Dream Team (40 page)

Nelson treasures the memory of that first meeting. “Can you imagine that today?” he says. “In the Internet age? Sarunas in the pot garage with the Dead? He would’ve failed every drug test in the NBA handbook.”

Eventually Jerry Garcia sat down with them and said to Marciulionis, “Man, you’re all about freedom and liberty and that’s what we’re about and we really dig you guys and we’re going to support you.” If that sounds like a caricature of Jerry, well, that’s how Nelson remembers it.

The Dead wrote Marciulionis a check for $5,000, but, most important, gave Lithuania the rights to a T-shirt that had been made for a concert in Boston. Sales of the Dead/Lithuania T-shirt in Barcelona all but financed Lithuania’s sojourn to the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, where they won the bronze, the same finish as in 1992. And as much as anything, that T-shirt turned the Lithuanians into folk heroes and their heroic struggle for independence into mainstream sports fodder. At “Lithuania Day” at a Warriors game, Dead guitarist Bob Weir was in the locker room before the game, learning the chords to the Lithuanian national anthem from Marciulionis.

Consider this: the United States had raised millions of dollars to send million-dollar pros to Barcelona, where one room at the Ambassador cost almost a grand a night. Lithuania sent a team that had to raise its own money, the equivalent of Little Leaguers selling magazines door-to-door.

I’m not passing judgment. I’m just saying.

On the day that the United States played Lithuania in the semifinals, Jordan was so concerned about the challenge ahead that he played thirty-six holes of golf. The team bus was idling in front of the Ambassador, Daly muttering a few “Omigods,” before Jordan
finally showed up, having instructed his wife, Juanita, to retrieve his basketball shoes from their suite.

Going into the Olympics, remember, Lithuania was Daly’s principal worry. He knew that four of the five Lithuanian starters had been on the Soviet team that beat David Robinson and the United States in 1988 in Seoul. He respected the hard-bodied, tough-minded Marciulionis. And he worried about the mysterious giant Sabonis, who at his best was a better center than either Robinson or Ewing. Of course, Sabonis’s best had been a decade earlier.

Not long ago, as we sat by the tennis courts at a country club near Marciulionis’s home in southern California, I asked Sarunas what had been going on in the Lithuanian locker room before the semifinal.

“We were not thinking about winning the game, if that is what you mean,” he answered.

“But was there any talk of going zone or making the U.S. shoot from the perimeter?” I asked him. “Donnie told me that you wanted to keep them out of the paint and—”

Marciulionis began waving his hands to stop me. “It did not make a difference,” he said. “It did not matter what Donnie said, and I do not even remember what that was. We just wanted to—how do you say it?—not lose face.”

Jordan, meanwhile, may have made Daly uneasy, but he understood the challenge. “I got Sarunas,” he told the coach. “Don’t worry about it.”

Jordan hit an early jumper and Magic hit a three-pointer. Jordan made a layup off a steal, then he scored on a stutter-stop jump shot, and it was over by the time the United States built a 31–8 lead and Lithuanian forward Arturas Karnisovas had instructed a team manager to take a photo of him guarding Barkley, his favorite Dream Teamer. The final score was 127–76. Nine of twelve U.S. players scored in double figures, led by Jordan’s 21—who knows how well he would’ve played if he’d gone only eighteen holes—and, in a statistical anomaly, Bird, Drexler, Malone, and Mullin all finished with 10 points. In retrospect, it might’ve been the Dream Team’s most devastating performance.

A couple of things from that game resonate with me. At one point a loose ball happened to hit an official, keeping it inbounds and enabling Lithuania to retain possession. Less than a minute later Bird grabbed a rebound with his left hand, glanced at that same official, who was standing nearby, and bounced the ball off him, scooping it up a split second later. In that brief span of time between when he grabbed the ball and saw the official, Bird’s basketball mind took a snapshot, developed it, and determined that he could have a little fun without giving up the advantage. He used to talk about how he was able to freeze the action, get time itself to almost slow down, so he could make a split-second decision.

The other one involved Jordan. For about a six-minute stretch he simply decided that Marciulionis wasn’t going to do anything. He guarded him so zealously that on most possessions this most determined and resilient of players couldn’t even get the ball. “I remember that,” Marciulionis told me when I brought it up. “It just changed everything for us. My teammates were used to me controlling the ball, and now I couldn’t get it, and now somebody else had to make decisions. We were lost, all because of Michael.” Jordan remembered it, too. “Sarunas was so strong with the ball that the best thing to do was not let him get it,” said Jordan. “You can’t do that for the whole game, but you can do it for a while.” Jordan was so into the idea that Marciulionis was going to be contained that after the Lithuanian scored a basket right before halftime, Jordan, who was on the bench, reamed out the defender, Drexler.

Jordan’s defense on that night was one of Daly’s favorite Olympic memories, too. On more than one occasion—it could’ve been fifteen years later—I’d say to him, “Chuck, how about the night you put Michael on Marciulionis and—”

“Michael didn’t let him get the ball,” Daly would say, finishing my sentence. “He wouldn’t even let him
get the damn ball
.”

Lithuania’s defining moments of the Games took place two nights later against the Unified Team, the bronze medal at stake. The game got lost in the hubbub of the Dream Team–Croatia gold medal game,
which was played several hours later, but it was absolutely one of the most significant political games in the history of the Olympics.

“I never felt any pressure like that in my entire life,” remembers Donnie Nelson. “To the Lithuanians and anyone associated with them, even an outsider like me, the Unified Team represented the Soviet Union. We were playing the country that had killed our citizens and ruled over them for decades. The feeling was, ‘We
cannot
lose this game. There is no way we can lose this game.’ ”

The game was ragged and intense, tightly played throughout. Sabonis, who hadn’t been able to do anything against the United States, screamed at his teammates, imploring them to battle harder. He played with a stiff-kneed magnificence, which was a revelation. To much of the Western world, Sabonis had been a basketball Sasquatch, spotted from time to time outsmarting some centers, stomping on others, an eternal man of mystery who had been throttled by the Soviet hierarchy and who drowned his anger and frustration in his nation’s favorite beverage.

Sabonis’s teammates included Alvydas Pazdrazdis and Gintaras Einikis, who were among those who had joined hands to stop the Soviet tanks rumbling through the streets of the capital. Marciulionis was all over the place, as he always was, and in the end, his brilliance and the play of Sabonis won the day. The game ended with a score of 82–78, touching off a wild celebration.

The president of Lithuania, a dignified man named Vytautas Landsbergis, was doused with champagne. He had brought only one suit to the Olympics, so he changed into one of the Grateful Dead tie-dyes and began squirting champagne himself. When that celebration was over, Marciulionis retired to the shower and stood under the water for a long, long time in his uniform, all the while thinking,
What if we had lost to the Soviets? What if we had lost?
He told me this years later: “Thinking about what
could’ve
happened almost took away the joy of winning. That’s how much we needed to win.”

Eventually, though, the celebratory mood returned, and the Lithuanians went back to the Olympic Village. “We had several
hours before we were due back at the medal stand,” said Nelson, “and that’s way too much time if you’re a Lithuanian.” Sabonis, who had been kept in a virtual basketball prison for years—as a thirty-one-year-old, he would finally get to play in the NBA in 1995 with the Portland Trail Blazers, where he had seven fairly productive seasons—was a particularly avid celebrator. He took on and vanquished all comers—boxers, weight lifters, discus throwers—in arm-wrestling contests, all the while downing shots. When it was time to return to the arena, as the Dream Team was playing Croatia in the gold medal game, Sabonis was sleeping it off somewhere. Legend has it that he was found a couple of days later in the women’s dorm of the Unified Team, having beaten the Russians on the court but then doing his best to spread his own version of
glasnost
.

The Lithuanians were supposed to wear the logo-emblazoned collared shirt of a sponsor to the medal ceremony, but at the last moment Marciulionis handed out the skeleton T-shirts and told his teammates to put them on. “The Grateful Dead believed in us when we were nothing,” he said, and out marched the Lithuanians in their garish T-shirts, displeasing representatives from the IOC—a fascinating tableau that was not the only medal-stand kerfuffle of the evening.

On the night before the United States was to play Croatia for the gold medal, the card game in the Coolest Room in the World was especially animated. All the regulars were there, including Jordan, who was scheduled to do a video shoot the next morning for NBA Entertainment. It was not a small thing, a commitment of several hours for what would become
Michael Jordan: Air Time
. To be honest, I can’t separate one Jordan video from another, but they were big deals in the sports world, exquisitely produced moneymakers.

This was classic Jordan—commit to something, let it hang in the air for as long as possible while the other party goes apoplectic with anxiety, then pull it off at the last moment, like a buzzer-beating jump shot. Magic does things the same way.

It was one in the morning, then two, then three. Jordan was smoking his phallic stogies and the guys were ripping on one another, and Don Sperling of NBA Entertainment was circling the edge
of the group like an overwrought den mother, trying to remind Jordan about the morning shoot and how Michael should also figure in the small matter of, you know, the gold medal game that night. Then it was four o’clock, then it was five. The players knew that this was the last card game, for the team was leaving Barcelona as soon as the gold medal had been secured and the arena celebration dispensed with. This round of tonk was something special, a ceremony of sorts, a parting of the ways before they all became enemies again.

At six-fifteen the game finally broke up. Sperling followed Jordan to one of his two rooms (a Jordan perk), where Jordan was to take a shower.

“Don’t crash on me, Michael,” Sperling begged.

“I told you I’ll be out,” said Jordan, “so I’ll be out.”

True to his word, Jordan reemerged twenty-five minutes later, showered, bald head glistening, decked out in a bright, orange-tinted shorts set that made him look like a Zambian exchange student. And for the next several hours the crew followed him through Barcelona, filming on the streets and at the Olympic Stadium. “What you have to understand is that it’s ninety-six degrees and 100 percent humidity and he had no sleep,” said Sperling. “And when you see that video, he looks as fresh as if he’d just gotten out of bed after eight hours.”

When they were finished, in midafternoon, Jordan asked for a favor.

“Could you take me to the golf course?” he said. “My clubs are out there, and I’m going to try to get in a round.”

Jordan played eighteen holes at the Real Club de Golf El Prat on the outskirts of Barcelona, as he did most days, got a ride back to the hotel, went to his room, changed, waded through the crowds at the Ambassador (they had only gotten larger as the Games went on), climbed aboard the team bus, and, eight years after his first, went off in search of his second gold medal.

“Michael tried to get me on his schedule over there, and I just couldn’t do it,” Magic says today. “I got so I could play cards all night, and so did some of the other guys. But then to go out and
play eighteen, thirty-six holes of golf? Then come back and get 20 in the game like it’s nothing?

“Man, nobody could do that. Michael Jordan is the strongest, and the strongest-willed, athlete ever. I don’t care what anybody says.”

No matter how the story is spun two decades later, the United States Olympic Committee deeply resented the attention that the Dream Team received in Barcelona. That resentment had started way back in Portland and continued from the first days in Barcelona. NBC’s Dick Ebersol had made special arrangements for the Dream Team to arrive late for the opening ceremonies and be deposited into the middle of the U.S. procession in an effort to lessen the chaos. It didn’t matter. As soon as the players were spotted, athletes of every size and stripe broke ranks and ran to the Dream Team, particularly to Magic.