Dream Team (44 page)

The same arguments can be mustered to support both positions.

Jordan was so big, such a global star, that Stern couldn’t risk any further revelations. He had to jettison him for a year. Or: Jordan was so big, such a global star, that Stern couldn’t risk getting rid of him. He needed the Jordan buzz, the Jordan revenue.

It was Stern who always supplied the best barometer of Jordan’s fame. He delighted in telling of a trip to a rural province of China, where families lived in almost prehistoric conditions, and meeting a farmer who, upon learning who Stern was, said, “Ah, the team of the Red Oxen.” Or his visit to a refugee camp in Zambia when the residents swept the dirt floors clean and put on Bulls jerseys to welcome an NBA contingent. “It demonstrated to me,” said Stern, “that the Bulls were the world’s team.”

And Jordan was, to a greater extent than anyone else besides Muhammad Ali, the world’s athlete. But he left, for a while at least, riding buses and eating fast food with the Birmingham Barons, the minor-league team he joined for spring training in 1994, conjuring up nightly memories of his father, secure in the knowledge that James Jordan was looking down and beaming, even on those frequent nights when he went 0 for 4.

    
The Writer

So as the 1993–94 season began, Bird was gone, Magic was gone, and Jordan was gone. The Dream Team was gone. Portland, Monte Carlo, Barcelona … all of it gone. I had signed on to do a book with a rookie named Shaquille O’Neal—cue requisite laugh track for the lunacy of telling the life story of a twenty-year-old—and my heart was only half in it. Shaq was, still is, a great character, a truly smart, funny, and unique individual. But I could see right away that this was new territory—the era of the fully hatched superstar, the guy who wanted to cut the line and get his just because, well, he could.

Shaq went on to be a great player, but for him it was never first and foremost about the game. It was about the other stuff that came with the game. For the guys on the Dream Team, these cut-out-your-heart-and-watch-it-beat-on-the-sidewalk
immortals, it was always about basketball first and foremost. The other stuff just happened to come. I had been fortunate enough to catch them in the full bloom of their talent, maturity, and competitiveness, a team like no other.

I told my bosses that I needed to get off the beat for a while. It just wasn’t going to be the same, couldn’t be the same, and so I jumped off what had been the greatest ride in the world.

Dirk Nowitzki was a gangly fourteen-year-old German in the summer of 1992, simply another kid with big dreams. He had just taken up hoops in his native Würzburg in northern Bavaria, and he was getting a feel for the game, having discovered that he had a gift for shooting and an even greater gift for working hard, happy in isolation, shooting, fetching his own ball, shooting some more—the same repetitive choreography that had made superstars out of American players such as Larry Bird, Scottie Pippen, Chris Mullin, and John Stockton. Nowitzki was a good tennis player and an even better team handball player, a sport his father, Jörg, played, and one that Germany dominates worldwide; had Dirk not found basketball with the help of the Dream Team, it’s easy to imagine that, with his height and athleticism, he would’ve represented Germany in team handball. Had that happened, he might today have a gold medal. And several million fewer dollars.

“For a long time I thought basketball was a woman’s sport because my sister and my mom played,” Nowitzki, the Dallas Mavericks star, told me in 2011. (His mother, Helga, was good enough to make the German women’s national team.) “That doesn’t make any sense, I know, but that’s how I thought. I started shooting around when I was maybe twelve or thirteen and then—boom!—the Olympics hit and everything changed. It made me really want to play basketball.”

Flashes of the Dream Team press conference and the Dream Team turning the opposition into chicken
Geschnetzeltes
were broadcast back to Germany. “I remember the other teams taking photos,” says Nowitzki. “I remember the Dream Team locked in the hotel with throngs of people outside. I remember how easy it was for them to dominate. And I’ll never forget the quote from Charles.” Nowitzki breaks into a big smile, and we say it together:
I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout Angola. But Angola’s in trouble
.

Like most young Germans, Nowitzki idolized his countryman Detlef Schrempf, who in the summer of 1992 had just completed his seventh NBA season and had led Germany into the Barcelona Olympics. But his favorite player was Pippen. “Scottie could do everything on the court, an all-around player, shot threes, posted up, passed, played defense. And it all looked so smooth. It really made an impression on me.”

Had Nowitzki ever told Pippen that?

“No,” says Dirk. “When I first came to the NBA my English wasn’t good and I was shy. So I never got a chance to tell him how important he was. Guess I’m telling him now.”

And so it went.
Boom
, as Nowitzki put it. Thousands of booms went off all around the world, the start of a revolution. In Argentina, Manu Ginobili, a fifteen-year-old with a wild, almost primitive athleticism, was watching. In Spain, twelve-year-old Pau Gasol, who had designs on being a doctor, and ten-year-old José Calderón, a budding point guard, were watching. In Turkey, two tall thirteen-year-olds, Mehmet Okur and Hedo Turkoglu, were watching. In France, ten-year-old Tony Parker, already among the quickest
youngsters in his country, was watching. In Brazil, a pair of ten-year-olds, big, strong Nene Hilario and speedy Leandro Barbosa, were watching. Closer to home, two young athletic prizes, sixteen-year-old Tim Duncan in the Bahamas, a swimmer, and eighteen-year-old Canadian Steve Nash, who was about to begin what few saw as a particularly illustrious hoops career at Santa Clara, were watching.

The whole world was watching. The television audience was not nearly as fragmented by cable as it is today, so the sport never had a wider viewership, never
will
have a wider viewership, at least in terms of audience share. An eager international army of print journalists spread the word, too. “Many foreign journalists were already invested in our game by Barcelona,” says Terry Lyons, the NBA’s international PR man at the time. “They would come to All-Star Games and Finals, and they just got it quicker than our guys did over here. They saw what it was about, how this could grow the game.”

“The Dream Team absolutely had massive impact,” says Donnie Nelson, the former assistant for the Lithuanian team who is now general manager of the 2011 champion Mavs. “You can’t really calibrate it, but you can imagine it. What effect did the Beatles coming to America have on music? It was the same kind of thing.”

“The Dream Team was the single biggest impact of any team in any sport in history,” says Lithuania’s Sarunas Marciulionis. “How many kids around the world started playing? How many said, ‘Oh, this is a great game. It is maybe better than soccer’?”

“We take a lot of research detail from our international players,” says the NBA’s Kim Bohuny, “and I can’t begin to tell you how many of them say they started watching basketball at the ’92 Olympics.”

By 2011, there were eighty-six international players from forty countries on NBA rosters, a number that no doubt will only increase. Of the first seven picks in the 2011 draft, four were international players, from Turkey, Lithuania, Serbia, and Congo.

To those people who loved the sound of a ringing cash register,
obviously, the revolution wasn’t all about the game. “Based on the impact of the Dream Team around the world,” says Rick Welts, the former NBA marketing genius now with the Golden State Warriors, “it moved our agenda ahead twenty years.” By “agenda” he means, of course, “bottom line.” If basketball didn’t supplant
futbol
as the world’s game after Barcelona, the NBA did turn into the world’s league and David Stern became the world’s commissioner.

That remains true today, the kick-start from ’92 the principal reason that the NBA makes one-tenth of its revenues (about $430 million) from international operations; the reason that NBA games are broadcast in 215 countries and territories (that number was eighty-five before the Dream Team) and translated into forty-six languages; the reason that three hundred members of the international media now cover the Finals; the reason that Beijing will probably have an NBA team before, say, San Diego will; the reason the NBA has an office in Africa, the next place that Stern wants to plant his flag; the reason that the commissioner did a grip-and-grin with Al Jazeera Sport during the 2011 NBA Finals. “Not sure how Stern’s Jewish owners feel about this,” said one courtside observer, “but nobody can ever say the guy is asleep on the job.”

It’s not just the league that raked in money. Remember that the NBA shares revenue with its players, so people such as Charles Grantham, a USA Basketball committee member who was also head of the National Basketball Players Association, also cheered the business uptick in the years that followed the Dream Team. “The Barcelona Olympics generated more international interest in the NBA, more international TV contracts and more revenue,” says Grantham, “so in the long run all NBA players benefitted from the Dream Team. It was a masterful triumph of timing. Unlike with other sports, the groundwork was there because basketball was at least being played in these other countries. It was the right time, the right place, and the right bunch of players to do it. Players talk about their ‘brand’ now. Well, I never heard anybody mention ‘brand’ until the Dream Team.”

As for the game of basketball, well, most of us in America had
it wrong. We failed to heed the sermons of the Inspector of Meat. We looked on at all those 40- and 50-point victims in Portland and Barcelona—gunned down, gutted, and field dressed—and we thought they would be discouraged. But for a whole younger class of competitors it had the opposite effect. Where others saw annihilation, the young foreign players saw revelation, a demystified process.

Yes, Michael Jordan operates at a level a hundred times above me, but I do the same things. I fake right, go left hard. I post up and shoot a fallback jumper. I sneak down the lane and double-team a big man
. And if Jordan was a bad example, owing to his extraordinary athleticism, there was John Stockton.
I’m his size. I can learn to run a team like him. And look at Patrick Ewing. I’m seven feet tall and I never realized I could go out to the corner and shoot jump shots
.

Also, the Dream Team’s whipsawed opponents were the ones who became the coaches and basketball missionaries back in their own countries, returning not only with stories and photographs but also with stratagems.

“True, back then we thought of the NBA as apart from us,” said Juan Antonio Orenga, who played for Spain in the 1992 and 1996 Games and is now assistant coach of the national team. “They were gods. It was like an impossible mission to play them.

“But it was a good mission. Everyone in basketball was waiting for this because players—if they are serious—want to play against the best no matter what the result. Only by playing the best can you become the best.”

We in the press, and the viewers back home, understandably want close games, tension, and some kind of buzzer-beating denouement. But whereas we looked down and saw scorched earth and carnage, the opponents saw lessons. Orenga remembers a major one from Barcelona.

“Before the game our coach [the respected Antonio Díaz-Miguel] tried to convince us that we could win,” says Orenga. “ ‘They are not great shooters and they will not be motivated,’ he told us. So out comes the Dream Team and they make everything
they shoot. And not motivated? Well, we were in a free-throw situation and I remember Scottie Pippen taking a look at the scoreboard and hollering to his teammates, ‘Hey, come on! We’re only up by 25 points. Come on!’

“It was not a fake. It was just that he thought they weren’t playing good enough. Next thing I know they are up 40, and I don’t even remember how. So I suddenly had the feeling, right out on the court, that they could do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. We were playing the game, but we were watching it, too.” Orenga smiles at the metaphor he had been forming in his mind. “We were like actors in a play. We wanted to get to that level ourselves.”

There had been the perception in the minds of some, too, that Americans were simply superior athletes, that their dominance was based primarily on size and speed. In other words, the same false conclusions held by some Americans were also held around the world. The Dream Team squelched that. “Yes, physically they were far above us,” said Orenga, “but they were far better than us in basketball, too. It showed how much work we had to do.”

The octogenarian Inspector of Meat, who never tires of studying the game, believes that the Dream Team altered what had been a flawed paradigm. “A lot of countries were doing it like the Soviets did it,” Stankovic told me recently. “Too much emphasis on physical preparation and being strong and not enough on how to dribble and shoot. What we learned from this first American pro team was the skill set.