Dream Team (30 page)

There is nothing to indicate that the school’s founder played
fourteen NBA seasons and retired with career averages of 21.2 points and 10.6 rebounds and once scored 71 points in a single game, one of only five players to reach that absurd number.

“We look for excellence in sports here, too, but that’s not what it’s about,” said Robinson. “It’s not corny to be a good student here. Man, I always loved school. That’s what I wanted to foster in these kids.”

Hanging around Carver with Robinson makes a man ponder, if only for a moment, what he’s done with his life, whether he’s made a mark. As I look back on these pages, I see how comparatively little I’ve written about Robinson, at least in comparison to Michael/Magic/Larry and Charles. I get Google Alerts that mention Michael Jordan virtually every day, but when the name David Robinson shows up in those alerts, it more likely refers to a reporter for the
Morning Sentinel
, a business writer for the
Buffalo News
, the sheriff of Kings County in California, the biographer of Charlie Chaplin, a Tyne-class lifeboat, a climatologist for the state of New Jersey, the executive chairman of Australian Food and Fibre, or the bass player for the Cars. There is scant mention of Carver Academy.

As I write this, Robinson will not be aboard the Celebrity Love Train in Canton, Ohio, with Mike Tyson, Patti LaBelle, the O’Jays, and Mo’Nique, as Magic was in the summer of 2011. He will not command airtime all over the country to comment on the size of Brett Favre’s penis, present his idea that mediocre teams should “throw games” to move up in the draft, quip that truTV is “the white BET,” or discuss any of a dozen other subjects on which Barkley is called upon to comment in any given week.

Robinson was sometimes an afterthought, too, on that immortal team, whose members admired his athleticism, his grace, and his integrity but didn’t know him particularly well, and who talked, as Jordan did, about how basketball wasn’t his passion, how his success was due to the accident of his astounding genetic composition.

But twenty years later, as the greatness of the 1992 Olympic
gold medalists becomes more and more a flickering light in history, I think that Robinson might be the truest Dream Teamer, a gentle and complex man from two worlds who lived the dream and, through the power of his own sweat and blood and faith, now gives a dream to others.

The referee, a gentleman from Italy whose name no one seems to remember, dribbles to midcourt and looks to his colleague, Dream Team assistant coach P. J. Carlesimo, to see if he is ready. Carlesimo is ready, though
ready
is relative in this case, since P.J.’s participation over the next forty minutes will be limited, bringing new dimension to the phrase “swallowing the whistle.”

If the gentleman from Italy had to do it all over again, I’m sure he would’ve tossed the ball to Carlesimo and proceeded rapidly to the nearest exit of Stade Louis II, the all-purpose arena in the Fontvieille section of Monte Carlo. For soon he would become the unluckiest person in town, including all those who were surrendering vast quantities of French francs at the tables.

He tosses the ball up between Patrick Ewing and David Robinson, and Robinson taps it—on the way up and illegally—toward his own basket. Robinson’s teammate on the Blue team, Christian Laettner, races Scottie Pippen for the ball. Take note, for this is the first and last time in recorded history that this sentence will be written:
Laettner beats Pippen to the ball
. Laettner sweeps it behind his back to Blue teammate Charles Barkley, who catches it, takes a couple of gathering dribbles, and knifes between Michael Jordan and Larry Bird. Jordan grabs Barkley’s wrist, the whistle blows, and Barkley makes the layup.

“Shoot the fouls, shoot the fouls,” Chuck Daly yells, sounding like that character in
Goodfellas
, Jimmy Two Times. It’s morning and almost no one is in the stands, and Daly is trying to install gamelike conditions because even the best of the best need a kick in the ass from time to time. As Jordan calls for a towel—it is extremely humid in the arena and almost everyone is sweating off a little alcohol—Barkley makes the free throw.

And so the Greatest Game That Nobody Ever Saw gets under way.

About twelve hours earlier, the United States had finished an exhibition game against the French national team. Prince Rainier had requested that Daly, his birthday homeboy, sit with him to deconstruct any nuances of the game of which he might be unaware, such as, for example, the one about coaches sitting on the bench. After some explanation, Rainier accepted Dave Gavitt as a replacement.

The United States–France game looked exactly like one would think an exhibition game in Monte Carlo would look like. It was awful. The players were still getting used to conditions—meaning the hilly terrain at the Monte Carlo Country Club and the nocturnal bass-beat rhythms at Jimmy Z’s—and even the seemingly inexhaustible Jordan was tired after walking eighteen holes and arriving back at the Loews not long before the 8:30 p.m. tip-off. One of his playing partners had been Daly, who proclaimed, “It’s a two-Nuprin, three-Advil day.” The Dream Team was sloppy and even allowed France leads of 8–2 and 16–13 before it woke up and went on to win 111–71.

It didn’t matter to the fans, though, who had gobbled up the 3,500 available tickets in a fifteen-minute box office frenzy a few days earlier. As had been the case at the Tournament of the Americas
in Portland, the opposing team’s guys, at least a half dozen of whom had brought cameras to the bench, were deemed heroic by dint of being slain. And there was certainly no thought of fallen French pride among the royals—Rainier beamed like a schoolkid when Magic climbed into his box for a photo op.

Happiest of all was the French coach, a man named Francis Jordane. “He was very excited because he figured that his last name would give him special entrée to Michael,” remembers the NBA’s Terry Lyons. “We took a photo and, sure enough, there is Jordane right next to Jordan, with his arm around him.”

After the game, Daly’s pessimistic nature began to take over, and by breakfast the next morning he had decided that his team had better beat itself up a little bit. The Dream Team had scrimmaged several times before this fateful day, a couple of the games ending in a diplomatic tie as Daly refused to allow overtime. He normally tried to divvy up the teams by conference, but on this day Stockton was still on the shelf and Drexler was out with a minor injury. Lord only knows how this morning would’ve gone had Drexler been available. Jordan had already taken it upon himself to torture the Glide in scrimmages, conjuring up the just-completed Finals, taunting Drexler: “Stop me this time!”

(Jordan still describes Drexler as “a poor man’s Michael Jordan.” Honest, he said that. “I wanted to go against Clyde every chance I could back then,” Jordan told me in the summer of 2011. “When we played them in the [1992] Finals, we were being compared, and I wanted to show there was a big difference between me and him. I knew how to
think
the game. I knew how to play different varieties of the game. Clyde plays one way—head down, drive straight to the hole. Big difference.” We already know what Drexler thinks about that analysis.)

So with two fewer Western players than Eastern players, and only two true guards, Magic and Jordan, Daly went with Magic, Barkley, Robinson, Mullin, and Laettner on the Blue Team against Jordan, Malone, Ewing, Pippen, and Bird on the White.

Whatever the result, there would be few to bear witness. The gym was all but locked down. The media were allowed in for only
the last part of practice. Officials from USA Basketball even kicked out the NBA PR people and videographers from NBA Entertainment. A single cameraman, Pete Skorich, who was Chuck Daly’s guy with the Pistons, recorded the day. It was a closed universe, a secret little world, when ten of the best basketball players in the world began going at each other.

Before the game began, Daly had a message: “All you got now,” he told them. “All you got.”

The absence of Drexler means that Magic and Jordan are matched up, a fact that will turn out to give the morning scrimmage its noisy character. “Those two going against each other,” Krzyzewski told me in 2011, “was the pimple being popped.”

Jordan dribbles upcourt and Magic yells, “Let’s go, Blue. Pick up now.” This is what Magic has missed in the months that he has been retired. The juice he got from leading a team, being the conductor, the voice box, the man from whom all energy flows. A half hour earlier, during leisurely full-court layup drills, Magic had suddenly stopped and flung the ball into the empty seats. “We’re here to
practice
!” he yelled. That was his signal that they had been half-assing it, and the day turned on that moment. Whether the players thought it was unnecessary is a matter of conjecture, but Magic had promised Daly back in San Diego that “I will see to it that there will be no bad practices.” He took that pledge seriously.

Bird gets the ball on the right side, guarded by Laettner. With an exaggerated, almost theatrical flourish, Bird swings his torso as if to pass to Jordan in the corner. The man made better use of body fakes than anyone else who ever lived, his remedy for his relative lack of quickness. Laettner bites and Bird is free to drive left into the lane, where he passes to Malone on the left baseline. Malone misses a jumper, Ewing misses an easy tip, and Laettner grabs the rebound.

Magic dribbles upcourt and goes into his Toscanini act, waving both Laettner and Mullin away from the right side of the court and motioning for Barkley to isolate on the block. Bird has him on a
switch. “Go to work, C.B.!” Magic instructs. “Go to work”! Barkley up-fakes Bird but air-balls a jumper. Laettner is there for the rebound and lays it in.

Playing tit-for-tat at the other end—this happens often in the NBA—Malone posts up Barkley on the left side. But the Mailman misses an easy jumper and Laettner—player of the game so far—gets the rebound. At the other end, Laettner drives baseline on Ewing, who shoulders him out of bounds. “Don’t force it if we don’t have it,” says Magic, directing his comment to Laettner. Magic can be a scold to his teammates. He considers it part of his leadership duties.

After the inbounds pass, Magic dribbles into the lane and spins between Jordan and Pippen, a forced drive if there ever was one. (As with most leaders, it is incumbent upon the followers to do as he says, not as he does.) The gentleman from Italy blows his whistle and no one is sure what the call is, including the gentleman from Italy. Bird, a veteran pickup-game strategist, turns to go upcourt, figuring that will sell the call as a travel, but Magic is already demanding a foul. He wins.

“That’s a foul?” Jordan asks in his deep baritone.

Years later, I would watch Magic in a pickup game at UCLA, this one without referees, and he would win the foul battle virtually every time, stand around incredulously until he was awarded the ball, and, on defense, pointedly play through his own fouls and act like a petulant child when one was called on him.

A minute later Barkley bats away Pippen’s shovel pass to Ewing and storms off, pell-mell, to the other end. Bird is ahead of him but overruns the play—at this stage in his life he’s hardly going to take a charge on a Mack truck—and Barkley puts in a layup.

Jordan is now getting serious and calls out, “One, one!” Pippen gets the ball on the right wing, fakes Mullin off his feet, and cans a jumper to break the drought for White.

Mullin, always sneaky, taps the ball away from a driving Jordan, and Barkley again begins steamrolling downcourt, this time going between Malone and Ewing for another full-court layup, taking his two steps from just inside the foul line with that sixth sense all great players have about exactly when to pick up the dribble. “Foul! Foul!” Barkley hollers, but he doesn’t get the call.

Malone misses another open jumper; Magic rebounds, heads downcourt, and yells, “I see you, baby,” to an open Mullin. Mullin misses but Barkley rebounds and finds a cutting Laettner, whose shot is swatted away by Ewing. Laettner spreads his arms, looking for a call, soon to be joined by his more influential teammate.

“That’s good!” Magic yells, demanding a goaltending violation.

“He didn’t call it,” says Jordan.

“It’s good,” Magic says again.

“He didn’t call it,” says Jordan.

Magic wins again. Goaltending.