I told my bosses that I needed to get off the beat for a while. It just wasn’t going to be the same, couldn’t be the same, and so I jumped off what had been the greatest ride in the world.
CHAPTER 36
THE IMPACT
“We Were Like Actors in a Play”
Dirk Nowitzki was a gangly fourteen-year-old German in the summer of 1992, simply another kid with big dreams. He had just taken up hoops in his native Würzburg in northern Bavaria, and he was getting a feel for the game, having discovered that he had a gift for shooting and an even greater gift for working hard, happy in isolation, shooting, fetching his own ball, shooting some more—the same repetitive choreography that had made superstars out of American players such as Larry Bird, Scottie Pippen, Chris Mullin, and John Stockton. Nowitzki was a good tennis player and an even better team handball player, a sport his father, Jörg, played, and one that Germany dominates worldwide; had Dirk not found basketball with the help of the Dream Team, it’s easy to imagine that, with his height and athleticism, he would’ve represented Germany in team handball. Had that happened, he might today have a gold medal. And several million fewer dollars.
“For a long time I thought basketball was a woman’s sport because my sister and my mom played,” Nowitzki, the Dallas Mavericks star, told me in 2011. (His mother, Helga, was good enough to make the German women’s national team.) “That doesn’t make any sense, I know, but that’s how I thought. I started shooting around when I was maybe twelve or thirteen and then—boom!—the Olympics hit and everything changed. It made me really want to play basketball.”
Flashes of the Dream Team press conference and the Dream Team turning the opposition into chicken Geschnetzeltes were broadcast back to Germany. “I remember the other teams taking photos,” says Nowitzki. “I remember the Dream Team locked in the hotel with throngs of people outside. I remember how easy it was for them to dominate. And I’ll never forget the quote from Charles.” Nowitzki breaks into a big smile, and we say it together: I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout Angola. But Angola’s in trouble.
Like most young Germans, Nowitzki idolized his countryman Detlef Schrempf, who in the summer of 1992 had just completed his seventh NBA season and had led Germany into the Barcelona Olympics. But his favorite player was Pippen. “Scottie could do everything on the court, an all-around player, shot threes, posted up, passed, played defense. And it all looked so smooth. It really made an impression on me.”
Had Nowitzki ever told Pippen that?
“No,” says Dirk. “When I first came to the NBA my English wasn’t good and I was shy. So I never got a chance to tell him how important he was. Guess I’m telling him now.”
And so it went. Boom, as Nowitzki put it. Thousands of booms went off all around the world, the start of a revolution. In Argentina, Manu Ginobili, a fifteen-year-old with a wild, almost primitive athleticism, was watching. In Spain, twelve-year-old Pau Gasol, who had designs on being a doctor, and ten-year-old José Calderón, a budding point guard, were watching. In Turkey, two tall thirteen-year-olds, Mehmet Okur and Hedo Turkoglu, were watching. In France, ten-year-old Tony Parker, already among the quickest youngsters in his country, was watching. In Brazil, a pair of ten-year-olds, big, strong Nene Hilario and speedy Leandro Barbosa, were watching. Closer to home, two young athletic prizes, sixteen-year-old Tim Duncan in the Bahamas, a swimmer, and eighteen-year-old Canadian Steve Nash, who was about to begin what few saw as a particularly illustrious hoops career at Santa Clara, were watching.
The whole world was watching. The television audience was not nearly as fragmented by cable as it is today, so the sport never had a wider viewership, never will have a wider viewership, at least in terms of audience share. An eager international army of print journalists spread the word, too. “Many foreign journalists were already invested in our game by Barcelona,” says Terry Lyons, the NBA’s international PR man at the time. “They would come to All-Star Games and Finals, and they just got it quicker than our guys did over here. They saw what it was about, how this could grow the game.”
“The Dream Team absolutely had massive impact,” says Donnie Nelson, the former assistant for the Lithuanian team who is now general manager of the 2011 champion Mavs. “You can’t really calibrate it, but you can imagine it. What effect did the Beatles coming to America have on music? It was the same kind of thing.”
“The Dream Team was the single biggest impact of any team in any sport in history,” says Lithuania’s Sarunas Marciulionis. “How many kids around the world started playing? How many said, ‘Oh, this is a great game. It is maybe better than soccer’?”
“We take a lot of research detail from our international players,” says the NBA’s Kim Bohuny, “and I can’t begin to tell you how many of them say they started watching basketball at the ’92 Olympics.”
By 2011, there were eighty-six international players from forty countries on NBA rosters, a number that no doubt will only increase. Of the first seven picks in the 2011 draft, four were international players, from Turkey, Lithuania, Serbia, and Congo.
To those people who loved the sound of a ringing cash register, obviously, the revolution wasn’t all about the game. “Based on the impact of the Dream Team around the world,” says Rick Welts, the former NBA marketing genius now with the Golden State Warriors, “it moved our agenda ahead twenty years.” By “agenda” he means, of course, “bottom line.” If basketball didn’t supplant futbol as the world’s game after Barcelona, the NBA did turn into the world’s league and David Stern became the world’s commissioner.
That remains true today, the kick-start from ’92 the principal reason that the NBA makes one-tenth of its revenues (about $430 million) from international operations; the reason that NBA games are broadcast in 215 countries and territories (that number was eighty-five before the Dream Team) and translated into forty-six languages; the reason that three hundred members of the international media now cover the Finals; the reason that Beijing will probably have an NBA team before, say, San Diego will; the reason the NBA has an office in Africa, the next place that Stern wants to plant his flag; the reason that the commissioner did a grip-and-grin with Al Jazeera Sport during the 2011 NBA Finals. “Not sure how Stern’s Jewish owners feel about this,” said one courtside observer, “but nobody can ever say the guy is asleep on the job.”
It’s not just the league that raked in money. Remember that the NBA shares revenue with its players, so people such as Charles Grantham, a USA Basketball committee member who was also head of the National Basketball Players Association, also cheered the business uptick in the years that followed the Dream Team. “The Barcelona Olympics generated more international interest in the NBA, more international TV contracts and more revenue,” says Grantham, “so in the long run all NBA players benefitted from the Dream Team. It was a masterful triumph of timing. Unlike with other sports, the groundwork was there because basketball was at least being played in these other countries. It was the right time, the right place, and the right bunch of players to do it. Players talk about their ‘brand’ now. Well, I never heard anybody mention ‘brand’ until the Dream Team.”
As for the game of basketball, well, most of us in America had it wrong. We failed to heed the sermons of the Inspector of Meat. We looked on at all those 40- and 50-point victims in Portland and Barcelona—gunned down, gutted, and field dressed—and we thought they would be discouraged. But for a whole younger class of competitors it had the opposite effect. Where others saw annihilation, the young foreign players saw revelation, a demystified process.
Yes, Michael Jordan operates at a level a hundred times above me, but I do the same things. I fake right, go left hard. I post up and shoot a fallback jumper. I sneak down the lane and double-team a big man. And if Jordan was a bad example, owing to his extraordinary athleticism, there was John Stockton. I’m his size. I can learn to run a team like him. And look at Patrick Ewing. I’m seven feet tall and I never realized I could go out to the corner
and shoot jump shots.
Also, the Dream Team’s whipsawed opponents were the ones who became the coaches and basketball missionaries back in their own countries, returning not only with stories and photographs but also with stratagems.
“True, back then we thought of the NBA as apart from us,” said Juan Antonio Orenga, who played for Spain in the 1992 and 1996 Games and is now assistant coach of the national team. “They were gods. It was like an impossible mission to play them.
“But it was a good mission. Everyone in basketball was waiting for this because players—if they are serious—want to play against the best no matter what the result. Only by playing the best can you become the best.”
We in the press, and the viewers back home, understandably want close games, tension, and some kind of buzzer-beating denouement. But whereas we looked down and saw scorched earth and carnage, the opponents saw lessons. Orenga remembers a major one from Barcelona.
“Before the game our coach [the respected Antonio Díaz-Miguel] tried to convince us that we could win,” says Orenga. “ ‘They are not great shooters and they will not be motivated,’ he told us. So out comes the Dream Team and they make everything they shoot. And not motivated? Well, we were in a free-throw situation and I remember Scottie Pippen taking a look at the scoreboard and hollering to his teammates, ‘Hey, come on! We’re only up by 25 points. Come on!’
“It was not a fake. It was just that he thought they weren’t playing good enough. Next thing I know they are up 40, and I don’t even remember how. So I suddenly had the feeling, right out on the court, that they could do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. We were playing the game, but we were watching it, too.” Orenga smiles at the metaphor he had been forming in his mind. “We were like actors in a play. We wanted to get to that level ourselves.”
There had been the perception in the minds of some, too, that Americans were simply superior athletes, that their dominance was based primarily on size and speed. In other words, the same false conclusions held by some Americans were also held around the world. The Dream Team squelched that. “Yes, physically they were far above us,” said Orenga, “but they were far better than us in basketball, too. It showed how much work we had to do.”
The octogenarian Inspector of Meat, who never tires of studying the game, believes that the Dream Team altered what had been a flawed paradigm. “A lot of countries were doing it like the Soviets did it,” Stankovic told me recently. “Too much emphasis on physical preparation and being strong and not enough on how to dribble and shoot. What we learned from this first American pro team was the skill set.
“And strategy, too. Zone defense was too prominent in the FIBA game. Americans made us think more about man-to-man, and the game just looks different that way, more intense, more … energetic.”
The way the Dream Team played flowed organically from who they were as players. Nobody had to up his game or take it to the next level, as the clichés go. “The main thing that happens when the best get together is that the game speeds up and you have to make plays a little quicker,” Bird said not long ago. “Basketball is so simple. You can run the pick and roll to perfection, work for the open man, and, if you don’t have a shot, swing the ball. That’s how you play. It doesn’t always happen, but on this team it happened. It wasn’t about scoring because we could’ve just got it in to Charles. It was about playing the game correctly.”
There was something else going on, too. By dint of the Dream Team’s collective maturity, its knack for domination without irritation, it offered a blueprint for professionalism, the lesson that Eddie Felson, the pool veteran played by Paul Newman in The Color of Money, tries to communicate to Tom Cruise’s Vincent. “Pool excellence is not about excellent pool,” Felson tells him. “It’s about becoming someone.”
Before Spain’s game against the United States, Orenga remembers, he met some of the Dream Team members in the bowling area at the Olympic Village. Spain had had a tough Olympics by that time, having lost to Angola in the first game and never gotten its bearings, a humiliation for the host nation, which had been considered a candidate for the bronze medal. The players were feeling down when they met the Americans, but that changed quickly. “They knew us and told us how sorry they were that we had lost,” Orenga said. “Charles Barkley, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan. And they knew us. They knew they would beat us, but they treated us with respect. No one on our team ever forgot that.”
Marciulionis, who knew most of the Dream Teamers personally or at least competitively, put it more simply: “They didn’t hold their noses in the air. They were who they were.”
Watching it all as a somewhat awed college coach, Dream Team assistant Krzyzewski says: “There was more depth to the dream than the basketball. It was the type of people they were, what they had done together to build the NBA. So it was not only that they were responsible for the explosion of basketball around the world. It was that the game exploded in the right way.”
Chris Mullin added this: “More than winning or losing, what I remember was the feeling of responsibility that we all had. We never talked about it. But we all felt it. How you handle yourself. Play with class. Play at the highest level.” He searched for another word. “Play, ultimately,” he added.
Oddly, a kind of reverse reaction happened at home. Almost as soon as the Dream Team had finished its mission, USA Basketball was tasked with rostering a team to play in the 1994 World Championships in Toronto. It was out of the question that any of the reigning gold medalists would play so shortly after the splendid show in Barcelona, so the goal became to select young players who would—along with a few of the original Dream Teamers—form the basis of the 1996 Olympic team in Atlanta.
Now, think of the enormousness of the mission for these guys: all they had to do was follow the best and most popular team in history. They were doomed from the beginning, and the smartest of them, such as Alonzo Mourning, knew it and said so. “Everything we do is compared to the first Dream Team,” said Mourning. “We can’t win.”
The Zeitgeist of that team was not to make nice while singing hosannas to the ’92ers. No, this was, almost quite literally, a different generation, one disinclined to play the role of dutiful progeny. They would act in accordance with their own code of comportment, which was, say, 10 percent Barkley and 90 percent bark.
The results were predictable. If the 1992 Olympic team produced a perfect chemical reaction, an ideal blend of talent, tenacity, and maturity, the 1994 team, which was prematurely and unfortunately labeled (not by me) Dream Team II, was an unholy concoction of all the wrong ingredients, a basketball dystopia, defiantly christened by forward Larry Johnson as “the all-principal’s-office team,” crotch-grabbers such as Derrick Coleman and Shawn Kemp, preeners such as Mourning, talented but incomplete players such as Johnson, whose game basically consisted of posting up with his back to the basket and waiting for the ball to be thrown in to him. Don Nelson got the gig that he had originally wanted two years earlier, and because he wasn’t the kind of coach who reined players in, he was as helpless as anyone else as the United States arrogantly rampaged through the tournament while making comments such as “We’re basically taking a lot of countries to school” (Johnson again). Okay, that’s what the first Dream Team did, too, but the idea was not to advertise it, “not be arrogant with the ass-whuppings we were handing out,” as country boy Karl Malone put it.
A snapshot of the difference between the two teams came in the way that they spent their nocturnal hours. While the Dream Team hung around the family room in the Ambassador, playing cards and ragging on one another, DT II bragged about clubbing at all hours. That doesn’t make them bad people and doesn’t make them all that different from Barkley. But it does speak to a different culture and a different wellspring of team chemistry. Were an editorial cartoonist to put this on paper, one panel would show a bunch of young bucks out on the town, the other an old-folks’ home with card tables, afghans, and wheelchairs, the geezers trad
ing stories and lies, children and beer bottles at their feet.
“That 1994 team was a disaster,” said Dick Ebersol, who got a migraine when he thought of what the 1996 Olympic basketball broadcast might look like.
“It was not a team to be proud of,” said Dave Gavitt. “And you know what the worst thing was? It was noticed immediately by the international opponents.”
“I don’t know if vile is the right word or disgusting,” said Andrew Gaze, a respected player who was the star of the Australian team that lost 103–74 to the United States. “There should be at least some pleasure in playing the game, some dignity.”
So just like that, the world went from taking pregame photos with the American heroes to calling them vile. Dream Team II won the Worlds but went a long way toward losing the world.
One footnote: Isiah Thomas had accepted an invitation to be on that 1994 team, at long last getting the chance to represent his country. But he tore his Achilles tendon in a late-season Pistons game, an injury that ended his career. Would DT II have been more mature with Isiah leading it? Or even more dysfunctional?
• • •
A sea change can never be explained simply. Obviously, seeds had been planted for the game to change domestically even before the first Dream Team came along. Remember that Magic and Bird had come into the league way back in 1979. Drexler’s rookie year was 1983, and Jordan, Barkley, and Stockton all came along in 1984. By 1994 and certainly by 1996, it was a new type of NBA player, tutored in a burgeoning AAU system that encouraged one-on-one performance art over teamwork. If you’ll permit a metaphor to be stretched to the breaking point, the 1992 team, as spectacular as it had been, was a well-made play, grounded in the fundamentals, a kind of moderned-up Cherry Orchard or Hedda Gabler. The ’94 team was a Cirque du Soleil show, an overproduced hodgepodge of high-wire acts, costumes, and over-the-top theatrics, a sexed-up mess.
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