Dream Team (38 page)

Ewing was a favorite target of Jordan’s, owing to their long friendship. Years later, Ewing would tell me, half amused and half angry, that Jordan was relentless. “Michael never let me forget that I couldn’t beat him,” Ewing says, shaking his head. “Michael never let me forget
anything
. Michael has been talking trash from the first day I met him at age seventeen, and he’s never stopped. Hell, yeah, it bothers me that I never beat him. And I gotta hear it from him every day I see him. ‘You didn’t beat me in college, and you didn’t beat me in the NBA. You’re out of chances, Patrick.’ That’s the kind of shit I gotta hear from him until my dying days.” (Ewing couldn’t even bring up the 1994 Eastern semis, when his Knicks finally beat the Bulls—Jordan was off playing baseball.)

Drexler, whose Finals frustration was freshest, got drawn in once in a while, and he would try to go back at them, particularly Magic.

“I used to tell them, ‘Let me play on your team and you play on mine,’ ” Drexler told me. “ ‘Let me play with Cap [Abdul-Jabbar], Worthy, Byron Scott, and A. C. Green, and you play with my team, and let’s see how many rings you’d have.’ Or, ‘Let me have Scottie. See how I do then.’ That would shut them up real quick.” (Drexler deserves his say, but it should be noted there is little anecdotal evidence that either Magic or Jordan shut up “real quick.”)

Jordan and Magic were particularly ruthless toward Barkley, who might sit down to join them only to hear, “Sorry, Charles, this is a ring table.” Magic would say something similar to Barkley or Ewing when he and Bird shot around together. “This is a ring basket” was Magic’s comment. Now, Jordan and Barkley were tight. A well-honed dialogue passed between them from time to time in Barcelona.
Jordan would say, “Hey, Charles, who’s the best two-guard in the world?” and Barkley would answer, “That would be Michael Jordan.” Then Barkley would ask, “And who’s the best power forward in the world?” and Jordan would answer, “That would be Charles Wade Barkley.” It was their own little poke at Drexler and Malone.

And Barkley could go at Jordan, one of his favorite topics being what he considered to be Jordan’s fraudulent sex appeal. “Man, you are so damn black,” Barkley would tell him. “And you ain’t the best-looking guy in the world either. Any guy has $500 million looks good. If you were a fuckin’ plumber, you couldn’t get a date.” Jordan would laugh because what else could you do? Only Barkley would choose to make a fellow African American’s skin color an issue.

But there was
another
circle, the supercircle above friendship that excluded Barkley, one in which only Michael, Magic, and Larry were members, the ones who had won nine straight MVP awards (three each) from 1984 through 1992. Even Pippen, who had won the same number of championships as Jordan, was not allowed. Back in San Diego, Jordan and Magic had been asked to appear on a
Newsweek
Dream Team cover. “Not without Larry,” they said, and so Bird was included in the portrait, too. (“I’m still signing those covers today,” Magic says.) Michael/Magic/Larry was special. They could say anything to anybody.

Bird wasn’t much of a card player and tended not to be the first one into the conversation. He would watch where it was going for a while—“Kind of like the father figure,” Mullin said, “just waiting around until someone said, ‘What do you think, Dad?’ ”—then jump in with both feet, an enthusiastic needler and debater when the subject interested him. He and Ewing, Harry and Larry—“the Odd Couple,” as Magic called them—would always share a beer or two or three or four. “Or twelve or thirteen,” Jordan added.

In Jackie MacMullan’s
When the Game Was Ours
, the author recounts a long, late-night dialectic among the principals when they debated both which team was the best ever and who was the best one-on-one player.

“Obviously one of our Laker teams,” said Magic in response to the first question. “We won five championships. More than all of you.”

Jordan had won two and had something to say about it. “You haven’t seen the best NBA team of all time yet,” Jordan said. “I’m just getting started. I’m going to win more championships than all of you guys.”

Ewing and Barkley tried to join in, the former offering up Bill Russell’s Celtics as the best of all time and Barkley offering up himself. “Michael, I’m going to steal at least one of them from you,” said Barkley who by then had gotten his wish and been traded out of Philadelphia.

It is fascinating to hold up that conversation in the light of the history that unfolded over the next few seasons. Barkley would get the chance to steal one of them from Jordan the very next season, but, like so many others, he would fall short. And Jordan would prove correct in his assessment—he would go on to win six titles, one more than Magic, three more than Bird.

Bird was never a chest-beater in the same way that Magic and Jordan were, but he had a cold heart when it came to winning. On this night he was feeling no pain. Others who were there remember Bird reclining on the floor—his back made it tough for him to sit—with empties all around him.

“You ain’t won nuthin’, Charles,” Bird said to Barkley after Charles made his I’m-going-to-steal-one-from-you claim. As MacMullan writes, Barkley, chastened, slumped away.

At another point in the conversation, the principals started musing about what ultimate victory in Barcelona (now all but guaranteed) would mean.

“If I get this, then I’ll have two gold medals, two championships, and one NCAA championship,” said Jordan.

And Magic said, “Yeah, and I’ll have an NCAA title, five championships, and one gold medal.”

And Ewing said, “I’ll have two gold medals and an NCAA championship, and when I get my NBA title I’ll be right there with you.”

Jordan would have none of that. “Until you learn to pass out of a double-team, Patrick,” His Airness said, “you won’t have to worry about that NBA ring.”

It was classic Jordan, moving the needle beyond the gentle-jab point because Ewing’s weakness was indeed that part of his game.

Jordan was always more respectful of Bird than he was of Magic, probably because Bird had always been so respectful of him. The Greatest Game Nobody Ever Saw in Monte Carlo affords a snapshot of that, Jordan and Magic going tonsil-to-tonsil while Michael remembered Bird’s lone basket of the game as absolutely crucial to victory, which it was not. Jordan’s affinity for Bird dated back to the 1986 postseason, when the second-year Bull laid 49 and 63 points on the Celtics in Boston Garden, although the Celtics won both games. “He is the most exciting, awesome player in the game today,” Bird said then, sounding very un-Bird-like. “I think it’s just God disguised as Michael Jordan.”

The interplay between Magic and Michael had more bite to it. A couple of variations of it played out in Barcelona. Magic was not ready to give up his treasured spot at the top of the NBA hierarchy. And while Jordan was amenable to, even grateful for, ceding the outward leadership to Magic—at the Tournament of the Americas he had proclaimed the Dream Team to be “Magic’s Team”—he wanted it confirmed, at least within the tight architecture of the team, that
he
was the Man.

Which, to confirm a point that has been made before, he was. “Michael was the leader,” Ewing said years later. “Yeah, Magic said all the things that Magic says. But Michael is Michael. We knew who the real leader was.”

Jordan kidded Johnson about not bringing his whole family out to L.A. to watch the Bulls beat them “out of respect for you.” Johnson countered by bringing it to Jordan’s attention that he felt sorry for Jordan since he would never have a rival like Bird. “We went two weeks without sleep knowing, if we made one mistake, the other guy was going to take it and use it to beat us,” MacMullan quotes Johnson in her book. “Who do you measure yourself against?”

Jordan had no answer for that one. He was indeed sui generis, which worked for him and against him. But he would not give in when Magic pressed the one-on-one argument.

“You’ve got no chance on this one,” Jordan said. “Larry, you don’t have the speed to stay with me. Magic, I can guard you, but you could never guard me. Neither one of you guys can play defense the way I can. And neither one of you can score like me.”

Jordan went on and on, piling up points because he was right and everyone knew it. Everyone except Magic. As MacMullan writes: “ ‘There were plenty of years when I knew in my heart I was the best guy in the room,’ Bird said. ‘That night I knew in my heart it wasn’t me anymore. And it wasn’t Magic either.’ ”

Years later, I am astounded at the degree to which that ongoing dialectic stuck with Jordan. Maybe I shouldn’t be, since we saw Jordan’s astonishingly long memory at work in his Hall of Fame induction speech, when he seemingly conjured up every slight that had ever come his way during his gilded career. But it bothered him that Magic would not recognize what he saw as plain truth. And he had an interesting riff on the Magic-Bird relationship.

“See, Magic really thought that it was his and Bird’s team, that the whole moment belonged to them,” Jordan told me in 2011. “Bird didn’t see it that way, and you know what? I learned as much about their relationship on that trip as anything else.

“Bird went along with that whole we-go-back-to-’79 relationship, but he was never into it the way that Magic was. He just kind of pulled Bird into it. Even today, sitting and talking with Larry, he knows that he will always be remembered for it, but it’s not necessarily something he wants to promote.” (We can assume that Jordan would not have been first in line for tickets to the production of
Magic/Bird
, which at this writing was scheduled to hit Broadway in 2012.)

“And the one time Larry stood up to Magic was in that room. He said: ‘Let’s just ride off into the sunset, Magic, we’ve had our time.’ He was able to say, ‘Okay, you and Pippen are better than we were, offensively and defensively.’ He gave out those rewards, whereas Magic would challenge them.”

Jordan acknowledged that it was Magic’s competitive nature at work, which he understands. But it still nags at him that in the summer of 1992—with Magic a few days from his thirty-third birthday, suffering from a virus that most of the world thought would turn fatal, and having been swept up like everyone else in the one-man tornado that was Jordan—Magic still believed he was the better player and would not surrender an inch.

But I wonder, too, if in some small way Jordan, who had conquered so many worlds, was indeed resentful, or at least envious, of the relationship that Magic and Bird did have, that whole “we-go-back-to-’79” bit, as Jordan put it. The one thing Jordan never had was a doppelganger, a friendly rival to measure against himself, a combatant with a shared history, “the only NBA super-duper star without a relative equal driving him to remain on top,” as Bill Simmons put it in
The Book of Basketball
. Jordan did have a beloved companion, one who shared his hopes and his dreams and even his DNA. But that man left far too soon.

    
Charlotte, North Carolina

I’m perusing a magazine story about the human time bomb named Charlie Sheen when Michael Jordan enters the conference room at the Charlotte Bobcats offices.

“I’m reading about your boy,” I say to Jordan, who’s wearing a Bobcat-blue Nike shirt. He and Sheen did Hanes commercials together what must now seem like a thousand years ago.

“Charlie’s not
my
boy,” says Jordan. “I haven’t talked to him in a long time. Man, I don’t know what’s going on there.”

I wonder how easy it would’ve been for Jordan to do a Sheen. He was one of the most famous people in the world for a while, if not
the
most famous. Everywhere he went, people offered themselves up like human sacrifices, clutched at him, jostled him for just a moment of his time. It’s not much different now. Plus his personality seemed prime for addiction—the thirst for competition, the gambling, the desire to always come out on top and crush the opposition.

Yet for the most part Jordan seemed to keep his rampaging impulses reasonably in check. He’s enjoyed the company of Lord knows how many women and his marriage broke apart because of it, yet, aside from several small incidents—there he is grinding away with a couple of young things in Cabo, a huge phallic cigar protruding from his mouth—in recent years he has stayed away from being a tabloid headline, kept the greatest part of himself in isolation. (At this writing, Jordan is planning to marry Yvette Prieto, a Cuban-born model.)

There is Magic, here, there, everywhere, one arm around Janet Jackson, the other around a nameless CEO from Asia, closing deals, chasing franchises, spreading the Gospel of Johnson. And Jordan is … somewhere. A golf course? Hiding in the Bobcats offices? Cabo?

Over the years David Falk, no longer Jordan’s agent but still a confidant, would say to him: “Let’s do a movie, something fun,
Lethal Weapon 17
or a James Bond type of thing. You’re well dressed, gadgets and stuff, play some kind of cool character.
Space Jam
did $400 million worldwide at the box office. Four hundred million in 1996! You could stay visible for the rest of your life.” But always Michael says no. No, no, no. No to almost everything. He claims that, more and more, as he gets comfortable running the Bobcats, he even says no to alluring golf invitations.