Dream Team (9 page)

In April 1989, about a month before Jordan made his oft-replayed shot over Ehlo, the Inspector of Meat got his wish. Boris Stankovic had never wavered in his crusade to get open competition into the Olympics, not even after his first attempt at passing the resolution, at the FIBA Congress in Madrid in 1986, failed. Getting the NBA into FIBA had by this time taken on a pragmatic aspect for Stankovic, too: After the 1980 Moscow Games, the Olympics boycotted by the United States, FIBA had been hemorrhaging money and was heading for bankruptcy. It needed both the sizzle and the steak that would come with the addition of NBA players.

So at a specially convened FIBA Congress in Munich, which had been preceded by much behind-the-scenes arm-twisting, a resolution passed that allowed NBA players to participate in the Olympics. The vote was 56–13, the United States and the Soviet Union being among the nay votes.

“We knew it was going to pass,” said Commissioner David Stern, “but we were absolutely not enthusiastic about it. It was sort of like, ‘Okay, what do we do now?’ ”

That’s a slight exaggeration, but it’s absolutely true that no full-scale mobilization was under way at the NBA offices in mid-town Manhattan. In fact, the vote got relatively scant attention in the United States because many observers believed there was no practical application. Nobody would ever get NBA players to go to the Olympics. Among the most skeptical was college hoops commentator Billy Packer, who said that NBA owners would not let their players play, and anyway, selfish NBA players would not want to give up their vacation. The late Al McGuire, a commentator of whom you couldn’t make any sense but whom you liked to hear talk anyway, said the same thing. Besides, this was spring, the opening of Major League Baseball, and, more than ever, there was Michael Jordan. Who could think of something that might or might not happen at the Olympics three years in the future?

In one corner of the United States, however, there was considerable interest. Immediately after the Final Four in Seattle, a group of men from ABAUSA, the body that governed amateur basketball in the United States, flew to Munich for the FIBA meeting. Their official role was to cast a no vote on the resolution, a vote they all knew was pointless because it was obvious that the Inspector of Meat would not have called the meeting if he didn’t have the votes.

Dave Gavitt had just been elected ABAUSA president and, as such, would be the official voter. He voted no, but what he really wanted to say was yes. By that time, Gavitt had already paid a visit to the NBA offices, where he told Stern and Granik: “Look, we’re going to vote no, but it’s going to pass. You better get ready to decide how you want to handle this.”

Stern had an idea: the NBA would simply buy the Olympic team from ABAUSA.

“It’s not for sale,” Gavitt told him. “It’s the country’s team. What you need to do is become part of ABAUSA, and I promise you that in putting together the committee we will protect you and
make sure you have the majority of representation coming from the NBA.”

It was Gavitt’s insistence that the NBA buy in lock, stock, and barrel that made all the difference in the end. While others feared the coming of the monolithic NBA, Gavitt saw the advantages. For one thing, the amateur organization—which depended primarily on funding from the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) and a half-assed contract with Converse that was worth about $300,000, a sum that Nike was tucking into the soles of Jordan’s shoes by then—was nearly broke. The NBA, its Michael/Magic/Larry renaissance still building, was awash in cash. Gavitt suggested that if NBA Properties could step in and do the marketing, everyone would benefit. Stern said okay.

In amateur basketball circles, Gavitt had done it all, seen it all. He had been a successful and respected coach and athletic director, one of the masterminds behind the creation of the Big East Conference, and, most impressive, the moving force behind the expansion of the NCAA basketball tournament into a billion-dollar bonanza. Soon after the amateur vote, the Boston Celtics would come calling, naming Gavitt CEO. Like many college guys who went to the pros in some capacity—Rick Pitino, Jerry Tarkanian, John Calipari, Lon Kruger, Leonard Hamilton, Tim Floyd, and that is not the end of the list—Gavitt would find that jump a long one, Beamonesque in its difficulty. But that would have no bearing on his importance in what was to become a sea change in Olympic basketball. “In many ways, Dave was the classic college guy,” says Russ Granik, “but he was also someone who saw the whole picture.”

About basketball, Gavitt was both visionary and romantic. He died at 73 in September of 2011, but in 2010, during a memorable lunch in his hometown, Providence, he conjured up a long-ago evening from the mid-1970s, when he was coaching a college all-star team in Athens. “We were playing a night game and there must’ve been thirty thousand people there and the Acropolis was in the background with a full moon,” Gavitt remembered. “I had chills.”

Gavitt never spoke from a bully pulpit. He was smooth, a
work-the-room diplomat who played both sides and from the beginning knew which side was going to win. Still, Gavitt had to mute his enthusiasm for the idea of open competition, for he was, after all, heading a group that was observing its own extinction.

“For me it was kind of simple,” Gavitt told me. “I felt that people in our country should have the same rights to represent their country as everyone else. I never bothered to lobby the college community with that opinion because they were squarely against it. They were against pros playing in the Olympics. Period.”

After Gavitt had cast the no vote on behalf of the United States and the resolution had passed, he asked for the floor. “Now that we’ve done this,” Gavitt told the FIBA reps, “you need to realize a few things and help us. We’re dealing with a powerful organization in the NBA, and we’re going to have to get your cooperation with dates and things like that.”

There were questions from other nations about how the United States would get its NBA players to participate—it wasn’t only Packer and McGuire who thought the idea of pros giving up their summer was folly. But Stankovic would have none of it. “That’s not our problem,” the Inspector of Meat told the delegates sternly. “That’s the problem of the United States. What we have to do is the right thing, and then let them work it out.”

After the vote, the U.S. delegation had a layover in Amsterdam on their way back. Gavitt had dinner with Bill Wall and Tom McGrath, the executive and assistant executive director, respectively, of ABAUSA. The future was uncertain, particularly for Wall, who had run the organization since the mid-1970s. That’s when ABAUSA was created to supplant the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), the confederation of stuffed shirts and clueless bureaucrats who, with an infuriating arbitrariness, had run amateur sports in this country for decades.

McGrath was an ABAUSA guy all the way, but he was younger than Wall and more politically nimble. He might’ve resented the NBA intrusion, but he saw the future and knew that much of the old organization’s resistance came from, as he puts it today, “not
wanting to vote ourselves out of office.” Wall could see that his time was up and absolutely resented it. At the 1986 FIBA Congress, when the resolution of open competition was first brought up by Stankovic and soundly defeated, Wall had spoken out passionately against admitting pros, and he still felt the same way. Wall was aligned with George Killian, a politician of the first order who would later become a U.S. delegate to the International Olympic Committee. Gavitt and Killian never got along, so Wall didn’t get along well with Gavitt, either.

But Wall did grasp the irony, too: the NBA was about to do to ABAUSA exactly what his group had once done to the AAU—turn it into the Edsel.

“You have to understand how much change this was for the college guys, and I was one of them,” said C. M. Newton, who, like Granik and Gavitt, was an important person in keeping the peace between the college types and the pro types. “Charter flights and exclusive hotels and the idea that we were going to train in Monte Carlo? These were things that David [Stern] and Russ [Granik] insisted on, and they were foreign to us.”

There would be talk later, from both Wall and McGrath, about how well the NBA had treated ABAUSA. But much of that is attributable to the fact that it’s not wise to piss off David Stern, not then, not now, not ever. Make no mistake about it: by the time the vote for open competition had been taken, the NBA had angered the amateur organization. The McDonald’s Open, for example, should’ve been an ABAUSA operation, but it turned into largely a Stern-Stankovic operation. The two men—oligarchs both, masters of their respective kingdoms—had become simpatico and done much of the planning and negotiation with their own people, their eyes now on a joint prize.

But at that dinner in Amsterdam, there was still business to discuss, as hazy as the future might be. Wall wasn’t out yet, and he, Gavitt, and McGrath began talking. Nobody could be sure of how substantial the NBA participation was going to be. The group finally reasoned that six NBA players, probably none of them
top-flight stars, would sign on. They figured that elite NBA players would never sacrifice playing time for the sake of pursuing a gold medal.

There was also the matter of a coach. All discussions were premature, but none of these men thought for a moment that the monarchial progression would not take place, which meant that, in all likelihood, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski would be the 1992 Olympic coach in Barcelona. Of course it would be a college coach, for aren’t they the resident geniuses of American sport?

Of all the myths in sports, few are as entrenched—and as absolutely ridiculous—as the idea that college basketball coaches are better coaches than their counterparts in the NBA. With a longer game, more time-outs, constant matchup changes, doubling defenses, better athletes, and five-games-in-seven-nights drudgery, an NBA coach does more coaching in a week than the college coach does in an entire season. College coaches coach programs; NBA coaches coach games. The fact that pro coaches lose jobs as often as tulips lose petals does not disprove the point; it supports it. Yes, many NBA coaches do their job with a scythe swinging overhead, but still they design the plays during time-outs and find another way to get somebody open on a back screen with two seconds on the clock—and
then
they get fired. Doesn’t mean they can’t coach the hell out of this game.

When the men returned to ABAUSA headquarters in Colorado Springs, questions about players and a coach had to take a backseat to more pragmatic agenda items. The name of the organization, for example, had to be changed to get “Amateur” out of it. So it became, simply, USA Basketball. The constitution had to be amended to provide for membership and representation of the NBA. Eventually Granik would come aboard as vice president, and, though he, like Gavitt, was a conciliator, a diplomat, the old guard could always feel the invisible presence of Stern behind him. Almost from the first meeting, Wall could see that he was gone.

“The essential tension that existed between USA Basketball and the NBA came about because of the way the amateur organization
had done business for twenty years under Bill’s guidance,” said Jeffrey Orridge, who was the staff attorney for USA Basketball and is now the executive director of sports properties for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “The vision and the level of business acumen, the sophistication the NBA had about growing the game … it was far, far different than the way USA Basketball had done it.”

Orridge remembers one of USA Basketball’s first trips to New York when the management team went in to meet with Stern and Granik. “We weren’t rubes or anything like that, but there was an almost overwhelming atmosphere to the whole thing,” says Orridge, a native New Yorker himself. “Now, you combine that business sophistication with the fact that I never met harder-working, harder-driving people than NBA people, and you could see it was inevitable that the NBA was going to take over. They drove the whole thing, make no mistake about that.”

And Wall, hardheaded and tough but also a realist, had to get out of the way of these mad drivers from New York City.

“How should I say this?” Wall says today from his home in the California desert. “I didn’t like some of the stuff I saw coming, and they wanted to get rid of somebody who was going to say no. And it was probably my time.”

It was. It was time for the NBA to come in and start throwing money around. The question nobody knew the answer to was this: who would sign on to play?