Dream Team

by Jack McCallum

  I ask Pippen if Jordan would ever admit that.

  “No way,” he says. “The great ones don’t tend to admit things were their fault. He’s going to say, ‘We were going to get beat by 25, so I did what I had to do.’ ”

  When it’s all said and done, I ask, is he glad he played with Jordan?

  “Of course I’m glad I played with him. But I had to figure out how to do it. You have to understand that Michael is a scorer. He has a will to score, and he had three years in the league without me. He knew what he could get done without me.

  “Defensively, we did it together. I can’t take the credit and he can’t take the credit. In ’91 [the Finals against the Lakers] I got some credit for defending Magic, but Michael defended him, too. We wore Magic down together.

  “See, we had good defensive chemistry. We had areas on the court where we just knew we were going to trap. We didn’t even talk about it. We let them cross half-court and get them in that corner. Or on an inbounds play, if a guy caught it at a certain spot, we knew we had him nailed. Or on our way up court, Michael would stop his guy, I would come, and we would catch him there. We were always in tune of how to double-team the ball.”

  So, I ask, who was the better defender?

  Pippen smiles. “Well, I guess everybody would say Michael,” he says.

  But what does Pippen say?

  “Well, Michael got away with a lot of things,” says Pippen. “Let’s just put it that way. He was the icon of the game for the world. And remember, that means for the opposing coaches, the officials, the opposing scorekeepers. Everybody was in awe of Michael Jordan. There’s never been another player like this in professional sports.

  “I mean, officials are saying to me, ‘Ask Michael if I can have his shoes after the game.’ Are you kidding me? All that made a difference. Michael goes into the backcourt, mauls Joe Dumars, and steals the ball. What, Joe Dumars is going to get a call? Nobody wanted Joe Dumars’s shoes after the game.”

  (Man, what the Pistons of the “Bad Boys” era wouldn’t have given to hear Scottie say that twenty years ago.)

  “But, hey, they were great perks if you were playing with him. They worked to our advantage and they worked to Michael’s advantage.”

  When Pippen was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2010, he asked Jordan to stand with him onstage. Scottie was as emotional as any player I’ve ever seen up there, truly overwhelmed by the moment, and he was extremely complimentary about Jordan. It was hard playing in the Jordan shadow, but in his heart of hearts I think he understands how much it helped him.

  I also know that he was extremely happy when, as I walked him to his car, a man looked up and said: “Hey, it’s Scottie Pippen! No Scottie … no rings for M.J.”

  CHAPTER 12

  THE COACH

  A Man of Both Style and Substance

  Minutes before tip-off of a postseason game in 1990 at the Palace of Auburn Hills in suburban Detroit, Pistons coach Chuck Daly leaned over to whisper some words of wisdom to me and my courtside companion, David Dupree of USA Today. We listened intently—perhaps it would be some strategic nugget we could use later.

  “See the subtle gold pinstripe in this suit?” Chuck said. “Notice how it’s the perfect match for the gold coloring in my tie?”

  That, in a nutshell, was why Charles Jerome Daly ended up coaching the Dream Team.

  Daly wasn’t serious, of course. Oh, he was serious about his wardrobe—“Nobody ever looked bad in a blue suit,” he told me once, offering one of his life principles in a sober voice, much like my father, who, cautioning me to drink booze neat, told me, “It’s those mixers with all that sugar that’ll kill you”—but Daly was having fun with his own wardrobe obsession, not to mention slowly opening the valve on the pressure-cooker reality of the occasion. Try to imagine, say, Bill Belichick acting that way before a playoff game; actually, try to imagine Bill Belichick noticing that his pinstripes matched his tie.

  The idea of having a college guy coach the ’92 team did not go down without a fight. Krzyzewski, who almost certainly would’ve been the coach, said that he came to accept the decision early, while others say that his was the most strident voice about the necessity of having a college coach for Olympic competition. Whichever account is correct, his opinion deserved to be heard … and was doomed to failure, since the selection committee was stacked with NBA general managers.

  Daly was not the first name out of everyone’s mouth. Quite early, Don Nelson volunteered for the job, and the names of two other predictable suspects, Pat Riley and Larry Brown, were bandied about. It was committee member Billy Cunningham who first brought up Detroit coach Daly, who had been Cunningham’s assistant when the Philadelphia 76ers won the NBA championship in 1983.

  At this point, sometime after the 1988–89 season, Daly was coming off a championship sweep of the Lakers, and he would win another, against the Portland Trail Blazers, in the summer of 1990, before the committee would make its decision. Daly had coached in high school, in college (at Penn, where for six years in the 1970s he co-dominated the Ivy League with Princeton), and the NBA. Most important, nobody didn’t like Chuck.

  Perhaps it had to do with Daly being a latecomer who had clearly paid his dues. He was already forty-eight when he got his first NBA job as Cunningham’s assistant. He was fifty-one when he got his first head coaching job (with the Cavs), fifty-one when he first got fired (from the Cavs), fifty-three when he got hired by the Pistons, and fifty-eight when he won his first NBA championship. He was no phenom, and perhaps that made him aware that it could all go away tomorrow. He wasn’t gloomy, but he did have a dark side that balanced out that nobody-looks-bad-in-a-blue-suit hauteur. The Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan, the dean of NBA writers, had christened Daly the “Prince of Pessimism.” In contrast to, say, Red Auerbach, who would light his victory cigar as soon as he felt his Celtics had the game under control, Daly would be sitting on a 20-point lead with ten seconds left and fret about the 21-point play the opposing coach had up his sleeve.

  Daly was the kind of guy who looked like somebody even if you didn’t know exactly who. With his dark suits and carefully coiffed hair, he seemed to have stepped out of the pages of Guys and Dolls, a man who knew how to make the deals or knew someone who knew how to make the deals. But he never got lost in all that Hugo Boss. He was from a small town called Kane, Pennsylvania, about a hundred miles northeast of Pittsburgh, a land of snow and ice and slush. Here’s what his high school coach, C. Stuart Edwards, was like. I called Edwards for a profile I was writing about Daly, and after hearing the words Sports Illustrated, grumbled, “I’m not interested in buying any magazines,” and hung up the phone. It took two more calls to get Edwards back on the line.

  Chuck’s first coaching job was at Punxsutawney High, in the town best known for pulling a groundhog out of a basket every February and asking it to predict the weather. With those roots, it’s hard to take yourself seriously, and this helps explain why Daly managed the neat trick of coming across as both blue- and white-collar without being a poseur.

  He had all sorts of set pieces he pulled out to charm you. “Ya owe me any money?” he used to say when he pumped your hand to say hello. He described NBA coaching as “dealing with twelve individual Fortune 500 companies.” He never overtalked during time-outs; sometimes he got his point across by saying nothing. “You know how some business executives hate meetings and say they’re ineffective?” Daly used to tell me. “Well, think about my job. Before the game you meet with the team and that’s a meeting. Every time-out … meeting. End of a quarter … meeting. Halftime … meeting. After the game … meeting. Next day at practice …” It was a brilliant shtick, and it rang true.

  Daly had remained a popular figure despite the fact that his physical Pistons, who wore the tag “Bad Boys” with pride, were controversial. Every night of his Pistons coaching life, Daly did a Wallenda on a very skinny rope. He had a subtle way of humanizing his hated team. Isiah Thomas was always “Zeke.” La
imbeer was always “Billy.” Feisty forward Rick Mahorn (a funny and terrific guy off the court, by the way) was always “Ricky.” Throw in “Vinnie” Johnson, the Pistons light-it-up third guard, and the Bad Boys sounded like a collection of precious cherubs rather than one of the most physical and intimidating teams in NBA history.

  Though Daly would never, ever sell out his players, he somehow detached himself from the on-court mayhem the Pistons created. It was almost as if he were the feckless father in a sitcom, unable to stop his sons from breaking the furniture, rather than the architect of the “Jordan Rules,” an armor-plated defense that doubled and tripled Jordan and gave him a strategic shove or elbow even when he didn’t have the ball. “Chuck’s ego,” says Rod Thorn, an NBA executive who helped pick the Dream Team coach and players, “was not as big as his team’s.”

  In short, Daly didn’t have warts—“He didn’t bring any baggage,” as Thorn put it—and, in the end, the committee decision was an easy one. On Valentine’s Day, 1991, a limo picked up Daly before a game in Milwaukee and whisked him to O’Hare Airport in Chicago, where he was told that he was the choice to coach the 1992 Olympic team. Daly said he was surprised, but who knew if that was true? He was a poker player of the first order. He was also told that Lenny Wilkens was the choice for first assistant, and that was fine with Daly, too.

  As an organization, the Pistons took the official position that they were happy for Daly. The reality might’ve been something else. The team had clearly lost its edge over the Bulls by then, yet there was Daly getting a “promotion” that had nothing to do with Motown. Isiah Thomas was battling a wrist injury that kept him out of action for ten weeks, and several weeks after Daly was announced as the Dream Team coach, the Pistons’ captain went off on everyone. “Nobody gives a shit around here anymore and that includes the coaches,” Thomas said after a home loss to the lowly Cleveland Cavaliers. “We’ve become comfortable with losing.”

  Perhaps that was Isiah’s audition for the Dream Team, an effort to demonstrate how important winning was to him. Perhaps it was legitimate anger. Perhaps it was both.

  USA Basketball wanted to announce a team by September 1991, ten months before qualifying competition would begin, and felt comfortable that it had gotten the right man as coach. Quite early in the process it was decided that the time-honored Olympic tryouts—those enervating ordeals that enabled tyrants such as Knight to rage and fume and hold the stage for weeks on end, and which in the U.S. track and field world are still held sacrosanct—weren’t going to happen. Listen, Michael, could you get in that layup line over there? We wanna get a good look at you. There was a lot of work to do to fill the roster, and the committee charged Daly with creating a list of the players he’d want, broken down by position, a half dozen or so in each category.

  For Daly, that was the easy part. That was the big list, and anyone could’ve made one with the usual suspects—Jordan, Magic, Bird, Barkley, Malone, Stockton, Mullin, Drexler, and so on. Daly included four of his own players on that list—Isiah (obviously), Joe Dumars, Rodman (just coming into his own as a player who would become one of the greatest rebounders of all time), and Laimbeer, who didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making the team but was an exceptionally smart player who had been a big part of Daly’s two championship teams.

  Seeing all those names on the board—players such as James Worthy, Kevin McHale, and Dominique Wilkins, all of whom were unlikely to be chosen—had a profound effect on the college guys on the committee. In casual conversations, the idea of a team with six NBA players and six college players had gradually given way to an eight-and-four breakdown. The college guys prepared to dig in at eight and four.

  Then the hard reality set in. “I’ll never forget the day we put the names from the big list on the board,” says C. M. Newton, one of the college guys on the committee. “We were talking about eight pros and four college kids at that point, and then you looked at the NBA names … and there was literally no one to leave off. We all knew at that point, and it was pretty early, that it was just about all over for the college kids.”

  The more interesting list that Daly provided, though, was his wish list, which included the names of the players he felt were most essential for success. I never saw that list, and as far as I know Chuck never showed it publicly before he died from cancer in May 2009. Perhaps he never even wrote down the names. Or perhaps somewhere in Chuck’s files there is a scrap of paper still to be unearthed. The memories of the committee members do not completely coalesce on the names, but, after some investigation, I stand behind the names I wrote in Sports Illustrated at the time: Jordan, Magic, Pippen, Robinson, Mullin, Malone, and Ewing.

  The order is deliberate. Michael and Magic are the obvious one-two. Daly wanted Pippen for his long-armed, cover-the-court defensive abilities and his offensive versatility. True, he had seen his own team turn Pippen into a shell of a player many times, but the Bulls sideman had upped his game considerably during the Bulls’ ’91 championship run. Players are often damned with the faint praise of being “complementary,” but Pippen was perhaps unique in this respect: he was a superstar complementary player.

  Daly loved Robinson’s shot blocking and Mullin’s shot making. Reggie Miller’s name came up early, but Daly saw Mullin as more of a classic zone breaker. The coach wasn’t completely enamored of Malone but considered the Mailman a dependable low-block scorer and a shot-clock bailout. Ditto for Ewing, though Daly had far more affection for Robinson’s game than he did for Ewing’s.

  The name of Isiah Thomas was not on Daly’s list. Exactly why not is a subject for later (Chapter 14), but Daly constantly sold the idea that he was only the coach. “The committee picks the players,” he said, comparing it to the situation in the NBA—general managers get the players, and coaches coach them. That was technically true but pragmatically hogwash. Had Daly walked into the room and said, “I want Isiah Thomas on this team,” the committee would’ve had a much tougher time with the selection process. I didn’t express that opinion at the time, and neither, as far as I know, did anyone else. In part I excuse myself for not writing about it because there was no Internet and no SI.com and therefore no great volume of stories about the selection of the Olympic team. But another part of the reason I didn’t write it was my respect for the tough position that Daly was in.

  “Chuck’s the one who really skated on the Isiah issue,” says Jan Hubbard, who did the most aggressive reporting about the Olympic selection process for Newsday.

  Isiah had another supposed ally on the committee in Detroit general manager Jack McCloskey, a respected voice in the NBA. If Isiah felt uncomfortable lobbying Daly for a spot on the team—and he did—he certainly could tell McCloskey that he wanted in on the Barcelona festivities. “Isiah felt that he couldn’t put pressure on Chuck,” says Dave Gavitt, “but he put big-time pressure on Jack.”

  Thomas once had political capital around the league, back when he was a kid whose killer crossover was matched only by his killer smile. But that capital was diminishing—the Jordan freeze-out, the Bird insult, the Pistons’ physical play. As Gavitt puts it, “It quickly became obvious that Isiah was not the most popular dude.”

  “At that particular time, we were the past,” says Laimbeer, Isiah’s best friend on the team and the Bad Boy least likely to mince words. “It would’ve been interesting to see what would’ve happened if the Olympics had come along two years earlier, when we were in the middle of our run. The Olympic team was a political battle, and if there was one team and one player that wasn’t going to win a political battle, it was the Detroit Pistons and Isiah Thomas.”

  Two notable names that were not on Daly’s wish list were those of Larry Bird and Charles Barkley. Bird had already made noises about being too old and too beset by back problems. And Charles … well, Charles was another matter, even to someone like Daly, who had coached more than his share of space cadets.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE JESTER

&nb
sp; Sir Charles Wants to Be an Olympian … He Just Doesn’t Always Act Like One

  On the evening of March 26, 1991, as USA Basketball’s Olympic selection committee was getting serious about whom they were going to invite to play on the team, Charles Barkley of the Philadelphia 76ers was getting irritated during a game against the New Jersey Nets. Even Barkley’s detractors had to give him points for getting amped up in New Jersey, in an arena devoid of animation and energy. Barkley would later say that an older male fan was yelling things like “Fat ass!” and “Asshole!” at him; in some stories the insults were said to be racial. The latter was never proven, but suffice to say that back then racial epithets were hurled during games. They weren’t directed at me, obviously, but I heard them.

  At any rate, Barkley turned to spit at the fan, but, as he said later in a memorable disquisition on the incident, “I didn’t get enough foam,” and his spittle landed on an eight-year-old girl named Lauren Rose, who was at the game with her parents. As soon as he realized what he had done, Barkley was properly mortified, issuing heartfelt apology after heartfelt apology, and, as was and is his style, eventually befriending the girl and her family.

  But spitting on a fan? A young girl? That was considered by many to be the public relations strike that would keep Barkley off the Olympic team, of which he desperately wanted to be a part. A few weeks earlier, at the NBA All-Star Game in Charlotte, he had run into C. M. Newton, who was on USA Basketball’s selection committee and who had been an assistant coach on Bob Knight’s gold medal team from which Barkley had been cut, partly because Knight didn’t like him, to be sure, but partly because Barkley grew bored with the enervating trials and more or less dared Knight to axe him.

  “Don’t hold 1984 against me,” Barkley said to Newton. “I really want to be on this team!” That was the All-Star Weekend to which Barkley, acknowledging the first Persian Gulf incursion, wore a cap that read “Fuck Iraq.”