Dream Team Read online

  Whatever the variety of reasons, Stankovic came back to Munich and told Jones that dropping the amateurs-only clause, thus clearing the way for America’s best players to compete in the Olympics, should be a FIBA goal—a truly anarchic idea, given the sociopolitical sports climate. The times might’ve been a-changin’, but not in the International Olympic Committee (IOC), where Avery Brundage—a loathsome individual, a clear number one on the list of tin-pot despots who have run sports over the centuries—held fast to the concept of shamateurism.

  Stankovic isn’t sure what Jones really thought of his idea, but his boss’s instruction was crystal clear. “He said, ‘Don’t bother,’ ” remembers Stankovic. “Or, as you say in America, ‘Don’t go there.’ ”

  And for the next decade and a half, no one except Boris Stankovic went there.

  Like many influential men and women throughout history, the Inspector of Meat is overlooked. He has never met Magic Johnson or Larry Bird, and the only time he has crossed paths with Michael Jordan was in the 1984 Olympics, in the pre–Dream Team days.

  But whatever revisionist history might eventually be written, remember this: the Dream Team resulted from the vision of Boris Stankovic. It was not a secret plot hatched by David Stern to “grow the game,” one of the commissioner’s favorite phrases. It was not the result of a crusade by the NBA’s marketing demons to sell $200 Authentics in Europe, even though that was an eventuality. It was not frustration built up by the increasing reality that inroads were being made on the United States’ claim of basketball supremacy. The idea germinated in the mind of the Inspector of Meat from Belgrade.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE CHOSEN ONE

  Sneaker Porn Is Born

  It was some rare time away from Bob Knight, their dictatorial Olympic coach, and two candidates for the 1984 U.S. team, Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing, were taking advantage of it by horsing around in their dorm room. Wild in-room wrestling matches were a major diversion for the collegians, particularly Charles Barkley and Chuck Person, two Auburn teammates who went at it pretty hard before they ended up on Knight’s very roomy chopping block.

  Jordan, who had just completed his junior year at North Carolina, was heading for the NBA, while Ewing would be going back to complete his senior year at Georgetown. They were already good friends, having first met at high school all-star games and, more eventfully, in the 1982 NCAA final. It was there that a jump shot by North Carolina freshman Jordan led the Tar Heels to a 63–62 victory over freshman Ewing and his Georgetown Hoyas. Though no one realized the significance of it at the time, Ewing became the first of many great players to be stopped short of the finish line by Jordan.

  The 6′6″ Jordan had the 7′0″ Ewing in a headlock. Neither young man was angry, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t semiserious: to Jordan, everything of a competitive nature had some degree of seriousness. Finally Ewing said uncle, and when the big center awoke the next morning, he couldn’t move his neck.

  Man, was this going to be a tough conversation.

  “Coach, I can’t practice this morning,” Ewing told Knight after screwing up his courage.

  “What happened?” said Knight, and Ewing was forced to tell the whole story, giving up Jordan as the culprit.

  “So I sat out, and man, Coach Knight was mad,” Ewing remembers years later. “But only at me. Michael? Nothing happened to him. Nothing ever happened to Michael.”

  Yes, the summer of 1984 was a glorious one for Michael Jordan, the first of many, despite the fact that he had been initially resistant to the idea of competing in Los Angeles. “I was a little intimidated by Coach Knight,” Jordan told me in the summer of 2011. “I didn’t like his tactics, heard he ragged players, swore at them, and I didn’t want to spend the summer being berated by someone.” So he sought the counsel of his coach, Dean Smith, with whom he had a kind of father-son relationship, although Jordan’s own father, James, was a strong influence in his life.

  “Coach Smith told me that all Knight wants to see is the fundamentals of the game of basketball,” Jordan said. (Even in casual conversation Jordan uses the phrase “the game of basketball” almost as if he’s describing holy writ.) “I had those fundamentals, so there shouldn’t be a problem. And once I got there I just saw a man who demanded you play the game a certain way and don’t make the same mistake twice. I didn’t.”

  The summer was glorious, too, for the men who ran amateur basketball in the United States. The Olympic boycott of 1980, which had so soured them against President Jimmy Carter, was a distant memory. A solid team full of eager collegians—anchored by Jordan, whose singular skills, if not known worldwide, were certainly recognized in the United States, where he had just finished a gilded college career—was about to storm to the gold medal in Los Angeles. When the Soviets returned the 1980 favor by boycotting the L.A. Games, it seemed not to matter all that much. The U.S. collegians would’ve beaten that group anyway, or so went the thinking.

  Knight was right out of the amateur hoops handbook, a tyrant of the first order but one of them, a dedicated (if sometimes out of control) disciple of ABAUSA, the group that ran amateur hoops at the time. “With Bobby in charge,” says C. M. Newton, one of his assistants, “there was no hoopla. It was straight down the path.”

  Knight made the Olympic trials a Darwinian exercise from start to finish. More than a hundred players were invited, and they got cut twenty at a time. Karl Malone, a muscular but largely unknown player from Louisiana Tech, remembers that the early cuts had an impersonal feel. “You went through the lunch line in this big cafeteria, where they had a big bulletin board,” remembers Malone. “If your name was on the board, you were in.” One day Malone’s name wasn’t on the board. Eventually that freak of nature named Charles Barkley was cut. So was a guard named John Stockton.

  There was a segment of the basketball population that didn’t completely buy into Jordan when he was at North Carolina, where, as common logic had it, the only one who could stop him was Smith, a rigid fundamentalist whose teams often held the ball. Anyone with one working eye and a semifunctional cortex knew that Jordan was going to be spectacular in the pros, but one supposition was that he would be a Clyde Drexler type, referencing the University of Houston product who had just finished his first season with the Portland Trail Blazers—that is, flashy but sometimes out of control, a scorer but not a shooter, a fan favorite but not a coach’s choice.

  Though that impression would endure in some quarters until 1991, the year Jordan won his first championship with the Chicago Bulls, the basketball cognoscenti watching the L.A. Games saw what it really had in Jordan. He was a player who could break a zone with a jumper, lock down a high-scoring opponent, run the offense from the point if he had to. He could please Bobby Knight, for God’s sake. “The 1984 Olympics,” says David Falk, his agent, “was Michael’s coming-out party.”

  Behind Jordan, the United States tore through the Olympic competition, winning its eight games by an average of 30 points and in the process drawing comparisons to the great Oscar Robertson–Jerry West team of 1960 that won gold in Rome. The United States beat Canada 78–59 in the semifinals and destroyed Spain 96–65 in the gold medal game, and the name Michael was on the lips of basketball fans everywhere.

  It had become evident that Jordan was the Chosen One, and no one knew that better than Falk, who had already commenced endorsement negotiations with Nike that would forever change the way athletes are marketed. Jordan had always worn Converse, the sneaker of choice for both his college coach and the United States Olympic Committee, and the de facto historical choice of most hoopsters. Michael has since said that he, like many players, believed that Adidas made the best product. Had he gotten a decent offer, Jordan probably would’ve signed with either Converse or Adidas.

  But Falk saw Nike as hungrier and more market-savvy than either of them. Both Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, the two biggest names in the pro game, wore Converse, but the company, coasting on its past rep, did almost
nothing with them. Think about it: Magic had an immortal nickname, a thousand-kilowatt smile, a flashy game, a glitzy home base, and a championship resumé, yet in the early years of his career Converse didn’t come close to capitalizing on his appeal, a decision that cost both Magic and the company millions. “Way before Michael came into the league,” says Falk, “Magic could’ve owned the world.”

  At Nike, by contrast, executives such as Rob Strasser saw in Jordan a new horizon for the endorsement game. Plus, Nike needed to make a major move since the running boom of the 1970s had petered out. It was a company that prided itself on taking chances, so it had decided to blow its entire marketing budget, $500,000, on advertising that would feature Jordan, plus what it would have to pay him to wear the sneakers. Still, Jordan was resistant to Nike, which he had never worn and knew very little about. The night before he, his father, and Falk were to fly to Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, Jordan told his mom that he wasn’t going. But she wouldn’t hear of it.

  “You will be on that plane, Michael,” said Deloris Jordan. So he was on the plane.

  At that first meeting, Peter Moore, Nike’s head designer, showed Jordan and Falk the sketches he had made of Air Jordan shoes, warm-up suits, and apparel, all of it in black and red—“devil’s colors,” as Jordan told Falk. Jordan never blinked, never smiled, never said much of anything, and everybody in the room figured that he was underwhelmed. But after the meeting he admitted that he was swayed, and Falk negotiated a five-year $2.5 million deal that, like so many deals over the years, was supposed to bring the world to an end.

  So was born Air Jordan.

  At first Jordan hated the red-and-black shoe. “I’ll look like a clown,” he said. But he relented and wore them, after which the NBA ruled them illegal for some bizarre reason, fining Jordan $5,000 per game, a sum that Nike paid with a secret smile. A design compromise was eventually reached, and the major thing the fines had accomplished was to turn Jordan’s shoes into one of the biggest stories of the 1984–85 season and gather worldwide attention for Nike.

  Rod Thorn, the Bulls’ general manager at the time, asked Falk, “What are you trying to do? Turn him into a tennis player?”

  “Now you get it,” said the agent.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE COMMISSIONER AND THE INSPECTOR OF MEAT

  The NBA Sticks a Tentative Toe into International Waters

  Late in 1985 David Stern and Russ Granik, commissioner and deputy commissioner of the NBA, received the Inspector of Meat in the league’s New York offices. The FIBA boss could hardly believe his good fortune. “You have to understand where I came from,” Stankovic told me recently, reflecting back on the meeting. “It was considered almost criminal just to communicate with the pro league. The amateur way was that we were not supposed to speak to them. And here I am sitting with the commissioner and we have a normal relationship.” He was positively beaming at the memory, sounding like Sally Field receiving her Best Actress award at the 1984 Oscars: You like me!

  Stern did like him. Both men are attracted to power the way moths are to light, but there is a similar air of informality about them, too. They’re not exactly regular guys, but they’re smart enough to know that they should act like regular guys. And Granik—cool, careful, collected, a lawyer who had started at the NBA in 1976—was the perfect complement to Stern, who could be quick-tempered, even volcanic.

  After a few get-acquainted moments, Stankovic went right to the point. “I don’t believe in these restrictions about who should play and who shouldn’t,” he said. “The best players in the world should be playing in everything, including the Olympics. But I can’t do that alone.”

  In some revisionist histories, Stern—all-seeing, all-knowing—instantly grasped the importance of aligning with FIBA, envisioning a day when NBA players were the toast of the Continent and the league was flooding Europe and Asia with sneakers, T-shirts, and hoodies. Nothing could be further from the truth, and Stern, to his credit, has never claimed otherwise. It wasn’t that the idea of NBA players in the Olympics slipped onto the NBA’s back burner; it wasn’t even on the stove. Yes, Stern saw the hypocrisy in the rules against competition—Germany’s Detlef Schrempf, who played in the NBA for about $500,000 a year, was considered a professional, while Brazil’s Oscar Schmidt, who played in Italy for about $1 million a year, was considered an amateur and eligible for Olympic play. Everyone saw the hypocrisy except the empty suits who ran the Olympics. But the commissioner couldn’t imagine adding the Olympics to an already full plate.

  “David and I thought that global basketball came with as many burdens as benefits,” says Granik today, “and that’s what we told Boris.”

  However, when Stankovic suggested a competition that would include an NBA team and a couple of FIBA teams, a kind of first step, Stern said yes. “We’ll host it,” he said immediately. It was out of that meeting that the first McDonald’s Open, which was eventually held in Milwaukee in 1987, was born. But it was never Stern’s plan to get his players into the Olympics, in large part because he faced far more pressing issues.

  The tide was beginning to turn by the time of Stankovic’s visit, but the NBA was still on relatively shaky ground. The popular how-bad-was-the-NBA? nugget to offer is the 1980 NBA Finals, which was on tape delay even though it pitted the Los Angeles Lakers (rookie Magic Johnson, superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) against the Philadelphia 76ers (Julius Erving). But there are other ways to measure the NBA’s low-water marks. When Rick Welts was hired in 1982 to head up sponsorship—“Like all of David’s guys back then, I was perfect for the job because I was young, dumb, and poor,” Welts says today—the NBA literally had no business plan. It sold nothing to no one. Welts and the other young, dumb, and poor soldiers found a nation that not only didn’t care about the NBA but downright loathed it.

  “The perception was that the NBA was mismanaged, too many African Americans, too many drug accusations, too many teams going out of business,” Welts told me in 2011. “I’d call advertising agencies, and to get a return call was remarkable if you had NBA attached to your name. The priority was NFL, Major League Baseball, and college sports. The NHL would get the calls before they’d even think of investing in the NBA.”

  As his young band of committed warriors tried to chip away at the NBA’s image, it was always Stern cajoling, conniving, caterwauling. “The power of everybody saying the same thing over and over again is pretty significant,” says Welts. “I’d come home beaten and battered after twelve hours of rejection, and the phone would ring in my room at the Summit Hotel on Lexington Avenue at ten o’clock. It would be David, and after fifteen minutes I’d be charged up and ready to go again.”

  Stern is so commonly called the best sports commissioner ever that he has all but retired the term, but there was certainly a bit of serendipity in his rise. It was under his watch, after all, that Michael/Magic/Larry descended from the heavens, and at the end of the day, the only thing a marketing man can do is shine a brighter light on the stage. If the people don’t like what they see, nothing is going to happen. But Stern and others in his office figured out how to maximize the appeal of these players and leverage their popularity.

  And while he didn’t see the full road ahead of him, the commissioner always kept an ear open to the sermons by the Inspector of Meat, who thought that great things would happen if the United States was able to put its stars together, bundle them up in red, white, and blue packaging, and send them off to play under a sacred set of rings.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE LEGEND

  “I’m the Three-Point King”

  Larry Bird stood on the floor of Reunion Arena in Dallas on the morning of February 8, 1986, where eight hours later he would compete in the NBA’s first three-point shooting contest during All-Star Weekend. Standing nearby was Leon Wood of the New Jersey Nets, who is now an NBA referee but who was then one of the favorites in the competition.

  “Hey, Leon,” Bird said, “you changed your shot latel
y? It looks different.”

  That was nonsense, of course. But Wood, a second-year player known for his three-point range—he wasn’t shy about attempting shots from a couple of feet behind the three-point line—looked stricken. Man, if Larry Bird says my shot has changed, I wonder if …

  Then Bird started talking about the red-white-and-blue balls, the ones that would be worth two points (instead of one) at each of the five racks of five balls that were set up for the competition. Bird said they felt slippery. Wood looked stricken again.

  Scratch Leon Wood from the list of potential winners. The others would come later.

  At this point in time—midseason, 1986—Larry Joe Bird was the undisputed king of the NBA. He was on his way to his third straight Most Valuable Player award, and his Boston Celtics were on their way to the NBA title. But it went beyond that. It was Bird’s bravado, his utter belief in himself, his trash talk (legendary around the league, if largely unknown to the general public, since Bird did it subtly), the street game that came wrapped in a pasty package that made the early-to-mid-1980s his game, his time.

  Bird’s package of skills—shooting, rebounding, passing, court savvy, competitiveness—had been there since his rookie season, 1979–80. We tend to think of him as the ultimate workaholic, endlessly polishing a shooting stroke that he had fabricated back in his high school days, and to an extent he was. But he was also a natural, someone to whom, as he always admitted, the game came easily. He just saw it differently from most everybody else.

  Bird well knew that at age twenty-nine and seven years into his Hall of Fame career, there was nobody like him. And that was even taking into account his creaky back, which he first injured in the summer of 1985 when he was shoveling gravel at the home he had built for his mother in his native French Lick, Indiana. Even early in that marvelous 1985–86 season, Bird had sometimes needed the magic hands of his physiotherapist, Dan Dyrek, just to get out of a prone position. A month into the season Dyrek had been called to Bird’s suburban Boston home and couldn’t believe that the star was in that much pain. But the back gradually improved—it would never really get better—and Bird was on his way to another transcendent year.