Dream Team (26 page)

Daly knew that Stockton didn’t want to give up his spot. Though he went about his business more quietly than, say, Barkley—need we note that this is an immortal understatement?—Stockton was exquisitely happy as a Dream Teamer. He had blended in perfectly with everyone. He was, like Mullin, a student of angles, a player who knew the precise moment to slip a teammate a pass so that the recipient was in perfect position to shoot. He knew when to take his own shot, having become a master at going off the wrong foot and shooting a driving layup quicker than the defense thought he would, a stratagem employed by Steve Nash these days. Stockton was the first player I noticed, too, who split a high double-team
immediately
upon its formation, rendering it useless. When I suggested that to him not long ago, Stockton said: “Well, I don’t think I was, but I’ll be glad to take credit for it.”

The one thing that drove Stockton to distraction on the court was when a teammate would tell him, “Hey, I was open but you didn’t give it to me.”

And Stockton would say: “No, you
weren’t
open. Just because no one seemed to be guarding you, that doesn’t mean you were open, because you couldn’t do anything with the ball if you got it.” For the record, that sometimes happened early with Malone but almost never as time went on.

Stockton would get kidded now and again about his relationship with Malone. “Hey, don’t bother running if Karl’s in the other lane,” Barkley used to shout at practice, “because John’s only going to throw it to him.”

And Stockton would come right back: “Charles, I throw it to Karl because, unlike some guys, he actually catches it.”

“Playing with these guys on the Dream Team was basketball heaven,” Stockton remembers. “It was like someone would run to the spot and, upon getting there, the ball would be there. Guys made reciprocal moves. It was basketball poetry. There was no place you could throw the ball that was wrong.”

Stockton told me all that in a small locker room in the gymnasium that he owns in Spokane. I never heard him, or too many others, speak so eloquently about the game in a short burst. It stuck with me.

At any rate, Daly was honestly worried about the point guard position, as ridiculous as it might seem today. Matt Dobek had two phone numbers out, ready to call, those of Isiah and Joe Dumars, Detroit’s championship backcourt from 1989 and 1990. Thorn, a realist, laughed as he watched Daly squirm. Thorn knew that Stockton didn’t really need to be replaced, and he knew how tough this was on Chuck.

“Let’s wait,” Daly said finally.

Meanwhile, back in his room, Stockton was sad. Patsy-Cline-on-the-jukebox
sad. More than anything, he wanted the noise about his being selected over Isiah Thomas to go away. He had a fierce pride—Stockton never forgot the booing that accompanied the announcement that the Utah Jazz had taken him with the sixteenth pick of the 1984 draft—and he didn’t think for a minute that he didn’t belong with the Dream Team. With an eight-season resumé behind him that included four All-Star Games, he was no token. But he also knew that Isiah could’ve just as easily been there in his stead.

(It wasn’t just Isiah who thought that. In a poll question I had raised in
Sports Illustrated
several months earlier, I asked NBA coaches and GMs whom they would rather have between Stockton and lightning-fast Kevin Johnson of the Phoenix Suns. I used K.J. instead of Isiah because he was more like Stockton. Isiah probably would’ve won the poll had he been in it. I was surprised at the result: Of those who answered, Johnson got sixteen votes and Stockton got only five. To be clear, Stockton’s best days were in front of him.)

As Stockton stewed, Barkley and Malone paid the disconsolate point guard a visit. “Don’t give up your spot,” they told Stockton. “We want you here.” That made Stockton feel better, but he was still uneasy. He desperately wanted to stay. As clearly as anyone, Stockton realized the dimension of being a Dream Teamer, how much it would mean to him later. Back in February, when there was some noise about agents holding out their players because of corporate complications—read: Jordan and Nike—Stockton had personally called Dave Gavitt and said, “Don’t worry about it. That is not going to happen.”

Back home after Stockton’s injury, newspapers took temperatures and ran polls, eager to have something newsworthy to write about this Dream Team besides how badly they would kick the puppies in their next game. Of some ten thousand fans responding to a
USA Today
poll that asked who should take Stockton’s place should the need arise, Isiah got 2,872 votes. Golden State’s Tim Hardaway was second with 2,275, Cleveland’s Mark Price third with 2,274
votes, Duke’s Bobby Hurley fourth with 1,290 votes, and Kevin Johnson fifth with 1,201. Dumars got scant attention.

Daly and Stockton talked again. “Don’t send me home, Chuck,” said Stockton. “I’ll be back for the Olympics. Heck, you can play with six if you have to.”

Daly thought it over. “Okay, John,” he said. “You’re staying.” If Daly were to speak truthfully, the injury actually helped him. With Stockton out and Bird on the shelf from time to time, it was much easier to divvy up minutes.

But had Daly come to a different conclusion, the call he was going to make was not to Isiah.

“I know for a fact that Chuck wanted Dumars,” Jordan told me recently. (Remember that he and Daly played golf together almost every day.) “But Chuck just felt he couldn’t because of how badly Isiah wanted to be on the Dream Team. He just couldn’t do it. So he let John stay even with a broken leg.”

I stand behind no one in my respect for Joe D., now the Pistons’ general manager. But I’m glad that Stockton stayed and Daly never made that call to Dumars. However many potholes Isiah had dug for himself over the years, that would’ve been just too cruel.

When John Stockton picks me up in front of the hotel in his hometown, he is wearing a brace around his left knee.

“What happened?” I ask, and Stockton starts to tell me that in a recent pickup basketball game he had bumped knees with …

“Wait a minute,” he asks suddenly, terror in his eyes. “You’re not writing that down, are you?”

“Well, yeah,” I answer.

And so begins a pleasant day of negotiation and secret note-taking. Stockton has taken quite literally that my visit is to talk about the Dream Team. In his view, that is the sole reason that I have flown three thousand miles to Spokane. It is part of Stockton’s worldview that not only does he consider himself not interesting but also he is uninterested in revealing any part of his life that can be construed as personal.

That includes, evidently, his knee, which was injured when he
bumped knees with—get this—the son (Parker Kelly) of the guy (Terry Kelly) whom he grew up idolizing.

“See, that’s interesting stuff, John,” I tell him.

“No, it isn’t,” he insists. “Why would anyone care about that?”

“Because they do,” I say. “I find it interesting.”

Stockton adds that the collision was his fault (“I was slow to react”), accepting blame being a central part of his DNA.

In telling you this, I am running the risk of pissing off Stockton, an athlete for whom I have deep respect. This on-or-off-the-record stuff can get complicated, but never so much as when you’re dealing with Stockton. I’m going to err on the side of revelation, concluding that nothing controversial came out during our five hours together. Stockton, I concede, may not see it that way. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t revelatory, going a long way to explain how and why this plain-speaking, plain-appearing citizen of Spokane ended up on the Dream Team and later in the Hall of Fame.

We start our tour at the spectacular Spokane Falls and end up at St. Aloysius, where Stockton went to grammar school. I ask if he was an altar boy, and—I’m not making this up—he grows as animated as if he’s talking about the Dream Team.

“Sixth and seventh grade I was the top altar boy,” Stockton says. “I’m not kidding about that.” (Didn’t infer that you were, John.) “I used to call up to ask to serve. I served more masses than any five kids put together. But then I got screwed over. I had a kid take over for me when I had another commitment. But he didn’t show, so they suspended me for one service. Then they suspended me again for not serving when I was suspended and
couldn’t
serve. Do you believe that? So that was the end of my time as an altar boy.”

We were inside the school now, and John shows me the small wooden-floored gym where he learned to play (“We’d put on a 1-3-1 press and it was all over”) and the small hallways they were ordered to run after practice (“Our coach was a psycho; he’s one of my best friends today”). A teacher passes by and nods. “His aunt,” says John, “was my first girlfriend.” Those are the kind of connections you get when you stay home.

Stockton spends the next few minutes talking about how well various teachers and teammates have done in life. Then a young girl taps him on the shoulder. “That’s my buddy right there,” John says, hugging his daughter, who is dressed as Dracula. “We’re doing Wax Museum,” she explains. An older daughter once trick-or-treated as Pat Summitt. Yes, this is a basketball family.

We take a brief tour around Gonzaga Prep, his alma mater, where in 2011–12 he served as assistant coach, his daughter, Lindsay, the team’s star guard. We pass by his parents’ house (“You’re not writing down the address, are you?”), hard by the one to which John moved his own family after his first season with the Jazz. We have lunch, at my request, at Jack and Dan’s Bar and Grill on North Hamilton Street, where there is scant evidence that a Hall of Fame Dream Teamer is related to the former longtime owner. (Jack Stockton has sold his interest.) “It’s always been a tough wall for me to make,” Stockton says.

We finish up at “the warehouse,” the
Hoosiers
-evoking gymnasium that Stockton bought a few years ago. It includes the floor from the old Salt Palace, which was given to him by Larry Miller, the late owner of the Jazz. Stockton rents out the facility to various basketball, indoor soccer, and volleyball leagues. I remark at how content he seems.

“My family is around me and my kids are doing well, and my life is just busy enough following them around,” he says. “For right now, I don’t need anything else.”

It just seems perfect, the idea that the Spokane Kid—who kept his head down and his oars in the water, always working, always listening, always improving—now holds the literal keys to the kingdom, handing out gym-rat time to the succeeding generations, the circle unbroken.

As the Tournament of the Americas wore on, the Dream Team began to get bored with the blowouts—the average margin of victory for the six games would be 51.5 points. Before the Argentina game, even ever-smiling team leader Magic got annoyed because guard Marcelo Milanesio kept pestering him for his jersey, which he didn’t want to give up and didn’t. After the 41-point defeat, Milanesio said, “I am so overwhelmed by joy.”

The U.S. players were not. You have to remember that competition was their lifeblood, and this was not competition. As the tournament neared its end, the players just wanted to get the hell out of Portland and get a few weeks of downtime before the Olympic grind.

Plus, all was not going well behind the scenes. Always there were balls to sign. Balls for sponsors. Balls for charities. Balls for auction. Balls for presidents, politicians, pencil pushers, pashas, and pals from every principality on earth. Balls for friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends’ friends.

“I remember walking down this hallway and all I saw was balls that were waiting there for us to sign,” Jordan told me in the summer of 2011. “All right, I get it. We have to sign. But hundreds and hundreds of balls? That’s not fair.

“I had told Russ and Rod and Dave Gavitt from the beginning that it bothered me that business was wrapped around everything. Sure, I was in business, but these were long-standing relationships I had with companies. They were contracts. All of a sudden I’m being asked to do a lot of stuff I wasn’t comfortable with.”