On the day that the United States played Lithuania in the semifinals, Jordan was so concerned about the challenge ahead that he played thirty-six holes of golf. The team bus was idling in front of the Ambassador, Daly muttering a few “Omigods,” before Jordan finally showed up, having instructed his wife, Juanita, to retrieve his basketball shoes from their suite.
Going into the Olympics, remember, Lithuania was Daly’s principal worry. He knew that four of the five Lithuanian starters had been on the Soviet team that beat David Robinson and the United States in 1988 in Seoul. He respected the hard-bodied, tough-minded Marciulionis. And he worried about the mysterious giant Sabonis, who at his best was a better center than either Robinson or Ewing. Of course, Sabonis’s best had been a decade earlier.
Not long ago, as we sat by the tennis courts at a country club near Marciulionis’s home in southern California, I asked Sarunas what had been going on in the Lithuanian locker room before the semifinal.
“We were not thinking about winning the game, if that is what you mean,” he answered.
“But was there any talk of going zone or making the U.S. shoot from the perimeter?” I asked him. “Donnie told me that you wanted to keep them out of the paint and—”
Marciulionis began waving his hands to stop me. “It did not make a difference,” he said. “It did not matter what Donnie said, and I do not even remember what that was. We just wanted to—how do you say it?—not lose face.”
Jordan, meanwhile, may have made Daly uneasy, but he understood the challenge. “I got Sarunas,” he told the coach. “Don’t worry about it.”
Jordan hit an early jumper and Magic hit a three-pointer. Jordan made a layup off a steal, then he scored on a stutter-stop jump shot, and it was over by the time the United States built a 31–8 lead and Lithuanian forward Arturas Karnisovas had instructed a team manager to take a photo of him guarding Barkley, his favorite Dream Teamer. The final score was 127–76. Nine of twelve U.S. players scored in double figures, led by Jordan’s 21—who knows how well he would’ve played if he’d gone only eighteen holes—and, in a statistical anomaly, Bird, Drexler, Malone, and Mullin all finished with 10 points. In retrospect, it might’ve been the Dream Team’s most devastating performance.
A couple of things from that game resonate with me. At one point a loose ball happened to hit an official, keeping it inbounds and enabling Lithuania to retain possession. Less than a minute later Bird grabbed a rebound with his left hand, glanced at that same official, who was standing nearby, and bounced the ball off him, scooping it up a split second later. In that brief span of time between when he grabbed the ball and saw the official, Bird’s basketball mind took a snapshot, developed it, and determined that he could have a little fun without giving up the advantage. He used to talk about how he was able to freeze the action, get time itself to almost slow down, so he could make a split-second decision.
The other one involved Jordan. For about a six-minute stretch he simply decided that Marciulionis wasn’t going to do anything. He guarded him so zealously that on most possessions this most determined and resilient of players couldn’t even get the ball. “I remember that,” Marciulionis told me when I brought it up. “It just changed everything for us. My teammates were used to me controlling the ball, and now I couldn’t get it, and now somebody else had to make decisions. We were lost, all because of Michael.” Jordan remembered it, too. “Sarunas was so strong with the ball that the best thing to do was not let him get it,” said Jordan. “You can’t do that for the whole game, but you can do it for a while.” Jordan was so into the idea that Marciulionis was going to be contained that after the Lithuanian scored a basket right before halftime, Jordan, who was on the bench, reamed out the defender, Drexler.
Jordan’s defense on that night was one of Daly’s favorite Olympic memories, too. On more than one occasion—it could’ve been fifteen years later—I’d say to him, “Chuck, how about the night you put Michael on Marciulionis and—”
“Michael didn’t let him get the ball,” Daly would say, finishing my sentence. “He wouldn’t even let him get the damn ball.”
Lithuania’s defining moments of the Games took place two nights later against the Unified Team, the bronze medal at stake. The game got lost in the hubbub of the Dream Team–Croatia gold medal game, which was played several hours later, but it was absolutely one of the most significant political games in the history of the Olympics.
“I never felt any pressure like that in my entire life,” remembers Donnie Nelson. “To the Lithuanians and anyone associated with them, even an outsider like me, the Unified Team represented the Soviet Union. We were playing the country that had killed our citizens and ruled over them for decades. The feeling was, ‘We cannot lose this game. There is no way we can lose this game.’ ”
The game was ragged and intense, tightly played throughout. Sabonis, who hadn’t been able to do anything against the United States, screamed at his teammates, imploring them to battle harder. He played with a stiff-kneed magnificence, which was a revelation. To much of the Western world, Sabonis had been a basketball Sasquatch, spotted from time to time outsmarting some centers, stomping on others, an eternal man of mystery who had been throttled by the Soviet hierarchy and who drowned his anger and frustration in his nation’s favorite beverage.
Sabonis’s teammates included Alvydas Pazdrazdis and Gintaras Einikis, who were among those who had joined hands to stop the Soviet tanks rumbling through the streets of the capital. Marciulionis was all over the place, as he always was, and in the end, his brilliance and the play of Sabonis won the day. The game ended with a score of 82–78, touching off a wild celebration.
The president of Lithuania, a dignified man named Vytautas Landsbergis, was doused with champagne. He had brought only one suit to the Olympics, so he changed into one of the Grateful Dead tie-dyes and began squirting champagne himself. When that celebration was over, Marciulionis retired to the shower and stood under the water for a long, long time in his uniform, all the while thinking, What if we had lost to the Soviets? What if we had lost? He told me this years later: “Thinking about what could’ve happened almost took away the joy of winning. That’s how much we needed to win.”
Eventually, though, the celebratory mood returned, and the Lithuanians went back to the Olympic Village. “We had several hours before we were due back at the medal stand,” said Nelson, “and that’s way too much time if you’re a Lithuanian.” Sabonis, who had been kept in a virtual basketball prison for years—as a thirty-one-year-old, he would finally get to play in the NBA in 1995 with the Portland Trail Blazers, where he had seven fairly productive seasons—was a particularly avid celebrator. He took on and vanquished all comers—boxers, weight lifters, discus throwers—in arm-wrestling contests, all the while downing shots. When it was time to return to the arena, as the Dream Team was playing Croatia in the gold medal game, Sabonis was sleeping it off somewhere. Legend has it that he was found a couple of days later in the women’s dorm of the Unified Team, having beaten the Russians on the court but then doing his best to spread his own version of glasnost.
The Lithuanians were supposed to wear the logo-emblazoned collared shirt of a sponsor to the medal ceremony, but at the last moment Marciulionis handed out the skeleton T-shirts and told his teammates to put them on. “The Grateful Dead believed in us when we were nothing,” he said, and out marched the Lithuanians in their garish T-shirts, displeasing representatives from the IOC—a fascinating tableau that was not the only medal-stand kerfuffle of the evening.
CHAPTER 34
THE GOLD, THE FLAG, AND THE CHOSEN ONE
Some Wear Old Glory … Though Not in the Service of Patriotism
On the night before the United States was to play Croatia for the gold medal, the card game in the Coolest Room in the World was especially animated. All the regulars were there, including Jordan, who was scheduled to do a video shoot the next morning for NBA Entertainment. It was not a small thing, a commit
ment of several hours for what would become Michael Jordan: Air Time. To be honest, I can’t separate one Jordan video from another, but they were big deals in the sports world, exquisitely produced moneymakers.
This was classic Jordan—commit to something, let it hang in the air for as long as possible while the other party goes apoplectic with anxiety, then pull it off at the last moment, like a buzzer-beating jump shot. Magic does things the same way.
It was one in the morning, then two, then three. Jordan was smoking his phallic stogies and the guys were ripping on one another, and Don Sperling of NBA Entertainment was circling the edge of the group like an overwrought den mother, trying to remind Jordan about the morning shoot and how Michael should also figure in the small matter of, you know, the gold medal game that night. Then it was four o’clock, then it was five. The players knew that this was the last card game, for the team was leaving Barcelona as soon as the gold medal had been secured and the arena celebration dispensed with. This round of tonk was something special, a ceremony of sorts, a parting of the ways before they all became enemies again.
At six-fifteen the game finally broke up. Sperling followed Jordan to one of his two rooms (a Jordan perk), where Jordan was to take a shower.
“Don’t crash on me, Michael,” Sperling begged.
“I told you I’ll be out,” said Jordan, “so I’ll be out.”
True to his word, Jordan reemerged twenty-five minutes later, showered, bald head glistening, decked out in a bright, orange-tinted shorts set that made him look like a Zambian exchange student. And for the next several hours the crew followed him through Barcelona, filming on the streets and at the Olympic Stadium. “What you have to understand is that it’s ninety-six degrees and 100 percent humidity and he had no sleep,” said Sperling. “And when you see that video, he looks as fresh as if he’d just gotten out of bed after eight hours.”
When they were finished, in midafternoon, Jordan asked for a favor.
“Could you take me to the golf course?” he said. “My clubs are out there, and I’m going to try to get in a round.”
Jordan played eighteen holes at the Real Club de Golf El Prat on the outskirts of Barcelona, as he did most days, got a ride back to the hotel, went to his room, changed, waded through the crowds at the Ambassador (they had only gotten larger as the Games went on), climbed aboard the team bus, and, eight years after his first, went off in search of his second gold medal.
“Michael tried to get me on his schedule over there, and I just couldn’t do it,” Magic says today. “I got so I could play cards all night, and so did some of the other guys. But then to go out and play eighteen, thirty-six holes of golf? Then come back and get 20 in the game like it’s nothing?
“Man, nobody could do that. Michael Jordan is the strongest, and the strongest-willed, athlete ever. I don’t care what anybody says.”
No matter how the story is spun two decades later, the United States Olympic Committee deeply resented the attention that the Dream Team received in Barcelona. That resentment had started way back in Portland and continued from the first days in Barcelona. NBC’s Dick Ebersol had made special arrangements for the Dream Team to arrive late for the opening ceremonies and be deposited into the middle of the U.S. procession in an effort to lessen the chaos. It didn’t matter. As soon as the players were spotted, athletes of every size and stripe broke ranks and ran to the Dream Team, particularly to Magic.
And you know what? It couldn’t have been a better scene if NBC had orchestrated the choreography of it.
But it didn’t matter to the USOC. The special accommodations, the extra security, the demand for tickets for a sport that in some years was barely on the Olympic radar—all of it angered the organization deeply. Mike Moran, the head of PR for the USOC, went after Barkley for the journal he was “writing” (it was more like a dictation with David Dupree cleaning it up) for USA Today, concerned that he was getting paid. The pettiness boggled the mind. Barkley was of course not getting paid, and if he had been, the sum wouldn’t have covered the amount that accidentally spilled out of his pockets on Las Ramblas every night.
The lead bureaucratic jihadist was LeRoy Walker, one of the officials who had gotten under the Dream Team’s collective skin in Portland. He was the titular head of the U.S. delegation as well as the next USOC president. Midway through the Games Walker caused a firestorm when he told a tale of stopping to watch a televised Dream Team game with a bunch of other U.S. athletes only to hear them root against their countrymen, the presumption being that they were fed up with the Brahmin treatment given the basketball team. “I may be from the old school,” the seventy-four-year-old Walker told several news outlets, “but when I find Americans pulling against Americans, it bothers me.”
“Old school” doesn’t begin to cover it. Walker conjured up the master-of-Trinity character memorably portrayed by John Gielgud in Chariots of Fire, who complained that a sprinter was “playing the tradesman” for daring to use a professional coach. Walker was lost in the past, holding on to the idea that the pros should’ve stayed in the Olympic Village and that a U.S. college team could still win gold “if we choose the right ones.” He ignored the fact that other highly compensated U.S. athletes, such as track stars Carl Lewis, Mike Powell, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee and tennis player Pete Sampras, were lavishly bungalowed outside the Olympic Village also, and that American collegians would no longer have a chance in an emerging new basketball order.
There is little doubt that the USOC saw it as a larger fight, one for the very future of the organization; even the eminently reasonable Harvey Schiller bought into that idea a little bit. “There was a real concern about the NBA taking over,” Schiller, the chairman of the USOC in 1992, told me. “The NBA had already put people on the USA Basketball board, so what was to stop them from putting people on the USOC board? Some people saw this as the beginning of professional sports consuming the Olympic movement.”
So the bureaucrats did what bureaucrats do—kvetch.
At the end of the day, the USOC dug in its heels on the one issue where it seemed to hold the hammer and one that seemed substantive enough to cause a civil war—the Dream Team’s podium garb at the medal ceremony.
No governing body can control the “competitive attire” of an athlete, though what constitutes competitive attire can get tricky. In hockey, for example, a player can’t be told what stick or skates he can use, but his gloves are up for grabs. In swimming, the cap is considered “competitive attire” but trunks are not. Basketball is like track and field—the USOC cannot dictate footwear, but it can mandate that a certain uniform be worn. There was never a whisper of complaint from anyone about the Dream Team game uniform, which was made by Champion, probably because the logo is small and Nike isn’t in the NBA uniform business anyway. But the Reebok-sponsored platform suit, which featured the company patch on the right shoulder? That was something else again.
In accepting the invitation to play on the Dream Team, Jordan and his agent, David Falk, had told the USOC, USA Basketball, and whoever else was listening that he wouldn’t wear Reebok. As much as anyone wanted to paint Nike as the bad guy—I’d be more than willing to do that if it were the truth—it wasn’t the company making the stink. Swoosh chairman Phil Knight had all but checked out on the issue, other than to offer a memorable one-liner at the expense of the USOC chairman: when he heard Schiller insist that the basketball team would not be allowed on the podium if it did not wear the Reebok suit, Knight said: “Who does Harvey Schiller think he is, Janet Reno?” (History lesson: she was attorney general at the time.) It was Jordan and Falk—mostly Jordan—who were most insistent.
The Reebok story had substantial legs in Barcelona partly because there was almost nothing to write about once the Dream Team took the court and began dismantling the opposition. The USOC’s Moran was always able to work up a nice froth when asked about the Dream Team anyway, and in this case he insisted that the players would not be able to take the medal stand
unless they wore “the patriotic clothing approved by the USOC.”
Now, we may raise an eyebrow about what Jordan believes to be principle, but by that time he had at least been in a protracted contractual relationship with Nike. As for the USOC’s position, there was nothing intrinsically “patriotic” about the Reebok suit, nothing red, white, and blue, only green. Reebok had paid the USOC about $2 million to be a platform sponsor. But it was easy for the USOC to play the star-spangled-banner card, painting itself as protectors of the Republic and the Dream Teamers as greedy self-promoters.
“I got two million reasons not to wear that shit,” Charles Barkley proclaimed, thereby releasing the terms of his deal with Nike.
But this wasn’t about Barkley. It was about Jordan, whose annual Nike take at the time was exponentially larger than what Barkley got. The team would follow Jordan’s lead. Players such as Malone, who had his own deal with LA Gear (“I’m an off-brand guy,” Karl used to say), weren’t crazy about always being a minor character in someone else’s play, and it would’ve been interesting had Jordan declared, “We’re not going out for the medal ceremony.” I have the feeling that Malone would’ve wrestled him to the locker room floor on that point. But the Dream Team functioned according to a hierarchy that had Jordan and Magic on top (and Bird when he cared), and the rest of the team would take its cue from Jordan.
Jordan’s loyalty to Nike sometimes reached a psychosis that went well beyond the objectionable Republicans buy sneakers, too. One of his good friends, Fred Whitfield, now team president with the Bobcats, remembers Jordan taking a knife to the Puma footwear that Whitfield had in his closet. One day Jordan, authentically indignant, looked at my piddling $50 New Balances and said, “What are you wearing that shit for?”
(When I interviewed Jordan in the summer of 2011, I wore loafers so he wouldn’t get a gander at my standard-issue Asics. I make no apologies for that. Jordan had that same insane loyalty about his alma mater. He once told Falk that he would fire him if the agent sent his daughter to Duke, which is where she ended up going. Falk was honestly worried for a while that Jordan would follow through, but he didn’t.)
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