So was it about loyalty or money? Both, really. The obvious comparison is to the Lithuanians, who wore their of-the-people-by-the-people-for-the-people Grateful Dead T-shirts out of loyalty. But, really, that had something to do with bucks, too—the Dead had written them a check.
Behind the scenes, Schiller played his trump card: the organization held all of the passports, and he told USA Basketball reps, “We won’t give them back.” Schiller knew that he wouldn’t strand twelve of the world’s best-known athletes in a foreign land—the Spanish government would’ve waved them through customs anyway, collecting autographs and photos along the way—and it was never going to come to that. But Schiller did see this as an issue that, unlike most involving the Dream Team, could be won.
As the years rolled by, it has become increasingly difficult to deconstruct this platform episode, to find out who knew what and when they knew it. Understand first there are two threads to the story—the pin-back and the flag. Schiller says that a few days before the gold medal game he attended a luncheon that featured U.S. tennis player Mary Jo Fernandez, who had won a gold medal in doubles and a bronze in singles. “Mary Jo was wearing the award jacket and had it zipped about two-thirds up,” says Schiller. “And with the flaps opened up, it covered the Reebok logo. As soon as I left, I called Dave Gavitt, told him to get an awards jacket and zip it part of the way up, see what happens.”
Meanwhile, a couple of days before the gold medal final, some of the Dream Teamers had decided that they would wear the jacket but get something—maybe tape or a strip of cloth—to cover up the logo. They didn’t know about the pin-back idea, and Jordan swears that he believed they wouldn’t have to wear the jacket at all. What is most incredible is that situation was allowed to go on as long as it did, right up until the gold medal game against Croatia on August 8.
On that morning, Daly read a note that had been slipped under his hotel room door. It was from NBC’s Ebersol, inviting Daly to send someone to pick up a videotape of a piece the network had run the night before about the controversial U.S. defeat in the 1972 Munich Games. Daly dispatched a manager to get it, and he and P. J. Carlesimo reviewed it, agreeing that it might serve as motivation to get a tired team amped up.
The tape player wouldn’t function at the pregame get-together at the hotel about four hours before tip-off. The Prince of Pessimism did not consider this a good omen. He made sure that the video came with them to the arena, and it did work in the locker room. On the way to the arena … another omen, though no one knew whether this was good or bad. As with Puerto Rico, the Croatian team bus was pulled over to the side so the Dream Team could pass. Bird was already on the practice court, going through his pregame retinue of shots, when the Croatian players arrived. “Laslo, what is this?” said Stojko Vrankovic, his Celtics teammate. “We cannot even be on the same road with you?” “Wasn’t up to me,” said Bird, suppressing a laugh and thinking, I hope this doesn’t work against us.
Once in the locker room, the Dream Teamers watched the 1972 tape attentively, fascinated by the appalling compound of double-dealing and bureaucracy that enabled the Soviets to get three chances to win the game. None of the Dream Teamers believed that they could get themselves in a position to lose by referee incompetence; that only happens to teams that can’t build a double-digit lead. But it was a wise move for the Prince of Pessimism.
Still, there was an anticlimactic feeling to the evening that was helped along by Croatia’s coach, Petar Skansi. After his team had beaten the Unified Team to reach the final, he had declared, “This was our final today.” The Dream Teamers were tired of Barcelona by then—even Barkley had stopped going to Las Ramblas—and thinking only of resting their weary bodies before NBA training camps began eight weeks hence. They came storming out of their locker room, stopped to take a pathetic snapshot (see the prologue), struggled for a few uneasy minutes (Croatia actually led 25–23), then continued on their merry, inexorable way, dispatching Croatia 117–85. Petrovic (24 points) was his usual defiant self, and Kukoc was a lot better (16 points) than he was in the first meeting. “I got my greatest respect for Toni Kukoc the second time we played them,” Jordan told me. (Let’s be clear that he said this in 2011; that’s not the way he acted in 1992.)
That left only the suspense of what the U.S. team, having defeated their eight opponents by the absurd average of 43.8 points, would wear to the medal ceremony.
Plans had been made at the pregame meal, according to USA Basketball’s Tom McGrath, to pin back the lapels of the Reebok suit on the players so that the logo wouldn’t show; this was the Schiller plan. I have no doubt that McGrath’s memory is correct because dozens of safety pins had to be gathered, and they were indeed there for the players after the game. But either the pin-back idea never caught on with the players, it wasn’t communicated clearly enough, or the players simply tuned it out.
“There kept being no solution and no solution and finally we’re at the gold medal game,” says Jordan, still able to work up a fire-eyed fury about the issue twenty years later. “So I thought we were just going to wear our game uniform, which I thought would be great. But then we were told, ‘You can’t go out there unless you wear Reebok.’ ”
Jordan stood up and said, “I feel like I’m dissing America, that we’re making business bigger than that America on our jersey.” If that sounds hypocritical since his fear was of showing disloyalty to his own business interests, well, that’s how he felt.
I ask him if he ever considered not going out for the medal ceremony.
“Of course not,” he says. “I wouldn’t have done that to my teammates. And they knew that. They had me in a corner.”
Then Jordan had another idea. “Can you find some American flags?” he asked McGrath.
Out came the tie-dyed Lithuanians, hungover and happy, Sabonis-less, looking for all the world like a gloriously pie-eyed band of pot smokers who had beaten Alpha Tau Omega in the intramural championship final. They were followed by the U.S. team. Magic Johnson, wearing a wide smile, was in the lead, an American flag draped over his right shoulder, his left hand holding it in place. Barkley was next, a flag around both of his shoulders. Mullin, Stockton, Malone, and Drexler followed. None of them wore flags, but all had their jackets zipped so that the Reebok logo was hidden. Jordan, blowing a bubble, was next, a flag on his right shoulder, clearly covering the Reebok logo. Pippen, Bird, Ewing, Robinson, and Laettner followed. (Only three flags had been procured from spectators.)
From his seat near midcourt, NBA commissioner David Stern watched with mixed emotions. He was proud (in general) of the way the NBA players had comported themselves, proud that they never seemed to rub it in (Barkley’s elbow notwithstanding), proud that eight grind-the-other-guys-into-dust routs had been accomplished without an international incident. But he was also a businessman, schooled in the art of the deal, and was disappointed in the flags and the artfully zipped jackets.
“In retrospect, I would’ve been much more forceful with our players for their sake,” Stern told me years later. “But unfortunately, as was our style in Barcelona, we [the NBA] deferred, and it tainted our players a little bit. We would’ve told Reebok and Nike, ‘Okay, fellas, let’s be above this.’ But we let USA Basketball handle it.”
That rings false. With Jordan’s legendary stubbornness in play, only a powerhouse on the level of the commissioner had the power to do anything, and he, like everyone else, let the issue fester, and after the game, the players had to deal with the matter.
“Everyone agreed we would not deface the Reebok [logo] on the award uniform,” said Jordan. “The American flag cannot deface anything. The American dream is standing up for what you believe in. I believed in it, and I stood up for it. If I offended anyone, that’s too bad.” As if to punctuate that, Jordan took off his Reebok suit and tossed it to Brian McIntyre. “I certainly don’t want it,” he said.
Magic sounded more contemptuous. “They could have come to us and treated us like men and t
alked this thing out,” he said. “Instead they had to be the big shot, be the big man.” Years later, Schiller would wryly note that Magic became an Olympic spokesman, securing sponsorships from the people he trashed.
On press row we noticed the flags and the zipped-up jackets, of course, but I doubt if anyone in the stands that night said, “Oh, look, the players covered up the logo.” As with most issues related to money, nobody cared except the people involved.
No, the fans were watching the smiles and the pure joy on the faces of the players, who turned around and around, waving to all sections of the cheering crowd, searching the seats for their loved ones. Several of the Dreamers beckoned for Daly and his assistants to join them on the podium. They had grown quite close to the staff over the weeks together and had universal respect for Daly. They loved his staccato speech, his sweat-only-the-big-stuff philosophy, his command of the game, and his habit of occasionally touching up his hair and smoothing his collar ever so subtly, even in the heat of the game. “Every time I went out on the floor,” Malone said years later, “I’d look back and there would be Coach Daly doing all this …” Malone mimicked a man grooming. “Everything had to be perfect.”
True to fashion, Daly and assistants demurred, players-first guys to the end. From the press area, I wanted to scream: Chuck, get up there! You’ll be coaching the New Jersey Nets soon! Enjoy this! But he was enjoying it, as Wilkens later made clear. “Chuck grabbed my arm and just held on, and I looked over and there was a tear coming out of Chuck’s eye. That said it all for me.”
Malone put his arm around Drexler. Harry and Larry, now bound for life, exchanged high fives. Barkley blew a kiss to the crowd. And Magic Johnson, a man who was supposed to be dying, pumped his right fist, then his left fist, and took Barkley in his arms.
I remember staring at Magic and Bird and wondering whether we had just seen the last time that either would ever play in a basketball game. Magic’s status as a returning NBA player was in doubt, and Bird had seemed paralyzed with stiffness in the gold medal game, having failed to score in twelve minutes. Was it over for the two men who had saved the NBA a decade earlier?
Then, suddenly, they were all gone, back to America on their chartered plane, which had practically begun idling during the second half. The lights dimmed, the Palau Municipal emptied, workers picked up trash, and it was like the day after your birthday, when the world seemed a little less bright, the fine edges of joy scrubbed flat.
The Dream Teamers continued their card games and their celebrating on the way home, but when they stepped off the plane it was like a curtain closed behind them and a malevolent stage crew began rearranging the scenery. No more Never Never Land. The “basketball heaven” that Stockton talked about was gone, to be replaced by realities, harsh and unforgiving.
CHAPTER 35
THE AFTERMATH
Michael/Magic/Larry … and Then There Were None
The Legend
A couple of days after Larry Bird returned to Boston from Barcelona, he went in to see Dave Gavitt. They hemmed and hawed about the Dream Team experience, hemmed and hawed about what the Celtics’ prospects were for the upcoming season, and then hemmed and hawed some more before finally Bird had had enough of hemming and hawing.
“That’s it, Dave,” Bird said. “I’m done.”
Gavitt had figured that was coming. But he needed Bird to say it.
Bird’s wife, Dinah, team trainer Ed Lacerte, and physiotherapist Dan Dyrek had some idea of what Bird had gone through during those summer months with the Dream Team. But only he truly knew how many nights he’d lain awake in pain, how uncertain he’d been that this movement or that movement wouldn’t send a breath-stopping electric stab through his body. True, guys with arthritic knees and ruined hips climb telephone poles and wrestle with jackhammers every day, and women with aching bunions make beds, cook dinners, and carry babies in their arms, so let’s not go overboard in turning Bird into a working-class hero. But what he did during those summer months of 1992 had a kind of last-gasp grandeur to it, and the Dream Team wouldn’t have been the same—wouldn’t have been nearly the same—without him.
“Larry … Larry just had to be there,” Magic told me years later, struggling to find some way to put it. “Just had to. How could you have something called a Dream Team without Larry Bird?”
Bird had two years left on his Celtics contract. If he played sixty games of the 1992–93 season, he would make about $8 million. He was due to receive $3.75 million of that, in fact, on August 15, which was only a couple of days hence, not enough time for Bird, with the attendant red tape, to get his official retirement letter prepared. But he backdated that document so he wouldn’t get the money. Where Bird came from, you didn’t take money for nothing.
Earlier in his career Bird had joked that upon retirement he would become the “fattest man driving out of Boston.” But in later years, after injuries and wear and tear had made him feel like a mere mortal, he had a change of heart. He realized that he liked his body when it was in tune and humming, and he wanted to keep that feeling in civilian life. With age, he realized he had lost the ability to shed excess weight, and it gnawed at him because he loved to eat. After he sat out most of the 1988–89 season following Achilles tendon surgery, he described to me what a bored and injured Larry Bird was like to be around. “I’d sit around the house, drive my wife crazy, and eat and eat,” he said. “In two and a half weeks once I ate ten gallons of ice cream and seven wedding cakes. I ate wedding cakes because you knew they were gonna be good. I mean, who would screw up a wedding cake?” As I wrote at the time, that was Bird’s philosophy at its most crystalline.
Fishing, golf, and French Lick home repairs such as building fences, bricklaying, a little roofing—that’s what Bird envisioned for retirement. Plus more fishing. That’s what he said publicly, anyway, and I have no reason to doubt him. But things changed during his exit meeting with Gavitt, which went something like this.
GAVITT: So what are you going to do now?
BIRD: Do? I might do nuthin’.
GAVITT: You know you’re going to need back surgery in Boston. So why don’t you come work for me as a special assistant. See a few college games, give me your opinion on players. It will be a big help having you around.
BIRD: Okay.
GAVITT: What do you want to get paid?
BIRD: More than you.
GAVITT: That’s not going to happen.
They settled on $350,000.
“You know what it came down to?” Bird told me in 2012. “I wanted to hang around Dave Gavitt. I love that man. He was one of the smartest human beings I’ve ever been around. And he wanted to hang out with me. So I signed on. It was that simple.”
So Larry Bird became the most famous special assistant in history, giving his opinion on players, attending some Celtics functions as an official representative (man, did he hate that), and being a kind of éminence grise around the Garden—a junior one, since Red Auerbach, the senior éminence grise, was still alive and kicking. Bird was in the job for five years, during which the Celtics followed a 48–34 season with records of 32–50, 35–47, 33–49, and finally an egregious 15–67. For one who played the game the way Bird did, his acid reflux must’ve been as bad as his back had ever been.
And so he left the city where he had become a legend.
The Magic Man
When the Dream Team was practicing in San Diego, Bird pulled Magic aside and said, “You look great.” In Barcelona, Magic’s eyes would light up the brightest when he talked about the reaction of his fellow Dream Teamers to how well he had played considering his months of inactivity and, well, his condition.
“They’d say to me, ‘You’re coming back, right?’ ” Magic said. “ ‘Do you have to go back to the Lakers? Can’t you play for us?’ ” It made him feel … whole. All the worldwide adulation from fans meant nothing next to the validation of his peers.
I assume that most of the comments from his fellow Dream Te
amers were genuine or at least proffered in the understandable spirit of Barcelona bonhomie. But I did detect hesitation from some members of the team when I would ask about Magic. They would all say the right things about his skills, but on the subject of his future as an NBA player, I never heard the will-you-come-play-for-us? sentiment expressed.
And once they were back in the States, all hell broke loose. Credit goes to Harvey Araton of the New York Times, who, at a preseason game between Utah and the Knicks at Madison Square Garden, interviewed Karl Malone about the prospect of Magic coming back to play full-time.
Here’s some of what Araton wrote in the November 1 issue of the New York Times.
“Look at this, scabs and cuts all over me,” Malone, the Utah Jazz All-Star forward, said last Tuesday night in the visitors’ locker room at Madison Square Garden before a preseason game against the Knicks. He pressed a finger to a small, pinkish hole on his thigh that was developing into a scab. “I get these every night, every game,” he said. “They can’t tell you that you’re not at risk, and you can’t tell me there’s one guy in the N.B.A. who hasn’t thought about it.”
Others leaped into the fray, some without attribution—Players are scared. I could see myself backing off when I’m guarding him. Players don’t know what to think. Players need more information—and some with. Phoenix Suns general manager Jerry Colangelo said, “I have a son-in-law who does surgery every day, and he wears gloves, goggles, masks, and lives in mortal fear.” Gerald Wilkins of the Cleveland Cavaliers, brother of a superstar, Dominique Wilkins, who had been spurned by the Dream Team committee, said that some players were “scared” to be playing against Johnson but, because of Magic’s celebrity and overall popularity, “are handling it with white gloves.”
Dream Team Page 30