The video began. There is Bird anticipating the direction of one of his own misses, running to the spot, rebounding and left-handing in a layup, the video’s money shot. There is Bird with a two-handed, over-the-head feed to a trailing Robert Parish for a dunk. There is Bird making precision passes from a sitting position on the floor, and there is Bird making two back-to-the-basket moves on the same play, finally knifing between two defenders for an underhand scoop shot.
We kept stealing glances back at Bird, to see his reaction, but his face was a blank.
There is Bird dribbling between two defenders and finally tapping a pass, à la Pete Maravich, back to McHale. There is Bird looking one way, then wrapping an entry pass around an opponent from the other direction. There is Bird, far under the basket, battling Milwaukee’s Jack Sikma for a rebound, somehow corralling it, and, almost in one motion, somehow left-handing an outlet under James Worthy’s outstretched arms to start a fast break.
Nobody makes those plays. Those plays are impossible. But Bird made them. And, finally, there is Bird stealing that fateful pass from Isiah in the ’87 playoffs.
The lights come on. Someone starts applauding and we look back at Bird. He smiles ever so slightly, raises his hand ever so slightly, and leaves the room.
In its own way, Bird’s career offers up more of a highlight reel than Magic’s. That is no slight to Magic. The success of the Lakers guard was built on flash, yes, but more on straight dash. With the ball, he got from point A to point B as quickly as anyone and, once there, could usually get where he wanted to go, often with that killer spin. He was an unstoppable combination of size, strength, and speed, a running back hitting the hole hard and then having enough open-field chops to find the end zone.
But Bird, not Magic, was the earthbound, 180-degree version of Jordan’s aerial artistry. Bird’s gems were the product of some kind of extraordinary muscle memory, strength, and vision. They often occurred in the midst of armed combat, when he suddenly emerged with the ball and, not content merely to have it, went on to make a play out of it, turn a positive into a positive-positive. In his own way, Bird, the fundamental master, made more spectacular plays than Magic, the architect of Showtime.
And then there was his mind. In one of the SI polls I did during the 1991–92 season, the question was: who is the league’s smartest player? Though Bird was in and out of the lineup, he won the voting over Stockton 10–8. Since we’re on the subject, Mullin and Utah Jazz guard Jeff Hornacek got the next highest numbers of votes. That’s four white players. Isiah Thomas got 1.5 votes. Racist? I can’t say that. But I never saw any evidence that Thomas was not as smart a player as, say, Stockton, and that’s a compliment to both of them. One caveat: several GMs and coaches say that they would’ve voted for Magic, an African American, had he been active during the season. But then, I never saw any evidence that Thomas was not as smart a player as Magic, either.
The most conclusive case that I can offer that Bird may stand alone at the top of the list of heady players comes from former Pistons player Laimbeer. Laimbeer does not like Bird and the feeling is mutual. But not long ago Laimbeer told me: “Let’s face it, it would be hard to find a smarter player than Bird.”
In the months before the Dream Team got together, the sometimes hobbled Bird probably drew the most attention during the strange and sometimes surreal circumstances surrounding the maybe-I-am-and-maybe-I’m-not retirement of Magic Johnson.
Magic had picked the date of his ceremony as February 16 because the Celtics and Bird would be in Los Angeles. That was one of the times when Bird was sidelined, and he would not have flown cross-country had Magic not been hanging up his sneakers … or whatever the hell he was doing. Gamely and uncomfortably, Bird stood on the podium during the forty-five-minute ceremony. He wore a double-breasted suit and looked for all the world like an Indiana undertaker. (Later, after he had returned to his more comfortable sweats, he uttered the obligatory line: “I rented it out, now I gotta take it back.” It sounded funny coming from him because a lot of stuff sounded funny coming from him.)
Bird’s introduction drew such loud and sustained applause that he was prompted to say, “I’m not the one retiring here, but thank you very much.” Magic, standing a few feet away, asked with a smile: “Soon?” To which Bird replied: “Very soon.” (Nobody but Bird knew how soon.) Bird then presented Magic with a piece of the Boston Garden parquet floor, the same memento the navel-gazing Celtics had given Kareem Abdul-Jabbar during his retirement tour in the 1988–89 season.
My best guess is that Bird honestly thought that Magic was retiring, because he was emotional during his brief remarks, promising, “We’re gonna go to Barcelona and bring back the gold”—quite an enthusiastic turnaround for one who had initially seemed so disinclined to play.
And Bird had by this time, with the reality of his basketball mortality settling in, begun to appreciate his relationship with Magic and understand their dual impact upon the NBA. This is not exactly new ground, having been covered in the outstanding HBO documentary Magic and Bird: A Courtship of Rivals and in When the Game Was Ours. Some players, most notably Michael Jordan, were dismissive of the “shared legacy” story line, believing it to be mostly a Magic creation. (See Jordan interlude.) But it’s worth another brief look.
Never in the history of sport has there been such a clear delineation of an era than the one that began when Magic and Bird came into the league, forever bound by blessed timing. Their rookie season, 1979–80, coincided with the coming of a new decade that would begin a new age in the NBA. They had been the two most-watched athletes in college basketball the previous season. They were dispatched not only to teams with contrasting styles but also to cities with a contrasting ethos—Magic’s Los Angeles, the glitzy and showy entertainment center, and Bird’s Boston, the conservative, traditional pride of the workingman.
The easy thing was to typecast the principals as reflections of their environment, the fast-breaking Magic as metaphor for fast-breaking Hollywood, the fundamentally sound Bird as metaphor for fundamentally sound Beantown. It worked at a certain surface level, but to draw such contrasts was to ignore the basic and all-important similarity between them: stylistic contrasts aside, they played the game unselfishly and democratically, and, not coincidentally, their teams won championships. Magic and Bird were, to an extent, the same person, midwestern children of the working class, blue-collared, nothing handed to them on a platter. That’s what came out when they laced up their sneakers.
“What happened with Larry and Magic was they set a precedent of how the game should be approached, physically and mentally,” Chris Mullin said during that 1991–92 season. “They taught everybody to not just focus on the money they were making or not making, but to play every single game like it’s important. And when you have the best guys doing that, it rubs off. I think back to before I was playing, when the league had a bad name, there were only certain guys who would do that, a few on each team and maybe not even that. But just as bad habits are contagious on a team, so are good habits. And a lot of them started with Larry and Magic.”
Both later said that when the NBA schedule was released each year they would circle the games they were to play against each other. Between December 28, 1979, and February 16, 1992, that happened thirty-seven times, the Lakers winning twenty-two of those games, further evidence that Magic had the better career. Each Magic-goes-against-Bird game was a red-letter date not just for them and the NBA but also for the sports world at large. By the time they had finished hammering away at each other, the league had been fundamentally transformed by their construction work. Teams were truly better, so good that an immortal like Bill Walton was a sixth man on the Celtics and a legendary scoring machine named Bob McAdoo was the eighth man on the Lakers.
Early in his career, Bird never thought much about those legacies and shared contributions, or at least never wanted to speak of them. He was too busy trying to beat Magic rather than philosophize about him. Since Ma
gic’s Michigan State team had defeated Bird’s Indiana State team in that 1979 NCAA final, and then Magic’s Lakers won the title in his rookie year, 1980, Bird felt like he was playing catch-up. When they finally got to spend extended off-court time together, during the filming of a Converse commercial in 1985, they enjoyed each other’s company.
On or off the record, background or deep background, I never heard one say a bad word about the other. And they treasured their competition. Steve Bulpett, the veteran Celtics reporter for the Boston Herald, told about encountering Bird, dressing alone, in the nearly deserted visitors’ locker room in the old Forum, home of the Lakers. “We’re playin’ the Lakers,” he sang almost to himself. “We’re playin’ the Lakers.”
And so there they were, in the same starting lineup on the day of that first game in Portland, soon-to-be-departed icons, so much history behind them. Magic got the tip and looked only for Larry. “I was only going one place,” Magic said years later, “and that was to him.”
And Larry looked only to the basket. “I knew I was going to shoot it,” Bird would joke later, “because I didn’t know if I’d get another chance to score.” Today he says: “I had a smaller man on me, and I was open. That’s all I ever needed.”
He rose and shot, somehow young again, backpedaling while the ball was still in the air, secure of its destination, just as he had been in all those three-point contests.
The Legend wouldn’t play in the next game because his back was stiff, and in fact he participated in only one more of the five remaining games in Portland. It was at the postgame interview session, in fact, when Bird felt such a severe stab of pain that he thought he’d be going home. But in those opening minutes he felt great, as if he had somehow gotten a cosmic reprieve just so he could catch that first pass from Magic and launch that shot.
For sure, the ball settled into the net, the first basket scored by the Best Team That Ever Played and also, in some way, the most glorious. “I’ll never forget that flash of joy on his face when he made that shot,” said Magic years later. “I can still see it today. I can still feel it today.”
CHAPTER 25
THE KID FROM SPOKANE
Daly Had a Pistons Phone Number in His Hand … and It Wasn’t Isiah’s
The day after the United States opened the Tournament of the Americas with the rout of photo-snapping Cuba, it played Canada, a team that brought its elbows and knees, not its cameras. What else could a hockey nation do but try to hard-check the Dream Team into the boards? The result was a rough, shoddy game, and in the first half, on a defensive switch, John Stockton knocked knees with Jordan and went down. It didn’t look bad at first and Stockton started to walk it off, which is what Jordan did. But then Stockton collapsed. It was bad, a spiral fracture of the right leg that would take between six and eight weeks to heal.
In this first incarnation of pros in the Olympics, there was too much of the old red-white-and-blue bonhomie in the ether for anyone to have raised much of a fuss about the specter of injuries. But as much as the fans back home might’ve been rooting for their respective Dream Teamers, general managers and coaches were worried, and, as time wore on, owners such as Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks began to complain about the injury risk to their assets. Frankly, it’s hard not to see their point. After Stockton went down, Malone said he was worried about communicating with Jazz coach Jerry Sloan. “I was afraid he’d tell me to come home,” said the Mailman.
(As time goes on, the prediction here is that owners will be less and less inclined to allow their best players to participate in the Olympic Games. That represents the principal threat to the continuance of the best pros playing for their national teams.)
On one level, Stockton’s injury was a nonstory. Magic was playing well and either Jordan or Pippen could move to the point if necessary; it wasn’t like exact positions were mandated anyway. But behind closed doors the injury did make for a lot of intrigue and, once again, brought Isiah into the conversation.
Daly’s mind was all but made up. He looked in on Stockton in the training room after the game and told him, “We’re going to need to replace you.” Stockton protested that he should sleep on it, wait a day. Daly said okay. The coach went to dinner at Jake’s, a Portland seafood institution popular with NBA types, and considered his options. Matt Dobek, who was rather like a son to Daly, was there, as were assistant Dream Team coach P. J. Carlesimo and USA Basketball committee member Rod Thorn, who was as inside as any executive.
Daly knew that Stockton didn’t want to give up his spot. Though he went about his business more quietly than, say, Barkley—need we note that this is an immortal understatement?—Stockton was exquisitely happy as a Dream Teamer. He had blended in perfectly with everyone. He was, like Mullin, a student of angles, a player who knew the precise moment to slip a teammate a pass so that the recipient was in perfect position to shoot. He knew when to take his own shot, having become a master at going off the wrong foot and shooting a driving layup quicker than the defense thought he would, a stratagem employed by Steve Nash these days. Stockton was the first player I noticed, too, who split a high double-team immediately upon its formation, rendering it useless. When I suggested that to him not long ago, Stockton said: “Well, I don’t think I was, but I’ll be glad to take credit for it.”
The one thing that drove Stockton to distraction on the court was when a teammate would tell him, “Hey, I was open but you didn’t give it to me.”
And Stockton would say: “No, you weren’t open. Just because no one seemed to be guarding you, that doesn’t mean you were open, because you couldn’t do anything with the ball if you got it.” For the record, that sometimes happened early with Malone but almost never as time went on.
Stockton would get kidded now and again about his relationship with Malone. “Hey, don’t bother running if Karl’s in the other lane,” Barkley used to shout at practice, “because John’s only going to throw it to him.”
And Stockton would come right back: “Charles, I throw it to Karl because, unlike some guys, he actually catches it.”
“Playing with these guys on the Dream Team was basketball heaven,” Stockton remembers. “It was like someone would run to the spot and, upon getting there, the ball would be there. Guys made reciprocal moves. It was basketball poetry. There was no place you could throw the ball that was wrong.”
Stockton told me all that in a small locker room in the gymnasium that he owns in Spokane. I never heard him, or too many others, speak so eloquently about the game in a short burst. It stuck with me.
At any rate, Daly was honestly worried about the point guard position, as ridiculous as it might seem today. Matt Dobek had two phone numbers out, ready to call, those of Isiah and Joe Dumars, Detroit’s championship backcourt from 1989 and 1990. Thorn, a realist, laughed as he watched Daly squirm. Thorn knew that Stockton didn’t really need to be replaced, and he knew how tough this was on Chuck.
“Let’s wait,” Daly said finally.
Meanwhile, back in his room, Stockton was sad. Patsy-Cline-on-the-jukebox sad. More than anything, he wanted the noise about his being selected over Isiah Thomas to go away. He had a fierce pride—Stockton never forgot the booing that accompanied the announcement that the Utah Jazz had taken him with the sixteenth pick of the 1984 draft—and he didn’t think for a minute that he didn’t belong with the Dream Team. With an eight-season resumé behind him that included four All-Star Games, he was no token. But he also knew that Isiah could’ve just as easily been there in his stead.
(It wasn’t just Isiah who thought that. In a poll question I had raised in Sports Illustrated several months earlier, I asked NBA coaches and GMs whom they would rather have between Stockton and lightning-fast Kevin Johnson of the Phoenix Suns. I used K.J. instead of Isiah because he was more like Stockton. Isiah probably would’ve won the poll had he been in it. I was surprised at the result: Of those who answered, Johnson got sixteen votes and Stockton got only five. To be clear, Stockton�
�s best days were in front of him.)
As Stockton stewed, Barkley and Malone paid the disconsolate point guard a visit. “Don’t give up your spot,” they told Stockton. “We want you here.” That made Stockton feel better, but he was still uneasy. He desperately wanted to stay. As clearly as anyone, Stockton realized the dimension of being a Dream Teamer, how much it would mean to him later. Back in February, when there was some noise about agents holding out their players because of corporate complications—read: Jordan and Nike—Stockton had personally called Dave Gavitt and said, “Don’t worry about it. That is not going to happen.”
Back home after Stockton’s injury, newspapers took temperatures and ran polls, eager to have something newsworthy to write about this Dream Team besides how badly they would kick the puppies in their next game. Of some ten thousand fans responding to a USA Today poll that asked who should take Stockton’s place should the need arise, Isiah got 2,872 votes. Golden State’s Tim Hardaway was second with 2,275, Cleveland’s Mark Price third with 2,274 votes, Duke’s Bobby Hurley fourth with 1,290 votes, and Kevin Johnson fifth with 1,201. Dumars got scant attention.
Daly and Stockton talked again. “Don’t send me home, Chuck,” said Stockton. “I’ll be back for the Olympics. Heck, you can play with six if you have to.”
Daly thought it over. “Okay, John,” he said. “You’re staying.” If Daly were to speak truthfully, the injury actually helped him. With Stockton out and Bird on the shelf from time to time, it was much easier to divvy up minutes.
Dream Team Page 18