Dream Team (15 page)

We talked for a while, and the conversation turned to Sam Smith’s soon-to-be-released book,
The Jordan Rules
. I had read excerpts that were sent to
Sports Illustrated
, and though the book wasn’t nearly as negative as Jordan took it to be, it did eventually cause a sensation, as it laid out Jordan’s sometimes heartless competitiveness, expressed mostly in rage toward his teammates, who never quite knew how to act around him. (It also showed glimpses of his compassion and was clear in its depiction of his alphasuperstar status.) “I know what’s in there,” Jordan said. “I know it’s going to be negative.” He shrugged but looked angry, as if this were part of a continuing crusade of negative publicity against him. Jordan had been nicked here and there, but he had basically been on a seven-year honeymoon with the press—ten years if you count his time in Chapel Hill.

In
The Jordan Rules
, Smith wrote of a moment during the season when Jordan said to his teammates: “Five more years. Five more years and I’m out of here. I’m marking these days on a calendar, like I’m in jail. I’m tired of being used by this organization, by the
league, by the writers, by everyone.” That from a man who had a love-of-the-game clause written into his first contract that allowed him to play pickup anytime, anyplace.

I wasn’t aware of that quote then, but it struck me on that Friday afternoon that Jordan seemed to know what lay ahead, the burdens of fame. He was happy, of course, and felt vindicated that he had sent a message to all those who said he was just a shoot-first-second-and-third player who would never win. But he was wary, too, hardened, much less the happy-go-lucky kid who had taken the sports world by storm. That was inevitable, but it didn’t mean it hadn’t come along quicker than I thought it would. And it was a little sad.

On the way out, I knocked on Franken’s door and asked him what it was like to have Jordan host. He thought for a moment and said, “It was like having Babe Ruth host in 1927.”

John Stockton was a wide-eyed Gonzaga Prep kid back in 1978 when he journeyed to an AAU basketball tournament in Huntington, West Virginia. Stockton was not a recognized star, even in Spokane, and says today that his parents participated in AAU fundraisers “only because they were convinced it would be my last chance to play.” Stockton, who would later lead the NBA in assists, steals, and expressions of self-deprecation, loves to tell the story of a Salt Lake City television station interviewing a former grade-school teammate on the occasion of some Stockton milestone with the Utah Jazz. “The guy told him, ‘Stockton was really nothing special,’ ” remembers Stockton.

For the first eighteen years of his life (not to mention the final chapters, still to be played out), Stockton’s world was circumscribed by the city limits of Spokane, a town where people have their heads on straight, a town of sensible shoes, a town where his paternal
grandfather, Houston Stockton, was a football legend. Stockton was small, 5′5″ as a high school freshman and barely six feet when he graduated. What made his career in basketball were his abnormally large hands and his abnormally large capacity for self-improvement. Stockton had a quiet confidence. He says he realized quite early that the battle didn’t always go to the biggest or the swiftest. “I felt that if you played the right way you could win,” Stockton says. “The other guys, when you looked at them, maybe they
should
win. But we
can
win.”

So there was no reason that he couldn’t win at that AAU tournament in Huntington. When the team arrived Stockton studied a tournament program that included a grainy photo of a player from the Chicago team. “I remember thinking, ‘How good can this guy be?’ ”

The guy, Isiah Thomas, who was about Stockton’s size, turned out to be pretty good. Team Washington hung in with Isiah’s Chicago for three quarters until Isiah decided to take over. “We had been pressing them pretty effectively and it looked to me like Isiah just decided he wasn’t going to do what the coach wanted,” says Stockton. “So he just dribbled through us like we were nothing. Dribble through, pass … somebody dunked. Dribble through, pass … somebody dunked. Dribble through … Isiah layup. He just killed us. One guy. He
killed
us.

“Now, I went back to my room and normally I was a pretty smiley kid, but I was frowning that day. I couldn’t believe anyone was that good.”

Anyone who has played sports remembers that moment of stark realization when someone proves to be
that
much better than you. The question is, what do you do about it? What Stockton did was set a new bar for himself. He had to get as good as guys like Isiah Thomas. There was a new universe out there.

Athletes like Stockton are often referred to as embodiments of the American dream. Undersized and undervalued, driven by doubt,
they go on to achieve great things in a sport that doesn’t seem designed for them, their own extraordinary athletic gifts (hand-eye coordination, endurance, competitive drive, balance, ambidexterity) not necessarily the gifts associated with their sport.

Too often, we forget that a player like Isiah represents the American dream, too, just not the white-bread version that’s been hammered into our heads. Yes, Isiah probably had more natural talent than Stockton in terms of quickness and jumping ability. But he had many, many, many more ways to go wrong. His odds of reaching the NBA were every bit as formidable as Stockton’s.

Three Thomas brothers surrendered to the temptations of the street. One of those, Gregory, an intravenous drug user, died of AIDS. Isiah’s heroic mother, Mary, chased away drug dealers, gang bangers, and thugs of all stripes so that her youngest of nine, Isiah Lord, could escape, make a life for himself. Isiah spent hours in isolation, dribbling a basketball off a milk crate, and rode a bus ninety minutes from his home on the West Side of Chicago to attend a Catholic school in Westchester, Illinois, where the bangers couldn’t get at him. St. Joseph was to Isiah what Gonzaga Prep was to Stockton.

Isiah’s game was both street and textbook, the perfect marriage of the West Side and St. Joseph, just as Chris Mullin’s game would be the perfect marriage of the playground and the CYO gym. “I always considered myself a smart player, thinking maybe one step ahead,” says Laimbeer, Thomas’s closest friend on the Pistons. “That’s the only way I could make it. But Isiah was always one step ahead of me. He saw what that guy was going to do, but he also saw what the other guy was going to do when that guy did that.”

And so it was—to use the favorite word in our vernacular—ironic that these two flip sides of the American dream, these two combatants from an AAU tournament in West Virginia, came to be the major sticking point for the Dream Team selection. Had Isiah not been so unpopular among other players and committee members, he would’ve made the Dream Team, and Stockton would’ve been left out. That’s just a fact.

My own opinion was that Isiah deserved to be on the team over Stockton, and I wrote that in a column for
Sports Illustrated
. Lo and behold, in the week that that opinion was due to appear, I was covering a game in Los Angeles and ran into Stockton at a deli where we were both catching a late-night sandwich.

“John, I don’t know whether you read
Sports Illustrated
, or whether you really give a damn,” I told him, “but I want to let you know that I wrote that Isiah should’ve been on the Olympic team.” I don’t think I had the guts to add
instead of you
, but the implication was there.

“Sure, okay,” he said. “A lot of people feel that way.”

“You know how much I respect your game,” I said. “It’s just that—”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

We sat down and ate.

On November 15, 1991, two months after Isiah discovered that he was not one of the first ten choices for the Dream Team and could only make it as a dreaded “add-on,” the Utah Jazz came to the Palace of Auburn Hills. As Laimbeer remembers it, “Isiah didn’t say anything before the game. He just had that
look
.”

Armed with a vendetta, few players in basketball history are more lethal than Thomas, who could score on almost anyone when he put his mind to it, and Stockton was just another in a long line of players who could not stay in front of Isiah. Thomas owned Stockton on that night, scoring 44 points in a Detroit victory, forgetting his role as team quarterback in the service of demonstrating that he belonged on the Dream Team.

Years later, I talked to Stockton about that night. This is all he would say: “Isiah figured he should’ve been on the Dream Team, and I guess I was the clear target.”

What’s forgotten is that Stockton was pretty good, too, with 20 points and 12 assists, fulfilling what Bill Simmons said about him, in a backhanded-compliment way, in
The Book of Basketball:
“For
Jazz fans, watching Stockton was like being trapped in the missionary position for two decades. Yeah, you were having regular sex (in this case, winning games), but you weren’t exactly bragging to your friends or anything.” Over the course of their careers, Stockton actually played quite well against Thomas, as did Thomas against Stockton.

A month later, Detroit came to the Salt Palace in Utah, a notoriously hostile place for rival teams. Isiah went at Stockton again, scoring six early points. That’s when Karl Malone decided he had seen enough.

This was the Mailman’s seventh season with Stockton and they had grown close, bonded by mutual respect and the realization that they made each other better. (They remain that way today; Stockton and his wife, Nada, are godparents to one of Malone’s daughters.) They were as hard as mahogany, and they liked it like that. At this writing, Malone has committed the second highest number of fouls in NBA history (behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Stockton ranked at number fourteen, the only true guard on the top-twenty list. (While Malone will take his rep as a tough guy to the grave—just look at his body—succeeding generations may not remember that, in his own way, Stockton was considered a bully, too, someone who wasn’t afraid to throw an elbow or stick out a knee in the middle of a scrum. Years later I asked Stockton if he was a dirty player. At the time we were standing high above the Spokane Falls in his hometown and I thought maybe he was going to push me over. “Absolutely not,” he snapped. “I would never intentionally hurt anybody and in nineteen years I never did. The only reason they said that was that they couldn’t think of anything else to say. They just figured that a little guy couldn’t have set so many screens any other way.”)

Malone and Stockton had friendly debates on the team bus to and from games, particularly about hunting. Stockton was no fiery liberal but he just couldn’t understand why Malone enjoyed gunning things down. (Malone’s home in Louisiana is a taxidermist’s wet dream. About a hundred mounted big-game animals hang unsmilingly
from the walls and ceiling, including what he calls “the grand slam of sheep,” the Dall, the Stone, the bighorn, and the desert bighorn. I had bad dreams about being eaten alive after spending a few hours in their company.)

Stockton also didn’t approve of Malone’s habit of nocturnal snowmobiling, believing that careening pell-mell down a mountain in darkness had a somewhat risky aspect to it.

They were extremely comfortable with each other. I walked them out to their cars after practice one day in Utah and said to Stockton, “Well, John, I bet you have something controversial to say as usual, right?”

“Not much,” deadpanned Stockton. “Only this homosexual problem we’ve got on our team.” He jerked his chin toward Malone. “And it’s worse among our black players. Typical.” Malone cracked up.

Until their dying days, Stockton, Malone, and ex-coach Jerry Sloan will be the very definition of Utah Jazz basketball, though a nasty public fight has erupted between the Mailman and Jazz CEO Greg Miller, son of the original owner, the late Larry Miller.

Anyway, late in the first quarter of this game, Laimbeer set a high pick on Stockton and Isiah set off down the lane on the right side, streaking by center Mark Eaton and heading for the basket. Malone left his man and met Isiah in the lane, chopping his right arm down on Isiah’s face. Isiah flew through the air like a rag doll and landed on the floor, blood pouring off his face, “like a boxer who had taken a punch,” as the play-by-play announcer described it at the time. By chance, Utah’s orthopedic surgeon had gone outside to answer a page, so it was left to the Jazz podiatrist to see if he could help the trainer with the profusely bleeding Thomas. His suggestion was to put a cervical collar on Isiah and take him out on a backboard. But Laimbeer, his eternal protector, said that his buddy wasn’t going out in such ignominious fashion, so he picked up Isiah himself, as easily as an adult picks up a three-year-old, and carried him into the locker room.

Malone was ejected from the game, and years later I asked him if he hit Isiah on purpose.