Dream Team (46 page)

Remember that there was a fairly significant original Dream Team presence on the ’96 team, thus demonstrating that the whole of the ’92 team was greater than its individual parts. I stand behind no man in my affection for Sir Charles. But Sir Charles as team leader and Michael/Magic/Larry as team leader are two vastly different things.

“This is probably sad,” says Grant Hill, “but Charles was our leader. He was probably the best player and the most natural guy to do it except for Scottie. But Scottie led more by example.” Hill didn’t mean
sad
as in “tragic”; he meant more like
sad
as in, well, “tragicomic.”

Barkley saw himself as a legit leader, and to some degree he was. But somewhere in his heart of hearts, he knows that he was not the perfect man for a leadership job, not on a team that is to be judged by history.

In the gold medal final in 1996, Yugoslavia led the United States by 7 points in the first half, was down by only 5 at halftime, and was trailing by only a single point, 51–50, with 14:03 left in the game. The Americans got their act together after that and won 95–69.

But the chipping away had started. At the Sydney Games in 2000, the United States beat Russia by only 15 points, Lithuania by only 2, and France by only 10 in the gold medal game. A disastrous sixth-place finish in the 2002 World Championships in Indianapolis augured failure in the 2004 Games in Athens, and failure is exactly what happened there. The backcourt of Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury couldn’t guard an arthritic llama. Tim Duncan was disinterested and disinclined to be the leader he should’ve been, and callow stars such as LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and Carmelo Anthony were ill-prepared to lead in his stead. Larry Brown, the coach, saw what was coming early and, as is his wont, tried to deflect blame away from himself and onto the team. The United States got blown out by Puerto Rico—
Puerto Rico!
—in the first game and won only the bronze medal.

To a world that hadn’t been paying close attention, it seemed sudden and cataclysmic. But that wasn’t the case. It was the product of gradual erosion in the American product and an exponential improvement in an international game that had been catalyzed by the Dream Team. Athens forced the United States to take seriously the idea of replacing the haphazard let’s-see-what-we-got-every-four-years approach, which had been the operative model, with a structured national team. Veteran executive Jerry Colangelo became USA Basketball’s CEO, and Krzyzewski, who years ago had learned so much as a Dream Team assistant, became the head coach.

“Barcelona was so important for my development as a coach,” Krzyzewski told me. “I came back with a greater love for the game because I hadn’t realized that NBA players could love the game that deeply. There is a certain percentage of college guys who believe with all their heart that we love the game more than anybody, certainly more than the NBA people. That was disproven by the Dream Team.”

During the ’92 Games, a veteran Brazilian guard named Marcel de Souza made this observation: “I will never play like Scottie Pippen, and my son will never play like Scottie Pippen. But perhaps my grandson will play like Scottie Pippen.”

He was too conservative with that prediction. In the 2011 NBA playoffs, Dirk Nowitzki, that wide-eyed observer of the 1992 Dream Team, averaged 28 points a game, made almost 50 percent of his shots, converted 94 percent of his free throws, and won the Finals MVP award as he led his Dallas Mavericks to the NBA championship. All those not-that-long-ago perceptions about European players—
they’re too soft, they don’t grow up with the game like we do, they don’t have the discipline, they don’t have the athleticism
—were dashed on the rocks of Nowitzki’s exquisite play.

De Tocqueville wrote: “In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.” We are still waiting, one supposes, for the end of this revolution begun by the Dream Team, but we have certainly seen where it is heading and how much quicker it moved than most of us originally thought. But not the Inspector of Meat. No, not him, not this perceptive, far-seeing man who came to these shores nearly four decades ago to learn the lessons of an American game.

“I was not surprised,” says Boris Stankovic. “I was not surprised at all.”

After I interviewed Larry Bird in February 2012, something he told me has stuck with me. It concerned the last game he played for the Boston Celtics, Sunday, May 17, 1992, at Richfield Coliseum, in Summit County, about halfway between Cleveland and Akron. The Cavs routed the Celtics 122–104, a Game 7 playoff victory that sent Boston home and Cleveland into the Eastern Conference finals, where (of course) they would be drummed out by Jordan and the Bulls, who went on to win the championship.

Bird’s back was killing him in that game. He played 33 painful minutes and took only nine shots and, most tellingly, never got to the free throw line. He had almost nothing left and his first Dream Team practice was less than seven weeks away.

“I walked off that floor and I said to myself, ‘This is it,’ ” Bird told me. “Maybe I had thought it before. But now I knew for sure.”

After that game, we clustered around his locker, trying to figure
out when to ask the question that was on everyone’s mind, see if we could get an exclusive. Bird would’ve been most likely to reveal his decision to the
Boston Globe
’s Bob Ryan, but he told Bob: “I can’t answer that right now. I’ve got the Olympics ahead of me.”

Still, Bird said he felt peace on that afternoon. “It just felt right, ending it there, in Cleveland.”

“I’m confused,” I said. “Why did it feel ‘right’? Why was Cleveland special?”

“See, I loved that building, Richfield,” he answered. “The second game I ever played in the NBA [in 1979] we pulled up there and I couldn’t believe it. Omigod, there was this beautiful, big arena in the middle of a cornfield. It’s what I had always dreamed of.” He nodded his head and smiled. “A big arena in a cornfield.”

I went back to check Bird’s memory, and he was of course correct. It was the second game of a season in which he would lead one of the most remarkable turnarounds in NBA history, a rookie orchestrating a Celtics revival that led to 61 wins after a 29-win season in 1978–79. In that memorable (to him anyway) first game at Richfield, he had 28 points in a 139–117 Boston rout.

“I usually played well there,” he said. “Something about it just felt right.”

Bird is ever the realist, rarely caught up in hype or given to bursts of sentimentality. Alone of the Dream Teamers, he expressed this caveat about all the Dream Team bonhomie: “If we would’ve been together another two weeks, we would’ve had some problems. You could sense it. You could hear it. ‘Oh, man, I only got to play fifteen minutes.’ ‘Oh, man, Chuck didn’t use me enough.’ I always told everybody, ‘Damn, it doesn’t matter. We’re winning by forty points. Hell, Michael Jordan’s only playing twenty minutes.’ ” Bird smiled. “Yup, I was glad it was over when it was.”

While it was going on, though, the experience meant as much to Bird as it did to anyone, and he enjoyed poring through the memories.

“I’ll never forget [Dream Team assistant] P. J. Carlesimo coming up to me after I came out of one game and saying, ‘Man, Larry, I didn’t realize you could rebound like that.’ I said, ‘P.J., I know you’re only a college coach, but you must have a TV, right?’ The guys got on P.J. something terrible after that.”

I ask for his memories of the Greatest Game Nobody Saw in Monte Carlo. “The talk started early because we figured we were going to scrimmage, and this might be the last one before we went to Barcelona,” Bird remembers. “So there was all this chatter on the bus, Magic and Michael, of course, but I wasn’t paying much attention because I didn’t think I was going to be playing. My back was killing me that day.

“Now we get there, and I climb on the stationary bike and that was where the hell I was going to stay, and all of a sudden I gotta go the whole time because we only got ten guys. I just wish I had been feeling better that day, and if I have one regret from the whole experience it’s that I was never in top shape.”

I ask him about the memory of his steal from Magic and how Jordan remembers it as the key play of the game. Bird smiles, and you can tell he recalls every detail, but it is part of his code that he won’t gloat about getting the best of Magic.

That’s when I tell him about Jordan’s opinion that the whole “back to ’79 thing,” (Jordan’s words) is a torch held highest by Magic. Bird swats that away, too. “Hey, it is what it is. You know Earvin as well as I do. He likes to talk. But we came in together, we played against each other, and the history is real and it’s been told millions of times. I would never run from it.”

Years ago, when his capacity for nostalgia was lower, Bird might’ve run from
Magic/Bird
, the Broadway play that was due onstage in 2012 (after this book went to press). But Bird is fully invested, and he is revved up over the opening when we talked. He has read the script and even suggested a few changes. “When I’m involved in something I just read my own part to see if it’s accurate,” Bird told me. “Whatever Magic says happened from his viewpoint, hey, that’s fine with me.”

Bird’s response surprised me when I asked him if he, like so
many others, took away any lessons from the Olympics. I expected he would say something like,
Sheet, I already knew everything these guys did
. But he didn’t.

“I remember watching how Michael and Scottie played together,” Bird says. “Michael would always play the point guard and put pressure on him, and I’d just be sitting there watching. Then Scottie would come, and next thing you know they’ve turned the guy and he would just throw the ball over his head. Anywhere. Just to get rid of it. The pressure that Michael put on these kids? Man, I could’ve got fifteen steals a game if I played with him.

“You know, winning by forty isn’t fun. Maybe to some guys but not to this team. But watching Michael and Scottie together out there, suckering these guys into a corner, or right before the half-court line … that was fun.”

Like almost every other Dream Teamer, Bird stood—still stands—in awe of Jordan’s abilities. “He’d play thirty-six holes of golf, and we’d be heading to the bus and here comes Michael with his clubs. But he’d be back two minutes later ready to play. The energy that man had … never saw anything like it.

“That’s why, when Magic started talking, deep down, he had to know that Michael had passed us. I mean, Michael was the best player in our league before Barcelona. I had no problem with it. I had my run. I said to Magic, you gotta be out of your mind if you think you can still compete with this guy. Let it go, man, let it go. Compete against him like you’re going to kick his ass, but realize it’s his time.”

I wondered if Bird ranked the Dream Team experience as highly as did Magic, who put it at the top of his achievements.

“It’s completely different,” he answered. “I thought it was special in high school when I played against the Russians. In college I got to play in the World Games. Each of those was unique—they just
felt
different—because of the international connection. It was the same thing with the Dream Team except on a much, much higher level. You just can’t compare winning a gold medal to an NBA championship. They are both great in their own way.”

Bird does not display his gold medal. But, then, he doesn’t display
anything, his fingers bereft of championship rings. “The rings don’t mean anything to me,” says Bird. “Now, the banners in Boston Garden? They mean something because they’ll be there forever.” But don’t think that his gold medal is insignificant to him. He knows right where his medal rests, and every four years he takes it out of a box for some show-and-tell.

“I’ll take it to high schools just so kids can touch it, leave it there a few days, then get somebody to take it somewhere else,” said Bird. “I took it to my kids’ school and to my own high school back in French Lick. Just so kids, when they’re talking about the Olympics, they get to see what the prize is, what it really means. I would’ve liked to have touched gold when I was a kid.”

I ask him what he remembers most about the Dream Team experience. He doesn’t even have to stop to think about it. He brings up his father, Joe Bird, that dark soul who took his own life and never got to see the boy he raised become one of the immortals.

“When I was a kid, my dad was big on the Olympics,” said Bird. “He’d turn it on—we only got about two stations—and my dad would hear the national anthem and he’d turn to us and say, ‘The United States won gold.’ He didn’t care whether it was track and field or gymnastics or whatever. He just cared that the United States won.

“So when we stood on that platform in Barcelona to get our gold medals, that was the most exciting thing for me. I was thinking back to my dad and remembering that when he heard that anthem he was happy. And I was happy, too.”

Talking to Bird has a way of simplifying things. Our games, and our Olympic Games, have a way of getting wrapped up in money and bureaucracy and politics and petty squabbles. But sometimes they’re about the simplest things, about an arena that arises like magic out of a cornfield and about fathers and sons and what they mean to one another.