I’ve long theorized that a major reason for the NBA’s post–Dream Team decline was that the new generation was not sufficiently invested in the league as an entity. Magic and Bird had come into an NBA that was perched on the precipice. They didn’t need to be sold the idea that it was in trouble, because the proof was manifest. And so they bought into the idea that they had to save it. Things had gotten better by the time Jordan came along, but he followed the Magic/Bird model and others followed him.
But the Shaqs, the Alonzos, and the Shawn Kemps had no such compunction about helping the game along. When they came in, everything was fine, the cash register was ringing, and the feeling was, Just let me get mine.
One could argue that Jordan, who called his teammates “my supporting cast” and whose singular appeal sold out arenas and created an empire out of a shoe company, had something to do with the attitudinal change in the game. Harvey Araton did argue exactly that in his 2005 book, Crashing the Borders: How Basketball Won the World and Lost Its Soul at Home. I can’t begin to offer a complete and cogent summary of Araton’s argument in these pages, so I’m not going to try. Suffice it to say that what Araton says makes some sense, particularly when he writes that, because of the one-man cyclone that was Jordan, the NBA became more about individuals than teams.
“Even going back to the late eighties, David Stern and NBA Properties, which was a machine by then, was doing a very good job of marketing players as individuals and promoting individual stars,” says Grantham. “So, as part of a game plan, to the extent that it was, the Dream Team fell right into that.”
Grantham, whose job it was to promote players, sees it as a good thing, a brand maker. Araton, whose job it is to question and cast a skeptical eye on the deleterious effects of commercialism, sees it as bad. Reasonable men can gaze upon the same inkblot and one will see the secrets of the universe and the other will see a truckload of turnips.
But certainly Jordan wasn’t all to blame. In the summer of 1985, Converse, finally realizing that it had been years late to the party, arranged for Magic and Bird to film what became an iconic commercial that showed Johnson arriving, via limousine, in French Lick. So there were those two grind-it-out competitors, always about basketball first, blood rivals, locking arms in the name of commerce. The concept of players being marketed ahead of teams began with Magic and Bird, though there is no doubt that Jordan finished it.
But whatever anyone thought or wrote about any of those guys, they were always about basketball first. That’s more than obvious with Bird, who has never been comfortable in front of a camera, but it was the same for Magic and Michael. I always considered Jordan’s ultimate achievement to be that he was better than his hype, which is not easy when you’re hyped the way he was. Those who followed were passionate about themselves more than the game, wanted what Jordan had without becoming what Jordan was.
“People have written books about how Jordan became Jordan,” says David Falk, “but it can’t be figured out logically. You have all the individual components of his competitive personality. He had the great coach at Carolina in Dean Smith. He was a late bloomer who wanted to prove himself. He came to an NBA that had gotten better with Magic and Larry but still needed him. And then you had to ignite that mixture somehow with something. You can’t just re-create it.
“In a similar vein, the Dream Team will never be replicated. The U.S. might someday put together a team that would win by 80 points and it still wouldn’t be the same. You wouldn’t have this combination of great players who were also icons.”
Only two players from the ’94 Nightmare Team (which was also called the Scream Team and the Preen Team), Shaquille O’Neal and Reggie Miller, were allowed onto the ’96 Olympic team, which won the gold medal in Atlanta. A sprinkling of original Dream Teamers—Barkley, Pippen, Malone, Stockton, and Robinson—also played. Lenny Wilkens was the coach and the team easily won the gold medal. But it wasn’t the same. It didn’t have the electricity, the magic (or the Magic). They knew it, too. They felt like the wife of Gus Grissom, the astronaut who flew the second Mercury mission, in the movie version of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff; she feels slighted that her husband didn’t get the parades, the acclaim, and the plaudits from the Kennedys that had accompanied the return of the first man into space. “Where’s Jackie now?” she wonders.
“I played because they called me and, honestly, I still considered it almost a duty,” says Stockton today. “But I knew it wasn’t going to be the same. You can call all the teams that followed Dream Teams, but the fact is that there was only one. Every guy was a rock star.” Stockton suddenly realizes with alarm that he’s just described himself as a rock star, so he self-corrects. “Well, maybe not everyone. But the first five or six. You line up next to someone on the court and they’re saying stuff like, ‘I just touched Magic Johnson,’ or ‘I just talked to Michael Jordan.’ Now how are you going to match something like that?”
Barkley, also a ’96er, put it in stronger terms. “It was a fucking nightmare,” he told me recently. “I wasn’t going to play when Lenny called me the first time. I said, ‘Lenny, I loved 1992. It was such a great experience and I want somebody else to have it.’ But he said, ‘I need you to play, but I need you more for leadership.’ So I said okay.
“I was just amazed at some of the things that went on,” Barkley continued. “We had a couple guys skip practice because they didn’t get to start and didn’t play as many minutes as they thought they should. Can you imagine that? Michael Jordan didn’t start some games in ’92. Michael freaking Jordan!” Barkley wouldn’t name the players, but they were Shaq and Penny Hardaway.
In some press reports, Hakeem Olajuwon, a native Nigerian who had just been granted U.S. citizenship, was presented as the model teammate on the ’96 squad. Pippen said that wasn’t the case. “Penny and Hakeem … there’s two guys who will whine when things don’t go their way. Hakeem got mad at Lenny because he didn’t play against Greece. ‘I’ve never had a DNP [Did Not Play] in my life!’ he was shouting at Lenny. He was so mad that tears were coming out of his eyes. I’m telling you, it was bad. I enjoyed Atlanta, I guess, but it wasn’t the same. And it wasn’t a Dream Team.”
Orenga was also on Spain’s ’96 team, and he recalls standing next to some of the U.S. team members at the Opening Ceremonies. “They looked at us and said, ‘Who do you play for, and who do you play in your first game?’ And we said, ‘We are from Spain and we play you.’ And it was like it was no big deal to them. Right away I didn’t see the same maturity and dedication as with the Dream Team.”
Remember that there was a fairly significant original Dream Team presence on the ’96 team, thus demonstrating that the whole of the ’92 team was greater than its individual parts. I stand behind no man in my affection for Sir Charles. But Sir Charles as team leader and Michael/Magic/Larry as team leader are two vastly different things.
“This is probably sad,” says Grant Hill, “but Charles was our leader. He was probably the best player and the most natural guy to do it except for Scottie. But Scottie led more by example.” Hill didn’t mean sad as in “tragic”; he meant more like sad as in, well, “tragicomic.”
Barkley saw himself as a legit leader, and to some degree he was. But somewhere in his heart of hearts, he knows that he was not the perfect man for a leadership job, not on a team that is to be judged by history.
In the gold medal final in 1996, Yugoslavia led the United States by 7 points in the first half, was down by only 5 at halftime, and was trailing by only a single point, 51–50, with 14:03 left in the game. The Americans got their act together after that and won 95–69.
But the chipping away had started. At the Sydney Games in 2000, the United States beat Russia by only 15 points, Lithuania by only 2, and France by only 10 in the gold medal game. A disastrous sixth-place finish in the 2002 World Championships in Indianapolis augured failure in the 2004 Games in Athens, and failure is exactly what happened there. The backcourt of Allen Iverson
and Stephon Marbury couldn’t guard an arthritic llama. Tim Duncan was disinterested and disinclined to be the leader he should’ve been, and callow stars such as LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and Carmelo Anthony were ill-prepared to lead in his stead. Larry Brown, the coach, saw what was coming early and, as is his wont, tried to deflect blame away from himself and onto the team. The United States got blown out by Puerto Rico—Puerto Rico!—in the first game and won only the bronze medal.
To a world that hadn’t been paying close attention, it seemed sudden and cataclysmic. But that wasn’t the case. It was the product of gradual erosion in the American product and an exponential improvement in an international game that had been catalyzed by the Dream Team. Athens forced the United States to take seriously the idea of replacing the haphazard let’s-see-what-we-got-every-four-years approach, which had been the operative model, with a structured national team. Veteran executive Jerry Colangelo became USA Basketball’s CEO, and Krzyzewski, who years ago had learned so much as a Dream Team assistant, became the head coach.
“Barcelona was so important for my development as a coach,” Krzyzewski told me. “I came back with a greater love for the game because I hadn’t realized that NBA players could love the game that deeply. There is a certain percentage of college guys who believe with all their heart that we love the game more than anybody, certainly more than the NBA people. That was disproven by the Dream Team.”
During the ’92 Games, a veteran Brazilian guard named Marcel de Souza made this observation: “I will never play like Scottie Pippen, and my son will never play like Scottie Pippen. But perhaps my grandson will play like Scottie Pippen.”
He was too conservative with that prediction. In the 2011 NBA playoffs, Dirk Nowitzki, that wide-eyed observer of the 1992 Dream Team, averaged 28 points a game, made almost 50 percent of his shots, converted 94 percent of his free throws, and won the Finals MVP award as he led his Dallas Mavericks to the NBA championship. All those not-that-long-ago perceptions about European players—they’re too soft, they don’t grow up with the game like we do, they don’t have the discipline, they don’t have the athleticism—were dashed on the rocks of Nowitzki’s exquisite play.
De Tocqueville wrote: “In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.” We are still waiting, one supposes, for the end of this revolution begun by the Dream Team, but we have certainly seen where it is heading and how much quicker it moved than most of us originally thought. But not the Inspector of Meat. No, not him, not this perceptive, far-seeing man who came to these shores nearly four decades ago to learn the lessons of an American game.
“I was not surprised,” says Boris Stankovic. “I was not surprised at all.”
EPILOGUE
THE LEGEND
“I Would’ve Liked to Have Touched Gold When I Was a Kid”
After I interviewed Larry Bird in February 2012, something he told me has stuck with me. It concerned the last game he played for the Boston Celtics, Sunday, May 17, 1992, at Richfield Coliseum, in Summit County, about halfway between Cleveland and Akron. The Cavs routed the Celtics 122–104, a Game 7 playoff victory that sent Boston home and Cleveland into the Eastern Conference finals, where (of course) they would be drummed out by Jordan and the Bulls, who went on to win the championship.
Bird’s back was killing him in that game. He played 33 painful minutes and took only nine shots and, most tellingly, never got to the free throw line. He had almost nothing left and his first Dream Team practice was less than seven weeks away.
“I walked off that floor and I said to myself, ‘This is it,’ ” Bird told me. “Maybe I had thought it before. But now I knew for sure.”
After that game, we clustered around his locker, trying to figure out when to ask the question that was on everyone’s mind, see if we could get an exclusive. Bird would’ve been most likely to reveal his decision to the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan, but he told Bob: “I can’t answer that right now. I’ve got the Olympics ahead of me.”
Still, Bird said he felt peace on that afternoon. “It just felt right, ending it there, in Cleveland.”
“I’m confused,” I said. “Why did it feel ‘right’? Why was Cleveland special?”
“See, I loved that building, Richfield,” he answered. “The second game I ever played in the NBA [in 1979] we pulled up there and I couldn’t believe it. Omigod, there was this beautiful, big arena in the middle of a cornfield. It’s what I had always dreamed of.” He nodded his head and smiled. “A big arena in a cornfield.”
I went back to check Bird’s memory, and he was of course correct. It was the second game of a season in which he would lead one of the most remarkable turnarounds in NBA history, a rookie orchestrating a Celtics revival that led to 61 wins after a 29-win season in 1978–79. In that memorable (to him anyway) first game at Richfield, he had 28 points in a 139–117 Boston rout.
“I usually played well there,” he said. “Something about it just felt right.”
Bird is ever the realist, rarely caught up in hype or given to bursts of sentimentality. Alone of the Dream Teamers, he expressed this caveat about all the Dream Team bonhomie: “If we would’ve been together another two weeks, we would’ve had some problems. You could sense it. You could hear it. ‘Oh, man, I only got to play fifteen minutes.’ ‘Oh, man, Chuck didn’t use me enough.’ I always told everybody, ‘Damn, it doesn’t matter. We’re winning by forty points. Hell, Michael Jordan’s only playing twenty minutes.’ ” Bird smiled. “Yup, I was glad it was over when it was.”
While it was going on, though, the experience meant as much to Bird as it did to anyone, and he enjoyed poring through the memories.
“I’ll never forget [Dream Team assistant] P. J. Carlesimo coming up to me after I came out of one game and saying, ‘Man, Larry, I didn’t realize you could rebound like that.’ I said, ‘P.J., I know you’re only a college coach, but you must have a TV, right?’ The guys got on P.J. something terrible after that.”
I ask for his memories of the Greatest Game Nobody Saw in Monte Carlo. “The talk started early because we figured we were going to scrimmage, and this might be the last one before we went to Barcelona,” Bird remembers. “So there was all this chatter on the bus, Magic and Michael, of course, but I wasn’t paying much attention because I didn’t think I was going to be playing. My back was killing me that day.
“Now we get there, and I climb on the stationary bike and that was where the hell I was going to stay, and all of a sudden I gotta go the whole time because we only got ten guys. I just wish I had been feeling better that day, and if I have one regret from the whole experience it’s that I was never in top shape.”
I ask him about the memory of his steal from Magic and how Jordan remembers it as the key play of the game. Bird smiles, and you can tell he recalls every detail, but it is part of his code that he won’t gloat about getting the best of Magic.
That’s when I tell him about Jordan’s opinion that the whole “back to ’79 thing,” (Jordan’s words) is a torch held highest by Magic. Bird swats that away, too. “Hey, it is what it is. You know Earvin as well as I do. He likes to talk. But we came in together, we played against each other, and the history is real and it’s been told millions of times. I would never run from it.”
Years ago, when his capacity for nostalgia was lower, Bird might’ve run from Magic/Bird, the Broadway play that was due onstage in 2012 (after this book went to press). But Bird is fully invested, and he is revved up over the opening when we talked. He has read the script and even suggested a few changes. “When I’m involved in something I just read my own part to see if it’s accurate,” Bird told me. “Whatever Magic says happened from his viewpoint, hey, that’s fine with me.”
Bird’s response surprised me when I asked him if he, like so many others, took away any lessons from the Olympics. I expected he would say something like, Sheet, I already knew everything these guys did. But he didn’t.
“I remember watching how Mi
chael and Scottie played together,” Bird says. “Michael would always play the point guard and put pressure on him, and I’d just be sitting there watching. Then Scottie would come, and next thing you know they’ve turned the guy and he would just throw the ball over his head. Anywhere. Just to get rid of it. The pressure that Michael put on these kids? Man, I could’ve got fifteen steals a game if I played with him.
“You know, winning by forty isn’t fun. Maybe to some guys but not to this team. But watching Michael and Scottie together out there, suckering these guys into a corner, or right before the half-court line … that was fun.”
Like almost every other Dream Teamer, Bird stood—still stands—in awe of Jordan’s abilities. “He’d play thirty-six holes of golf, and we’d be heading to the bus and here comes Michael with his clubs. But he’d be back two minutes later ready to play. The energy that man had … never saw anything like it.
“That’s why, when Magic started talking, deep down, he had to know that Michael had passed us. I mean, Michael was the best player in our league before Barcelona. I had no problem with it. I had my run. I said to Magic, you gotta be out of your mind if you think you can still compete with this guy. Let it go, man, let it go. Compete against him like you’re going to kick his ass, but realize it’s his time.”
I wondered if Bird ranked the Dream Team experience as highly as did Magic, who put it at the top of his achievements.
“It’s completely different,” he answered. “I thought it was special in high school when I played against the Russians. In college I got to play in the World Games. Each of those was unique—they just felt different—because of the international connection. It was the same thing with the Dream Team except on a much, much higher level. You just can’t compare winning a gold medal to an NBA championship. They are both great in their own way.”
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