There was always Magic, of course, and the man could talk the shell off a hard-boiled egg. But the idea that he was the eternal Mr. Sunshine, at least during his playing days, is overblown. After his exquisite junior-skyhook/MVP season of 1986–87, the game became a little less fun for him, the result of the Lakers’ enervating crusade to repeat as champions in 1987–88. Riley, who had “guaranteed” a repeat after the ’87 Finals, pushed them endlessly. I went out to L.A. before the playoffs and Riley pulled out a computer printout showing that the performances of Magic, Worthy, and Abdul-Jabbar had all gone down from the season before. Riley then put Magic in the context of Jordan and Bird, hauling out another stat sheet to reveal that Johnson’s plus-minus rating was third in the league, below the metrics of the other two. Coaches and players hate when journalists make comparisons based on statistics, but they do exactly the same thing.
“Last season Earvin was a driven player,” Riley told me. “He was driven to win the MVP award and finally get his due. He did it by constantly pushing himself to shoot, to penetrate, to take over a game. This year, for whatever reason, he hasn’t done it.” Riley couldn’t have been any more obvious that he was sending a message if he pulled out an envelope and a stamp.
Those comments forced Magic to don the mantle of victim. He sighed heavily when presented with Riley’s opinions and stats. “I think it’s just going back to the same way it was before, to taking me for granted,” he said. “ ‘Magic? He’s supposed to get a triple-double. He’s supposed to have all those assists. He’s supposed to be leading the best team in basketball.’ Does it bother me? Yes, a little. It hurts my chances for recognition as an individual, no doubt about it.”
You never got sighs and I’m-a-victim from Bird. You might’ve gotten a fuck-you-I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it. But not sighs and I’m-a-victim.
The Lakers did indeed repeat that season, the first team in two decades to go back-to-back. But the strain cleaved the relationship between Riley, who subsequently left after the 1989–90 season, and Magic, who was no longer so much the Sunshine Warrior.
Magic’s effulgent personality was a bit off-putting at times, but the man was a great, great player, the point guard on most everyone’s all-time team, his 6′9″ size giving him a clear advantage over the 6′5″ Oscar Robertson. One could argue to exhaustion about whether he or Bird was the greater player … and then you could keep arguing some more. But over the twelve years when he was on top of his game, Magic almost always put it on the line when it counted. The man finished with thirty triple-doubles in the playoffs, a record that might never be touched. (Bird had ten. Of the other Dream Teamers, only Charles Barkley and Scottie Pippen are on the list, with four each.) And since both Magic and Bird defined their careers by rings—I heard Bird say “win a championship” so often that it began to sound like one word, winachampionship—my contention is that Magic had the better career. He had five rings, Bird had three. Yes, Johnson had a great supporting cast, but so did Bird.
Purely as a basketball player, Jordan was better than either of them. (More on that later.) But Magic comes out on top in a singular aspect of the game—being influential on offense without needing to score. Hundreds of cases support that, but none better than this: in Game 6 of the 1982 Finals, Magic, who would win the series MVP, took exactly four shots yet totally dominated the game. He scored 13 points, grabbed 13 rebounds, and handed out 13 assists in a 114–104 win that closed out the Philadelphia 76ers.
Johnson did two things better than any other player who ever lived. One was his ability to control and conduct the half-court offense. Owing to his height, he ruled from on high, his court vision unobscured, like a lighthouse operator scanning the horizon for fog. And those who tried to steal the ball from him met with a strong arm bar. In effect, the defense could never pressure the quarterback. Second, he executed full-speed, completely-under-control spins that weren’t for show but, rather, for eluding the defense. He gets very little credit for that.
The rivalry between the Lakers and the Celtics (and therefore between Magic and Bird) was not nearly as protracted as one might believe. Their only truly epic mano-a-mano battle was in the 1984 Finals, when the Celtics won in seven games, a memory that still furrows Magic’s brow. By the time that Magic and Bird met again in the 1987 Finals, they had become more like bicoastal teammates, selling sneakers together and singing mutual hosannas, and by 1992, when they co-captained the greatest team ever, they were marching lockstep into history.
CHAPTER 7
THE SHOOTER
Mullin Puts Down the Bottle and Puts Up the Numbers
Chris Mullin was comfortable being alone. The first sport at which he was proficient back in his native Flatbush was swimming, stroking away in the local Boys Club pool in the early-morning, chlorine-scented fog that hid the world. He was a sprinter—“a 25-meter guy,” in his words—and probably would’ve gone on to be a really good one.
But he liked being part of a team, too, so when the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) coach at St. Thomas Aquinas told him he had to give up swimming if he was going to be really good in basketball, he said okay. He enjoyed the solitary aspects of basketball, too, and that’s why he got good. “I liked being in the gym alone,” Mullin told me recently. “No, I loved it. I’d put a tape player or radio near the floor, put on some Springsteen, really blast it, shoot it, get your own rebound, shoot it, get your own. I loved that. Or I’d go full-court thirty minutes by myself. I had no problem with that.”
So he never minded drinking alone, either.
Drinking was part of the family culture. His dad, Rod, a customs inspector at Kennedy Airport, was an alcoholic—a gentle one, but an alcoholic nonetheless. The mood swings scared Chris a little bit, but basically Rod always came out on the positive side. He was a “good drunk,” never a “mean drunk.”
Chris could drink at home, but he could be a club guy, too. Throughout his gilded years at St. John’s, 1982 through 1985, when players such as Mullin, Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing, and Villanova’s Ed Pinckney put the Big East on the map and sent three teams to the Final Four, Chris could be spotted in New York City bars, always part of the crowd but never making a scene, the quiet star leaning on the bar. But if he had to drink alone, back in his room, he could do that, too.
It had become easier to drink alone after the Golden State Warriors drafted Mullin with the seventh pick in 1985. Oakland, California, was a world away for a kid from Queens who was the epitome of old-school New York basketball. First and most basic, he could shoot. “I started doing it in my yard and took to it,” he says. “I just grabbed it, like a golfer grabs a great stroke. One day I made twenty, so the next day I had to make twenty-one. Then it became more shots and more makes.” As a shooter, Mullin was a prodigy, the way some kids are prodigies at chess or the violin. He won the national Hoop Shoot title when he was ten.
Mullin also learned the rudimentary geometry of basketball—the angles, the jab steps and quick cuts that would get him open. He loved playing one-on-one, then two-on-two, then three-on-three, the last of these the most fun because you could screen away, flare, always get yourself open. “I was taught how to negotiate the other guys on the court,” says Mullin. And he knew the physics of basketball, too, all the spins and caroms and applied English, sending up more junk than Fred Sanford, much of it ending up in the basket.
“I’d go into the city and play some street ball,” says Mullin, “and that would help me some. But then, back home, my CYO coach would go ‘nhhh’ [Mullin makes a sound like a buzzer going off] and get me back to fundamentals. So my game became a combination of the two.”
Fundamentals and team play were not what was going on in Oakland, California, circa 1985. Mullin came to a team defined by a big center named Joe Barry Carroll, who existed primarily as a punch line for New York Post columnist Peter Vecsey, who memorably rechristened him “Joe Barely Cares.” And Oakland itself was disorienting, three thousand miles away from his family, his longti
me girlfriend, Liz Connolly (later to be his wife), who had worked on the St. John’s stat crew, the unspeakably bad sweaters of his beloved college coach, Lou Carnesecca, and the overall warm familiarity of New Yawk ball. Oakland was a different culture—a drug culture, not a beer culture, and widely recognized as the cocaine capital of the NBA, which at the time was saying something. I remember Atlanta Hawks coach Mike Fratello deciding to keep his team in Los Angeles for an extra couple of days instead of staying in Oakland for a game with the Warriors. “I’d rather have them fuck themselves to death in L.A.,” Fratello reasoned, “than spend one night in Oakland.”
Cocaine was never Mullin’s problem. Beer was. He drank it in bars and he drank it alone, and he grew heavier and slower and less of a player in the eyes of coach Don Nelson, who had expected so much more of him.
In early December 1987, Mullin, the kid who would shoot a thousand jumpers alone in a darkened gymnasium, missed a couple of practices, and Nelson suspended him. Nellie knew what was going on from years of missed practices with other players, and he gave Mullin a message: Get yourself to rehab. Mullin had motivation. He knew that his father had given up the booze years earlier when he came to realize that it was doing himself and his family no good. But Chris was resistant. He said no to Nelson, they argued some more, and then Nelson got a report from a fan that Mullin was out boozing it up after a game. Nelson confronted him again, and finally Mullin said yes and entered an alcohol rehab clinic.
Back home, the New York Post, which once celebrated Chris Mullin as the ultimate playground star, a kid with both street smarts and textbook fundamentals, put Mullin’s face over a Heineken bottle in reporting the story. He was a long, long way from the Olympic glory he had experienced three years earlier, in 1984, and which he would find again four years hence.
The rehab part of the Mullin story is not dramatic, not Lohanian in any way, shape, or form. Mullin went in dirty and came out clean. He says there was no relapse and no return, and I never met anyone who believes differently. Mullin just beat it, and his career turned around immediately. It was that sudden. He averaged 26.5 points per game in his first booze-free season (1988–89) and 25.1 and 25.7 in his next two, the ones that mattered when Dream Team candidates were being identified.
“It seems like maybe there should be a lot more to tell,” Mullin said to me years later. “But … you know, I always wanted to beat it. I wanted to be a great player and booze was keeping me from being one. Now? Being sober is like a blessing I’d like to share. I’d like to tell everybody how good I feel.”
CHAPTER 8
THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER
The Admiral Takes an Olympic Fall
He grew up between two worlds, a self-described “oddity.” He’d be invited to a party, and when spin-the-bottle came up, someone would say, “Okay, David, you can be the referee.”
David Robinson still feels that sting. “ ‘Yeah, well, okay,’ I used to think,” said Robinson. “ ‘They’re cool with me.’ But only to a point.”
They were the white kids, the ones with whom he shared the advanced math classes and the elevated SAT scores. Among that company Robinson hit the social glass ceiling in his high school years.
Then he would go to the playground and the basketball camps, and it would be time to deal with the black kids, and he wasn’t comfortable there, either. “It was fun up to a certain point,” says Robinson, “but we might be talking trash and … well, if you speak a certain way and act a certain way, they’ll call you an Uncle Tom, tell you that you’re not black enough.”
The trash talk, at least the tone of it, never felt right to Robinson, which is easy to understand when you learn that his father, Ambrose Robinson, an imposing naval officer, used to open the dictionary to a random page to test his son’s spelling. “Why are we doing this, Dad?” David would ask, and his father, a sonar technician and an E-8, one step below the highest rank an enlisted man could reach, would answer that it was to keep him “focused.” When they weren’t doing that, they were assembling small televisions. You know, the usual father-son stuff.
Robinson relates all this two decades later in a tone best described as wistful, and I suggest that it couldn’t have been that bad, since at the very least he could always play, dominate the competition.
“Not when I was young,” Robinson answers quickly. “I wasn’t any good. It wasn’t like I had basketball to pick me up and get me in good standing. I didn’t do anything until my senior year of high school.”
By then Robinson had grown to 6′7″ and made enough noise to be recruited by schools including Virginia Military Institute and George Washington, which were near the suburban Maryland area where he grew up. It was practically ordained, though, that he would get an appointment to the United States Naval Academy.
He flourished at Annapolis and continued to grow, eventually reaching 7′0″. He looked all of seven feet, too, since he walked with textbook posture, his bearing a metaphor for the shoulders-straight, eyes-forward way he tried to live his life. The nation began to hear about his college board scores, his aptitude for gymnastics (he could do backflips and handsprings, and he could walk the length of a basketball court on his hands), and his punctilious manner; his public comments were unfailingly lucid, literate, and carefully chosen.
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.
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