Dream Team (8 page)

But even as he swatted away shots and got Navy to the regional finals of the NCAA tournament, there was resistance to Robinson. The basketball public looked at him the way the black kids used to back at Osbourn Park High in Manassas, Virginia. Nobody could be
that
smart and also tough. Yes, pro players such as Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson had also come from stable two-parent families, but, from the beginning they demonstrated a wolfish rapacity on the court that Robinson didn’t have. Plus they weren’t nearly as smart. Nobody was as smart as David.

Georgetown’s John Thompson was selected to be the 1988 U.S. Olympic basketball coach, which didn’t mean that he was particularly popular among the hierarchy of ABAUSA. Thompson didn’t have much international experience and didn’t care about studying the game beyond our shores, something he had in common with many American basketball coaches at the time. He was independent to the point of arrogance. He brooked no interference from officials and defied them by making Mary Fenlon, Georgetown’s academic advisor, an assistant Olympic coach.

Still, he was the predictable Olympic choice, having established the Hoyas as a national power through dint of pure will and a knack for getting the most out of the tough kids who came to play for him. There was a clear line of coaching succession within ABAUSA, almost as rigid as the monarchial line in Great Britain. The Olympic coaching job was just
conveyed
upon the most likely candidate, the one who had paid his dues. North Carolina’s Dean Smith in 1976, Providence’s Dave Gavitt in 1980 (he was named although the boycott kept the United States home), and Bob Knight in 1984—that’s how it went. You signed on, you formed your team from the best available collegiate players, and you kicked ass.

When David Robinson, fresh from two years as a civil engineering officer at a submarine base in Georgia, reported to Thompson for Olympic duty, he had already been the first pick in the 1987 draft and had already earned the sobriquet “the Admiral,” though in point of fact the highest rank he attained was lieutenant. The Admiral told Thompson that he would probably be out of his rhythm for a while considering that while on naval duty he had not scrimmaged against anyone taller than six-feet-one. “But, Coach,
I’m going to work hard, just like I did in college, and I’ll become a dominant player again,” Robinson told Thompson.

The coach looked him over and said: “Son, you’re not going to make this team.” Thompson then went through the list of what he considered Robinson’s weaknesses. “You can’t handle the ball, you can’t pass, your basketball skills are minimal.”

What Thompson really had against Robinson was that he didn’t see him as tough enough. “He thought I was a spoiled, not-from-the-hood type of guy,” says Robinson. “Coach Thompson likes those guys that …” Robinson stops, probably trying not to sound racist himself since Thompson’s teams were the victim of stereotyping, though maybe not as often as Thompson thought. “The type of guys who would run through a wall if he asked them,” Robinson continues. “But, see, I’m the type of guy who says, ‘Why are we running through this wall?’ ”

Robinson eventually made the team—Thompson wasn’t crazy enough to leave off a player who even before his first NBA game was one of the most multitalented big men in the world. But the burden of Olympic success fell most heavily upon Robinson … and fall it did.

At that point in time, the rosters of the Soviets and the Yugoslavs were filled with players who would go down as their nation’s all-time best. They were extremely well coached, too, the Yugoslavs by a strategic master named Ranko Zeravica, the Soviets by the immortal Alexander Gomelsky, about whom someone should make a movie.

Gomelsky, who died in 2005, was known as the “Silver Fox.” He was a mysterious character, rumored to be a Russian secret agent, which is possibly true, although the KGB hated him, too. No one ever knew exactly what the Silver Fox was up to. He was supposed to coach the national team at the Munich Olympics in 1972, but the state confiscated his passport, fearing that, as a Jew, he would defect to Israel. He was always involved in this deal or that deal—for
a while in the early 1980s he was suspended from coaching for alleged smuggling—yet managed to be the major figure in the rich history of Soviet basketball.

Two days before a semifinal showdown in Seoul against Robinson and the United States, Gomelsky began visiting the Soviet players for personal pep talks. Sarunas Marciulionis, the Lithuanian star, remembers three visits from the Silver Fox, all of them with the same message:
You have to believe in yourself. The Americans are not gods. They are only college players
. Plus, the Soviets, at least players such as Marciulionis, Arvydas Sabonis, and Alexander Volkov, had an extra incentive:
Win the gold medal
, they were promised, either implicitly or obliquely,
and you can leave the country to play in the NBA
. “We considered the Olympics our freedom ticket,” says Marciulionis.
That
is serious motivation.

Then, too, Gomelsky was prepared for Thompson’s stifling press, which had intimidated and shut down so many collegiate opponents. Gomelsky worked on little else during the practice sessions in Seoul, insisting on an elaborate set of screens to free Marciulionis and get open shots for players such as Sabonis and Volkov. He didn’t want backcourt turnovers to be converted into dunks. “Don’t let them fast-break dunk,” Gomelsky told his charges. “When they do that, their arms turn into wings.” The man knew his way around a phrase.

The Soviets won 82–76, thus becoming somewhat the Darwin’s finches of worldwide basketball, the marker of the evolutionary changes that had come upon us. Unlike 1972, this loss to the Soviets was no fluke, no give-’em-three-chances-to-win. The United States just got beat.

The Admiral averaged a respectable 12.8 points and 6.8 rebounds in Seoul, but he didn’t dominate, didn’t snarl his way through the competition. And he took it very hard. “I thought, obviously, I had missed my one and only chance to get a gold medal,” he says today. “And it was an embarrassment because I thought we were good enough. The ’72 team was robbed. We just got beat. And man, I grew up with the Olympics. I loved the Olympics. This was a big, big black mark.”

In the United States, the 1988 team is still looked upon as an abject failure. That is wrongheaded. With a different approach, yes, the United States
could’ve
won, but its defeat wasn’t necessarily an upset. That was the message conveyed by anyone who had his eyes open.

Gold medal: the Soviet Union. Silver medal: Yugoslavia. Bronze medal: the United States.

We’re number three! We’re number three!

Nobody in charge ever wanted to see that again. But, seemingly, there was nothing that could be done about it.

Robinson was disappointed and discouraged that he had been blamed. But he wasn’t all that surprised. He had played on touring U.S. teams before and seen the growth in European basketball, his nimble mind uncovering the fact that, though he himself was athletically blessed, there was more to this game than running and jumping.

And there was more to life than basketball. It was around this time that Robinson began feeling the first stirrings of discontent with his life’s path, not the basketball so much but the spiritual part of it. He felt empty inside, and he began searching for something else.

On the morning of May 7, 1989, I came down to breakfast at a suburban Cleveland hotel, the same one at which the Chicago Bulls were staying for their semifinal Eastern Conference series against the Cleveland Cavaliers. The deciding Game 5 was that afternoon. At breakfast I chatted up coach Doug Collins and his assistants, Johnny Bach and Tex Winter, both of whom spun more stories than Scheherazade, and I even collected a quote or two from Jordan. That sort of impromptu meeting rarely happens these days. While reporters may graze away at the make-your-own-waffles station, players are eating in a private room or skipping breakfast altogether. But the Bulls in those days were a young team—Jordan, Pippen, Horace Grant—and they made their own waffles.

Jordan was in his fifth season, engaged in the heavy-lifting process of trying to get a championship ring. He had no peer as a player, but there was still a resistance to him. Was he a
winner
, like Bird and
Magic? He had become the individual face of the NBA, so seemingly comfortable in the spotlight that few people remembered that he had once been a tongue-tied kid who in 1985 was so nervous that he couldn’t get through his lines in his first McDonald’s commercial.

Although Jordan was cordial, he was not particularly enamored of me at that moment. About seven weeks earlier I had come to Chicago to do a story on Jordan, and he invited me to his suburban townhouse to hang out with him and his boys. One of the delightful aspects of Jordan’s life at that point was how close he had remained to his boyhood chums, who included Adolph Shiver, Fred Whitfield, and Fred Kearns. It was a variation on the customary leader-of-the-pack syndrome that so often gets star athletes into trouble. Some athletes cannot or will not disentangle themselves from their past and end up giving too much money and too much power to guys who shouldn’t be around. But Jordan’s circle consisted of good guys and solid citizens, the whole scene a kind of early
Entourage
, African American style, without the Cristal and the blow. (Whitfield is today president of the Charlotte Bobcats, the franchise partially owned and run by Jordan.)

At the end of the afternoon, a young lady, Juanita Vanoy—who later became Mrs. Michael Jordan, and, years after that, the very rich ex–Mrs. Michael Jordan when she received about $168 million in a divorce settlement—came down the stairs holding a baby. I was astonished because I hadn’t heard that Jordan was a father, and we spent the next thirty minutes billing and cooing over the kid.

Later that night, at the game at Chicago Stadium, Tim Hallam, the Bulls’ PR chief, collared me and said: “You know, Michael expects that you won’t write that he has a son.” Tim was just doing his job.

“But, Tim, I saw the baby,” I answered. “We talked about diapers and stuff like that. He didn’t say anything about not writing it.”

“Well, he told me to tell you that. A couple other guys know it and haven’t written it.”

To me, it was a journalistic dilemma, not a moral one. The list of human beings who have had children out of wedlock is quite long and includes friends and relatives of mine. What did I care? But I didn’t see how I could hide the fact that Jordan had a baby—what was he going to do, store Jeffrey Michael in a closet?—so I put it in that week’s story as the last paragraph.

I was criticized in Chicago both for burying it and for writing it at all. And Jordan let it be known that he was upset. But those were different times, when détente was possible between journalist and subject, and he let it go.

Anyway, at breakfast that morning in Cleveland, the Bulls left, and a teenager stealthily approached the table and grabbed a utensil.

“Look!” he shouted. “Michael Jordan’s fork! Michael Jordan ate with this fork!” He stuck it in his pocket and walked out of the restaurant.

I’ve thought about that fork from time to time. Does he still have it in a collection somewhere? Is it on eBay? Encased in glass at his law office?

When you hung around Jordan, your story quite often almost wrote itself. A year earlier during a visit to Chicago, I was waiting for Jordan after practice, and he told me to jump into his car so he could dodge the autograph hounds. As we cruised through the parking lot of a shopping center in his Porsche 911 Turbo, two cars just about cut him off, forcing Jordan to brake. A man jumped from one car holding a sweatsuit to which he had affixed an Air Jordan logo, while two autograph seekers leaped from the other. Jordan dutifully signed his name and took the sweatsuit guy’s card, all of that theater supplying invaluable material for a journalist.

As for the fork, well, it became a collectible after Jordan stuck a metaphorical one in the Cavaliers. That was the day he made an impossible double-clutch jump shot (his 43rd and 44th points of the game), with 6′7″ Cavaliers defender Craig Ehlo hanging all over him, to give the Bulls an absurdly dramatic 101–100 victory and the series. My favorite part of the clip, which you’ve seen about a
thousand times, is Ehlo wistfully throwing up his hands, as if to say,
This just isn’t fair
. Which it wasn’t.

Before the Bulls broke from the huddle, Jordan had whispered to his teammate Craig Hodges, “I’m going to make it.” The Bulls frequently ran what Bach called “the Archangel Offense,” defined by the assistant as “getting the ball to Jordan and saying, ‘Save us, Michael.’ ” After this game, Doug Collins, who looked more exhausted than Jordan, said this about the play, “That was the give-the-ball-to-Michael-and-everybody-else-get-the-fuck-out-of-the-way play.” Jordan cracked up but looked embarrassed that Collins had used the F-word. Indeed, at that time, in casual conversation Jordan would say things like “Eff you” and “that MF-er.” There was an innocence about him, and I always thought that it might never have been better for him than it was on that day in Cleveland, his star rising, his future bright and unclouded, his breakfast utensils sacred tokens.