Dream Team Read online

  “Man, I don’t eat this shit,” said Malone, a country boy from Louisiana who never hesitated to remind you of that fact.

  “I don’t, either,” I protested. “Do I look like a quail egg guy?”

  “I don’t know what you white people eat,” Malone said, winking at Dupree, also an African American.

  When we finished, Karl promised to check on the photo op and get back to us. “We clear that stuff with Magic,” said Malone. “He’s the captain.”

  There was no better indication that the Dream Team had become one big happy family than Malone’s unquestioned acceptance of Magic as ceremonial captain. Malone had never been a huge Magic fan, and just a few months later the Mailman would openly question whether Magic should be allowed to play in the NBA given the fact that Johnson had the AIDS virus. Then, too, there had been several times during that glorious summer of 1992 when Malone had tired of the relentless chatter of Magic, the go-to spokesman, a man who, as Scottie Pippen puts it, “always needs the microphone.” And Malone wasn’t the only one.

  The days went by, the United States rolled up easy win after easy win, Barcelona and the world beyond continued to watch in slack-jawed awe, and the team continued to bathe in this heady marinade of adulation, testosterone, and 40-point victories. We heard nothing about the photo op until about a half hour before the Dream Team was to play the gold medal game against Croatia on August 8.

  “Now?” I asked Brian McIntyre, the congenial and consistently competent head of NBA public relations. “Christ, they’re going for the gold medal!” But Brian escorted David and me behind the members-only ropes that led to the most famous locker room in the world just as the Dream Team was emerging to take the floor.

  “Let’s go! Let’s get it done! Let’s take it to ’em!”

  I couldn’t separate the voices, but there was much clamor and clapping; it suggested Croatia was about to enter a world of pain, which it subsequently did. Suddenly Magic halted the procession so that—I’m mortified even as I write this—Dupree and I could be photographed with the team. It was as if a band of brothers on the way to battle had been halted to share hors d’oeuvres with Anderson Cooper. There were several expressions of what-the-hell-are-we-doing? confusion, but the team stopped, Dupree and I slipped into the front row, and NBA photographer Andy Bernstein prepared to take the least compelling photo of his illustrious career.

  And as we posed—my groin tight, flop sweat soaking my brow, praying that this moment would soon be over—I heard a voice from the back row, one with a distinctive Hoosier twang.

  “Hey, Jack,” drawled Larry Bird, “later on, you wanna blow us?”

  If you’ll permit a metaphorical extension of Bird’s transitive verb—and who among you would not?—this was the most fellated gang of warriors since the Spartan army. As the members of the Dream Team, one by one, had accepted invitations to become the first NBA players to participate in the Olympic Games, they understood that they were signing on to something special. But from the first moment they came together to practice, in San Diego on June 21, 1992, they had been the central players in an unprecedented spectacle, an adoring public and almost-as-adoring media bestowing upon them attention that can only be described as pornographic. It’s become so commonplace to describe them as rock stars that I won’t even do it, although I guess I just did. They were Jagger mugging in an open limo, Princess Di flashing her come-hither smile at an Elton John concert, Liz Taylor air-kissing Michael Jackson at an AIDS benefit. By the time the Dream Team landed in Barcelona, thousands having gathered just to watch their plane touch down in twilight at El Prat de Llobregat Aeropuerto, they knew that they were on a march into immortality, not a footnote to sports history but an entire chapter.

  An accident of timing—that most blessed breeder of success—put me in the middle of all this. From 1981 to 1985, I had been at Sports Illustrated as a kind of relief pitcher—long man more than closer—as the second, third, or even fourth backup on pro and college football, pro and college basketball, boxing, baseball, and track and field. In the winter of 1982 I wrote eight stories on eight different sports in eight weeks, including the World Championship of Squash, held in New York City at the Yale Club, to which I was denied access until I had purchased a sport coat and tie.

  I am not suggesting that this equates to, say, walking through rice paddies and swiping leeches off your body to cover the Vietnam War, as the late David Halberstam, who became an NBA chronicler at a plane considerably elevated from my own, once did. It’s merely to say that I needed a stable home, and in the fall of 1985 I got one when managing editor Mark Mulvoy put me as the number one man on the NBA beat.

  It is the dirty little secret of journalism (maybe it’s not such a secret) that you’re only as good as your material, and man, I parachuted into a valley of material so rich and fertile that only the worst kind of hack could’ve screwed it up. Under Mulvoy, Sports Illustrated was largely a front-runners’ magazine—that is, we wrote about winners and put winners on the cover. In the years before Barcelona, I wrote dozens and dozens of stories about these men, who were—as we realized even at the time—creating a kind of Golden Age of pro hoops.

  Along the way I was accused by readers and friends of variously favoring Jordan and the Bulls, Bird and the Celtics, and Magic and the Lakers. (Years later, after he had become a general manager in Indiana, Bird would usually greet me with, “You blown Magic lately?” The man does like that verb.) I thought I did an adequate job of covering the beat honestly, tossing out criticisms along with encomiums. To varying degrees, stories I wrote in the 1980s and early 1990s angered Jordan, Barkley, Drexler, and Ewing, but part of what made this the golden age from a journalist’s perspective was that these guys understood the implicit contract between athlete and writer, that it was not a crime against humanity when someone wrote something bad about them, that journalism was not to be confused with hagiography, even if they didn’t know what hagiography is.

  “It’s a system of checks and balances,” as someone described the relationship between athletes and the press to me not long ago. That was Michael Jordan.

  I feel fortunate to have come along when I did, and I apologize in advance for making myself a small part of this story. “You can’t help it,” one editor told me. “You were along for the ride.” I was a minor-league Cameron Crowe, almost almost famous, “walking in the shadow of a dream,” as did Mr. Dimmesdale, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tortured minister in The Scarlet Letter.

  I even had something to do with the nomenclature and explosion of the Dream Team phenomenon. In February 1991, well after the announcement that pros would be allowed into the Olympics but well before any player had publicly committed, I wrote a Sports Illustrated cover story projecting what the team could be and naming my choices for starters: Jordan, Magic, Ewing, Barkley, and Malone. I thought that they were the five best players in the game at that time. I would’ve had the thirty-five-year-old Bird on my starting team—though he hadn’t made an All-Star team since 1988, it wouldn’t have been a totally ceremonial choice, because the man could still play—but he had already made noises that his back was too creaky and he probably would not go to Barcelona. I took him at his word.

  We gathered those five together at the 1991 All-Star Game in Charlotte for a photo that had taken months to set up, clearing the time with the players, their agents, and the NBA. I had been such a pain in the ass about it with the players that when Magic entered the room where the photo was to be taken, he looked at me and said, with some exasperation, “Okay, you happy now?”

  With more prescience, I should’ve seen on that day what the U.S. Olympic team would become. Despite the fact that the shoot took place in a secured area, hundreds of onlookers pressed in when they caught glimpses of the players. They pushed against the door and tried to find a rear entrance to the room, hoping for just a glance at their heroes. It’s beyond obvious that any individual fame the players had, which was considerable, had increased exponentially
by their being together. (And in Barcelona it would increase exponentially exponentially.) But all I remember thinking was, “Hmm, now this is interesting.”

  The opening to my story in the following week’s magazine read:

  It’s a red, white and blue dream: the five players who grace this week’s cover playing together, determined to restore America’s lost basketball dignity, in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. What’s the chance of this dream coming true? Not bad. Not bad at all.

  The cover photo was accompanied by the tagline “Dream Team,” right up by the Sports Illustrated logo.

  So there it was for the first time: Dream Team.

  Years later, I was credited with coming up with that magical appellation, but I always tried to set the record straight: Yes, I had used the word dream twice, but an editor had put dream and team together on the cover. I even tried to find out exactly who had come up with it at the office but couldn’t do it. SI cover lines are written democratically, by trial and error. Chances are there had been multiple possibilities: “Golden Dream!” “Red, White, Blue and Ready!” “Look Out, World!”

  But Dream Team it was, and Dream Team stuck. To this day Barkley believes he was one of the first five players chosen by the committee because he was on the cover. (Trust me, he wasn’t among the first five to be picked.) “Once in a while, something just clicks, and that was the case here,” says Rick Welts, now the president and COO of the Golden State Warriors but then the NBA’s resident marketing genius. “After that cover, the idea of ‘Dream Team’ really took off.”

  I’m proud of two things in my career: that the “This Week’s Sign of the Apocalypse” that still runs in the Scorecard section of SI was my idea, and that I had something to do with coining the phrase “Dream Team.” NBA commissioner David Stern said to me recently: “The fact that all of this took off was a delicious accident. We didn’t even name it. Maybe, God forbid, you did.”

  In my office at home, I have only a few photos chronicling my years covering the NBA. The photo of Dupree and me with the Dream Team is clipped to a bulletin board, barely visible, a nearly capsized vessel floating in a sea of family photos. I never had it blown up. You can tell it’s an afterthought photo, the kind in which everyone poses for a second or two, then keeps going. Christian Laettner gazes to one side, not even bothering to look at the photographer, and John Stockton is not in the frame at all; my guess is, he just continued onto the floor. I’m in the front row, partially obscuring Bird’s face.

  Though not, alas, his commentary.

  1

  BEFORE THE DREAM

  CHAPTER 1

  THE INSPECTOR OF MEAT

  Pros in the Olympics? It Was His Idea, and Don’t Let Anyone Tell You Different

  He first came to the United States in January 1974, dispatched by his boss to study up on American basketball. He didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the customs, and settled into the basketball hotbed of Billings, Montana, because that’s where he could secure free lodging with a Yugoslavian family.

  This stranger in a strange land was named Boris Stankovic. He was six months from his forty-ninth birthday and he had come on behalf of FIBA. At the time not more than a dozen Americans knew what it stood for (Fédération Internationale de Basketball), where it was headquartered (at the time in an apartment in Munich, later in Geneva), and what the hell it did (governed amateur basketball in all parts of the world except the United States). “You cannot know basketball if you do not know basketball in the United States,” Stankovic was told by R. William Jones, who as secretary-general ran FIBA with a bow tie, a lit cigar, and a dictator’s fist. So Stankovic came and was instantly seduced by the college games he saw live—UCLA’s redheaded phenomenon, Bill Walton, was his favorite player—and the NBA games he saw on television.

  For much of his early adult life, Stankovic had been a meat inspector in Belgrade. “My job was to look over the meat and cheese and, as you do here, put a stamp on it,” said Stankovic when I interviewed him in Istanbul in the summer of 2010. He is retired now but comes to many events as the éminence grise of international basketball. Stankovic had earned a degree in veterinary medicine in 1945 from the University of Belgrade. “It was natural in our country that veterinarians looked after the meat and cheese, because it has to do with animals, no?”

  The type of meat Stankovic most liked to inspect, though, was the cured leather on a basketball. Even as he was arising at five in the morning to take up his meat stamp and lace up his white apron, basketball is what moved his spirit. He was an earthbound, fundamentally sound low-post forward who played thirty-six games for the Yugoslavian national team. One of his proudest moments was playing for his country in the first world championship organized by FIBA, which took place in Argentina in 1950. “We finished ninth,” says Stankovic, chuckling, “and there were nine teams.” One of his enduring regrets was that he never participated in the Olympics as a player.

  The Yugoslavs were a tall, tough, and lean people, hardened by wars civil and foreign. In the Balkan area of Yugoslavia where Stankovic was born, the people measure eras not by “war and peace” but by “war and non-war.” When Boris was nineteen, he and his father, Vassilje, a lawyer who fought for Serbian nationalism, were imprisoned by an invading Russian army. After two months Boris was released, but Vassilje was executed by firing squad and buried in a common grave; even today, Stankovic does not know where. Stankovic was put on a blacklist that later kept him from becoming a medical doctor, his desired profession, and forced him to veterinary school, his way of staying in the field of medicine. Like most of his countrymen from that generation, he identified with the Serbian rebels who had squirmed under foreign rule for five centuries. “They lived in groups and learned to cooperate, to work with each other,” Stankovic said. “We grew up with that in our blood. We Serbians have never had much success in the individual sports, but our team sports are very, very strong. We have a proficiency in and an aptitude for sports that require a lot of teamwork.”

  Stankovic’s knowledge of the game and overall intelligence—virtually anyone who talks about him invariably mentions his brains—enabled him to rise steadily as a coach and executive. By the time he was thirty he was the most important nonplayer in Yugoslavian basketball, even as he continued to inspect meat, and had already become active in FIBA.

  In 1966 Oransoda Cantù, a team in the Italian professional league, came calling in search of a coach, and Stankovic left his homeland. “I went for the money,” says Stankovic. “Italy was the richest league.” He was reviled by many Italians as an outsider but later grew to be loved, as winners usually are, when his team captured the championship in 1968. That’s when R. William Jones beckoned him back. Jones had seen the future of FIBA, and its name was Boris Stankovic.

  Jones, who died in 1981, months after suffering a stroke during a dinner at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, was the kind of man for whom the term “grudging admiration” seems to have been invented. Born in Rome to a British father and French mother, he had earned a degree from Springfield College, where Dr. James Naismith hung up his first peach basket. Jones was “a very international guy” (Stankovic’s words), a combination that made him an undeniable basketball visionary. But he was also the classic amateur-sport pasha, imperious and intractable. For basketball people in the United States, Jones left his enduring imprimatur by allowing the Soviets three chances to win the gold medal against the U.S. team on September 9, 1972, at the star-crossed Olympic Games in Munich.

  Stankovic was a long way from being an established leader when he first came to the United States on that intelligence-gathering trip in 1974. He was just an outsider trying to learn the nuances of American basketball while also trying to learn how to order a hamburger. He was granted a papal audience with John Wooden—“We talked basketball, so it was easy to communicate,” he says—but mostly he was left on his own, to watch, listen, and compare.

  And what happened was that a basketball junkie was transfi
xed by the American players, college and pro. “It just seemed to be a different game,” says Stankovic, smiling at the memory. “Faster but also fundamentally sound. You watched a guy like Bill Walton for one minute and you could see that his level was so much higher than anyone we had in Europe.”

  FIBA’s rules at the time banned professionals from playing under the FIBA banner, and the rules of FIBA were the rules of Olympic basketball. So it was, so it had always been, and so, everyone thought, it would always be. The hypocrisy, of course, was that de facto professionals were playing anyway, since international basketball teams always comprised their country’s top players, even if they were officially listed as “soldiers” or “policemen.”

  With the lone exception of Stankovic, there was no push to include American pros in the Olympics, since the supremacy of even American collegians was considered self-evident, the anomaly of 1972 notwithstanding. Plus, it was simply part of our sporting ethos that the Olympics were for our college players. The NBA and the Olympics were planets rotating in different solar systems.

  But the Inspector of Meat, an outsider, didn’t see it that way. As he watched the pro stars of the 1970s on TV—among them Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, plus his two favorites, Walt Frazier and Pete Maravich—it began to gnaw at him that America’s best players would never participate in the Olympic Games. “The hypocrisy was what got to me,” said Stankovic. “And there was a practical side. My concern was trying to make the game of basketball strong, to grow it, and yet there was this separation. It became impossible for me to tolerate.”

  There might’ve been a self-serving side, too. Stankovic saw himself as the messiah of hoops, the person to lift the game above King Futbol. And he was irritated by the fact that his organization—the We-Have-the-Final-Say Court of All Appeals for world basketball—came with an asterisk because it wasn’t even a blip on the NBA’s radar screen.