Dream Team Read online

  At the time, the should-Charles-be-chosen? debate was one of the hottest among the committee members. On pure ability, Barkley was a lock, “one of the top three players in the world at that time,” as Mike Krzyzewski, a committee member, described him. Barkley could score, run the floor, and shoot well enough to bust zones (if that was necessary); most important, he could rebound. He is probably not the greatest rebounder of all time, but he’s in the conversation. His rebounding stats, in the double figures per game, are taken for granted, but what was extraordinary was the number of offensive rebounds he got—four per game for his career and almost five per game during a five-season stretch early in his career. Yes, Dennis Rodman got more offensive rebounds, but the Worm was averaging in single figures in scoring, compared to 25 points per game for Barkley.

  Barkley was less easy to classify than any of the other reigning superstars at the time. Jordan’s ability was nonpareil, but at least you could explain it: he was hardwired for success, talented and tenacious, gifted with a body that was both strong and supple. Magic was a giant at his position. David Robinson was a seven-footer with gymnast’s skills, Isiah Thomas an elusive jitterbug with lightning reflexes, Karl Malone a muscleman who had refined his shooting touch.

  But what was Barkley? He was 6′4″, yet played almost exclusively under the basket. He looked fat, but he could jump out of the gym. He rebounded like a madman, but he never boxed out; Roger Banks, an assistant coach back at Auburn, told Barkley, “Just go for the ball,” so that’s how he rebounded, from the first day to the last day of his NBA career. He looked like he couldn’t beat the ballboy in a race, but few people ever caught him when he went end to end with the ball.

  Chris Mullin remembers the first time he met Barkley. It was the summer of 1982, and the two were bunking up prior to a tour on a U.S. junior team. They were both going into their sophomore year, Mullin at St. John’s, Barkley at Auburn. Mullin, his head and his heart in eastern basketball, had never heard of Barkley.

  “He was sitting on the bed with his shirt off,” says Mullin, “and I’ll never forget it. He was real … inquisitive. Asking me about New York, real interested that I came from there, almost like—I hesitate to say it—a fan. I swear to God, I thought he was working for the basketball organization or something, maybe like a manager. I did not know he was a player.

  “So the next day, the first day of practice, we split into sides and there on my team is Charles. I could not believe it. And then we started playing and here’s this fat kid jumping out of the gym and … I mean, I never saw anything like it. The only thing I can compare it to was years later when I saw [7′7″] Manute Bol for the first time. Just this extreme … physicality. Two things stuck in my mind: How freakin’ good is this guy? And can he maintain because of how hard he comes down on dunks?”

  I compare Barkley to Bird, strictly in a during-the-game sense. That is strange in one respect because the ability to elevate, one of the keys to Barkley’s game, had nothing to do with Bird’s success. But they both jumped quickly, if to markedly differing altitudes, and they both had strong hands when they seized a rebound. Bird was a student of Barkley’s game and loved analyzing it. “Charles jumps from side to side, not just straight up,” Bird told me once. Bird jumped side to side, too, thereby clearing a path while almost never getting whistled for it.

  There was a street-smartness to Barkley’s game, too, a Bird-like elemental rawness. I was at a game during the 1988–89 season when Barkley was standing near Portland Trail Blazers rookie Mark Bryant, who held the ball on the baseline. “Yo!” Barkley shouted to him suddenly, and apparently convincingly, because Bryant passed him the ball, which Barkley took to the other end for a dunk. Bird pulled off some kind of similar street theft a dozen times in his career.

  But as far as the men choosing the Olympic team were concerned, Barkley brought baggage way, way, way over the fifty-pound limit. After all, it wasn’t like Barkley had lost his virginity with the spitting incident. Before he was drafted, he was considered in some quarters to be an NBA question mark, which didn’t stop him from going on an eating binge in an effort to discourage the 76ers from drafting him. (Philadelphia owner Howard Katz wanted Charles to go from 282 pounds to 275; instead Charles ballooned to 291.)

  He once slapped a fan in the face for verbally abusing him. He told an elderly female fan in Boston, “Shut up, you bitch.” He got in trouble with the league office for pretending to lay bets during the game with the New York Knicks’ Mark Jackson. In August 1988, Barkley was arrested for illegal possession of a handgun after being pulled over for speeding. He had a permit to carry in Pennsylvania but not in Jersey. When I brought it up during an interview, asking the inevitable non-gun-owner’s question about whether it was loaded, Barkley responded, “Of course it was, fool! What’s the use of carrying a gun that ain’t loaded?”

  He trashed teammates, cursed out referees, exchanged punches with opponents, and angered every kind of minority group possible, which was mitigated by the fact that he angered majority groups too. Indeed, it is impossible to find another player who was at once praised for his honesty yet made so many contradictory statements. What he said on Tuesday might go against what he said on Monday, but that didn’t matter because he’d say something else on Wednesday. “You never know what Charles is going to say,” David Stern says, “because he doesn’t know himself.” Barkley would talk about team unity, for example, then rip his teammates, as he did in Outrageous!, which came out in December 1991. After that he made publishing history by declaring that he had been “misquoted” in his own autobiography and didn’t really mean to criticize teammates Armen Gilliam, Manute Bol, and Charles Shackleford, as well as 76ers owner Katz.

  He talked endlessly about the leadership lessons he had learned from Julius Erving, Maurice Cheeks, and Bobby Jones, the 76ers veterans who ran the club when he came aboard in 1984, and he waxed nostalgic for the days when he was required to bring Erving the morning newspaper at 7:00 a.m. and fetch Andrew Toney a glass of warm milk at night. Yet his own leadership style would never have been even remotely mistaken for the ones demonstrated by those diplomats. He didn’t always practice hard and sometimes showed up late, a precursor to another 76er, Allen Iverson, who went on a memorable rant about practice, believing, as Barkley did, that the measure of a man was how hard he busted his ass in the forty-eight minutes that really mattered.

  But—and there is always a but with Barkley (not to mention a butt)—I loved coming to see him. There is not another athlete in history who could do the things that Barkley did and still remain beloved to a good portion of the population.

  After the spitting incident, Rod Thorn, in his position as the NBA’s vice president of operations, fined him $10,000 (it would be much, much more today, not to mention a lengthy suspension) and said all the predictable things about how disappointed the league was in Barkley. At the same time, Thorn, in his position as an influential member of the USA Basketball committee assembling the Olympic team, was lobbying for Barkley’s inclusion.

  Whenever I came to see Charles, I would promise myself that I would wade through the muck of his contradictions and make him answer for some of the double-talk that came out of his mouth. He would invariably go on some kind of rant about the media, which, in his version, had started to treat him unfairly after the gun incident. The charges in that case were eventually dropped after a judge ruled that the car had been illegally searched, but Barkley professed at the time to have been fundamentally changed by the incident, claiming that the media had overreacted to the story. I suppose that was the case in some instances, but by and large the media were Barkley’s ally. If they hadn’t been, nobody could’ve gotten away with what he did and still emerge as a popular figure.

  No matter how much you thought he deserved to be skewered, the man would wear you down with his antic charm. All of the Dream Teamers were friendly and polite when they met my family, but Charles was the one to bear-hug my sons and tell my wife, feigni
ng confusion, “You seem like a nice woman. What the hell’s the matter with your judgment?” He was like Claude Rains’s Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca, a figure who would round up the usual suspects yet somehow remain likable.

  The committee’s job was to weigh the benefits of Barkley’s abilities (they did love his rebounding) and general popularity (all of the top players in the league liked and respected him, especially Jordan, for whom he had good-naturedly caddied during a charity golf tournament in the summer of 1990) against the possibility that he would start World War III. “The question we had to answer,” says committee member Donnie Walsh, “was whether Charles was too much of a nut.”

  The two most powerful NBA voices on the committee were divided on Barkley. Had it been up to Russ Granik, the committee probably would’ve said no to Charles. Had it been up to Rod Thorn, it would’ve said yes to Charles. “The basketball people are always petrified that they don’t have enough good players,” said Stern, and Thorn was a basketball guy. By contrast, executives such as Granik are always more concerned about the knucklehead factor. They have to be. Neither man would’ve gone to the mat with his position, and gradually Barkley the basketball player started gaining traction over Barkley the knucklehead.

  Then again, he hadn’t yet downed a drunk with a left cross thrown outside a Milwaukee bar at two-thirty in the morning.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE COMMITTEE AND THE DREAM TEAM

  Okay, Superstars, Prepare for Deification.… Uh, Isiah? Not So Fast

  There’s back story here, and, even two decades later, much broken-field running by everyone who was involved in the final decision about who was invited to play on the 1992 Olympic team and who was not. It’s one of the stickiest subjects in the history of the NBA. But let’s cut to the bone before we sort through all the meat.

  Isiah Thomas was not a member of the Dream Team primarily because of two men, Michael Jordan and Chuck Daly. If we want to put a finer point on it, it was really one man—Jordan.

  Throughout the spring and summer months of 1991, the business of USA Basketball’s Olympic selection committee was carried out rather like the business of the Politburo. Bits of news leaked out from time to time but quite often were wrong, as when the Chicago Tribune reported that Isiah had been offered a spot. USA Basketball was not unlike a schoolgirl planning a sweet-sixteen party. They wanted the cool kids there, but if the cool kids weren’t coming, they needed to get the next-coolest kids there to fill the quota. But sometimes the coolest kids were the ones who were coy about coming, so they had to let the next-coolest kids know that they still had a chance without raising their hopes too much.

  Fortunately for the committee, cool kid Magic Johnson wasn’t coy. After getting an early call from Russ Granik, the first official one made by the committee, Johnson jumped in with both feet, thereby becoming a kind of baseline selectee. “Magic really helped us,” says Dave Gavitt. “He set a tone, that being on the Olympic team was the thing to do.”

  Rod Thorn, who as general manager of the Bulls in 1984 had drafted Jordan, was assigned the most important task: pulling the prize catch into the boat. Thorn called Jordan directly sometime during the summer, after the Bulls had won their first championship. (In fact, all of the invitations were extended directly to the athletes, not through agents; Granik, who as a league exec had fought numerous nasty battles with agents by that time, had insisted on that.) So let’s be clear right now about what Jordan said in that first phone call.

  “Rod, I don’t want to play if Isiah Thomas is on the team,” Jordan said.

  I wrote that in Sports Illustrated at the time, not because Jordan confirmed it, which he didn’t, but because at least two reliable sources did. At the time, Jordan more or less denied that he would stand in Isiah’s way.

  But he did confirm it to me in the summer of 2011. “I told Rod I don’t want to play if Isiah Thomas is on the team.” That’s what he said.

  Thorn knew his part. I don’t know how explicitly he said it—and Thorn won’t say—but he made it clear that no one would be on the team if Jordan didn’t want him on the team. No one on the committee had to communicate that to Daly because Daly knew it himself, as Jordan had told the coach in an early phone call, I don’t want to play if Isiah Thomas is on the team. And Chuck let it be known that he wouldn’t fight for Isiah.

  Was Jordan wrong? Well, you can call him spoiled and talk about how this was “America’s Team” and all the rest of it. But he was hesitant to give up his summer time in any case and definitely didn’t want to do it if it involved making nice with a man he despised. “Michael was all about who was going to be on the team,” Magic told me years later. “It was more important … no, make that just as important, for Michael to have a good time as it was to play the games.” No, Magic, stick with what you said first—it was more important.

  A more interesting question is whether Daly was wrong. A number of people say that he was, all but one of whom didn’t want his name attached to that opinion. The exception was Clyde Drexler (see the interlude following Chapter 18). But to those who say that Daly politicized the process by letting one man dictate what a committee should’ve decided on, and to those who would castigate the committee for caving to the dictates of one player, ask yourself what you would have done. Would you have selected Isiah Thomas over Michael Jordan in the summer of 1992? Or any other summer?

  Even though he had assurances that Isiah would not be on the team, Jordan continued to be coy. Magic played the role of ambassador, calling Jordan from time to time. As late as August 19, when they shared the podium at Magic’s annual summer all-star game in L.A. to benefit the United Negro College Fund, Jordan was still playing footsy. But I still maintain that Jordan knew early on that he was playing, once it was clear that Isiah would not be invited and that Daly would leave sufficient time for golf. From the beginning, Jordan was set; he just wasn’t set set, as screenwriter William Goldman once wrote in Adventures in the Screen Trade about the peculiar way that deals were set up in Hollywood.

  Bird was another matter. That task, less crucial than landing Jordan but ceremonially significant, fell primarily to Gavitt, who by then was in his first year of running the Boston Celtics. The committee didn’t need the thirty-four-year-old Bird in the way that it needed the twenty-eight-year-old Jordan, who was in the prime of his career. But the members desperately wanted Bird, which was almost the same thing.

  The extent to which Jordan, Magic, and Bird formed a subset within the universe of great players cannot be overestimated. Magic and Bird had been measured against each other for over a decade by that time, and Jordan had come along to join them; the three formed the golden tripod on which the NBA was standing strong. No one else could join this exclusive club. Some players, like Barkley, understood this and carved out a comfortable position outside the tripod but friend to all three. Others, like Malone, may have resented the primacy of Michael/Magic/Larry but remained on the outside, smoldering but seemingly unconcerned.

  Isiah was different. It was an enduring frustration for him that he could not break into this select society, that, as great as he was, he was on the outside looking in. Had he been as tall as Magic or Larry, or even Michael, yes, perhaps it would’ve been a Big Four. (Isiah would make that point, in typically ham-handed fashion, years later.) But at 6′1″ he just couldn’t dominate like the others, and it gnawed at him that he was, in his view, perpetually unappreciated. What hurt more was that Magic, his old friend, was growing closer and closer to Jordan, his enemy. Most of us are familiar with, and perhaps even subject to, this dynamic … in junior high.

  Gavitt thought he had a chance with Bird. They had hit it off when Bird returned for the 1990–91 season and saw that Gavitt, now the Celtics CEO, had upgraded the facilities at Hellenic College, the old-school venue where the Celtics practiced. “Hey, we’re serious about winning again, huh?” Bird said to him.

  Gavitt first broached the subject of Barcelona at Bird’s house in N
eedham, Massachusetts.

  “Larry, we want you to be on the Olympic team,” he said.

  “I’m past history,” said Bird. “It’s for the young guys.”

  Gavitt let it go. There would be time.

  Bird desperately did not want to be a token, but his aching back was forcing him to conclude that that’s exactly what he would be. I was around him a lot in those days, writing a book on the Celtics’ season, and Bird’s aching back was the defining leitmotif of that season. How is Larry? Will Larry announce his retirement? Is Larry getting treatment? Is Larry answering questions today?

  Gavitt, his political powers tested to the max, decided that all missives about Bird would come from him. To this day, when I see Celtics trainer Ed Lacerte (who was also the Dream Team trainer), I’ll ask him, “Any update on Larry?” and Lacerte, the nicest of men and the most capable of trainers, will smile and say, “Dave will have a statement soon.”

  In truth, the issue of Olympic participation was pushed to the background by Bird, who had worries that his career was over. Midway through that 1990–91 season, as I went to work on what became the “Dream Team” story in Sports Illustrated, Magic let it be known that he would not appear on the cover without Bird.

  “But Larry says he’s not playing,” I told him.

  “I’m going to check myself,” said Johnson.

  A couple of dozen phone calls transpired before Magic finally said okay, convinced that Bird was not going to Barcelona.

  Looking back at Bird’s storied career, one could do worse than studying the 1990–91 season to capture the man’s greatness. There were mornings that he could barely walk. I saw it with my own eyes. That doesn’t make him a messiah, a saint, or a war hero, but it makes the numbers he put up that season over 60 games, much of them played in pain, quite remarkable. He averaged 19.4 points, 8.5 rebounds, and 7.2 assists and mixed in an epic game or two along the way, one of them against Jordan’s Bulls on the last day of March, when he scored 34 points as the Celtics won 135–132.