So there was no reason that he couldn’t win at that AAU tournament in Huntington. When the team arrived Stockton studied a tournament program that included a grainy photo of a player from the Chicago team. “I remember thinking, ‘How good can this guy be?’ ”
The guy, Isiah Thomas, who was about Stockton’s size, turned out to be pretty good. Team Washington hung in with Isiah’s Chicago for three quarters until Isiah decided to take over. “We had been pressing them pretty effectively and it looked to me like Isiah just decided he wasn’t going to do what the coach wanted,” says Stockton. “So he just dribbled through us like we were nothing. Dribble through, pass … somebody dunked. Dribble through, pass … somebody dunked. Dribble through … Isiah layup. He just killed us. One guy. He killed us.
“Now, I went back to my room and normally I was a pretty smiley kid, but I was frowning that day. I couldn’t believe anyone was that good.”
Anyone who has played sports remembers that moment of stark realization when someone proves to be that much better than you. The question is, what do you do about it? What Stockton did was set a new bar for himself. He had to get as good as guys like Isiah Thomas. There was a new universe out there.
Athletes like Stockton are often referred to as embodiments of the American dream. Undersized and undervalued, driven by doubt, they go on to achieve great things in a sport that doesn’t seem designed for them, their own extraordinary athletic gifts (hand-eye coordination, endurance, competitive drive, balance, ambidexterity) not necessarily the gifts associated with their sport.
Too often, we forget that a player like Isiah represents the American dream, too, just not the white-bread version that’s been hammered into our heads. Yes, Isiah probably had more natural talent than Stockton in terms of quickness and jumping ability. But he had many, many, many more ways to go wrong. His odds of reaching the NBA were every bit as formidable as Stockton’s.
Three Thomas brothers surrendered to the temptations of the street. One of those, Gregory, an intravenous drug user, died of AIDS. Isiah’s heroic mother, Mary, chased away drug dealers, gang bangers, and thugs of all stripes so that her youngest of nine, Isiah Lord, could escape, make a life for himself. Isiah spent hours in isolation, dribbling a basketball off a milk crate, and rode a bus ninety minutes from his home on the West Side of Chicago to attend a Catholic school in Westchester, Illinois, where the bangers couldn’t get at him. St. Joseph was to Isiah what Gonzaga Prep was to Stockton.
Isiah’s game was both street and textbook, the perfect marriage of the West Side and St. Joseph, just as Chris Mullin’s game would be the perfect marriage of the playground and the CYO gym. “I always considered myself a smart player, thinking maybe one step ahead,” says Laimbeer, Thomas’s closest friend on the Pistons. “That’s the only way I could make it. But Isiah was always one step ahead of me. He saw what that guy was going to do, but he also saw what the other guy was going to do when that guy did that.”
And so it was—to use the favorite word in our vernacular—ironic that these two flip sides of the American dream, these two combatants from an AAU tournament in West Virginia, came to be the major sticking point for the Dream Team selection. Had Isiah not been so unpopular among other players and committee members, he would’ve made the Dream Team, and Stockton would’ve been left out. That’s just a fact.
My own opinion was that Isiah deserved to be on the team over Stockton, and I wrote that in a column for Sports Illustrated. Lo and behold, in the week that that opinion was due to appear, I was covering a game in Los Angeles and ran into Stockton at a deli where we were both catching a late-night sandwich.
“John, I don’t know whether you read Sports Illustrated, or whether you really give a damn,” I told him, “but I want to let you know that I wrote that Isiah should’ve been on the Olympic team.” I don’t think I had the guts to add instead of you, but the implication was there.
“Sure, okay,” he said. “A lot of people feel that way.”
“You know how much I respect your game,” I said. “It’s just that—”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
We sat down and ate.
On November 15, 1991, two months after Isiah discovered that he was not one of the first ten choices for the Dream Team and could only make it as a dreaded “add-on,” the Utah Jazz came to the Palace of Auburn Hills. As Laimbeer remembers it, “Isiah didn’t say anything before the game. He just had that look.”
Armed with a vendetta, few players in basketball history are more lethal than Thomas, who could score on almost anyone when he put his mind to it, and Stockton was just another in a long line of players who could not stay in front of Isiah. Thomas owned Stockton on that night, scoring 44 points in a Detroit victory, forgetting his role as team quarterback in the service of demonstrating that he belonged on the Dream Team.
Years later, I talked to Stockton about that night. This is all he would say: “Isiah figured he should’ve been on the Dream Team, and I guess I was the clear target.”
What’s forgotten is that Stockton was pretty good, too, with 20 points and 12 assists, fulfilling what Bill Simmons said about him, in a backhanded-compliment way, in The Book of Basketball: “For Jazz fans, watching Stockton was like being trapped in the missionary position for two decades. Yeah, you were having regular sex (in this case, winning games), but you weren’t exactly bragging to your friends or anything.” Over the course of their careers, Stockton actually played quite well against Thomas, as did Thomas against Stockton.
A month later, Detroit came to the Salt Palace in Utah, a notoriously hostile place for rival teams. Isiah went at Stockton again, scoring six early points. That’s when Karl Malone decided he had seen enough.
This was the Mailman’s seventh season with Stockton and they had grown close, bonded by mutual respect and the realization that they made each other better. (They remain that way today; Stockton and his wife, Nada, are godparents to one of Malone’s daughters.) They were as hard as mahogany, and they liked it like that. At this writing, Malone has committed the second highest number of fouls in NBA history (behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Stockton ranked at number fourteen, the only true guard on the top-twenty list. (While Malone will take his rep as a tough guy to the grave—just look at his body—succeeding generations may not remember that, in his own way, Stockton was considered a bully, too, someone who wasn’t afraid to throw an elbow or stick out a knee in the middle of a scrum. Years later I asked Stockton if he was a dirty player. At the time we were standing high above the Spokane Falls in his hometown and I thought maybe he was going to push me over. “Absolutely not,” he snapped. “I would never intentionally hurt anybody and in nineteen years I never did. The only reason they said that was that they couldn’t think of anything else to say. They just figured that a little guy couldn’t have set so many screens any other way.”)
Malone and Stockton had friendly debates on the team bus to and from games, particularly about hunting. Stockton was no fiery liberal but he just couldn’t understand why Malone enjoyed gunning things down. (Malone’s home in Louisiana is a taxidermist’s wet dream. About a hundred mounted big-game animals hang unsmilingly from the walls and ceiling, including what he calls “the grand slam of sheep,” the Dall, the Stone, the bighorn, and the desert bighorn. I had bad dreams about being eaten alive after spending a few hours in their company.)
Stockton also didn’t approve of Malone’s habit of nocturnal snowmobiling, believing that careening pell-mell down a mountain in darkness had a somewhat risky aspect to it.
They were extremely comfortable with each other. I walked them out to their cars after practice one day in Utah and said to Stockton, “Well, John, I bet you have something controversial to say as usual, right?”
“Not much,” deadpanned Stockton. “Only this homosexual problem we’ve got on our team.” He jerked his chin toward Malone. “And it’s worse among our black players. Typical.” Malone cracked up.
Un
til their dying days, Stockton, Malone, and ex-coach Jerry Sloan will be the very definition of Utah Jazz basketball, though a nasty public fight has erupted between the Mailman and Jazz CEO Greg Miller, son of the original owner, the late Larry Miller.
Anyway, late in the first quarter of this game, Laimbeer set a high pick on Stockton and Isiah set off down the lane on the right side, streaking by center Mark Eaton and heading for the basket. Malone left his man and met Isiah in the lane, chopping his right arm down on Isiah’s face. Isiah flew through the air like a rag doll and landed on the floor, blood pouring off his face, “like a boxer who had taken a punch,” as the play-by-play announcer described it at the time. By chance, Utah’s orthopedic surgeon had gone outside to answer a page, so it was left to the Jazz podiatrist to see if he could help the trainer with the profusely bleeding Thomas. His suggestion was to put a cervical collar on Isiah and take him out on a backboard. But Laimbeer, his eternal protector, said that his buddy wasn’t going out in such ignominious fashion, so he picked up Isiah himself, as easily as an adult picks up a three-year-old, and carried him into the locker room.
Malone was ejected from the game, and years later I asked him if he hit Isiah on purpose.
“Of course,” he said.
But unless you’re holding a scalpel and your target is lying on an operating table, you can’t arrange that kind of hit, right?
“Look, I tried to hit him,” Malone answered. “I wanted to hit him. But that hard? No, you don’t have time to plan that. But I hit him, I know that.”
Had Malone’s victim been someone other than Isiah, league reaction might’ve been massive outrage. Accusations that Malone was a dirty player were nothing new, and the best reaction came, of course, from Barkley, who mused about what would happen if Isiah were added to the Dream Team roster. “I have no problem with Isiah being on the Olympic team,” said Barkley, “but there would be at least three guys he wouldn’t be roommates with. Michael and Scottie don’t want to, and I guess Karl’s out of the picture now. I’d wind up rooming with him by default.” (The idea of the players actually having to bunk with someone was hilarious in itself.)
For me, the most interesting part of Malone’s hatchet job was Chuck Daly’s reaction. As soon as Isiah went down, the Pistons’ coach flew off the bench in a rage, charging over to the scene of the crime. It was absolutely not an act—his captain had gone down and Chuck was mad. But what could he do? Rip off his custom sport jacket and challenge Malone to a fight? Pick one with his Jazz counterpart Jerry Sloan, a bare-knuckles brawler from way back? In the end, what Daly did was go ballistic in the time-honored I-want-to-hit-somebody-but-I-don’t-know-whom-to-hit manner that we’ve seen from so many coaches.
Perhaps because Stockton was so sensitive to the Isiah issue, and because he also respected him as a player, Stockton never said anything remotely negative about Thomas. (Then again, Mostly Silent John never said that much anyway.) And Thomas, for his part, never hung Stockton out to dry. There is no doubt that Isiah considered himself the superior player, but he never denigrated the Jazz point guard, and after the Dream Team business had finished, Isiah placed a phone call to Jack and Dan’s Bar and Grill in Spokane and asked to speak to the owner.
“I just want to let you know, Mr. Stockton,” Isiah said to John’s father, Jack, “that anything I had to say about the Dream Team had nothing to do with your son. He’s a great player.”
Neither Stockton nor his father ever forgot that call. And when Stockton was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2009, he asked Isiah to stand onstage and represent him. It may have been 50 percent theater, but it was 50 percent legit.
When Daly was asked after the game about the Malone foul, he did the customary bobbing and weaving. He had to stick up for his captain and star, but he didn’t have much to gain by trashing a player he would be coaching in Barcelona. “They ask if it was a flagrant foul, and Isiah had forty stitches, fifteen inside and twenty-five outside,” Chuck answered. “The league office will determine how malicious.”
Before Chuck died, I never got a chance to ask him, after years of reflection, whether he regretted not advocating for Isiah to be on the Dream Team. I know he agonized about it at the time, even though “It was tough … really hard … I really wanted him, but …” was about all I managed out of him. But as I watched him kneel over the bleeding Isiah, I wonder: did he wish at that moment that he had pushed harder for the inclusion of this complex kid from Chicago, this lightning rod who had brought him two championships and so many magic moments?
CHAPTER 17
THE DUKIE
Wanted: College All-American … Must Perform Scut Duty on Summer Vacation
With the exception of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird, one could argue that Christian Laettner, who turned out to be the least important player on the twelve-man roster, was the next surest player to be an Olympic invitee. In the earliest stages of negotiating among the committee members who would pick the team, the idea that college players would have equal representation was quickly squelched. Then eight and four bit the dust. The idea of ten pros and two collegians remained alive, but—with players such as Isiah Thomas, Clyde Drexler, and Dominique Wilkens not among the initial ten chosen—it soon became clear that only one collegian would be among the twelve roster players, “the gift to the college guys,” as committee member Donnie Walsh put it.
And it became clear who that guy was going to be.
“Nobody said it out loud,” says C. M. Newton, “but Christian Laettner was going to be on this team.”
Certainly his college coach, Mike Krzyzewski, a committee member, pushed that idea. Laettner says that early in his senior year, 1991, Coach K told him, “They’re going to take one collegian. Your goal should be to be that guy. And you will be that guy if we have a great season and you play great.”
Duke did have a great season and Laettner did play great, and if there were still some holding out throughout the winter months for Shaquille O’Neal, the man-child from Louisiana State University, that all changed on the fateful afternoon of March 28, about two months before the committee would announce the final two players. That was when Christian Laettner became a legend.
In the Eastern Regional final at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, a game that would determine one Final Four entry, Kentucky led Duke 103–102 with just 2.1 seconds left. “We’re gonna win,” Krzyzewski told his team in the time-out huddle that would precede a full-court pass. That’s what a coach is supposed to say, of course, but Krzyzewski felt he had a chance. Everyone knew the final shot would go to Laettner, and there was a precedent for success; two years earlier, in a regional final against Connecticut, Laettner had hit a lunging, twisting double-pump jumper to win the game and put Duke into the Final Four.
Krzyzewski designated Grant Hill to throw the pass. Hill’s father, Calvin, had been an NFL star with the Dallas Cowboys, quite possibly an irrelevant fact but hard to avoid mentioning considering how perfectly Hill threw the ball. Earlier in the season, in the same game situation at Wake Forest, Hill had given Laettner a screwball that drove him out of bounds. But this time Hill’s toss was perfect, straight, true, and high enough that the 6′11″ Laettner, a decent jumper but no aerial acrobat, caught the ball.
It would be impossible to calculate how badly Kentuckians wanted Laettner to screw up the play. Earlier in the game, with Duke leading 73–68, Laettner and Kentucky’s Aminu Timberlake had collided, Timberlake falling to the floor. Laettner promptly planted his right foot into Timberlake’s stomach, not with a great deal of pressure but enough to make him feel it. As Alexander Wolff of Sports Illustrated later put it: “It was just a chippy, I’m-Christian-Laettner-and-you’re-not thing to do.”
Laettner, so often the villain, was not often the goat. He took one dribble, wheel-faked right, then spun left and unleashed a fallaway jumper, the twentieth shot that he had attempted that day. To that point, all nineteen—nine from the field, ten from the foul line—had gone in.
Krzyzewski said later that, had he been aware of that fact, he might not have called Laettner’s number, fearing the law of averages was against him. I doubt that, though.
Laettner’s shot soared toward the basket, the rotation perfect, and those Kentucky fans who had started to head toward the exits stopped in their tracks, looks of horror beginning to take shape on their faces.
Bonnie Laettner admired Marlon Brando’s performances in Mutiny on the Bounty and The Young Lions so much that she put “Christian,” the name Brando had given to his son, on the birth certificate of her firstborn, even though she had unofficially named him Christopher. Laettner looked like what he was—a product of the Nichols School, a small, mostly white, coats-and-ties-mandatory preppy depot in his native Buffalo. Laettner loved to talk about Nichols, to the point that his Duke teammates grew sick of hearing about it.
He seemed tailor-made for Duke, a magnet for highly regarded Caucasian players who end up irritating the masses (Danny Ferry, Cherokee Parks, Chris Collins, Greg Paulus, Steve Wojciechowski, and J. J. Redick among them), but his mother, a strong influence in his life, loved the University of North Carolina and coach Dean Smith. She urged Christian to go to Chapel Hill, and he considered it. But, eventually, he was just too much a Dukie not to become a Dukie. And it is simply impossible to overestimate the hatred that, almost immediately, Laettner engendered in the opposition.
“Duke was like America’s team and Christian Laettner was like God and I didn’t like him,” Juwan Howard said in the documentary The Fab Five, which chronicles the celebrated freshman class at the University of Michigan that acted as a kind of cultural cross-reference to Duke back in the early 1990s.
“I thought Christian Laettner was soft,” Jimmy King said.
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