But had Daly come to a different conclusion, the call he was going to make was not to Isiah.
“I know for a fact that Chuck wanted Dumars,” Jordan told me recently. (Remember that he and Daly played golf together almost every day.) “But Chuck just felt he couldn’t because of how badly Isiah wanted to be on the Dream Team. He just couldn’t do it. So he let John stay even with a broken leg.”
I stand behind no one in my respect for Joe D., now the Pistons’ general manager. But I’m glad that Stockton stayed and Daly never made that call to Dumars. However many potholes Isiah had dug for himself over the years, that would’ve been just too cruel.
INTERLUDE, 2011
THE KID FROM SPOKANE
“You’re Not Writing That Down, Are You?”
Spokane, Washington
When John Stockton picks me up in front of the hotel in his hometown, he is wearing a brace around his left knee.
“What happened?” I ask, and Stockton starts to tell me that in a recent pickup basketball game he had bumped knees with …
“Wait a minute,” he asks suddenly, terror in his eyes. “You’re not writing that down, are you?”
“Well, yeah,” I answer.
And so begins a pleasant day of negotiation and secret note-taking. Stockton has taken quite literally that my visit is to talk about the Dream Team. In his view, that is the sole reason that I have flown three thousand miles to Spokane. It is part of Stockton’s worldview that not only does he consider himself not interesting but also he is uninterested in revealing any part of his life that can be construed as personal.
That includes, evidently, his knee, which was injured when he bumped knees with—get this—the son (Parker Kelly) of the guy (Terry Kelly) whom he grew up idolizing.
“See, that’s interesting stuff, John,” I tell him.
“No, it isn’t,” he insists. “Why would anyone care about that?”
“Because they do,” I say. “I find it interesting.”
Stockton adds that the collision was his fault (“I was slow to react”), accepting blame being a central part of his DNA.
In telling you this, I am running the risk of pissing off Stockton, an athlete for whom I have deep respect. This on-or-off-the-record stuff can get complicated, but never so much as when you’re dealing with Stockton. I’m going to err on the side of revelation, concluding that nothing controversial came out during our five hours together. Stockton, I concede, may not see it that way. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t revelatory, going a long way to explain how and why this plain-speaking, plain-appearing citizen of Spokane ended up on the Dream Team and later in the Hall of Fame.
We start our tour at the spectacular Spokane Falls and end up at St. Aloysius, where Stockton went to grammar school. I ask if he was an altar boy, and—I’m not making this up—he grows as animated as if he’s talking about the Dream Team.
“Sixth and seventh grade I was the top altar boy,” Stockton says. “I’m not kidding about that.” (Didn’t infer that you were, John.) “I used to call up to ask to serve. I served more masses than any five kids put together. But then I got screwed over. I had a kid take over for me when I had another commitment. But he didn’t show, so they suspended me for one service. Then they suspended me again for not serving when I was suspended and couldn’t serve. Do you believe that? So that was the end of my time as an altar boy.”
We were inside the school now, and John shows me the small wooden-floored gym where he learned to play (“We’d put on a 1-3-1 press and it was all over”) and the small hallways they were ordered to run after practice (“Our coach was a psycho; he’s one of my best friends today”). A teacher passes by and nods. “His aunt,” says John, “was my first girlfriend.” Those are the kind of connections you get when you stay home.
Stockton spends the next few minutes talking about how well various teachers and teammates have done in life. Then a young girl taps him on the shoulder. “That’s my buddy right there,” John says, hugging his daughter, who is dressed as Dracula. “We’re doing Wax Museum,” she explains. An older daughter once trick-or-treated as Pat Summitt. Yes, this is a basketball family.
We take a brief tour around Gonzaga Prep, his alma mater, where in 2011–12 he served as assistant coach, his daughter, Lindsay, the team’s star guard. We pass by his parents’ house (“You’re not writing down the address, are you?”), hard by the one to which John moved his own family after his first season with the Jazz. We have lunch, at my request, at Jack and Dan’s Bar and Grill on North Hamilton Street, where there is scant evidence that a Hall of Fame Dream Teamer is related to the former longtime owner. (Jack Stockton has sold his interest.) “It’s always been a tough wall for me to make,” Stockton says.
We finish up at “the warehouse,” the Hoosiers-evoking gymnasium that Stockton bought a few years ago. It includes the floor from the old Salt Palace, which was given to him by Larry Miller, the late owner of the Jazz. Stockton rents out the facility to various basketball, indoor soccer, and volleyball leagues. I remark at how content he seems.
“My family is around me and my kids are doing well, and my life is just busy enough following them around,” he says. “For right now, I don’t need anything else.”
It just seems perfect, the idea that the Spokane Kid—who kept his head down and his oars in the water, always working, always listening, always improving—now holds the literal keys to the kingdom, handing out gym-rat time to the succeeding generations, the circle unbroken.
CHAPTER 26
THE CHOSEN ONE
So Many Balls to Sign … and Jordan Almost Reaches His Breaking Point
As the Tournament of the Americas wore on, the Dream Team began to get bored with the blowouts—the average margin of victory for the six games would be 51.5 points. Before the Argentina game, even ever-smiling team leader Magic got annoyed because guard Marcelo Milanesio kept pestering him for his jersey, which he didn’t want to give up and didn’t. After the 41-point defeat, Milanesio said, “I am so overwhelmed by joy.”
The U.S. players were not. You have to remember that competition was their lifeblood, and this was not competition. As the tournament neared its end, the players just wanted to get the hell out of Portland and get a few weeks of downtime before the Olympic grind.
Plus, all was not going well behind the scenes. Always there were balls to sign. Balls for sponsors. Balls for charities. Balls for auction. Balls for presidents, politicians, pencil pushers, pashas, and pals from every principality on earth. Balls for friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends’ friends.
“I remember walking down this hallway and all I saw was balls that were waiting there for us to sign,” Jordan told me in the summer of 2011. “All right, I get it. We have to sign. But hundreds and hundreds of balls? That’s not fair.
“I had told Russ and Rod and Dave Gavitt from the beginning that it bothered me that business was wrapped around everything. Sure, I was in business, but these were long-standing relationships I had with companies. They were contracts. All of a sudden I’m being asked to do a lot of stuff I wasn’t comfortable with.”
Doing a lot of the asking were two members of the United States Olympic Committee, LeRoy Walker and Mary T. Meagher. They gave Jordan the standard lecture, intent on sending the message that the Dream Team was nothing special, that it had its Olympic responsibilities, that revenue produced by the Dream Team was being used to support other athletes who weren’t staying in luxury hotels and who weren’t highly compensated, and … on and on.
“They went at Michael with the attitude of ‘Don’t be an asshole,’ ” says Barkley. “So you know how well that shit went over with Michael.”
Not well at all. “I’m outta here,” said Jordan, throwing down his Sharpie one day and giving the impression that he meant to leave the team, not just the room.
Had Jordan really meant it, had he upped and left, Magic would’ve been next. Then Barkley would’ve exited stage left, and after
him Pippen, and next thing you know there would’ve been, in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, mutiny from stern to bow. (Or from Stern to bow.)
But Jordan didn’t mean it.
“Of course I never came close to quitting,” Jordan says today. “I wasn’t going to disgrace the Olympic team and walk out. And I wasn’t going to look like the only idiot who didn’t have my name on a ball. But I wanted everyone to know that they promised one thing and did something else.”
(The ball issue would surface again in Barcelona, when suddenly there was a need for players to sign at least a hundred more balls. There might’ve been a revolt except for the intercession of respected NBA PR chief Brian McIntyre, who kept the balls in his room and had the players stop by whenever it was convenient to get it done. When it was Bird’s turn, he said to McIntyre, “What’s the quickest it’s taken anyone to do this?” McIntyre said between fifteen and twenty minutes. Bird said, “Time me,” finished in about six minutes, tossed the pen to McIntyre, and said, “Won another one, didn’t I?” Stockton, on the other hand, was the most careful signer, the Dream Team’s Hancock. “I want people a hundred years from now to know that I was on this team,” he told McIntyre.)
Indeed, while all ran rather smoothly within the Dream Team’s incestuous fraternity, the responsibilities of fame—as dictated to them by the USOC and sometimes by USA Basketball—got to the players, as did criticism from the outside world that filtered through the walls of the castle from time to time. You’re just a bunch of spoiled millionaires. Why are you bothering to beat up on teams like Panama (112–52), Argentina (128–87), Puerto Rico (119–81), and Venezuela (127–80)?
In some quarters there continued to be residual resentment that the great honor of representing one’s country had been taken away from the amateurs. Plus it was hard to muster up empathy for rich men who were being treated like royalty and, in between the beatdowns they were hanging on the Third World, were spending most of their spare time at Pumpkin Ridge, the exquisite Portland-area golf course that lies at the base of the Tualatin Mountains. (A team joke was that P. J. Carlesimo’s main duty was setting up tee times. In point of fact, Carlesimo logged hundreds of hours editing videotape of opponents. But yes, the tee times were important, too.)
The players’ position was: You came to us. You begged us to play. We’re getting you all this revenue and all this attention, but every time we turn around there’s something else to sign, somebody else to shake hands with.
The players felt that they had allies at USA Basketball, men such as Steve Mills, who had a basketball background and was a close friend of Magic Johnson’s. Plus they genuinely liked Rod Thorn and respected both Russ Granik and Dave Gavitt. The USOC, by contrast, was distant and imperious.
“Everybody understood the issues,” Mills told me recently, “but it was the way they were presented that the players clearly took as offensive. It was sort of, ‘You’re just another athlete. You’re just like everyone else and this is what you’re going to do.’ Except that they weren’t like everyone else, not in terms of fame and the revenue they generate.”
No one felt the pressure more forcefully than Jordan, who was at the apex of his fame and who, as he saw it, had compromised more than a few of his business relationships by joining the Olympic team. At this point in his life he was a human ATM: people pushed the Jordan button and out came money. He had been selling out arenas for years. I remember being at back-to-back Washington Bullets games in the mid-1980s even before the Bulls were good. The first game drew about five thousand; the Bulls and Jordan came to town two nights later, and it was a sellout, about seventeen thousand. That’s twelve thousand additional people on one isolated night in one isolated arena in one isolated season. Get out your calculator to see how much money Jordan generated just in terms of attendance.
As for Jordan’s own franchise, Chicago Bulls chairman Jerry Reinsdorf had bought the team for less than $20 million midway through Jordan’s rookie season. It was valued at five times that by the time that Jordan won his first championship and, until a full-scale renaissance led by Derrick Rose in the 2010–11 season, had increased its value mainly because it was, eternally, Michael Jordan’s team.
Sure, Nike helped make Jordan, but the reverse was true, too. In his first full season under the Swoosh, the Air Jordan line produced more than $153 million in revenue.
By Dream Team time, Jordan believed that the seesaw was unbalanced, that he was the one with legs swinging uncomfortably in midair and no one would allow him to come down.
A few months earlier, before the Dream Team got together, I sat down with Jordan in his suite in a Berkeley, California, hotel for a long interview related to his having been chosen Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year, an honor he singularly deserved and deeply appreciated. There were no distractions, as there had been months before at the Saturday Night Live set, and I continued to see a changed Jordan, a man who, at twenty-eight, was realizing the perils of fame. He had … hardened. That’s the best way I can put it.
There was anti-Jordan backlash about his White House snub, about the revelations in Sam Smith’s The Jordan Rules, about his role in keeping Isiah off the team, about his refusal to involve himself with the black community and speak out on issues. Jordan had by this time made his famous comment that “Republicans buy sneakers, too,” when he refused to endorse Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, who had mounted a Senate challenge to unseat Jesse Helms.
(My own opinion about the Gantt issue is this: the degree to which an African American athlete—or any athlete—is obligated to involve himself in politics is a long and complicated subject, but Jordan was absolutely wrong in this case. Helms was an anachronistic racist hypocrite, and Gantt deserved more than a dismissive comment about footwear. On the other hand, when Charles Barkley made his oft-quoted statements about being a rich Republican, he got a pass.)
“Sooner or later, I knew things were going to turn around,” Jordan told me. “Five, six, seven years at the pinnacle of success and it’s going to happen. Signs are starting to show that people are tired of hearing about ‘Michael Jordan’s positive influence’ and ‘Michael Jordan’s positive image.’ I’ve seen it in letters to the editor, magazines, newspapers. That feeling of ‘God, quit talking about Michael Jordan. I’m tired of hearing about him.’ ”
I thought that showed an unusual degree of self-awareness, as did his subsequent comments about the way the tornado of fame had swept him up unexpectedly.
“What everybody has to understand is that my success caught me completely by surprise,” said Jordan. “If you told me in college that soon, within a year, my face, my image, would be all over the country and the world, I would’ve said you were crazy. What I was trying to do was project everything positive, and maybe that was wrong. Maybe people wanted to see some negative with the positives, so that they’d have more of a sense of you as a human being. I accept that.
“The real problem with what happened to me was that it happened so early. That’s the difference between me and some of the other superstars, like Julius Erving. And so my longevity was bound to produce overkill. It had to. The negative stuff, the backlash, is coming down on me, and heck, I’m at the peak of my career.”
That was unequivocally true. He was recognized by anyone with half a brain as the best player on the planet, and his earning power seemingly had no limit. Estimates of Jordan’s endorsement earnings for the 1991–92 season were between $16 million and $20 million, a figure that would eventually rise to about $35 million; even more astonishing was the money he routinely left on the table. His philosophy back then, as it is now, was to refuse most appearances outside of those associated with his corporate obligations. Mark Vancil, who covered the Bulls for the Chicago Sun-Times and later got into business with Jordan as president of Rare Air Media, wrote about some of them. For example, Jordan turned down $250,000 for a three-day appearance for a Canadian company in Toronto and spurned a cool $1 million
for what would’ve been a one-day commitment to promote tourism in Jordan, the country. As Jordan saw it, that was chump change compared to a free day to play golf.
Jordan had the sense to know that he had been lucky as well as good, and he brought up Magic to make that point.
“Magic should’ve had what I had,” he told me. “The way I was presented out there from a PR standpoint, marketing-wise, he was never portrayed like I was away from basketball. With fewer credentials, at least of basketball championships, I got more than he did. Is that fair? No. But I didn’t have control of it. He should’ve had the Wheaties, the big deals before me, but he didn’t.”
Magic was in Chicago on December 17, 1991, when Jordan was presented with his Sportsman of the Year award, to publicize the Magic Johnson Foundation, a charitable organization he had set up (with much alacrity, since his shocking announcement had only been made a month earlier) to support AIDS education, research, and awareness. Magic, like Jordan, was dealing with his own backlash at the time. If he had heard it once, he had heard it a thousand times since his November 7 press conference: Why are you treating this guy like a hero?
In short, everything in Magic’s life was in turmoil—his health, his public image, his career with the Lakers, his Olympic participation. And yet, after both Jordan and Johnson had finished their press duties on that December evening, one was left with the head-shaking feeling that it was Jordan’s life coming apart at the seams and that Magic’s principal duty in Chicago was to provide succor for the healthiest, wealthiest, and most successful athlete on the planet. Jordan, on the podium, said all the right things about the honor, but his defensiveness came through. “I went from un-American, to tyrant [a reference to some of the anecdotes in The Jordan Rules], to Sportsman of the Year.”
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