“Overrated,” Ray Jackson said.
“Pretty boy,” Howard said.
Laettner was neither soft nor overrated, not as a college player. “Pretty boy” is right on. He looked (still looks) impossibly like a soap-opera star, with wavy hair, piercing blue eyes, and all that height. He would be cast either as the cad head surgeon who beds the OR nurses or, in a modern version, as the gay seducer of vulnerable young residents. Reports did surface that Laettner was gay, specifically that he was in a relationship with teammate Brian Davis. That was not surprising considering that the fan bases at rival schools, bent on out-crazying the Cameron Crazies who support Duke basketball, are brutal. What was surprising was how much Laettner defiantly encouraged those rumors, kissing Davis after he dunked in one game and, on other occasions, extending his arm and flopping his wrist while attempting a free throw, daring the crowd to insult him.
At the same time, Laettner was also, in the words of teammate Hill, a bully. “Christian was bigger than everybody and he could fight, and he always wanted to fight,” says Hill. “He’d pick a fight with guys just to see if that guy had heart.” Bobby Hurley, Duke’s All-American point guard, was a favorite target. It drove Laettner nuts—still does—that Krzyzewski handed Hurley the ball and a starting job as soon as he hit campus, whereas Laettner was treated like the freshman he was.
He always played the role of alpha Dukie. One night in 1990, when he was a freshman, Hill answered a knock at his door around midnight. It was Laettner, who ordered him to get his coat. It was raining hard, but Laettner insisted they were going out and led him to his car. He drove through the night fast until he came to the empty parking lot of Duke Medical Center, at which point he began doing full-speed donuts by suddenly yanking on the emergency brake while traveling at a high rate of speed. Hill was afraid to say much because, well, he was only a freshman and Laettner was Laettner.
Hill says that the white-bread kid from Nichols School also wanted to be black. “One year Bobby [Hurley] got hurt and Tony Lang was starting for him and Christian’s in the huddle clapping his hands and going, ‘Okay, we got five brothers starting.’ And it didn’t seem like he was kidding.”
By the time he was a senior, you could get a debate on whether Laettner was the best player in the country, but he was unquestionably the most-watched, the beloved idol of the Duke fans, the embodiment of frat-boy evil for the opponents. He was also a recognized archetype—the immortal collegian who would not be as good in the pros, everybody’s All-American turned standard issue. Whereas Jordan was constrained by North Carolina’s share-the-wealth-take-care-of-the-ball-philosophy, Laettner’s talents were maximized in Krzyzewski’s get-up-and-go system. Laettner, with talent all around him, could get off his perimeter shot with ease but was also able to post up and dominate with his size. He wouldn’t be able to do that in the pros. He was a little soft, a little disinclined to improve, a little slow—a little of this and a little of that. It all adds up to a lot when you’re talking about becoming an NBA star on the level of his Dream Team playmates.
But man, what a college player he was.
And so Laettner’s shot settled into the basket, as it seemed destined to do, completing his 31-point perfect afternoon, one comparable to the near-perfect 44-point performance that UCLA’s Bill Walton had famously inflicted on Memphis State in the 1973 NCAA championship game. At press row after the Laettner shot went in, veteran Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan wrote out a question on a piece of notebook paper, “Greatest Game Ever?” and held it up. Many agreed, and Laettner was its unquestioned star.
Volumes have been written about that game, a predictable luncheon stop for anyone grazing through NCAA history. The late Chris Farley, playing the role of Laettner, did an NCAA video promo about it. The shot has been replayed, by conservative estimate, a couple of thousand times since then. Laettner professes that he doesn’t watch it, but Hill admits that he pauses each time it comes on—the perfect pass, the catch and graceful turn, the perfect shot, the orgiastic celebration. “That’s the great thing about it,” says Hill, “You get to relive it every year.”
In the wake of that game, C. M. Newton, who was the athletic director at Kentucky as well as chairman of the Olympic selection committee, astonished the Kentucky seniors by retiring their jerseys even though they had been beaten. That’s what kind of impact that game had.
So for the Olympic selection committee, it was an easy decision that Laettner would be the college guy, the lone concession to the old way of doing things. It would not be an easy task for anyone, far less for Laettner, the bully-boy antagonist with a lot of attitude.
CHAPTER 18
THE GLIDE
Clyde’s on the Team, and Jordan Shrugs
On May 11, a few weeks before he was to meet Michael Jordan in a Finals showdown that everyone was waiting for, Clyde Drexler was named to the Olympic team along with Christian Laettner. The roster was now complete, and for all eternity Clyde would be the eleventh man, the add-on among the NBA players.
The main argument against adding Drexler to the team was that he was too much like Jordan. At the same time, that was probably the best reason to add him, since being a lot like Jordan couldn’t be a bad thing. In truth, by this time, it didn’t matter what style of player or which position was to be added. Everything was set: ball-handling with Magic, Stockton, Jordan, and Pippen; rebounding with Robinson, Ewing, Barkley, and Malone; outside shooting with Mullin, Jordan, and Bird; lockdown defending with Pippen and Jordan; scoring with everybody; high-level entertainment with Barkley. Coffee and donuts? The college kid could bring them. It was only necessary to take the best available player, or, as the case might be, the best available player who wasn’t Isiah.
For several years the Jordan-or-Clyde story line had been predictable chum for the sportswriter—I chomped on it from time to time—and Jordan invariably won in all places save the lovely city of Portland, Oregon, whose fans felt loyal to Clyde, ignored by three of the four time zones, and just plain sick and tired of hearing about Jordan. Plus, they needed Drexler to be as good since it was the presence of Drexler on the roster that prompted the Trail Blazers to bypass Jordan and go for a big man, Sam Bowie, in the 1984 draft. Portland-based broadcaster Steve “Snapper” Jones, a delightful man who loved to talk basketball and debate any question, was especially vocal about Drexler being the equal of Jordan. Rod Thorn, conjuring up his best West Virginia drawl, used to say to him: “Steve, d’y’all have TVs out there in Portland?”
For the most part, Drexler stayed away from the comparisons with Jordan, but he was just vain enough—a quality that does not distinguish him from most other high-achieving pro athletes—to stick one little toe into those dangerous waters every once in a while, to ask quietly, as he asked me from time to time off the record: What can Michael do that I can’t do?
One answer was nothing. There was nothing that Jordan did that Drexler couldn’t do.
The other answer was nothing … except that Jordan did everything better.
They played the same two-guard position with a similar athletic flair, but Jordan was a better pull-up shooter, a better driver, a better passer, a better defender, a better rebounder, and even a better dunker, though Drexler, whose running vertical was measured at forty-four inches, could probably outleap Jordan.
One can only imagine, then, the ghastliness of the waking nightmare in which Clyde found himself in Game 1 of the 1992 NBA Finals. His Trail Blazers had gotten off to a quick start against Jordan’s Bulls in Chicago. But then came the second period and Jordan started draining three-point shots, one, two, three, four, five …
What the hell was going on? Neither Jordan nor Drexler was ever considered a drop-dead long-distance man. Drexler’s career percentage on threes was 31 percent, and Jordan’s was only one percentage point better. However, Drexler’s long-range shooting sank to about 28 percent in the postseason, while Jordan’s rose to 33 percent. That is well on its way to being an appreciable differ
ence. Still, going into these Finals, Drexler was generally considered a better long-distance shooter than Jordan, or as Jordan pointedly put it before the series began, “Clyde is a better three-point shooter than I choose to be.”
And then in this strange Game 1 Jordan hit his sixth three-pointer and … what was he doing? He was shrugging? Who the hell ever saw him shrug? But, yes, after the final one went in, Jordan glanced over at courtside commentator Magic Johnson and shrugged, as if to say, I don’t know what’s going on myself.
Drexler knew exactly what was going on. In the endless war of comparison between him and Jordan, he was getting torched again. And what did Clyde the Glide say to Jordan during all of this? Spicy comments such as “Aren’t you going to miss?”
“Nice shot,” and “Good play.” I wrote in SI the following week that Drexler “had set the art of trash-talking back about 30 years.”
For a long time Drexler was said to have the highest score ever recorded on the psychological profile test that the Trail Blazers give rookies. Assistant coach John Wetzel used to talk about Drexler having “a gentleness to his soul.” Clyde was also unfailingly polite and cordial, even to the media. All of those things sound good if you’re running for student council president, but they’re not necessarily barometers of NBA success.
As for basketball, Drexler played a lot of small forward at the University of Houston and a lot of center at Ross Sterling High School in Houston, so he did have an adjustment when he became an NBA shooting guard. He had some strange habits for a great player. He brought his hands down to his waist before he raised them to shoot, and he dribbled with his head down and almost exclusively with his right hand, habits that didn’t change much as he matured. But neither did they seem to slow him down all that much. (Jerry West almost always went right and Lenny Wilkens almost always went left, and no one could stop them, either.)
Then, too, while Drexler didn’t exactly feud with his coaches, he did spar with two of them—the respected Jack Ramsey and the less-respected Mike Schuler. Drexler’s rep for showing up “just in time” for practice was widely known, especially since Drexler owned up to it. Whereas Jordan was picking fights and busting on his teammates during intrasquad scrimmages, Drexler put himself in the practice-kind-of-counts-but-not-really camp.
In 1990 Don Nelson called Drexler the most overrated player in the league and added a few other poisonous comments. “He chips away at what an organization is trying to do,” said Nelson. “He is the worst of all kinds because he comes off as polite. He is religious, devoted to family. Yet in the context of a team, he is destructive.” Drexler always figured that Nelson was in fact speaking the mind of his assistant, Schuler, who had been fired by the Blazers midway through the 1988–89 season and ended up with the Warriors. Whatever their source, those were inexcusable comments—indicative of why Nelson would’ve been the wrong man to coach the Dream Team—and Nelson later apologized for making them.
But by 1992, Drexler was considered by many to be the best non-Jordan player in the league. There was wide consensus that he had “toned down” his game, was playing with more consistency, and had enough playmaking skills to overcome Portland’s rep as a dumb team, a criticism that nagged at Drexler. He insisted that he had always played with consistency and that his game had never needed toning down because it was never toned up. Of all the African American athletes I ever met who were sensitive to the stereotype that blacks make it on pure athleticism and whites make it on discipline and smarts, Drexler was at the top of the list, along with Isiah Thomas. As for the “dumb” tag, he and his Trail Blazer teammates used to joke about it during practice, scratching their heads and saying “Duh” after coach Rick Adelman called for a certain set.
But it was one of those clenched-smile jokes because, indeed, they had been out-thought by Chuck Daly’s wily Pistons in the Finals the year before. And here came Jordan and the Bulls to face them in what they all knew was their last best chance to win it all.
It wasn’t to be. Drexler was playing on a bum right knee, and in truth, though the Trail Blazers were a match for the Bulls on paper, they weren’t as basketball-savvy and they didn’t have Jordan, who remembered that, eight years earlier, he had been passed over because Portland was sure it had its two-guard in Drexler.
When Jordan made his sixth and final three-pointer, Drexler was not on him. Cliff Robinson closed out too late to defend it, and it was Robinson who was left shaking his head as Jordan shrugged.
But make no mistake about it: it was Clyde who got shrugged. That’s how it always was. Another player might’ve searched for some rationalization—I wasn’t really on him when he made most of those threes—or at least stared down a reporter when asked about Jordan’s three-point orgy. But here’s what Drexler said. “I said before the series that he had two thousand moves. I was wrong. He has three thousand. I can tell you this, I’m glad I’m going to Barcelona on his team.”
INTERLUDE, 2011
THE GLIDE
“Jordan Was Damn Good—But Was He Better Than Me?”
Houston, Texas
Clyde Drexler insists that he will make me lunch. We are in the kitchen of his roomy house, which lies off the seventh fairway (a long par-4) of a beautiful suburban golf course. Living under such trying circumstances has turned Drexler into a low-handicapper who plays from time to time with a neighbor, Jim Nantz, a buddy from the University of Houston.
Lunch is good—chicken salad and fruit; Clyde is a careful eater who has always taken care of himself—and we talk of many things, including kids, the aggravation of aging knee joints (he has a little, I have a lot), and our mutual butchering past (both of our fathers were meat cutters). But being the eleventh man on the Dream Team nags at him, and I open up that conversational box. He does not close it.
“I learned I was on the team from [Trail Blazers general manager] Harry Glickman,” says Drexler. “Harry was all excited about it, but I was … melancholy.” I thought that a strange and interesting word to use. “I should’ve been on there with the first batch of players. You can only control what you can control, right?
“But it bothered me. How can you leave off Worthy, Dominique, and Isiah? And leave me off, too? I was runner-up for the MVP that season. I should’ve been on the team right away and so should they have.”
Okay, I say, but who would he have left off? There were only twelve spots.
“You look at production that year,” he answers. “What did Bird do that year? What did Magic do?”
Well, I say, we all know why they were there. It was a Dream Team. They’d saved the league.
He doesn’t say much about Bird. Drexler remembers a night in Barcelona when he came out of his room and there was Bird sipping a beer. He fetched one for Clyde, and they stood there for a long while and talked. Years later Drexler treasures that memory. “Just standing there drinking beer and talking to Larry Bird,” says Drexler with a big smile on his face.
(It’s an example of that distant-legend mystique that Bird has, even with his fellow Dream Teamers. They knew him mostly as this mysterious, cold-blooded character, so he surprised them when he came across as loose and humorous off the court.)
But Magic, whom he knew better from years of Western Conference competition, was another story. “Magic was always …” And Drexler goes into a decent Magic impression: “ ‘Come on, Clyde, come on, Clyde, get with me, get with me,’ and making all that noise. And, really, he couldn’t play much by that time. He couldn’t guard his shadow.
“But you have to understand what was going on then. Everybody kept waiting for Magic to die. Every time he’d run up the court everybody would feel sorry for the guy, and he’d get all that benefit of the doubt. Magic came across like, ‘All this is my stuff.’ Really? Get outta here, dude. He was on the declining end of his career.”
Drexler had played exquisitely in the 1992 All-Star Game in Orlando, although the MVP award eventually went to Magic, who had been added by Commissioner Stern as
a special thirteenth player to the Western Conference roster (Chapter 20). “If we all knew Magic was going to live this long, I would’ve gotten the MVP of that game, and Magic probably wouldn’t have made the Olympic team.”
If those words sound harsh, or at best impolitic, keep in mind that later, when Magic drew criticism from many other players (especially Karl Malone) for returning to the NBA even though he had HIV, Drexler was one of his staunchest defenders.
Anyway, I tell Drexler, Magic would’ve still made the Olympic team, All-Star Game or not. Whom else would he have left off?
“Well,” says Drexler, “Mullins was added.” (Drexler was not the only Dream Teamer to call Mullin “Mullins.”) “You going to tell me there weren’t other guys on that team who could break a zone?”
Drexler is now laughing. This is the disarming tone he uses when bitching about something.
“If you took Isiah and Mullins and had them shoot shots, who do you think would hit more?”
“In that situation, Clyde, my guess is Mullin,” I say. “And that’s not to say that Isiah wasn’t a great player. It’s Mull-in, by the way.”
“Yeah, Mullin was a great shooter,” Drexler says. “But Isiah was better, especially when it counted. We geared our whole team to stopping Isiah. It’s a whole different level of play with him. You never wanted Isiah to take a shot ever.”
Keep in mind that Drexler had a bond with Thomas that he did not with Mullin—the Glide and Isiah were opponents in the ’90 Finals, when Drexler got a close-up view of Isiah’s skills.
So why does he think Isiah wasn’t on the team?
“I don’t think Jordan wanted to play with Isiah,” Drexler answers. “Two championships in a row, always an All-Star. And Isiah can’t make it?
“I didn’t like that. It’s not the players’ choice. It’s who’s supposed to be there. If you don’t like me, I don’t give a fuck. We’re competitors. You’re not supposed to like me. But when one player has the ability to leave another player off, we’ve lost control of the system.
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