Dream Team (33 page)

By the time David Dupree and I arrived in Barcelona—having turned a six-and-a-half-hour drive from Nice into nine hours in that pre-GPS age—the Dream Team had already arrived, launching a nonstop, sixteen-day freak show. The accreditation process at the airport had been a zoo, as camera crews repeatedly broke through police lines to fire off shots of the gods. If you think American paparazzi are obnoxious, you haven’t seen European photographers in action. One Italian cameraman, walking backward, stumbled and fell and others tripped over him, thousand-dollar lenses and scopes flying everywhere, and for a brief moment some in the American party thought they were about to witness the equivalent of a soccer riot:

“17 Onlookers Crushed in Dream Team Debacle! Stockton, Mullin Pick Up I.D. Badges!”

My digs were a few subway stops from the Ambassador, the new hotel that had been almost completely taken over by the Dream Team and its attendant retinue—as the story went, only one of the $900-per-night rooms was occupied by someone not associated with the Dream Team. It was a small miracle that they were ensconced there at all, given the Spanish predilection for a casual approach to labor. Nine months before the Olympics, NBC’s Dick Ebersol, who was in Barcelona on one of his frequent pre-Olympic visits, called David Stern. “You know that hotel you’re planning to stay at?” Ebersol told the commissioner. “Well, I’ve over here at a hotel nearby, and I can tell you it’s a hole in the ground.” After much barking at the IOC, followed by the IOC’s barking at the Spanish Olympic Committee, the Ambassador was finished just days before the Dream Team’s arrival.

I decided to venture over there upon arriving, see if I could grab a beer with the PR guys, maybe get a couple of minutes with one of the players, Barkley, Malone, or Drexler, perhaps, and …

You might’ve thought that by this time I had fully grasped the Dream Team phenomenon, but I hadn’t. For there, outside the hotel, lined up on Pintor Fortuny, the narrow street that fronted the hotel, were hundreds and hundreds of spectators, just waiting and watching, waiting and hoping for … what? A glimpse. That’s all. Just a
glimpse
. When the team bus had rounded the corner a few hours earlier, fans began running after it, a phenomenon that Malone compared to the running of the bulls at Pamplona. “I don’t know what they were going to do if they caught us,” said Malone.

Anyone still demanding to know why the Dream Team had special accommodations needed only to glance at an aerial photo of this scene to realize how completely its presence would’ve wrecked the delicate ecosystem of the Olympic Village. Police holding bayoneted rifles were everywhere. It was midnight, remember, and the hotel was in lockdown. I couldn’t get close to the front door, and, this being the pre-cellphone age, I had no one to call to let me in. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway, since a couple of days’ advance notice was needed. Over the next two weeks I would worm my way
into the inner sanctum of the Ambassador a couple of times, always requiring a badge and an escort from the NBA or USA Basketball, flashing my credential to the steely-eyed policemen like Wayne and Garth backstage at the Aerosmith gig in
Wayne’s World
.

“Meester, get us pleez Ma-jeek’s autograph,” I’d hear on my way in.

Around town and in the arena, one achieved a certain celebrity just by being associated with the Dream Team. I gave a dozen interviews, not because anyone had the slightest interest in me or the clever way I had around an adjective, but because I could shed light on the Dreamers. It is impossible to overstate how invested most international reporters are in their respective teams. It’s not like in the United States, where there is a distance (or supposed to be) between journalist and subject. I still have a vivid memory from the 2010 FIBA World Championships in Istanbul of a dozen Lithuanian reporters hugging, celebrating, and singing songs with the team members after they won the bronze medal.

Therefore, most of the international press assumed that since I covered the Dream Team I was a de facto member of it. One Japanese reporter even said that he wanted to follow me around on a day when the team wasn’t playing.

“Why in the hell would you want to do that?” I asked.

“I will follow because you will probably see Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson, no?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Actually I’m going to do an hour at the Picasso museum, then go watch the table tennis.”

He wisely withdrew his request.

Among other American journalists who specialized in Olympic coverage—“Ringheads,” as they were known, even among themselves—the Dream Team chroniclers were either an alien species or some version of the Rodney Dangerfield character in
Caddyshack
, an obnoxious trespassing outsider. A few of the Ringheads made a statement by refusing to watch the Dream Team play, so it must’ve made them gag when International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch, who didn’t know a three-point
shot from three-card monte, was a conspicuous Dream Team observer at the Palau Municipal d’Esports de Badalona. “There was a lot of jealousy and pettiness about this from the Olympics press,” said ESPN’s Michael Wilbon, who covered the Games for the
Washington Post
. “It was like their show was taken away from them and, suddenly, there was a bunch of non-amateurs in the Olympics. Like [sprinter] Michael Johnson was an amateur, right?”

At one level, I could understand how ridiculously overblown the Dream Team scene was, how absurd that so much of the world’s attention was focused on a group of men who put a ball through a hoop. True, that is the sports journalist’s game, but this was the game times a thousand.

But there was a serious side to covering the Dream Team. The possibility that something could happen was always there, and not just because the memory of the massacres at the Munich Games was only two decades old. The world was coming apart in the early 1990s. War and revolution had torn apart Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, whose teams in Barcelona bore those scars. Basque separatists, whose MO was placing bombs in parked cars outside public buildings, were a constant threat. Spain itself was a country not even a generation removed from the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco, and I could not help thinking that some of those itchy-fingered
policía
brandishing weapons outside the Ambassador had worked for him. With the first Gulf War still fresh in everyone’s mind, there was no clearer target than the Dream Team if one wanted to make a political statement about millionaire Americans.

This same kind of dichotomy was later captured by David O. Russell in
Three Kings
, a thriller set during the latter part of the first Gulf War. Outside was the constant threat of war, death, and destruction. But inside the bubble there were hijinks and insults and soldiers riding to war in luxury vehicles as Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” played on the radio, the sappy sound track of the war.

Years later, when I talked to retired NBA security chief Horace Balmer, he still sounded relieved that nothing had happened in Barcelona. “Biggest assignment of my life,” said Balmer, unnecessarily.
“But in the end, Atlanta was much worse.” Balmer was on duty when a bomb went off in Olympic Park at the 1996 Games.

Not coincidentally, the McDonald’s Open had been played in Barcelona in 1990 (it was an Olympics testing ground with the New York Knicks as the NBA entrant), so Balmer knew his way around. He says that he had worked for months with the State Department and various Spanish agencies to coordinate security and that even the French government had been involved, obligingly locking up hundreds of Basque separatists to keep them from coming to Barcelona. (That doesn’t sound legal.)

Still, when Balmer saw the crowds outside the hotel, he decided that reinforcements were necessary from local law enforcement, which was already stretched thin by the demands of security at the Olympic Village. “They had the attitude of, ‘Why can’t these guys stay in the Village like everybody else?’ ” says Balmer. So he convened a meeting at the hotel and had Jordan, Barkley, and Malone drop by to offer their opinion that more was better. And so did it happen.

(Balmer grew so close to the local authorities that eventually a pickup basketball game was arranged between the NBA group and the Spanish police. During that game, which was good-naturedly refereed by Barkley and Drexler, assistant coach Lenny Wilkens tore his Achilles tendon, the fifty-four-year-old Hall of Famer thus becoming the most seriously injured member of the Dream Team.)

Inside the hotel was “a soft security presence,” as Balmer put it, consisting of well-dressed undercover forces. But outside the presence was
hard
. Snipers crouched on top of the buildings surrounding the team hotel, and no vehicles could be parked within two blocks of the Ambassador. When Dupree and I had our dinner with Malone, the first thing he said was, “There’s helicopters up there. This shit is
serious
.” Balmer said that “these were the most protected guys in Barcelona,” and I don’t doubt that for a minute.

On game nights, two buses pulled out of the Ambassador en route to the Palau Municipal d’Esports in the suburb of Badalona, one bearing the players, one a decoy, the same technique the feds
use to get a Mafia don to trial. Routes were constantly changed. Roads and freeways were cleared when the Dream Team bus headed to practice and tip-off. Stockton sheepishly remembers the police pulling over the bus of that night’s opponent, Puerto Rico, so the Dream Team bus could get by; Stockton caught a glimpse of his Utah Jazz teammate Jose Ortiz, a starting guard for Puerto Rico, as he roared by.

“That night, when we lined up to exchange gifts, Jose and I were across from each other,” said Stockton. “I could see all the Puerto Rican team angling to shake hands with Magic, Michael, or Larry. That’s the way it always was. And I motioned to Jose, ‘You better come over here.’ We hugged, and I felt a little better about it.”

Daredevil police motorcyclists were omnipresent. European police forces love their bikes, and I can only imagine the intramural clamor to get that gig. The cyclists in front of the bus went so frightfully fast that Bird eventually urged officials to tell them to slow up with the provision that the team would leave fifteen minutes earlier.

Besides trips to games, the Dream Team was largely tethered to the Ambassador, locked in a golden, twenty-four-hour-room-service prison that had been constructed by their own collective fame,
prison
being a curious term since the mob outside would’ve given a year’s salary just to get inside. On at least two occasions, players (Magic, Stockton, and Mullin for sure) got off a caught-in-traffic Dream Team bus and grabbed the metro, driving security out of its mind.

Stockton, in fact, was the only Dream Teamer who was able to get around normally, being, as he puts it, “a six-foot white guy who looks like everybody else.” He even filmed a segment for NBA Entertainment that centered around his anonymity. As Stockton held a camera, he spotted a tourist wearing a Dream Team T-shirt, and he asked if she had seen any of the players. “Well, we saw Charles Barkley,” she said, having that in common with thousands of others.

“Anyone else?” asks Stockton before two of his children pointed to her shirt and said, “There’s Daddy!”

Enticing invitations were tossed out like confetti at a wedding, but most fell to the ground ungathered. Michael Douglas, most recently seen bedding Sharon Stone in
Basic Instinct
, something that had to impress even these guys, wanted to entertain the team, but the Dreamers said no thanks. They did take up the offer of Miami Heat owner Micky Arison for an afternoon on his yacht. When they arrived, they were informed that the air-conditioning was down, so Arison was bringing over his other yacht.