to 16 feet and knock down 75 percent of those.

SA: The game has changed in its physical demands, too. Taking games off for “load management.” Obviously flying charter vs. commercial. What do you make of those changes?

MJ: It amazes me how much emphasis they place on proper rest. And they have these trackers telling the trainers how many miles they’re running. People don’t realize, we had training camp for 30 days, going six, sometimes seven days a week. And we had two-a-days all camp. They weren’t worried about making allowances for the wear and tear. We’d go two practices hard, every day, for the whole time.

SA: Now the league tries to minimize back-to-back games. But in your rookie season, the Bucks played five sets of back-to-back-to-back games. You had a stretch from Dec. 2 to Dec. 10, 1977, when Milwaukee played seven games in nine nights, beginning and ending with games on three consecutive nights. It started with a game at New York sandwiched between two home games. Then you flew to the West Coast to face Lakers, and wrapped up that trip at Golden State, at Seattle and at Denver.

MJ: We got back on Sunday, we had to face the Sixers on Tuesday and Nellie had us practicing on Monday. I’d been playing hard minutes, probably averaging 43 those last three games. I remember, I called up Nellie’s secretary, Jean Schuler, and told her, “I can’t get out of bed, I’m so sore right now.” And she said, “That’s OK, Marques. Nellie said you’d probably call, and to take the day off.” The next night against Dr. J, I went out and had 29. He had 29 too. [laughs]

SA: So what’s your take on your Hall of Fame candidacy, knowing you’re up again for the Class of 2019?

MJ: My name just kind of stays in nomination. Y’know, I’ve come across some Web sites about guys who are Hall of Fame-worthy based on “win shares” and other analytics, and they say I am deserving of that. And I probably could have played another four or five years if not for the neck injury, so the numbers would have looked a lot better. But five All-Star Games, first-team all-NBA, second-team NBA a couple of times. I played for some great teams in Milwaukee. There’s an honor in being nominated with Willie West, my high school coach, and Sidney Moncrief. I’d like to see Sidney and myself both get in, but it’s out of my hands. Just got to see what happens.

I’m definitely one of those guys who’s not a shoe-in. But looking at some things the other day, I thought, I might get to the point where I become an “early African-American pioneer.” [laughs]

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Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on Twitter.

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