Dream Team (42 page)

That rings false. With Jordan’s legendary stubbornness in play, only a powerhouse on the level of the commissioner had the power to do anything, and he, like everyone else, let the issue fester, and after the game, the players had to deal with the matter.

“Everyone agreed we would not deface the Reebok [logo] on the award uniform,” said Jordan. “The American flag cannot deface anything. The American dream is standing up for what you believe in. I believed in it, and I stood up for it. If I offended anyone, that’s too bad.” As if to punctuate that, Jordan took off his Reebok suit and tossed it to Brian McIntyre. “I certainly don’t want it,” he said.

Magic sounded more contemptuous. “They could have come to us and treated us like men and talked this thing out,” he said. “Instead they had to be the big shot, be the big man.” Years later, Schiller would wryly note that Magic became an Olympic spokesman, securing sponsorships from the people he trashed.

On press row we noticed the flags and the zipped-up jackets, of course, but I doubt if anyone in the stands that night said, “Oh, look, the players covered up the logo.” As with most issues related to money, nobody cared except the people involved.

No, the fans were watching the smiles and the pure joy on the faces of the players, who turned around and around, waving to all sections of the cheering crowd, searching the seats for their loved ones. Several of the Dreamers beckoned for Daly and his assistants to join them on the podium. They had grown quite close to the staff over the weeks together and had universal respect for Daly. They
loved his staccato speech, his sweat-only-the-big-stuff philosophy, his command of the game, and his habit of occasionally touching up his hair and smoothing his collar ever so subtly, even in the heat of the game. “Every time I went out on the floor,” Malone said years later, “I’d look back and there would be Coach Daly doing all this …” Malone mimicked a man grooming. “Everything had to be perfect.”

True to fashion, Daly and assistants demurred, players-first guys to the end. From the press area, I wanted to scream:
Chuck, get up there! You’ll be coaching the New Jersey Nets soon! Enjoy this!
But he
was
enjoying it, as Wilkens later made clear. “Chuck grabbed my arm and just held on, and I looked over and there was a tear coming out of Chuck’s eye. That said it all for me.”

Malone put his arm around Drexler. Harry and Larry, now bound for life, exchanged high fives. Barkley blew a kiss to the crowd. And Magic Johnson, a man who was supposed to be dying, pumped his right fist, then his left fist, and took Barkley in his arms.

I remember staring at Magic and Bird and wondering whether we had just seen the last time that either would ever play in a basketball game. Magic’s status as a returning NBA player was in doubt, and Bird had seemed paralyzed with stiffness in the gold medal game, having failed to score in twelve minutes. Was it over for the two men who had saved the NBA a decade earlier?

Then, suddenly, they were all gone, back to America on their chartered plane, which had practically begun idling during the second half. The lights dimmed, the Palau Municipal emptied, workers picked up trash, and it was like the day after your birthday, when the world seemed a little less bright, the fine edges of joy scrubbed flat.

The Dream Teamers continued their card games and their celebrating on the way home, but when they stepped off the plane it was like a curtain closed behind them and a malevolent stage crew began rearranging the scenery. No more Never Never Land. The “basketball heaven” that Stockton talked about was gone, to be replaced by realities, harsh and unforgiving.

        
The Legend

A couple of days after Larry Bird returned to Boston from Barcelona, he went in to see Dave Gavitt. They hemmed and hawed about the Dream Team experience, hemmed and hawed about what the Celtics’ prospects were for the upcoming season, and then hemmed and hawed some more before finally Bird had had enough of hemming and hawing.

“That’s it, Dave,” Bird said. “I’m done.”

Gavitt had figured that was coming. But he needed Bird to say it.

Bird’s wife, Dinah, team trainer Ed Lacerte, and physiotherapist Dan Dyrek had some idea of what Bird had gone through during those summer months with the Dream Team. But only he truly knew how many nights he’d lain awake in pain, how uncertain he’d been that this movement or that movement wouldn’t send a breath-stopping electric stab through his body. True, guys with arthritic knees and ruined hips climb telephone poles and wrestle
with jackhammers every day, and women with aching bunions make beds, cook dinners, and carry babies in their arms, so let’s not go overboard in turning Bird into a working-class hero. But what he did during those summer months of 1992 had a kind of last-gasp grandeur to it, and the Dream Team wouldn’t have been the same—wouldn’t have been
nearly
the same—without him.

“Larry … Larry just
had
to be there,” Magic told me years later, struggling to find some way to put it. “Just
had
to. How could you have something called a Dream Team without Larry Bird?”

Bird had two years left on his Celtics contract. If he played sixty games of the 1992–93 season, he would make about $8 million. He was due to receive $3.75 million of that, in fact, on August 15, which was only a couple of days hence, not enough time for Bird, with the attendant red tape, to get his official retirement letter prepared. But he backdated that document so he wouldn’t get the money. Where Bird came from, you didn’t take money for nothing.

Earlier in his career Bird had joked that upon retirement he would become the “fattest man driving out of Boston.” But in later years, after injuries and wear and tear had made him feel like a mere mortal, he had a change of heart. He realized that he liked his body when it was in tune and humming, and he wanted to keep that feeling in civilian life. With age, he realized he had lost the ability to shed excess weight, and it gnawed at him because he loved to eat. After he sat out most of the 1988–89 season following Achilles tendon surgery, he described to me what a bored and injured Larry Bird was like to be around. “I’d sit around the house, drive my wife crazy, and eat and eat,” he said. “In two and a half weeks once I ate ten gallons of ice cream and seven wedding cakes. I ate wedding cakes because you knew they were gonna be good. I mean, who would screw up a wedding cake?” As I wrote at the time, that was Bird’s philosophy at its most crystalline.

Fishing, golf, and French Lick home repairs such as building fences, bricklaying, a little roofing—that’s what Bird envisioned for retirement. Plus more fishing. That’s what he said publicly, anyway,
and I have no reason to doubt him. But things changed during his exit meeting with Gavitt, which went something like this.

They settled on $350,000.

“You know what it came down to?” Bird told me in 2012. “I wanted to hang around Dave Gavitt. I love that man. He was one of the smartest human beings I’ve ever been around. And he wanted to hang out with me. So I signed on. It was that simple.”

So Larry Bird became the most famous special assistant in history, giving his opinion on players, attending some Celtics functions as an official representative (man, did he hate that), and being a kind of éminence grise around the Garden—a junior one, since Red Auerbach, the senior éminence grise, was still alive and kicking. Bird was in the job for five years, during which the Celtics followed a 48–34 season with records of 32–50, 35–47, 33–49, and finally an egregious 15–67. For one who played the game the way Bird did, his acid reflux must’ve been as bad as his back had ever been.

And so he left the city where he had become a legend.

     
The Magic Man

When the Dream Team was practicing in San Diego, Bird pulled Magic aside and said, “You look great.” In Barcelona, Magic’s eyes
would light up the brightest when he talked about the reaction of his fellow Dream Teamers to how well he had played considering his months of inactivity and, well, his condition.

“They’d say to me, ‘You’re coming back, right?’ ” Magic said. “ ‘Do you have to go back to the Lakers? Can’t you play for us?’ ” It made him feel … whole. All the worldwide adulation from fans meant nothing next to the validation of his peers.

I assume that most of the comments from his fellow Dream Teamers were genuine or at least proffered in the understandable spirit of Barcelona bonhomie. But I did detect hesitation from some members of the team when I would ask about Magic. They would all say the right things about his skills, but on the subject of his future as an NBA player, I never heard the will-you-come-play-for-us? sentiment expressed.

And once they were back in the States, all hell broke loose. Credit goes to Harvey Araton of the
New York Times
, who, at a preseason game between Utah and the Knicks at Madison Square Garden, interviewed Karl Malone about the prospect of Magic coming back to play full-time.

Here’s some of what Araton wrote in the November 1 issue of the
New York Times
.

Others leaped into the fray, some without attribution—
Players are scared. I could see myself backing off when I’m guarding him. Players don’t know what to think. Players need more information
—and some with. Phoenix Suns general manager Jerry Colangelo said, “I
have a son-in-law who does surgery every day, and he wears gloves, goggles, masks, and lives in mortal fear.” Gerald Wilkins of the Cleveland Cavaliers, brother of a superstar, Dominique Wilkins, who had been spurned by the Dream Team committee, said that some players were “scared” to be playing against Johnson but, because of Magic’s celebrity and overall popularity, “are handling it with white gloves.”

It turned out that a
rubber
glove was the tipping point in the Magic controversy. A couple of days after Malone made his comment, the Lakers were in Chapel Hill, North Carolina—Jordan country—playing an exhibition game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, one of those spread-the-game-to-non-NBA-towns events that players and coaches detest. Johnson suffered a small cut on his right forearm, and under new medical guidelines that had been set up specifically to allay fears about Magic—“the Magic rule,” as it had been inevitably christened—he was forced to come out of the game for medical attention.

Gary Vitti, the veteran Lakers trainer who was extremely close to Magic, came over to check it out. Vitti—one of those unsung heroes of the NBA, a guy who kept everything humming in Laker Land and never sought the spotlight himself—had made it his business to study up on the disease. The medical literature was not voluminous at the time, but from everything he could glean the risk of Magic’s passing on the disease was small, smaller than the cut itself, which Vitti later said he could barely see.

The trainer reached for a cotton swab and appeared to be reaching for the rubber gloves in his pocket, which was the newly instituted policy for dealing with blood. But then Vitti decided against it and tended to Magic barehanded, applying a cotton swab and bandage.

There was a stunned silence when fans realized that Magic was the one who was about to get treatment, and then a small collective gasp as everyone stared at the tableau before them: a man touching the bloody arm of someone with the AIDS virus. The story and the photo made national headlines the next morning and continued to
have legs for weeks afterward. To look on the positive side, it did initiate a dialogue about what was safe and what wasn’t. It was a bit like the stories that would follow in the wake of a nonfatal accident at a nuclear plant—the story was not what happened but what
could
happen. On the negative side, the sensationalism dominated the conversation, and there were more than a few tabloid stories exaggerating the danger of what Vitti did or didn’t do. One medical doctor even filed a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about the trainer.