Dream Team (27 page)

Doing a lot of the asking were two members of the United States Olympic Committee, LeRoy Walker and Mary T. Meagher. They gave Jordan the standard lecture, intent on sending the message that the Dream Team was nothing special, that it had its Olympic responsibilities, that revenue produced by the Dream Team was being used to support other athletes who weren’t staying in luxury hotels and who weren’t highly compensated, and … on and on.

“They went at Michael with the attitude of ‘Don’t be an asshole,’ ” says Barkley. “So you know how well that shit went over with Michael.”

Not well at all. “I’m outta here,” said Jordan, throwing down his Sharpie one day and giving the impression that he meant to leave the team, not just the room.

Had Jordan really meant it, had he upped and left, Magic would’ve been next. Then Barkley would’ve exited stage left, and after him Pippen, and next thing you know there would’ve been, in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, mutiny from stern to bow. (Or from Stern to bow.)

But Jordan didn’t mean it.

“Of course I never came close to quitting,” Jordan says today. “I wasn’t going to disgrace the Olympic team and walk out. And I wasn’t going to look like the only idiot who didn’t have my name on a ball. But I wanted everyone to know that they promised one thing and did something else.”

(The ball issue would surface again in Barcelona, when suddenly there was a need for players to sign at least a hundred more balls. There might’ve been a revolt except for the intercession of respected
NBA PR chief Brian McIntyre, who kept the balls in his room and had the players stop by whenever it was convenient to get it done. When it was Bird’s turn, he said to McIntyre, “What’s the quickest it’s taken anyone to do this?” McIntyre said between fifteen and twenty minutes. Bird said, “Time me,” finished in about six minutes, tossed the pen to McIntyre, and said, “Won another one, didn’t I?” Stockton, on the other hand, was the most careful signer, the Dream Team’s Hancock. “I want people a hundred years from now to know that I was on this team,” he told McIntyre.)

Indeed, while all ran rather smoothly within the Dream Team’s incestuous fraternity, the responsibilities of fame—as dictated to them by the USOC and sometimes by USA Basketball—got to the players, as did criticism from the outside world that filtered through the walls of the castle from time to time.
You’re just a bunch of spoiled millionaires. Why are you bothering to beat up on teams like Panama (112–52), Argentina (128–87), Puerto Rico (119–81), and Venezuela (127–80)?

In some quarters there continued to be residual resentment that the great honor of representing one’s country had been taken away from the amateurs. Plus it was hard to muster up empathy for rich men who were being treated like royalty and, in between the beatdowns they were hanging on the Third World, were spending most of their spare time at Pumpkin Ridge, the exquisite Portland-area golf course that lies at the base of the Tualatin Mountains. (A team joke was that P. J. Carlesimo’s main duty was setting up tee times. In point of fact, Carlesimo logged hundreds of hours editing videotape of opponents. But yes, the tee times were important, too.)

The players’ position was:
You came to us. You begged us to play. We’re getting you all this revenue and all this attention, but every time we turn around there’s something else to sign, somebody else to shake hands with
.

The players felt that they had allies at USA Basketball, men such as Steve Mills, who had a basketball background and was a close friend of Magic Johnson’s. Plus they genuinely liked Rod Thorn and respected both Russ Granik and Dave Gavitt. The USOC, by contrast, was distant and imperious.

“Everybody understood the issues,” Mills told me recently, “but it was the
way
they were presented that the players clearly took as offensive. It was sort of, ‘You’re just another athlete. You’re just like everyone else and this is what you’re going to do.’ Except that they
weren’t
like everyone else, not in terms of fame and the revenue they generate.”

No one felt the pressure more forcefully than Jordan, who was at the apex of his fame and who, as he saw it, had compromised more than a few of his business relationships by joining the Olympic team. At this point in his life he was a human ATM: people pushed the Jordan button and out came money. He had been selling out arenas for years. I remember being at back-to-back Washington Bullets games in the mid-1980s even before the Bulls were good. The first game drew about five thousand; the Bulls and Jordan came to town two nights later, and it was a sellout, about seventeen thousand. That’s twelve thousand additional people on one isolated night in one isolated arena in one isolated season. Get out your calculator to see how much money Jordan generated just in terms of attendance.

As for Jordan’s own franchise, Chicago Bulls chairman Jerry Reinsdorf had bought the team for less than $20 million midway through Jordan’s rookie season. It was valued at five times that by the time that Jordan won his first championship and, until a full-scale renaissance led by Derrick Rose in the 2010–11 season, had increased its value mainly because it was, eternally, Michael Jordan’s team.

Sure, Nike helped make Jordan, but the reverse was true, too. In his first full season under the Swoosh, the Air Jordan line produced more than $153 million in revenue.

By Dream Team time, Jordan believed that the seesaw was unbalanced, that he was the one with legs swinging uncomfortably in midair and no one would allow him to come down.

A few months earlier, before the Dream Team got together, I sat down with Jordan in his suite in a Berkeley, California, hotel for a
long interview related to his having been chosen
Sports Illustrated
’s Sportsman of the Year, an honor he singularly deserved and deeply appreciated. There were no distractions, as there had been months before at the
Saturday Night Live
set, and I continued to see a changed Jordan, a man who, at twenty-eight, was realizing the perils of fame. He had … hardened. That’s the best way I can put it.

There was anti-Jordan backlash about his White House snub, about the revelations in Sam Smith’s
The Jordan Rules
, about his role in keeping Isiah off the team, about his refusal to involve himself with the black community and speak out on issues. Jordan had by this time made his famous comment that “Republicans buy sneakers, too,” when he refused to endorse Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, who had mounted a Senate challenge to unseat Jesse Helms.

(My own opinion about the Gantt issue is this: the degree to which an African American athlete—or any athlete—is obligated to involve himself in politics is a long and complicated subject, but Jordan was absolutely wrong in this case. Helms was an anachronistic racist hypocrite, and Gantt deserved more than a dismissive comment about footwear. On the other hand, when Charles Barkley made his oft-quoted statements about being a rich Republican, he got a pass.)

“Sooner or later, I knew things were going to turn around,” Jordan told me. “Five, six, seven years at the pinnacle of success and it’s going to happen. Signs are starting to show that people are tired of hearing about ‘Michael Jordan’s positive influence’ and ‘Michael Jordan’s positive image.’ I’ve seen it in letters to the editor, magazines, newspapers. That feeling of ‘God, quit talking about Michael Jordan. I’m tired of hearing about him.’ ”

I thought that showed an unusual degree of self-awareness, as did his subsequent comments about the way the tornado of fame had swept him up unexpectedly.

“What everybody has to understand is that my success caught me completely by surprise,” said Jordan. “If you told me in college that soon, within a year, my face, my image, would be all over the
country and the world, I would’ve said you were crazy. What I was trying to do was project everything positive, and maybe that was wrong. Maybe people wanted to see some negative with the positives, so that they’d have more of a sense of you as a human being. I accept that.

“The real problem with what happened to me was that it happened so early. That’s the difference between me and some of the other superstars, like Julius Erving. And so my longevity was bound to produce overkill. It had to. The negative stuff, the backlash, is coming down on me, and heck, I’m at the peak of my career.”

That was unequivocally true. He was recognized by anyone with half a brain as the best player on the planet, and his earning power seemingly had no limit. Estimates of Jordan’s endorsement earnings for the 1991–92 season were between $16 million and $20 million, a figure that would eventually rise to about $35 million; even more astonishing was the money he routinely left on the table. His philosophy back then, as it is now, was to refuse most appearances outside of those associated with his corporate obligations. Mark Vancil, who covered the Bulls for the
Chicago Sun-Times
and later got into business with Jordan as president of Rare Air Media, wrote about some of them. For example, Jordan turned down $250,000 for a three-day appearance for a Canadian company in Toronto and spurned a cool $1 million for what would’ve been a one-day commitment to promote tourism in Jordan, the country. As Jordan saw it, that was chump change compared to a free day to play golf.

Jordan had the sense to know that he had been lucky as well as good, and he brought up Magic to make that point.

“Magic should’ve had what I had,” he told me. “The way I was presented out there from a PR standpoint, marketing-wise, he was never portrayed like I was away from basketball. With fewer credentials, at least of basketball championships, I got more than he did. Is that fair? No. But I didn’t have control of it. He should’ve had the Wheaties, the big deals before me, but he didn’t.”

Magic was in Chicago on December 17, 1991, when Jordan was presented with his Sportsman of the Year award, to publicize the Magic Johnson Foundation, a charitable organization he had set up (with much alacrity, since his shocking announcement had only been made a month earlier) to support AIDS education, research, and awareness. Magic, like Jordan, was dealing with his own backlash at the time. If he had heard it once, he had heard it a thousand times since his November 7 press conference:
Why are you treating this guy like a hero?

In short, everything in Magic’s life was in turmoil—his health, his public image, his career with the Lakers, his Olympic participation. And yet, after both Jordan and Johnson had finished their press duties on that December evening, one was left with the head-shaking feeling that it was Jordan’s life coming apart at the seams and that Magic’s principal duty in Chicago was to provide succor for the healthiest, wealthiest, and most successful athlete on the planet. Jordan, on the podium, said all the right things about the honor, but his defensiveness came through. “I went from un-American, to tyrant [a reference to some of the anecdotes in
The Jordan Rules
], to Sportsman of the Year.”

Then Magic stepped up and the sun came out. “First off, I can’t tell you how excited I am to come in second as Sportsman of the Year,” he began. “I lost to him again.” It was a terrific opening line. Johnson then patiently answered questions for thirty minutes about his foundation, his health, his family, and his views on mandatory AIDS testing (he opposed it) before finally turning the subject back to Jordan and scolding the press, in his gentle way, for making it tough on the world’s best player.

“It seems like this has been Michael’s hardest year,” said Magic, as if it had not also been his own. “It’s too bad that nothing he can do makes it better, and I’m sure my retirement made it worse. Now Michael has it all on him. I wish I could come back and take the pressure off.” (Magic was again demonstrating his extraordinary ability to be humble and self-aggrandizing in the same monologue.)

But remember this, too: Jordan would stay in the backseat for only so long. In both the Dream Team pre-Olympic practice in Monte Carlo and the Games in Barcelona, Jordan rose up from time to time and, in the strongest thus-spake-Zarathustra terms, made sure that everyone
—especially
Magic—knew who really ruled the basketball world.

My late father-in-law was a straight-shooting kind of guy—he kept the trains running on schedule at a plant that manufactured condensers and pumps, good old-fashioned American stuff like that—so he understandably had trouble getting his mind around the Dream Team’s decision to hold pre-Olympic training in Monte Carlo.

“You don’t go to Monte Carlo to play basketball,” he said. “You go there to gamble and horse around. It’s like Las Vegas, only more expensive, and, you know, dressy.”

“They have gyms there,” I said, not altogether convincingly. “At least I think they do.”

“Anyway, why are
you
going?” he asked. “If they’re only practicing—and I even doubt that—what are you going to write about?”