Dream Team (12 page)

Seeing all those names on the board—players such as James Worthy, Kevin McHale, and Dominique Wilkins, all of whom were unlikely to be chosen—had a profound effect on the college guys on the committee. In casual conversations, the idea of a team with six
NBA players and six college players had gradually given way to an eight-and-four breakdown. The college guys prepared to dig in at eight and four.

Then the hard reality set in. “I’ll never forget the day we put the names from the big list on the board,” says C. M. Newton, one of the college guys on the committee. “We were talking about eight pros and four college kids at that point, and then you looked at the NBA names … and there was literally no one to leave off. We all knew at that point, and it was pretty early, that it was just about all over for the college kids.”

The more interesting list that Daly provided, though, was his wish list, which included the names of the players he felt were most essential for success. I never saw that list, and as far as I know Chuck never showed it publicly before he died from cancer in May 2009. Perhaps he never even wrote down the names. Or perhaps somewhere in Chuck’s files there is a scrap of paper still to be unearthed. The memories of the committee members do not completely coalesce on the names, but, after some investigation, I stand behind the names I wrote in
Sports Illustrated
at the time: Jordan, Magic, Pippen, Robinson, Mullin, Malone, and Ewing.

The order is deliberate. Michael and Magic are the obvious one-two. Daly wanted Pippen for his long-armed, cover-the-court defensive abilities and his offensive versatility. True, he had seen his own team turn Pippen into a shell of a player many times, but the Bulls sideman had upped his game considerably during the Bulls’ ’91 championship run. Players are often damned with the faint praise of being “complementary,” but Pippen was perhaps unique in this respect: he was a superstar complementary player.

Daly loved Robinson’s shot blocking and Mullin’s shot making. Reggie Miller’s name came up early, but Daly saw Mullin as more of a classic zone breaker. The coach wasn’t completely enamored of Malone but considered the Mailman a dependable low-block scorer and a shot-clock bailout. Ditto for Ewing, though Daly had far more affection for Robinson’s game than he did for Ewing’s.

The name of Isiah Thomas was not on Daly’s list. Exactly why not is a subject for later (
Chapter 14
), but Daly constantly sold the idea that he was only the coach. “The committee picks the players,” he said, comparing it to the situation in the NBA—general managers get the players, and coaches coach them. That was technically true but pragmatically hogwash. Had Daly walked into the room and said, “I want Isiah Thomas on this team,” the committee would’ve had a much tougher time with the selection process. I didn’t express that opinion at the time, and neither, as far as I know, did anyone else. In part I excuse myself for not writing about it because there was no Internet and no SI.com and therefore no great volume of stories about the selection of the Olympic team. But another part of the reason I didn’t write it was my respect for the tough position that Daly was in.

“Chuck’s the one who really skated on the Isiah issue,” says Jan Hubbard, who did the most aggressive reporting about the Olympic selection process for
Newsday
.

Isiah had another supposed ally on the committee in Detroit general manager Jack McCloskey, a respected voice in the NBA. If Isiah felt uncomfortable lobbying Daly for a spot on the team—and he did—he certainly could tell McCloskey that he wanted in on the Barcelona festivities. “Isiah felt that he couldn’t put pressure on Chuck,” says Dave Gavitt, “but he put big-time pressure on Jack.”

Thomas once had political capital around the league, back when he was a kid whose killer crossover was matched only by his killer smile. But that capital was diminishing—the Jordan freeze-out, the Bird insult, the Pistons’ physical play. As Gavitt puts it, “It quickly became obvious that Isiah was not the most popular dude.”

“At that particular time, we were the past,” says Laimbeer, Isiah’s best friend on the team and the Bad Boy least likely to mince words. “It would’ve been interesting to see what would’ve happened if the Olympics had come along two years earlier, when we were in the middle of our run. The Olympic team was a political battle, and if there was one team and one player that wasn’t going to win a political battle, it was the Detroit Pistons and Isiah Thomas.”

Two notable names that were not on Daly’s wish list were those of Larry Bird and Charles Barkley. Bird had already made noises about being too old and too beset by back problems. And Charles … well, Charles was another matter, even to someone like Daly, who had coached more than his share of space cadets.

On the evening of March 26, 1991, as USA Basketball’s Olympic selection committee was getting serious about whom they were going to invite to play on the team, Charles Barkley of the Philadelphia 76ers was getting irritated during a game against the New Jersey Nets. Even Barkley’s detractors had to give him points for getting amped up in New Jersey, in an arena devoid of animation and energy. Barkley would later say that an older male fan was yelling things like “Fat ass!” and “Asshole!” at him; in some stories the insults were said to be racial. The latter was never proven, but suffice to say that back then racial epithets were hurled during games. They weren’t directed at me, obviously, but I heard them.

At any rate, Barkley turned to spit at the fan, but, as he said later in a memorable disquisition on the incident, “I didn’t get enough foam,” and his spittle landed on an eight-year-old girl named Lauren Rose, who was at the game with her parents. As
soon as he realized what he had done, Barkley was properly mortified, issuing heartfelt apology after heartfelt apology, and, as was and is his style, eventually befriending the girl and her family.

But spitting on a fan? A young girl? That was considered by many to be the public relations strike that would keep Barkley off the Olympic team, of which he desperately wanted to be a part. A few weeks earlier, at the NBA All-Star Game in Charlotte, he had run into C. M. Newton, who was on USA Basketball’s selection committee and who had been an assistant coach on Bob Knight’s gold medal team from which Barkley had been cut, partly because Knight didn’t like him, to be sure, but partly because Barkley grew bored with the enervating trials and more or less dared Knight to axe him.

“Don’t hold 1984 against me,” Barkley said to Newton. “I really want to be on this team!” That was the All-Star Weekend to which Barkley, acknowledging the first Persian Gulf incursion, wore a cap that read “Fuck Iraq.”

At the time, the should-Charles-be-chosen? debate was one of the hottest among the committee members. On pure ability, Barkley was a lock, “one of the top three players in the world at that time,” as Mike Krzyzewski, a committee member, described him. Barkley could score, run the floor, and shoot well enough to bust zones (if that was necessary); most important, he could rebound. He is probably not the greatest rebounder of all time, but he’s in the conversation. His rebounding stats, in the double figures per game, are taken for granted, but what was extraordinary was the number of offensive rebounds he got—four per game for his career and almost five per game during a five-season stretch early in his career. Yes, Dennis Rodman got more offensive rebounds, but the Worm was averaging in single figures in scoring, compared to 25 points per game for Barkley.

Barkley was less easy to classify than any of the other reigning superstars at the time. Jordan’s ability was nonpareil, but at least you could explain it: he was hardwired for success, talented and tenacious, gifted with a body that was both strong and supple. Magic
was a giant at his position. David Robinson was a seven-footer with gymnast’s skills, Isiah Thomas an elusive jitterbug with lightning reflexes, Karl Malone a muscleman who had refined his shooting touch.

But what was Barkley? He was 6′4″, yet played almost exclusively under the basket. He looked fat, but he could jump out of the gym. He rebounded like a madman, but he never boxed out; Roger Banks, an assistant coach back at Auburn, told Barkley, “Just go for the ball,” so that’s how he rebounded, from the first day to the last day of his NBA career. He looked like he couldn’t beat the ballboy in a race, but few people ever caught him when he went end to end with the ball.

Chris Mullin remembers the first time he met Barkley. It was the summer of 1982, and the two were bunking up prior to a tour on a U.S. junior team. They were both going into their sophomore year, Mullin at St. John’s, Barkley at Auburn. Mullin, his head and his heart in eastern basketball, had never heard of Barkley.

“He was sitting on the bed with his shirt off,” says Mullin, “and I’ll never forget it. He was real … inquisitive. Asking me about New York, real interested that I came from there, almost like—I hesitate to say it—a fan. I swear to God, I thought he was working for the basketball organization or something, maybe like a manager. I did not know he was a player.

“So the next day, the first day of practice, we split into sides and there on my team is Charles. I could not believe it. And then we started playing and here’s this fat kid jumping out of the gym and … I mean, I never saw anything like it. The only thing I can compare it to was years later when I saw [7′7″] Manute Bol for the first time. Just this extreme … 
physicality
. Two things stuck in my mind: How freakin’
good
is this guy? And can he maintain because of how hard he comes down on dunks?”

I compare Barkley to Bird, strictly in a during-the-game sense. That is strange in one respect because the ability to elevate, one of the keys to Barkley’s game, had nothing to do with Bird’s success. But they both jumped quickly, if to markedly differing altitudes, and
they both had strong hands when they seized a rebound. Bird was a student of Barkley’s game and loved analyzing it. “Charles jumps from side to side, not just straight up,” Bird told me once. Bird jumped side to side, too, thereby clearing a path while almost never getting whistled for it.

There was a street-smartness to Barkley’s game, too, a Bird-like elemental rawness. I was at a game during the 1988–89 season when Barkley was standing near Portland Trail Blazers rookie Mark Bryant, who held the ball on the baseline. “Yo!” Barkley shouted to him suddenly, and apparently convincingly, because Bryant passed him the ball, which Barkley took to the other end for a dunk. Bird pulled off some kind of similar street theft a dozen times in his career.

But as far as the men choosing the Olympic team were concerned, Barkley brought baggage way, way,
way
over the fifty-pound limit. After all, it wasn’t like Barkley had lost his virginity with the spitting incident. Before he was drafted, he was considered in some quarters to be an NBA question mark, which didn’t stop him from going on an eating binge in an effort to discourage the 76ers from drafting him. (Philadelphia owner Howard Katz wanted Charles to go from 282 pounds to 275; instead Charles ballooned to 291.)

He once slapped a fan in the face for verbally abusing him. He told an elderly female fan in Boston, “Shut up, you bitch.” He got in trouble with the league office for pretending to lay bets during the game with the New York Knicks’ Mark Jackson. In August 1988, Barkley was arrested for illegal possession of a handgun after being pulled over for speeding. He had a permit to carry in Pennsylvania but not in Jersey. When I brought it up during an interview, asking the inevitable non-gun-owner’s question about whether it was loaded, Barkley responded, “Of course it was,
fool
! What’s the use of carrying a gun that ain’t loaded?”

He trashed teammates, cursed out referees, exchanged punches with opponents, and angered every kind of minority group possible, which was mitigated by the fact that he angered majority groups too. Indeed, it is impossible to find another player who was
at once praised for his honesty yet made so many contradictory statements. What he said on Tuesday might go against what he said on Monday, but that didn’t matter because he’d say something else on Wednesday. “You never know what Charles is going to say,” David Stern says, “because he doesn’t know himself.” Barkley would talk about team unity, for example, then rip his teammates, as he did in
Outrageous!
, which came out in December 1991. After that he made publishing history by declaring that he had been “misquoted” in his own autobiography and didn’t really mean to criticize teammates Armen Gilliam, Manute Bol, and Charles Shackleford, as well as 76ers owner Katz.

He talked endlessly about the leadership lessons he had learned from Julius Erving, Maurice Cheeks, and Bobby Jones, the 76ers veterans who ran the club when he came aboard in 1984, and he waxed nostalgic for the days when he was required to bring Erving the morning newspaper at 7:00 a.m. and fetch Andrew Toney a glass of warm milk at night. Yet his own leadership style would never have been even remotely mistaken for the ones demonstrated by those diplomats. He didn’t always practice hard and sometimes showed up late, a precursor to another 76er, Allen Iverson, who went on a memorable rant about practice, believing, as Barkley did, that the measure of a man was how hard he busted his ass in the forty-eight minutes that really mattered.