Dream Team (7 page)

Those comments forced Magic to don the mantle of victim. He sighed heavily when presented with Riley’s opinions and stats. “I think it’s just going back to the same way it was before, to taking me for granted,” he said. “ ‘Magic? He’s
supposed
to get a triple-double. He’s
supposed
to have all those assists. He’s
supposed
to be leading the best team in basketball.’ Does it bother me? Yes, a little. It hurts my chances for recognition as an individual, no doubt about it.”

You never got sighs and I’m-a-victim from Bird. You might’ve gotten a fuck-you-I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it. But not sighs and I’m-a-victim.

The Lakers did indeed repeat that season, the first team in two decades to go back-to-back. But the strain cleaved the relationship
between Riley, who subsequently left after the 1989–90 season, and Magic, who was no longer so much the Sunshine Warrior.

Magic’s effulgent personality was a bit off-putting at times, but the man was a great, great player, the point guard on most everyone’s all-time team, his 6′9″ size giving him a clear advantage over the 6′5″ Oscar Robertson. One could argue to exhaustion about whether he or Bird was the greater player … and then you could keep arguing some more. But over the twelve years when he was on top of his game, Magic almost always put it on the line when it counted. The man finished with thirty triple-doubles in the playoffs, a record that might never be touched. (Bird had ten. Of the other Dream Teamers, only Charles Barkley and Scottie Pippen are on the list, with four each.) And since both Magic and Bird defined their careers by rings—I heard Bird say “win a championship” so often that it began to sound like one word,
winachampionship
—my contention is that Magic had the better career. He had five rings, Bird had three. Yes, Johnson had a great supporting cast, but so did Bird.

Purely as a basketball player, Jordan was better than either of them. (More on that later.) But Magic comes out on top in a singular aspect of the game—being influential on offense without needing to score. Hundreds of cases support that, but none better than this: in Game 6 of the 1982 Finals, Magic, who would win the series MVP, took exactly four shots yet totally dominated the game. He scored 13 points, grabbed 13 rebounds, and handed out 13 assists in a 114–104 win that closed out the Philadelphia 76ers.

Johnson did two things better than any other player who ever lived. One was his ability to control and conduct the half-court offense. Owing to his height, he ruled from on high, his court vision unobscured, like a lighthouse operator scanning the horizon for fog. And those who tried to steal the ball from him met with a strong arm bar. In effect, the defense could never pressure the quarterback. Second, he executed full-speed, completely-under-control spins that weren’t for show but, rather, for eluding the defense. He gets very little credit for that.

The rivalry between the Lakers and the Celtics (and therefore
between Magic and Bird) was not nearly as protracted as one might believe. Their only truly epic mano-a-mano battle was in the 1984 Finals, when the Celtics won in seven games, a memory that still furrows Magic’s brow. By the time that Magic and Bird met again in the 1987 Finals, they had become more like bicoastal teammates, selling sneakers together and singing mutual hosannas, and by 1992, when they co-captained the greatest team ever, they were marching lockstep into history.

Chris Mullin was comfortable being alone. The first sport at which he was proficient back in his native Flatbush was swimming, stroking away in the local Boys Club pool in the early-morning, chlorine-scented fog that hid the world. He was a sprinter—“a 25-meter guy,” in his words—and probably would’ve gone on to be a really good one.

But he liked being part of a team, too, so when the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) coach at St. Thomas Aquinas told him he had to give up swimming if he was going to be really good in basketball, he said okay. He enjoyed the solitary aspects of basketball, too, and that’s why he got good. “I liked being in the gym alone,” Mullin told me recently. “No, I
loved
it. I’d put a tape player or radio near the floor, put on some Springsteen, really blast it, shoot it, get your own rebound, shoot it, get your own. I loved that. Or I’d go full-court thirty minutes by myself. I had no problem with that.”

So he never minded drinking alone, either.

Drinking was part of the family culture. His dad, Rod, a customs inspector at Kennedy Airport, was an alcoholic—a gentle one, but an alcoholic nonetheless. The mood swings scared Chris a little bit, but basically Rod always came out on the positive side. He was a “good drunk,” never a “mean drunk.”

Chris could drink at home, but he could be a club guy, too. Throughout his gilded years at St. John’s, 1982 through 1985, when players such as Mullin, Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing, and Villanova’s Ed Pinckney put the Big East on the map and sent three teams to the Final Four, Chris could be spotted in New York City bars, always part of the crowd but never making a scene, the quiet star leaning on the bar. But if he had to drink alone, back in his room, he could do that, too.

It had become easier to drink alone after the Golden State Warriors drafted Mullin with the seventh pick in 1985. Oakland, California, was a world away for a kid from Queens who was the epitome of old-school New York basketball. First and most basic, he could shoot. “I started doing it in my yard and took to it,” he says. “I just
grabbed
it, like a golfer grabs a great stroke. One day I made twenty, so the next day I had to make twenty-one. Then it became more shots and more makes.” As a shooter, Mullin was a prodigy, the way some kids are prodigies at chess or the violin. He won the national Hoop Shoot title when he was ten.

Mullin also learned the rudimentary geometry of basketball—the angles, the jab steps and quick cuts that would get him open. He loved playing one-on-one, then two-on-two, then three-on-three, the last of these the most fun because you could screen away, flare, always get yourself open. “I was taught how to
negotiate
the other guys on the court,” says Mullin. And he knew the physics of basketball, too, all the spins and caroms and applied English, sending up more junk than Fred Sanford, much of it ending up in the basket.

“I’d go into the city and play some street ball,” says Mullin, “and that would help me some. But then, back home, my CYO coach would go
‘nhhh’
[Mullin makes a sound like a buzzer going off] and
get me back to fundamentals. So my game became a combination of the two.”

Fundamentals and team play were not what was going on in Oakland, California, circa 1985. Mullin came to a team defined by a big center named Joe Barry Carroll, who existed primarily as a punch line for
New York Post
columnist Peter Vecsey, who memorably rechristened him “Joe Barely Cares.” And Oakland itself was disorienting, three thousand miles away from his family, his longtime girlfriend, Liz Connolly (later to be his wife), who had worked on the St. John’s stat crew, the unspeakably bad sweaters of his beloved college coach, Lou Carnesecca, and the overall warm familiarity of New Yawk ball. Oakland was a different culture—a drug culture, not a beer culture, and widely recognized as the cocaine capital of the NBA, which at the time was saying something. I remember Atlanta Hawks coach Mike Fratello deciding to keep his team in Los Angeles for an extra couple of days instead of staying in Oakland for a game with the Warriors. “I’d rather have them fuck themselves to death in L.A.,” Fratello reasoned, “than spend one night in Oakland.”

Cocaine was never Mullin’s problem. Beer was. He drank it in bars and he drank it alone, and he grew heavier and slower and less of a player in the eyes of coach Don Nelson, who had expected so much more of him.

In early December 1987, Mullin, the kid who would shoot a thousand jumpers alone in a darkened gymnasium, missed a couple of practices, and Nelson suspended him. Nellie knew what was going on from years of missed practices with other players, and he gave Mullin a message:
Get yourself to rehab
. Mullin had motivation. He knew that his father had given up the booze years earlier when he came to realize that it was doing himself and his family no good. But Chris was resistant. He said no to Nelson, they argued some more, and then Nelson got a report from a fan that Mullin was out boozing it up after a game. Nelson confronted him again, and finally Mullin said yes and entered an alcohol rehab clinic.

Back home, the
New York Post
, which once celebrated Chris
Mullin as the ultimate playground star, a kid with both street smarts and textbook fundamentals, put Mullin’s face over a Heineken bottle in reporting the story. He was a long, long way from the Olympic glory he had experienced three years earlier, in 1984, and which he would find again four years hence.

The rehab part of the Mullin story is not dramatic, not Lohanian in any way, shape, or form. Mullin went in dirty and came out clean. He says there was no relapse and no return, and I never met anyone who believes differently. Mullin just beat it, and his career turned around immediately. It was that sudden. He averaged 26.5 points per game in his first booze-free season (1988–89) and 25.1 and 25.7 in his next two, the ones that mattered when Dream Team candidates were being identified.

“It seems like maybe there should be a lot more to tell,” Mullin said to me years later. “But … you know, I always wanted to beat it. I wanted to be a great player and booze was keeping me from being one. Now? Being sober is like a blessing I’d like to share. I’d like to tell everybody how good I feel.”

He grew up between two worlds, a self-described “oddity.” He’d be invited to a party, and when spin-the-bottle came up, someone would say, “Okay, David, you can be the referee.”

David Robinson still feels that sting. “ ‘Yeah, well, okay,’ I used to think,” said Robinson. “ ‘They’re cool with me.’ But only to a point.”

They
were the white kids, the ones with whom he shared the advanced math classes and the elevated SAT scores. Among that company Robinson hit the social glass ceiling in his high school years.

Then he would go to the playground and the basketball camps, and it would be time to deal with the black kids, and he wasn’t comfortable there, either. “It was fun up to a certain point,” says Robinson, “but we might be talking trash and … well, if you speak a certain way and act a certain way, they’ll call you an Uncle Tom, tell you that you’re not black enough.”

The trash talk, at least the tone of it, never felt right to Robinson, which is easy to understand when you learn that his father, Ambrose Robinson, an imposing naval officer, used to open the dictionary to a random page to test his son’s spelling. “Why are we doing this, Dad?” David would ask, and his father, a sonar technician and an E-8, one step below the highest rank an enlisted man could reach, would answer that it was to keep him “focused.” When they weren’t doing that, they were assembling small televisions. You know, the usual father-son stuff.

Robinson relates all this two decades later in a tone best described as wistful, and I suggest that it couldn’t have been that bad, since at the very least he could always play, dominate the competition.

“Not when I was young,” Robinson answers quickly. “I wasn’t any good. It wasn’t like I had basketball to pick me up and get me in good standing. I didn’t do anything until my senior year of high school.”

By then Robinson had grown to 6′7″ and made enough noise to be recruited by schools including Virginia Military Institute and George Washington, which were near the suburban Maryland area where he grew up. It was practically ordained, though, that he would get an appointment to the United States Naval Academy.

He flourished at Annapolis and continued to grow, eventually reaching 7′0″. He looked all of seven feet, too, since he walked with textbook posture, his bearing a metaphor for the shoulders-straight, eyes-forward way he tried to live his life. The nation began to hear about his college board scores, his aptitude for gymnastics (he could do backflips and handsprings, and he could walk the length of a basketball court on his hands), and his punctilious manner; his public comments were unfailingly lucid, literate, and carefully chosen.