Dream Team

by Jack McCallum

  The room was designated primarily as a gathering place for players and their families, though NBA and USA Basketball people were all over the place. The two “outsiders” who had carte blanche were Jordan’s guys, Ahmad Rashad and Spike Lee. Payne Stewart wandered in from time to time in between his high-stakes golf games with Jordan. So did Will Smith, a guest of NBC, whose executives were staying at a nearby hotel.

  As was the case with the casino in the Loews Monte Carlo, the family room had a peanut gallery aspect to it: if an interloper somehow managed to elude security and gain entrance to the hotel, he could stare into the room, since the side facing the lobby was all windows and the door was frequently open.

  By day, the family room was abuzz with the noise of beeping video games, the crack of pool balls, the rhythmic plonk … plonk … plonk of a ping-pong match, and the sound of a music video coming from a TV, usually Cypress Hill, since the selection of videotapes was small. The room functioned as a kind of drop-off center, where athletes and wives left their kids so they could attend other Olympic events. To this day Larry and Dinah Bird and Clyde and Gaynell Drexler greet Bohuny warmly as “our babysitter.”

  Don Sperling, then the head of NBA Entertainment, remembers scooping up Jeffrey Michael Jordan seconds before the young boy would have tumbled down the elegant marble stairs into the lobby. Jordan gave him a grateful nod. Not so lucky were the pool balls thrown by Bird’s son, Connor, which from time to time clattered lobbyward.

  C. M. Newton remembers with fondness the afternoon that his late wife, Evelyn, sat down to play a video game in an effort to improve her skills so she could play with her grandchildren. Her partner was Patrick Ewing’s young nephew, Michael, and they were playing against Patrick Ewing Jr. and someone else. Mrs. Newton eventually blew the game, and she turned to apologize to Michael.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Next time you’ll have to get another partner.”

  To which Michael replied: “That’s all right, Mrs. Newton. We’ll get those motherfuckers next time.”

  Says C.M. today: “That was one of her fondest memories. She really felt like one of the boys.”

  In the early evening, after golf, it might be ping-pong time, which meant Jordan time, which meant life was miserable for everyone if the man lost. Any number of people (including me) can relate horror stories of playing ping-pong against Jordan, who was very good but not great, beatable on paper but generally not in reality since he wore almost everyone down with his relentless aggression and psych game. At one point Steve Mills was playing him even until Jordan put down his racket, stared him in the eye, and announced, “I will not let you go home and tell your friends you beat me.” From that point on, his lacerating competitiveness simply rolled over Mills.

  One major exception was Laettner, an outstanding player who repeatedly beat Jordan, at one point prompting the world’s most famous athlete to throw his paddle in disgust and storm out of the room. Later, one of Jordan’s buddies was tasked with finding a ping-pong table in Barcelona so Jordan could set it up in his room and practice, but it never came to pass.

  (The identity of Laettner’s biggest rival, though, might be a surprise. “I could usually beat him,” remembers Laettner, “but Commissioner Stern was my toughest opponent by far.”)

  I was glad Laettner had his table-tennis moments because the Olympic experience, while a pure joy for the Dream Teamers who had come from the NBA, was a mixed bag for Laettner. No matter what he said then or says now, he felt like a tag-along. Barkley, Bird, Mullin, and Drexler went out of their way to befriend him, but Laettner was no fool—he knew he only half belonged.

  Not his mother, though. Bonnie Laettner positively plunged into the Olympic experience, trading pins and cheerleading like mad at the arena. She developed a close relationship with Drexler’s wife and at one point almost got involved in fisticuffs at a game to protect Gaynell’s seat when she left to change a diaper.

  It was after midnight when the family room achieved legendary status. Not everyone was a part of it. David Robinson, for example, floated blessedly above the fray, sometimes literally so, as when he and Branford Marsalis traded sax licks on the roof of the Ambassador. But most of the Dream Team was in there at one time or another, the hours moving steadily to dawn, the card game in full swing, the beer bottles and the glasses of vodka and lime (purchased at the nearby corner bar) starting to stack up, along with the empty pizza boxes, snuffed-out Jordan stogies, and, most of all, one-upmanship rhetoric.

  There were moments of high comedy, as when one Dream Team member burst into the room and demanded, “Who’s got a rubber? I need one quick.” (That demonstrated, more than anything, that the NBA had officially joined the post-Magic HIV awareness era.) And Drexler’s ears are still ringing from the abuse he took in the room for mistakenly bringing two left sneakers to practice one day. (“I was dressing in the dark that morning,” he told me years later.) Clyde actually tried to get away with wearing them until Barkley stopped practice and exclaimed, “Wait a minute, Clyde’s got two damn left sneakers on.”

  The room regulars were Jordan, Magic, Barkley, Pippen, and Ewing. They owned it, the first three in particular, of course, owing both to their personalities and to their status within the game. But Pippen and Ewing were full-fledged members as well. Pippen’s inclusion in the charmed circle was easy to understand. He was good company, he had proven himself to be Robin to Michael’s Batman, and he was now a champion. At first glance, Ewing might not seem to belong, but there was never a question that he was one of the main guys. That rarely came across to outsiders. Ewing’s agent, David Falk, was always trying to convince me that Patrick was an engaging personality whose name sold a lot of shoes, but I never bought it. Ewing was never exactly rude, but to outsiders he was more or less dismissive, his postgame comments blander than broth. Whenever I wanted a one-on-one interview with him at practice, for example, I always had to do it as he got a post-practice rubdown from the athletic trainer, his version of multitasking.

  “This doesn’t work when there’s somebody else around, Patrick,” I used to complain.

  “Works for me,” he said. “I’m not going to change any answers because somebody else is around.”

  “That’s because you never say anything,” I’d remind him.

  Take it or leave it was his position. Yet I, like many others, genuinely liked Ewing because, at the very least, he was consistent in his dismissiveness.

  I was secretly happy years later, though, when Ewing told me, “The only thing I’d change about my career is that maybe I should’ve been a little more accessible to the media.” He also admitted that he regretted the four-team deal that sent him to Seattle late in his career, one that came about largely because he wanted out of Gotham. “After hearing rumblings for fifteen years that the team was ‘better without Ewing,’ I just got tired of it,” Ewing told me. “I reached my breaking point.” He tacked on a forgettable free-agent year in Orlando that ended his career in 2001–2, but his legacy remains as a New York warrior who couldn’t quite get his team to the finish line. I do believe that, even for those who didn’t appreciate his game, he was a respected player.

  On non-game nights, the cards in the Coolest Room in the World came out around ten. Tonk fit their style—a form of knock rummy, it’s played at a high rate of speed, concentration helpful but not essential, so part of the brain could be devoted to insults.

  The go-to insult for both Jordan and Magic was championships, as in who had won some and who hadn’t. Malone and Stockton got a pass—they weren’t particularly close to either player and woofing on those who are not return woofers is kind of like drowning puppies, even for those guys. Now, had Jordan known then what would transpire later—Finals victories over their Jazz teams in 1997 and 1998—perhaps he wouldn’t have been so kind.

  Ewing was a favorite target of Jordan’s, owing to their long friendship. Years later, Ewing would tell me, half amused and half angry, that Jordan was relentless. “M
ichael never let me forget that I couldn’t beat him,” Ewing says, shaking his head. “Michael never let me forget anything. Michael has been talking trash from the first day I met him at age seventeen, and he’s never stopped. Hell, yeah, it bothers me that I never beat him. And I gotta hear it from him every day I see him. ‘You didn’t beat me in college, and you didn’t beat me in the NBA. You’re out of chances, Patrick.’ That’s the kind of shit I gotta hear from him until my dying days.” (Ewing couldn’t even bring up the 1994 Eastern semis, when his Knicks finally beat the Bulls—Jordan was off playing baseball.)

  Drexler, whose Finals frustration was freshest, got drawn in once in a while, and he would try to go back at them, particularly Magic.

  “I used to tell them, ‘Let me play on your team and you play on mine,’ ” Drexler told me. “ ‘Let me play with Cap [Abdul-Jabbar], Worthy, Byron Scott, and A. C. Green, and you play with my team, and let’s see how many rings you’d have.’ Or, ‘Let me have Scottie. See how I do then.’ That would shut them up real quick.” (Drexler deserves his say, but it should be noted there is little anecdotal evidence that either Magic or Jordan shut up “real quick.”)

  Jordan and Magic were particularly ruthless toward Barkley, who might sit down to join them only to hear, “Sorry, Charles, this is a ring table.” Magic would say something similar to Barkley or Ewing when he and Bird shot around together. “This is a ring basket” was Magic’s comment. Now, Jordan and Barkley were tight. A well-honed dialogue passed between them from time to time in Barcelona. Jordan would say, “Hey, Charles, who’s the best two-guard in the world?” and Barkley would answer, “That would be Michael Jordan.” Then Barkley would ask, “And who’s the best power forward in the world?” and Jordan would answer, “That would be Charles Wade Barkley.” It was their own little poke at Drexler and Malone.

  And Barkley could go at Jordan, one of his favorite topics being what he considered to be Jordan’s fraudulent sex appeal. “Man, you are so damn black,” Barkley would tell him. “And you ain’t the best-looking guy in the world either. Any guy has $500 million looks good. If you were a fuckin’ plumber, you couldn’t get a date.” Jordan would laugh because what else could you do? Only Barkley would choose to make a fellow African American’s skin color an issue.

  But there was another circle, the supercircle above friendship that excluded Barkley, one in which only Michael, Magic, and Larry were members, the ones who had won nine straight MVP awards (three each) from 1984 through 1992. Even Pippen, who had won the same number of championships as Jordan, was not allowed. Back in San Diego, Jordan and Magic had been asked to appear on a Newsweek Dream Team cover. “Not without Larry,” they said, and so Bird was included in the portrait, too. (“I’m still signing those covers today,” Magic says.) Michael/Magic/Larry was special. They could say anything to anybody.

  Bird wasn’t much of a card player and tended not to be the first one into the conversation. He would watch where it was going for a while—“Kind of like the father figure,” Mullin said, “just waiting around until someone said, ‘What do you think, Dad?’ ”—then jump in with both feet, an enthusiastic needler and debater when the subject interested him. He and Ewing, Harry and Larry—“the Odd Couple,” as Magic called them—would always share a beer or two or three or four. “Or twelve or thirteen,” Jordan added.

  In Jackie MacMullan’s When the Game Was Ours, the author recounts a long, late-night dialectic among the principals when they debated both which team was the best ever and who was the best one-on-one player.

  “Obviously one of our Laker teams,” said Magic in response to the first question. “We won five championships. More than all of you.”

  Jordan had won two and had something to say about it. “You haven’t seen the best NBA team of all time yet,” Jordan said. “I’m just getting started. I’m going to win more championships than all of you guys.”

  Ewing and Barkley tried to join in, the former offering up Bill Russell’s Celtics as the best of all time and Barkley offering up himself. “Michael, I’m going to steal at least one of them from you,” said Barkley who by then had gotten his wish and been traded out of Philadelphia.

  It is fascinating to hold up that conversation in the light of the history that unfolded over the next few seasons. Barkley would get the chance to steal one of them from Jordan the very next season, but, like so many others, he would fall short. And Jordan would prove correct in his assessment—he would go on to win six titles, one more than Magic, three more than Bird.

  Bird was never a chest-beater in the same way that Magic and Jordan were, but he had a cold heart when it came to winning. On this night he was feeling no pain. Others who were there remember Bird reclining on the floor—his back made it tough for him to sit—with empties all around him.

  “You ain’t won nuthin’, Charles,” Bird said to Barkley after Charles made his I’m-going-to-steal-one-from-you claim. As MacMullan writes, Barkley, chastened, slumped away.

  At another point in the conversation, the principals started musing about what ultimate victory in Barcelona (now all but guaranteed) would mean.

  “If I get this, then I’ll have two gold medals, two championships, and one NCAA championship,” said Jordan.

  And Magic said, “Yeah, and I’ll have an NCAA title, five championships, and one gold medal.”

  And Ewing said, “I’ll have two gold medals and an NCAA championship, and when I get my NBA title I’ll be right there with you.”

  Jordan would have none of that. “Until you learn to pass out of a double-team, Patrick,” His Airness said, “you won’t have to worry about that NBA ring.”

  It was classic Jordan, moving the needle beyond the gentle-jab point because Ewing’s weakness was indeed that part of his game.

  Jordan was always more respectful of Bird than he was of Magic, probably because Bird had always been so respectful of him. The Greatest Game Nobody Ever Saw in Monte Carlo affords a snapshot of that, Jordan and Magic going tonsil-to-tonsil while Michael remembered Bird’s lone basket of the game as absolutely crucial to victory, which it was not. Jordan’s affinity for Bird dated back to the 1986 postseason, when the second-year Bull laid 49 and 63 points on the Celtics in Boston Garden, although the Celtics won both games. “He is the most exciting, awesome player in the game today,” Bird said then, sounding very un-Bird-like. “I think it’s just God disguised as Michael Jordan.”

  The interplay between Magic and Michael had more bite to it. A couple of variations of it played out in Barcelona. Magic was not ready to give up his treasured spot at the top of the NBA hierarchy. And while Jordan was amenable to, even grateful for, ceding the outward leadership to Magic—at the Tournament of the Americas he had proclaimed the Dream Team to be “Magic’s Team”—he wanted it confirmed, at least within the tight architecture of the team, that he was the Man.

  Which, to confirm a point that has been made before, he was. “Michael was the leader,” Ewing said years later. “Yeah, Magic said all the things that Magic says. But Michael is Michael. We knew who the real leader was.”

  Jordan kidded Johnson about not bringing his whole family out to L.A. to watch the Bulls beat them “out of respect for you.” Johnson countered by bringing it to Jordan’s attention that he felt sorry for Jordan since he would never have a rival like Bird. “We went two weeks without sleep knowing, if we made one mistake, the other guy was going to take it and use it to beat us,” MacMullan quotes Johnson in her book. “Who do you measure yourself against?”

  Jordan had no answer for that one. He was indeed sui generis, which worked for him and against him. But he would not give in when Magic pressed the one-on-one argument.

  “You’ve got no chance on this one,” Jordan said. “Larry, you don’t have the speed to stay with me. Magic, I can guard you, but you could never guard me. Neither one of you guys can play defense the way I can. And neither one of you can score like me.”

  Jordan went on and on, piling up points becau
se he was right and everyone knew it. Everyone except Magic. As MacMullan writes: “ ‘There were plenty of years when I knew in my heart I was the best guy in the room,’ Bird said. ‘That night I knew in my heart it wasn’t me anymore. And it wasn’t Magic either.’ ”

  Years later, I am astounded at the degree to which that ongoing dialectic stuck with Jordan. Maybe I shouldn’t be, since we saw Jordan’s astonishingly long memory at work in his Hall of Fame induction speech, when he seemingly conjured up every slight that had ever come his way during his gilded career. But it bothered him that Magic would not recognize what he saw as plain truth. And he had an interesting riff on the Magic-Bird relationship.

  “See, Magic really thought that it was his and Bird’s team, that the whole moment belonged to them,” Jordan told me in 2011. “Bird didn’t see it that way, and you know what? I learned as much about their relationship on that trip as anything else.

  “Bird went along with that whole we-go-back-to-’79 relationship, but he was never into it the way that Magic was. He just kind of pulled Bird into it. Even today, sitting and talking with Larry, he knows that he will always be remembered for it, but it’s not necessarily something he wants to promote.” (We can assume that Jordan would not have been first in line for tickets to the production of Magic/Bird, which at this writing was scheduled to hit Broadway in 2012.)

  “And the one time Larry stood up to Magic was in that room. He said: ‘Let’s just ride off into the sunset, Magic, we’ve had our time.’ He was able to say, ‘Okay, you and Pippen are better than we were, offensively and defensively.’ He gave out those rewards, whereas Magic would challenge them.”

  Jordan acknowledged that it was Magic’s competitive nature at work, which he understands. But it still nags at him that in the summer of 1992—with Magic a few days from his thirty-third birthday, suffering from a virus that most of the world thought would turn fatal, and having been swept up like everyone else in the one-man tornado that was Jordan—Magic still believed he was the better player and would not surrender an inch.