Dream Team

by Jack McCallum

  The hardest job of tracking Charles belonged to David Dupree, since he was ghostwriting Barkley’s daily journal for USA Today. Universally recognized as the journalist least likely to keep night hours, teetotaler Dupree nevertheless found himself at every nightclub in Barcelona, receiving notes from bartenders, bouncers, and strippers on where he could catch up to Barkley. He always did. You can always find Charles because there are always lots of clues.

  It’s a distinct art, this Barkleyian ability to make eye contact, mingle, and keep going forward, never stopping long enough to get really mobbed. “It’s not hard, but players think it’s hard,” Barkley told me years later. “I have two main principles. Don’t travel with security, because that’s what makes people mad and that’s when bad stuff happens. And don’t travel with an entourage, because that puts people off, too. I rolled alone. Still do.”

  A few words about Charles Barkley and alcohol. He is familiar with it. But so am I, though probably not as familiar as Charles. Some of my fondest nights on the NBA beat involved having drinks with Charles somewhere in the immediate vicinity, so I am not the one to say whether or not he drinks too much. But drinking is part of the Charles Barkley story.

  On December 31, 2008, he was famously pulled over in his hometown of Scottsdale and arrested after failing a field sobriety test. He was found to have a blood alcohol level of 0.149 percent, nearly twice the legal limit of 0.08 percent in Arizona, and later spent a weekend in prison. The typical story is to say that he came out of the experience a changed man, but that would not be accurate. Charles came out of it exactly as he went into it. There were those who wanted to see more public groveling and behavior modification from Barkley, those who have long felt that the media, seduced by the man’s antic charm, let him get away with far too much. Perhaps. But I saw Barkley shortly after the arrest and before he went to prison, and—I’m sorry if this comes out wrong—I had to respect the fact that he refused to offer up a bunch of phony platitudes. Yes, he had done his scripted act of contrition on TNT after serving a network-mandated suspension. But he would not cop to the I-found-God-and-now-I’m-a-teetotaler attitude that would be predictable for others in his position.

  “Look, drinking and driving is a very serious thing,” he told me. “It is unacceptable, and I embarrassed a lot of people who care about me.” (For the record, they were more embarrassed that he told the police he was looking for oral sex at the time he was pulled over.) “But come on now—everyone wants to be overly dramatic about it. I’m going to prison? Okay, big deal. For most people, when you go to jail, it’s a terrifying thing. You come out and you don’t have a house and you don’t have any money. When I get out, I’ll still have everything.”

  It was his way of saying: I’m still going to drink. I’ll be more careful and I’ll try not to get picked up by the police. But I’m still going to drink.

  And he still does. On a January night in 2011, I met him for dinner at a Phoenix restaurant to discuss the Dream Team. After exchanging greetings with practically every patron, he took a look at my chicken entrée and said, “I should’ve gotten that. Black people love chicken.”

  So it went. We had a great time—the cell phone photos Brett Favre sent of his penis were a popular subject, at least with Charles—because you always have a great time with Charles. I almost performed a classic spit take as he delivered the punch line on a story he told involving an encounter with the boyfriend of his daughter, Christiana.

  “The young man said to me, ‘Mr. Barkley, Christiana said that if I treat her bad, you’ll kill me.’ And I told him, ‘Son, that’s just not true. I don’t want to go to prison. I’m gonna hire someone to kill your ass.’ ”

  For all I know, Charles has said that in a hundred other venues. Maybe he has said it on the air. As I was going through the reporting for this book, any number of people asked me: How were your interviews with Charles Barkley? And my answer was always: They were great. Just like your interviews with Charles would be. One truism of journalism is that the more the public knows a person, the worse it is for the interviewer. I suppose there is a hidden Charles to write about, but, more than any other Dream Teamer, the man is out there.

  The one thing that may have changed a little for Barkley is that he has a greater appreciation—make that a greater cognition—of Arizona’s Draconian drunk-driving laws. As he watched me sip my first vodka, he said, “You know, you’re already over the legal limit. You can’t drink anymore because you have to drive me home.”

  “Didn’t you bring your own car?” I asked him. “And how can I be over with one drink?”

  “Man, I don’t drive around this city now. I take cabs. When you’re in jail, it’s a long fucking weekend. And yes, you’re over. Trust me on that.”

  A couple of hours later, he climbed into my car. “Don’t be too far under the speed limit,” he said. “They look for that, too. Just nice and steady.”

  We were about two miles from Charles’s house when he said suddenly, “Turn in here!”

  “This doesn’t look like home, Charles.”

  We were in the parking lot of a bar.

  “I have to go in for a while,” he said. “You wanna come?”

  “I gotta go, Charles. Anyway, I’m over the limit, right?”

  “All right, Jack,” he said. “You be good.”

  “You gonna get another ride home, right?”

  He waved as he went off into the night. I should’ve guessed that I wouldn’t have been taking him home.

  While Charles was rambling on Las Ramblas, his teammates were almost always back in the family room of the hotel, playing cards and goofing on one another. But it’s not like Barkley missed that. He would get back to the Ambassador by two or three in the morning, maybe four, and there would still be a gang of them in there, usually Jordan, Pippen, Magic, and Ewing. Even when he was in his room there was a commotion. “Charles would come in at all hours, talking to himself or talking to somebody on the phone, loud as anything, and Liz and I could hear everything he said,” remembers Mullin, who had the room next to his. “Singing, taking a shower, all of it. I went up to him one day and said, ‘Charles, I don’t know whether you care or not, but this place has thin walls.’ He really didn’t care.”

  Barkley wasn’t the only Dream Team ambassador; he just handled the majority of the nocturnal and predawn duties. It became part of the journalistic landscape in Barcelona to dutifully report whenever a Dream Teamer showed up at a venue. Most of those stories had an annoying reverential tone to them, as if Zeus had come down from Mount Olympus to purchase an apple at the corner store, but then, that was the tone of most stories about these guys. And NBC never failed to zoom in on any Dream Team members who happened to be spectating, as if their very presence conveyed importance upon the proceedings.

  The team had made friends early with the women gymnasts. Bird spotted several of them at the airport during accreditation check-in and invited them onto the bus, and the players gave them USA Basketball trading cards. Later in the competition, after the gymnasts had finished a rotation, they spotted Pippen, Stockton, and Laettner in the stands, reached into their bags, pulled out the cards, and waved them at the players, like the pom-pom girls flirting with the varsity.

  Early on, Bird found a side door out of the Ambassador that he used to avoid the crowds. He was and still is a baseball fan, and he took in a couple of U.S. games, once riding the metro—riding it and riding it, in fact, since he missed his stop—to the venue. He exchanged autographs with the players in the dugout. Malone was a fixture at the U.S. women’s basketball games and became buddies with U.S. boxer Oscar de la Hoya. Pippen was a mensch. He was everywhere, out of the Jordan shadow, a hero in his own right. Ewing took in a lot of events, too, including women’s track and field at the Olympic Stadium, where he screamed like a grade schooler for his Jamaican homegirl, Merlene Ottey, who won a bronze medal in the 200 meters.

  Not surprisingly, no one played the role of diplomat better than
Magic. He spoke often of his love for the Olympics, how as a thirteen-year-old he’d run home to see if Mark Spitz was going to win another gold medal in Munich, how he’d gotten goose bumps watching the athletes cry on the podium, how he’d hesitated for just a minute about turning professional in 1979 since that meant he would never be an Olympian. Each morning that the Dream Team was not in action Magic would peruse the schedule and pick his events, like a man at the track handicapping his horses—reminiscent, in fact, of the way he planned his assignations: Okay. I’m going to boxing in the afternoon, then take in a little gymnastics, and finish up at the track. At every site, cries of “Ma-jeek” would roll through the stands, and each time it happened one had to marvel, again, at the ever-turning cycle of that man’s life: presumably dying of AIDS in November, accepting worldwide acclaim in August.

  The same cries would erupt before games, when Ma-jeek would be announced last, so happy that he had taken Rosenfeld’s suggestion to wear number 15. He wouldn’t be the only one cheered, of course, for nary a disparaging sound could be heard during pregame introductions … except, of course, for the smattering of boos directed at the Jester, both the King of Nighttime and the Ugly American.

  Years later, Barkley clings to the story that he was elbowed not once but three times by Angolan forward Herlander Coimbra before Barkley elbowed him back in clear view of everyone. This happened on July 26 during the Dream Team’s first Olympic game at the Palau Municipal d’Esports.

  “I warned him to stop elbowing me, and he didn’t listen,” Barkley told me during our 2011 dinner. “So I elbowed him back. Sure, it bothered me. But they weren’t all innocent in this thing.”

  I can’t verify that Coimbra elbowed Barkley, since game tapes are incomplete—NBC frequently cut away from Dream Team games as the carnage escalated. Karl Malone backs up Barkley. “I mean, you going to give somebody four chances before you do anything?” said Malone years later. “In the States, normally, you get one chance.” I’ll take the Mailman’s word, but it should be noted that he loves Charles.

  Jordan sees it differently. “Charles was an idiot in that case,” he says, taking the sting off the words with a chuckle. “He said that was his way of intimidating, and I said, ‘Charles, they’re getting our autographs before the game. You think they need to be intimidated?’ ”

  Whatever Coimbra may or may not have done, everyone watching in the stands or at home that day clearly saw Barkley throw what seemed to be an undeserved elbow as he headed upcourt after scoring a layup. What some forget is that minutes earlier Barkley had shoved an Angolan forward named David Diaz, so evidently Barkley was already in a bad mood.

  Justified or not—I’m going with not—the Barkley elbow crystallized, early in the competition, everything that seemed to be wrong about NBA players competing in the Olympics. Angola was a struggling war-torn nation with three gymnasiums in the entire country; the Dream Team represented an imperial power. Coimbra weighed 174 pounds; Barkley was built like a fullback. Coimbra studied economics; Barkley studied flight attendants. Barkley was Coimbra’s favorite player, a man he searched for when he got snippets of NBA games back in his hometown, Luanda; Barkley didn’t “know nuthin’ ’bout Angola.” After the game Coimbra said he was astonished that Barkley would “make violence with me”; Charles was unrepentant, saying, “If somebody hits me, I hit ’em back.”

  The Dream Team, with the exception of Malone, always found that humorous. “It wasn’t the elbow that got Charles in trouble,” Mullin said years later, “as much as it was trying to explain it.”

  Then there was the game itself, which ended in a 116–48 U.S. victory. At one point, the Dream Team went on a 46–1 run. Daly had decided weeks earlier that he was never going to call a time-out during the Olympic competition—“What am I going to say that these guys can’t figure out themselves?” he reasoned—but at times he felt like he should’ve called for one just to stanch the opposition’s bleeding.

  Given the thin public relations line that the Dream Team was walking, the elbow was a big deal. Though his public stance continued to be that Coimbra deserved it, Barkley apologized to his teammates even before Magic, Jordan, and Robinson gave him quiet talking-tos. “We said, ‘Charles, what we want to do is destroy these guys, but not destroy the love they have for us,’ ” Magic told him, as only Magic could.

  The biggest reaction came from USOC officials, who, fed up with the Dream Team in the first place, pondered for a short moment if Barkley should be sent home. Wisely, they let him stay. Whenever the USOC sends anyone home, as it did in 1968 after track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists in Mexico City, the fallout is worse than the offense.

  As the years rolled by, l’affaire Coimbra folded comfortably into the Barkley narrative, right along with the unfortunate spitting, the fight with the drunk, the verbal insults directed at teammates, and all the rest of it. Anyway, for every one who turned anti-American after the elbow, Barkley probably gathered a hundred to the Dream Team’s bosom with his personality, talent, and nocturnal ramblings. Barkley is always at his best when nestled within the comfortable cocoon of a family, cast as the impish delinquent who has to be chastised once in a while. These days on TNT, he is surrounded by Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal, the counterparts to Michael and Magic, the nice big brothers who keep him (somewhat) in line or at least render his transgressions less meaningful.

  After the Angola game, Jordan steered the conversation toward the Dream Team’s second game, the following night against Croatia, and not purely for diplomatic reasons. “If defense is ever going to be played,” he warned, “it will be Monday night.” Jordan and sidekick Pippen, see, were about to show the acceptably diplomatic way to terrorize, intimidate, and utterly emasculate an opponent.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE KUKOC GAME

  “They Were Like Mad Dogs on Toni”

  To his fellow Yugoslavs, Drazen Petrovic was Michael/Magic/Larry all wrapped up in one. He was the player who had lifted Yugoslavia to international basketball prominence, like Magic and Larry; he was the most talented and showiest player, like Michael; and he was the most competitive, go-for-the-jugular player, like all three of them. Reggie Miller once paid Petrovic the ultimate Reggie Miller compliment: “Drazen could talk trash in four languages,” said Miller, himself a world-class trash-talker.

  In the wonderful documentary that NBA Entertainment produced for ESPN, Once Brothers, teammate Toni Kukoc says of Petrovic the same thing that was said about Jordan a hundred times: other players got so caught up in watching him perform that it sometimes distracted them from their game. “Drazen was a killer,” said Dino Radja, another Yugoslav, who, like Petrovic and Kukoc, played in the NBA. “He was the only man I know who could beat somebody himself.”

  But the Dream Team’s focus in Game 2 against Croatia—the sovereign nation that more or less represented the painfully crippled and “old” Yugoslavia, which could not play since it was on international sanction—was not point guard Petrovic, whom they knew and respected from his three years in the NBA with the Trail Blazers and Nets. It was forward Kukoc, whom they really did not know but reviled anyway.

  Well, really, only Pippen and Jordan reviled him, steamed that Kukoc seemed to be the pet of Bulls general manager Jerry Krause, who had used the twenty-ninth pick to select Kukoc in the second round of the 1990 draft and badly wanted him in Chicago. That was one thing. But Krause went so far as to not extend Pippen’s contract because he wanted to save money to offer $3.7 million to Kukoc. That was quite another. You must understand this about the NBA: You can insult a player, even insinuate that someone is better than him, and maybe throw in an insult about his mama. But when you mess with a man’s wallet, you’re asking for serious trouble.

  And you must understand this about Jordan: if Jerry Krause said that George Washington was our first president, Jordan would argue that, no, it was actually Trooper Washington, a 6′7″ forward who played in the old AB
A. Without the addition of Krause into the volatile mix, I’m not sure how far Jordan would’ve carried the water on this one, for it was clearly Pippen’s issue. But Jordan was by this point almost fully invested in Pippen as a worthy teammate—almost being the operative word, because they did have their moments.

  Pippen had played shakily against the Knicks in the ’92 playoffs, prompting Jordan to comment: “I think he [Pippen] is at the point now where maybe he is a little unsure of himself in certain games.” In Game 6 of that series, Xavier McDaniel, one of the Knicks’ many musclemen, was all over Pippen, taunting him, pushing him around, getting into his head. That went on until Jordan got in McDaniel’s face, and that was that. And as far as Pippen had come since his uncertain early years, he still demonstrated from time to time how difficult it was to be a teammate of the greatest player in the world, as when he turned down a TNT interview request in the postseason. “You wanted Michael, not me,” he sullenly told the NBA’s broadcast partner. That could serve as Pippen’s epitaph: You wanted Michael, not me.

  But they had come together to win another championship—Pippen was almost as good as Jordan in the Finals against Portland—and they were clearly comfortable together in Barcelona. And so Jordan kind of sympathetically reviled Kukoc, or at least the idea of Kukoc. Krause had given Jordan game tapes of Kukoc, hoping that he would see the same brilliance; though Jordan would watch scouting tapes of Kukoc, looking for weaknesses to exploit, he had about as much chance of screening Krause’s tapes as he did of watching Kurosawa’s Rashomon in the original Japanese.

  In the bus on the way to the arena, Jordan and Magic sat across the aisle from each other, as they usually did, figuring out margins of victory. They called each other M.J., a kind of joint masters-of-the-universe thing.