Dream Team (2 page)

It couldn’t have been scripted any better, and when the Dreamers finally released all that star power into a collective effort, the show was better than everyone thought it would be … and everyone had thought it would be pretty damn good. They were Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, the Allman Brothers at Fillmore East, Santana at Woodstock. “If it would’ve happened today,” says Larry Bird, “it would’ve been one of those reality shows.”

The names (Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley) remain familiar to fans two decades later, their cultural-relevancy quotient still quite high. It’s not just that an engaging Dream Teamer who’s now an A-list TV star partially inspired Danger Mouse and Cee Lo Green to christen their hip-hop duo Gnarls Barkley. Or that Magic Johnson (Red Hot Chili Peppers and Kanye West), Scottie Pippen (Jay-Z), Karl Malone (the Transplants), and Michael Jordan (impossible to count the references) have been subjects in song. Consider this: the name of John Stockton, a buttoned-down, no-nonsense point guard, is on a track in a 2011 release by Brooklyn rapper Nemo Achida, and the popular NBA 2K12 video game features Jordan, Magic, and Bird on the box cover, not contemporary players such as LeBron James, Dirk Nowitzki, and Derrick Rose.

The Dream Teamers are never far from the news, even the crime news. Not long ago a convict tattooed Jordan’s Jumpman logo onto his forehead, and an accused rapist in Arkansas, in an interview after he was captured, described his run from the cops this way: “I was like Michael Jordan, man. Gone!” An armed robber asked that his sentence be increased from thirty years to thirty-three years to honor Larry Bird’s number.

Yet the written record of that team and that time is not particularly
large. The Dream Team, like the dinosaurs, walked the earth in the pre-social-media age. Beyond newspaper stories, there is no detailed daily log of their basketball activities (“Bird shot around today but his back is sore”) and no enduring exclamations of chance meetings around Barcelona (“OMG, jst met ChazBark at bar & he KISSED me on cheek; hez not rlly fat LOL”). There is much of the story to be told in the fresh light of history.

There is little doubt that the Dream Team, like that red-haired lass you met years ago at a pub in Dublin, looks better in the soft-focus blur of nostalgia. “This is now the Dream Team of blessed memories,” says NBA commissioner David Stern. “They were the guy with the piccolo and the scrappy band of revolutionaries marching off to war. They forget Charles elbowing the Angolan, Michael and the others covering up their logo, the cries of ‘Why are we sending these teams? You’re just trying to humiliate the other nations.’ Over the years it’s become beatified.”

None of that is forgotten in these pages, Mr. Stern. The Dream Team was indeed forged amid conflicts athletic and bureaucratic and touched by tragedy and controversy when it returned home after an Olympics that, yes, was layered in a gauzy romanticism. All that is part of the story. The book is in fact a panoptic survey of that entire generation, in large part because the members of the Dream Team represented the central characters in the compelling drama of pro basketball from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, a golden age for the NBA that ended when the fairy-tale world of the Dream Team itself ended in August 1992.

The narrative unfolds in roughly (emphasis on
roughly
) chronological fashion. It struck me as crucial to give definition to the players before they were Dream Teamers—Michael Jordan as the young hero of the 1984 Olympics, Scottie Pippen as the neophyte struggling to play alongside his infinitely more famous Chicago Bulls teammate, Charles Barkley as the unbridled wild child, and, of course, the 1980s rivalry of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.

Then, too, the selection process—how the team came together—is in some ways more riveting than the games themselves.
It was political theater, a kind of convention without the pom-poms, a process in which backstabbing and rivalries current and ancient all played a part.

But it was also important to provide glimpses of the players as they are now, some in their hometowns (Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio, Spokane), some in their places of business (Charlotte and Orlando). These are defined as “interludes.” So there are stops and starts to the narrative, which emerges as more like a Magic yo-yo dribble than a Barkley straight-ahead, bowl-over-any-obstacle dash to the hoop.

Like all of us, in later life they have found failure, some as husbands or fathers, others as coaches, general managers, or businessmen. But from a basketball perspective they approached perfection. They are history writ large, the greatest team of all time by such a wide margin, says Dallas Mavericks general manager Donnie Nelson, who coached against them in the Olympics, “that I can’t even think of who’s in second place.”

The best barometer of what this team meant to history is limned by the words of one of its most prominent members, a man who won five NBA championships, three MVP awards, one NCAA title, and an untold number of popularity contests.

“For me, the Dream Team is number one of anything I’ve done in basketball,” says Magic Johnson, “because there will never be another team like it. There can’t be.”

I knew it was a bad idea from the beginning. I swear I did. But David Dupree, my friend and colleague from
USA Today
, kept pushing it.

“We’ve covered the Dream Team from the beginning,” said David. “We should get our picture taken with them. It’s no big deal. It’ll be something to look back on.”

Taking a photo with famous athletes seemed like the last thing David would suggest, but such was the overheated temperature of the times, when the phrase “Dream Team” was on the lips of everyone in the world, not just the sports world; when helicopters dotted the bleached Spanish sky like fireflies to protect the millionaire players; when snipers sat on the roof of their hotel in Barcelona to take down potential assassins wanting to enter the history books; when adoring fans congregated around the clock just to catch a fleeting glimpse of the twelve Americans who were in the process of storming to the gold medal and rewriting basketball history.

“I’ll run it by Magic,” said Karl Malone when we asked the Mailman about the photo. Karl, David, and I were having dinner in Barcelona. The other diners were staring at us. Staring at Malone, actually. I had gotten a restaurant recommendation from a friend—this was before the days of go-on-the-Internet-and-check-out-Zagat—and it was a bad choice. They brought out quail eggs for an appetizer.

“Man, I don’t eat this shit,” said Malone, a country boy from Louisiana who never hesitated to remind you of that fact.

“I don’t, either,” I protested. “Do I look like a quail egg guy?”

“I don’t know
what
you white people eat,” Malone said, winking at Dupree, also an African American.

When we finished, Karl promised to check on the photo op and get back to us. “We clear that stuff with Magic,” said Malone. “He’s the captain.”

There was no better indication that the Dream Team had become one big happy family than Malone’s unquestioned acceptance of Magic as ceremonial captain. Malone had never been a huge Magic fan, and just a few months later the Mailman would openly question whether Magic should be allowed to play in the NBA given the fact that Johnson had the AIDS virus. Then, too, there had been several times during that glorious summer of 1992 when Malone had tired of the relentless chatter of Magic, the go-to spokesman, a man who, as Scottie Pippen puts it, “always needs the microphone.” And Malone wasn’t the only one.

The days went by, the United States rolled up easy win after easy win, Barcelona and the world beyond continued to watch in slack-jawed awe, and the team continued to bathe in this heady marinade of adulation, testosterone, and 40-point victories. We heard nothing about the photo op until about a half hour before the Dream Team was to play the gold medal game against Croatia on August 8.

“Now?”
I asked Brian McIntyre, the congenial and consistently competent head of NBA public relations. “Christ, they’re going for the gold medal!” But Brian escorted David and me behind the
members-only ropes that led to the most famous locker room in the world just as the Dream Team was emerging to take the floor.

“Let’s go! Let’s get it done! Let’s take it to ’em!”

I couldn’t separate the voices, but there was much clamor and clapping; it suggested Croatia was about to enter a world of pain, which it subsequently did. Suddenly Magic halted the procession so that—I’m mortified even as I write this—Dupree and I could be photographed with the team. It was as if a band of brothers on the way to battle had been halted to share hors d’oeuvres with Anderson Cooper. There were several expressions of what-the-hell-are-we-doing? confusion, but the team stopped, Dupree and I slipped into the front row, and NBA photographer Andy Bernstein prepared to take the least compelling photo of his illustrious career.

And as we posed—my groin tight, flop sweat soaking my brow, praying that this moment would soon be over—I heard a voice from the back row, one with a distinctive Hoosier twang.

“Hey, Jack,” drawled Larry Bird, “later on, you wanna blow us?”

If you’ll permit a metaphorical extension of Bird’s transitive verb—and who among you would not?—this was the most fellated gang of warriors since the Spartan army. As the members of the Dream Team, one by one, had accepted invitations to become the first NBA players to participate in the Olympic Games, they understood that they were signing on to something special. But from the first moment they came together to practice, in San Diego on June 21, 1992, they had been the central players in an unprecedented spectacle, an adoring public and almost-as-adoring media bestowing upon them attention that can only be described as pornographic. It’s become so commonplace to describe them as rock stars that I won’t even do it, although I guess I just did. They were Jagger mugging in an open limo, Princess Di flashing her come-hither smile at an Elton John concert, Liz Taylor air-kissing Michael Jackson at an AIDS benefit. By the time the Dream Team landed in Barcelona, thousands having gathered just to watch their plane touch
down in twilight at El Prat de Llobregat Aeropuerto, they knew that they were on a march into immortality, not a footnote to sports history but an entire chapter.

An accident of timing—that most blessed breeder of success—put me in the middle of all this. From 1981 to 1985, I had been at
Sports Illustrated
as a kind of relief pitcher—long man more than closer—as the second, third, or even fourth backup on pro and college football, pro and college basketball, boxing, baseball, and track and field. In the winter of 1982 I wrote eight stories on eight different sports in eight weeks, including the World Championship of Squash, held in New York City at the Yale Club, to which I was denied access until I had purchased a sport coat and tie.

I am not suggesting that this equates to, say, walking through rice paddies and swiping leeches off your body to cover the Vietnam War, as the late David Halberstam, who became an NBA chronicler at a plane considerably elevated from my own, once did. It’s merely to say that I needed a stable home, and in the fall of 1985 I got one when managing editor Mark Mulvoy put me as the number one man on the NBA beat.

It is the dirty little secret of journalism (maybe it’s not such a secret) that you’re only as good as your material, and man, I parachuted into a valley of material so rich and fertile that only the worst kind of hack could’ve screwed it up. Under Mulvoy,
Sports Illustrated
was largely a front-runners’ magazine—that is, we wrote about winners and put winners on the cover. In the years before Barcelona, I wrote dozens and dozens of stories about these men, who were—as we realized even at the time—creating a kind of Golden Age of pro hoops.

Along the way I was accused by readers and friends of variously favoring Jordan and the Bulls, Bird and the Celtics, and Magic and the Lakers. (Years later, after he had become a general manager in Indiana, Bird would usually greet me with, “You blown Magic lately?” The man does like that verb.) I thought I did an adequate job of covering the beat honestly, tossing out criticisms along with encomiums. To varying degrees, stories I wrote in the 1980s and
early 1990s angered Jordan, Barkley, Drexler, and Ewing, but part of what made this the golden age from a journalist’s perspective was that these guys understood the implicit contract between athlete and writer, that it was not a crime against humanity when someone wrote something bad about them, that journalism was not to be confused with hagiography, even if they didn’t know what hagiography is.

“It’s a system of checks and balances,” as someone described the relationship between athletes and the press to me not long ago. That was Michael Jordan.

I feel fortunate to have come along when I did, and I apologize in advance for making myself a small part of this story. “You can’t help it,” one editor told me. “You were along for the ride.” I was a minor-league Cameron Crowe,
almost
almost famous, “walking in the shadow of a dream,” as did Mr. Dimmesdale, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tortured minister in
The Scarlet Letter
.