“M.J.,” Jordan said to Magic, “I want to be up 20 by halftime.”
“You got it, M.J.,” Magic said back. “We’ll do it for you and Scottie.”
Since Scottie and Michael were doing some reviling, well, that was enough to get everybody else amped up, too. Even artificial challenges were hard to come by in the summer of 1992. The other Dreamers picked up on Pippen and Jordan’s adrenaline burn and came after Kukoc the way the Samuel L. Jackson character, Jules, went after his victims in Pulp Fiction: “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers!”
Years later, I was surprised to discover how vividly the Dream Team and anyone associated with it remembered what came to be known as “the Kukoc game.” Virtually everyone mentioned it before I brought it up.
Ewing: “They dogged Kukoc so bad. That was the best defense I ever saw Michael and Scottie play. By far. And they played a lot of great defense.”
Barkley: “Dude, it was scary what they did to Kukoc. And beautiful to watch.”
Mullin: “Scottie and Michael were like mad dogs on Toni, almost to the point that they lost sight of the game.”
Malone: “You ever see a feeding frenzy? That’s what it was like.”
NBA international liaison Bohuny: “Scottie kept talking it up in the meal room—how Jerry Krause had screwed him to try to get Toni.”
NBA PR man McIntyre: “I distinctly remember Scottie talking about it, and I can still hear him saying, ‘I don’t want Kukoc taking my money. That’s my money.’ ”
Over in the Croatian locker room on that night, the young target was blessedly unaware of the vendetta against him, as well as how personal money matters could get in the NBA. “It was a strange time,” Kukoc told me in the spring of 2011. “It was a strange time for all of us, just to be competing for Croatia after all that had happened in my country. We were happy to be there, but we were also sad about the war.” That wasn’t all—Kukoc’s wife, Renata, was about to go into labor, and his son, Marin, would be born days later. “So my mind,” says Kukoc, “was on many other things besides the game.”
Kukoc doesn’t remember much pregame strategy in the Croatian locker room. “It was just kind of ‘Do your best against these guys, try to be competitive, try to not let them embarrass you,’ ” he says. “What would be the use of coming up with a game plan? There was none possible anyway.”
Kukoc was a gifted player who with a little more straight-up quickness could’ve been the second coming of Magic. All right, the Dream Team will strike me down with great vengeance and furious anger for even suggesting that, so forget I said it. But Kukoc was damn good. As an eighteen-year-old in the 1987 Junior World Championships, he had played on a Yugoslavian team that twice beat the United States. In one game he made 11 three-pointers and scored 37 points; it was then that Krause first noticed him.
Still, Kukoc always looked a little soft. He was pale and skinny (his playing weight was listed as 192 pounds, which means he was probably 182), with a handsome, sleepy-eyed, boyish face. Petrovic was four years older than Kukoc and, beyond that, far more constitutionally suited to the kind of challenge that would be presented by the hunters in heat named Pippen and Jordan. Kukoc would go on to have a thirteen-year NBA career with four teams, most memorably the Bulls, and finish with averages of 11.6 points, 4.2 rebounds, and 3.7 assists. But on this night he was a distracted twenty-three-year-old lamb being led to slaughter.
At the time, the Celtics were courting one of Croatia’s starters, center Stojko Vrankovic, so franchise player Bird and team president Dave Gavitt visited with the big man before the game. Other than that, the night had a kind of Cold War feel to it.
Daly was more than happy that his team was amped up and more than happy to give Pippen the hammer. The day before the game Jordan came to Daly and said, “Scottie and I want to play big minutes.” What’s the coach going to say, no? Daly started Pippen along with Jordan, Ewing, Barkley, and Magic. Daly never tipped his hand that he favored one starting team over another, but privately he knew that his three most important players were Jordan, Pippen, and Barkley. Barkley was important because he could always score, no matter what the opponent, no matter what the situation. He didn’t have to depend at all on the vicissitudes of outside shooting—Charles would simply plow his way to the basket and get in position for an easy score. Jordan and Pippen were key because they could both cover the floor on defense and initiate the offense, either as shooters or as distributors. And there was a subset even within that subset. “Give me Michael and Scottie,” Daly would tell his confidants, “and it really doesn’t matter who else is out there.”
As soon as the game began, Pippen latched on to Kukoc, who still managed to wriggle free early and slip a clever pass to Radja for a basket. That infuriated Pippen and represented the only Kukoc highlight of the night. At the other end, Daly called for a rare isolation play, stationing Pippen at the top of the key with the ball while his other four teammates spread the floor. He managed to draw a foul on Kukoc.
Everyone looked for Pippen to get open; twice Mullin slipped him clever passes for dunks over Kukoc. At times, Pippen face-guarded Kukoc all the way up the floor, like Kukoc was a junior high rival who had stolen Pippen’s girlfriend. At times, early on, Kukoc slapped away Pippen’s hands, but—ultimately and inevitably—Pippen stole his will. Jordan was all over the place, picking up Kukoc when Pippen overplayed him, clogging the passing lanes, even blocking a Kukoc layup. He had an incredible seven steals in the first half and Pippen had four.
They just moved Chicago Stadium to Barcelona. That’s all they did.
Even breaks in the action were lively, which was not normally the case. “Time-outs for us were funny more than anything,” Magic said years later, “because there was nothing to really talk about. We’d stare at each other and maybe say something about a back screen, and Chuck would stare at us for a while and finally just say, ‘Okay, keep doing what you’re doing.’ ” But on this night Jordan and Pippen made sure that everyone stayed in focus. The Bulls duo was so amped up that Barkley played the role of peacemaker, lifting Kukoc up after he had been knocked down and making a palms-down take-it-easy sign to his teammates at one point. Of course, Barkley still managed to collect a technical for talking to the crowd, a no-no in international ball.
Some of the Croatian players would later concede that their goal was to keep the margin at 25, which they failed to do, losing 103–70. Pippen was blunt in his postgame appraisal of Kukoc, who made only two of eleven shots, committed seven turnovers, and in general looked like a Roman spectator who had been mowed over in a chariot race. “Toni Kukoc could be a good player,” says Pippen, “but he’s in the right league right now.”
“I played a terrible game that night,” Kukoc tells me now. “Well, let’s just say a very bad game.”
The most lasting Croatian impression was made by Petrovic, who battled throughout, never intimidated, always going nose-to-nose with whomever was guarding him. He hit two back-to-back fuck-you three-pointers near the end of the first half, one of my enduring memories of that game. Alas, Petrovic would play only one more season in the NBA, the 1992–93 campaign, when he averaged 22.3 points per game for the Nets and seemed to be coming into his own, ready to be the first international player to really make an NBA splash.
On June 7, 1993, Petrovic was asleep in the front passenger seat of a car driven by his girlfriend, Klara Szalantzy, when it crashed into the back of a truck on a rain-drenched section of the autobahn in Bavaria. He was dead at twenty-eight. Some 100,000 of his countrymen attended his funeral in Zagreb. Kukoc was one of the pallbearers. Back home, his Nets coach, who had been with the club for only one season, was one of the mourners. That was Chuck Daly.
Years later, over breakfast, Pippen and I talk about Kukoc, a subject of which he has grown tired over the years, mostly because the Croatian was a central character in Pippen’s lowest professional m
oment. That happened in the 1994 postseason (the one when Jordan was off playing minor-league baseball) when Pippen refused to reenter a game after coach Phil Jackson had designed a last-second shot for Kukoc, not him.
“I was always cool with Toni,” Pippen tells me, but their coexistence was uneasy, owing first to Krause’s contract offer and second to the playoff game, which dogged Pippen for the rest of his career. To an extent, it still does. Whenever any athlete refuses to go into a game, Scottie’s name is the one that is raised. “Sittin’ Like Pippen” was the headline run by one New York newspaper after Yankees catcher Jorge Posada refused to enter a 2011 game because he had been moved down in the batting order during a slump.
“You know how I felt about that,” says Pippen. “It was an insult that I wouldn’t take the last shot. I regret that it happened, sure, and it was the wrong thing to do. But I always considered that [Jackson’s strategy] wrong since I was the franchise player at that time.”
Pippen’s resistance to Kukoc was not personal—it was professional. What basketball people praised in Kukoc was his versatility, his ability to be a perimeter package of shooting and playmaking even though he was an interior-sized player. That was Pippen’s calling card, too, and he deeply resented it when Krause said the Bulls needed another do-everything player.
Kukoc, for his part, looks back on the ’92 Games with mixed feelings. “My son was born, we made a good statement for European basketball, and Croatia, my country, got to compete,” he said. “All that was good. But then I think back on Drazen, how great he played and how spirited he was in Barcelona and what happened later … and I get very sad.”
Kukoc also swears that he didn’t think anything unusual was going on that night with the Dream Team defense. “I thought that was the way they guarded everybody,” he said.
Trust me, I tell him, it wasn’t—and it certainly wasn’t the way they guarded everyone in the Olympics.
“Well, I’ll take that as a compliment, then,” he says. “Or at least figure that it helped me when I got into the league. I got the toughest first.”
Kukoc eventually made peace with both of his teammates in Chicago, though he has a more enduring friendship with Jordan because they have something to do together. “I became a golf addict, a golf fool, a golf degenerate, whatever you want to call it,” he says. “Like Michael.” Kukoc even emerged triumphant in the tenth annual Michael Jordan Celebrity Invitational in the spring of 2011. His partner? The tournament host.
Still, there is no record that Jordan ever looked at the tapes of Kukoc.
CHAPTER 32
THE COOLEST ROOM IN THE WORLD
“Charles, We’re Sorry, but This Is a Ring Table.…”
After the win over Croatia and the systematic stripping of Kukoc’s manhood, the Dream Team games took on a numbing sameness for players, coaches, fans, and press alike. After each rout, one story nugget of interest might present itself, just enough to write a “game story,” although any sort of upset possibility was gone by six or seven minutes into the game. We had assumed that the low-hanging fruit had been dispensed with in Portland and that Barcelona would present a higher competitive plane. It turned out that, for the Dream Team, it was all low-hanging fruit.
Germany fell 111–68 on a night when Bird (game-high 19 points) looked like he was young again. Brazil went down 127–83 on a night when Oscar Schmidt finally got to play against his idols, though his stat line revealed an essential truth about true greatness and offensive efficiency—Schmidt scored 24 points on 25 shots, while Barkley (“Ooh, Oscar Schmidt; I’m shaking in my boots”) scored 30 on only 14 shots.
Spain was next, making a 122–81 sacrifice on a night when Stockton’s healing leg finally allowed him some playing time—he scored 4 points in six minutes. And as the United States entered the medal round, Puerto Rico went down in the quarterfinals, 115–77, on a night when the outside shooting of Mullin (21 points) was the big story.
The team was by then a cliché—a well-oiled machine—turning it off and on at will, handing out points, rebounds, and assists according to some notion of democracy of which they were aware but couldn’t really elucidate. “It became kind of like playing your little brother,” Drexler told me years later. “You knew you were going to kill him, so it became only a matter of how much pain you wanted to give him.”
By the time they would finish, five players would average in double figures (Barkley led with 18 points and shot an absurd 71 percent from the floor) and three others would average 9 points or more. Laettner, predictably, was the only low scorer, with a 4.8 average. Nobody would average more than 5.3 rebounds (both Ewing and Malone), but everybody would get some. The only jaw-dropping number was Pippen’s assist total—he had a team-high 47 over eight games, and it’s hard to even remember him playing long stretches as a traditional point guard. Jordan had 37 steals and Pippen had 23 in the eight games, but here’s another remarkable number: Barkley had 21, demonstrating both his instincts and the extent to which he could play the passing lanes if so inclined.
None of the Dream Teamers ever glanced at a stat sheet—it just wasn’t important because the game felt right. Besides, it would be gauche, and if someone got caught doing it, well, it would’ve been all over. Their own stats didn’t matter and the opponents’ stats didn’t matter, so for the Dream Teamers the only way to measure oneself was against a teammate. Years later I would be surprised at how much they said they got from one another.
From Jordan and Pippen, Malone learned about single-minded mental focus. “When those guys honed in on their competitors,” said Malone, “you could just forget it. That time they were watching films of Kukoc? You could’ve walked in front of Michael and Scottie a thousand times and their eyelashes would’ve never moved.”
From Malone, Pippen learned physical preparation. “You’d see Karl’s physique during the season, but until you’re with him you don’t realize that it’s not an accident. I started working out with Karl during the Dream Team, and that really pushed me.”
From Stockton, Jordan learned the value of synergy. “Karl Malone was a great player,” said Jordan, “but he could not play without John Stockton. John was his left hand to Karl’s right. That’s how important he was. That’s how important some teammates can be to others.”
From Michael/Magic/Larry, Robinson learned the lessons of leadership. “The Spurs had not been a championship team at the point when I went to Barcelona,” Robinson said, “so what I wanted to pick up on was, what do you need to do to be a leader, to lift your team up? And I took that commitment and focus back to San Antonio. Sure, I did the physical and mental work, but those guys made me understand that you have to require the same thing of everyone around you. You have to demand excellence from your teammates or you will not win a championship.”
And from the entire collective experience, Mullin learned something about himself. “I don’t think I realized this until years later,” he says now, “but the Dream Team turned out to be a very positive reinforcement about the way I was living my life. To come from where I was [alcohol rehab] to make that team … man, that really helped me beyond basketball.”
More specifically, Mullin remembers—indeed, treasures—the shooting games he had against Bird. The team rarely held formal practices in Barcelona, but a bus took volunteers to casual workouts. And on one such off-day afternoon, an hourlong game of H-O-R-S-E turned into an unseen masterpiece, something like the morning scrimmage in Monte Carlo.
“Larry and I would play for a hundred dollars a shot,” Mullin told me in the summer of 2011. “You shoot, you miss, just normal shots, not this crazy, bounce-the-ball-off-the-wall commercial shit.” (Such a trick shot made by Mullin at the Bristol campus of ESPN when he was working as a playoff commentator has become a YouTube classic.)
“The stakes get up to about a thousand. I’m up considerably. I couldn’t miss. I remember looking over and David Robinson has stopped working out and he’s watching us. I don’t know, maybe I
started letting down. Maybe I started thinking, ‘Holy shit, I’m kicking Larry Bird’s ass.’ But little by little Larry starts coming back, all the time telling me, ‘You know, I never lost one of these.’ Finally, he gets even and he says, ‘Okay, that’s it.’ He tosses me the ball and just walks away.”
Bird had been concerned even before the game began. “I needed to take lots of shots to prepare,” he told me in 2012, “and I hadn’t been doing that because of my back. When I got back to even, I knew that had to be it.”
Mullin is positively beaming as he finishes the story. “You know, before that … I mean, I knew I was a good shooter, better than most. But one of the guys I always thought was better than me was Larry. Of course he was better. It was Larry Bird. And that day, when I shot even with him, even though I didn’t really beat him … that day helped my career a lot.”
More and more, the center of the team became the family room at the Ambassador, their polestar. “By the time the Olympics were over,” said the NBA’s Kim Bohuny, “nobody cared what they looked like. Flip-flops, sweatpants, probably a pair of pajamas or two. You wore anything in there.”
At the beginning of the Games, Krzyzewski’s oldest daughter, Debbie, was overwhelmed the first time she was introduced to Magic, her favorite player. “She just burst into tears,” remembers her father. “Strangest thing.” But by the end of the Games, Debbie and Magic were simply friends.
The room was located on the second floor of the Ambassador, one flight up from the regular lobby, accessible either by stairs or by elevator. I visited a couple of times, but, as was the case in the Monte Carlo casino, I felt a little hesitant about hanging around, almost like I was rummaging through someone’s bedroom. I remember looking in one afternoon and seeing Stockton and his sons horsing around. It figured that Stockton needed to get out of his room—he, his wife, and their three kids were all encamped in there, mattresses spread out on the floor like a slumber party.
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