Dream Team (13 page)

But—and there is always a but with Barkley (not to mention a butt)—I loved coming to see him. There is not another athlete in history who could do the things that Barkley did and still remain beloved to a good portion of the population.

After the spitting incident, Rod Thorn, in his position as the NBA’s vice president of operations, fined him $10,000 (it would be much, much more today, not to mention a lengthy suspension) and said all the predictable things about how disappointed the league was in Barkley. At the same time, Thorn, in his position as an influential member of the USA Basketball committee assembling the Olympic team, was lobbying for Barkley’s inclusion.

Whenever I came to see Charles, I would promise myself that I
would wade through the muck of his contradictions and make him answer for some of the double-talk that came out of his mouth. He would invariably go on some kind of rant about the media, which, in his version, had started to treat him unfairly after the gun incident. The charges in that case were eventually dropped after a judge ruled that the car had been illegally searched, but Barkley professed at the time to have been fundamentally changed by the incident, claiming that the media had overreacted to the story. I suppose that was the case in some instances, but by and large the media were Barkley’s ally. If they hadn’t been, nobody could’ve gotten away with what he did and still emerge as a popular figure.

No matter how much you thought he deserved to be skewered, the man would wear you down with his antic charm. All of the Dream Teamers were friendly and polite when they met my family, but Charles was the one to bear-hug my sons and tell my wife, feigning confusion, “You seem like a nice woman. What the hell’s the matter with your judgment?” He was like Claude Rains’s Captain Louis Renault in
Casablanca
, a figure who would round up the usual suspects yet somehow remain likable.

The committee’s job was to weigh the benefits of Barkley’s abilities (they did love his rebounding) and general popularity (all of the top players in the league liked and respected him, especially Jordan, for whom he had good-naturedly caddied during a charity golf tournament in the summer of 1990) against the possibility that he would start World War III. “The question we had to answer,” says committee member Donnie Walsh, “was whether Charles was too much of a nut.”

The two most powerful NBA voices on the committee were divided on Barkley. Had it been up to Russ Granik, the committee probably would’ve said no to Charles. Had it been up to Rod Thorn, it would’ve said yes to Charles. “The basketball people are always petrified that they don’t have enough good players,” said Stern, and Thorn was a basketball guy. By contrast, executives such as Granik are always more concerned about the knucklehead factor. They
have to be. Neither man would’ve gone to the mat with his position, and gradually Barkley the basketball player started gaining traction over Barkley the knucklehead.

Then again, he hadn’t yet downed a drunk with a left cross thrown outside a Milwaukee bar at two-thirty in the morning.

There’s back story here, and, even two decades later, much broken-field running by everyone who was involved in the final decision about who was invited to play on the 1992 Olympic team and who was not. It’s one of the stickiest subjects in the history of the NBA. But let’s cut to the bone before we sort through all the meat.

Isiah Thomas was not a member of the Dream Team primarily because of two men, Michael Jordan and Chuck Daly. If we want to put a finer point on it, it was really one man—Jordan.

Throughout the spring and summer months of 1991, the business of USA Basketball’s Olympic selection committee was carried out rather like the business of the Politburo. Bits of news leaked out from time to time but quite often were wrong, as when the
Chicago Tribune
reported that Isiah had been offered a spot. USA Basketball was not unlike a schoolgirl planning a sweet-sixteen party. They wanted the cool kids there, but if the cool kids weren’t coming, they
needed to get the next-coolest kids there to fill the quota. But sometimes the coolest kids were the ones who were coy about coming, so they had to let the next-coolest kids know that they still had a chance without raising their hopes too much.

Fortunately for the committee, cool kid Magic Johnson wasn’t coy. After getting an early call from Russ Granik, the first official one made by the committee, Johnson jumped in with both feet, thereby becoming a kind of baseline selectee. “Magic really helped us,” says Dave Gavitt. “He set a tone, that being on the Olympic team was the thing to do.”

Rod Thorn, who as general manager of the Bulls in 1984 had drafted Jordan, was assigned the most important task: pulling the prize catch into the boat. Thorn called Jordan directly sometime during the summer, after the Bulls had won their first championship. (In fact, all of the invitations were extended directly to the athletes, not through agents; Granik, who as a league exec had fought numerous nasty battles with agents by that time, had insisted on that.) So let’s be clear right now about what Jordan said in that first phone call.

“Rod, I don’t want to play if Isiah Thomas is on the team,” Jordan said.

I wrote that in
Sports Illustrated
at the time, not because Jordan confirmed it, which he didn’t, but because at least two reliable sources did. At the time, Jordan more or less denied that he would stand in Isiah’s way.

But he did confirm it to me in the summer of 2011. “I told Rod I don’t want to play if Isiah Thomas is on the team.” That’s what he said.

Thorn knew his part. I don’t know how explicitly he said it—and Thorn won’t say—but he made it clear that no one would be on the team if Jordan didn’t want him on the team. No one on the committee had to communicate that to Daly because Daly knew it himself, as Jordan had told the coach in an early phone call,
I don’t want to play if Isiah Thomas is on the team
. And Chuck let it be known that he wouldn’t fight for Isiah.

Was Jordan wrong? Well, you can call him spoiled and talk about how this was “America’s Team” and all the rest of it. But he was hesitant to give up his summer time in any case and definitely didn’t want to do it if it involved making nice with a man he despised. “Michael was all about who was going to be on the team,” Magic told me years later. “It was more important … no, make that
just
as important, for Michael to have a good time as it was to play the games.” No, Magic, stick with what you said first—it was
more
important.

A more interesting question is whether Daly was wrong. A number of people say that he was, all but one of whom didn’t want his name attached to that opinion. The exception was Clyde Drexler (see the
interlude
following Chapter 18). But to those who say that Daly politicized the process by letting one man dictate what a committee should’ve decided on, and to those who would castigate the committee for caving to the dictates of one player, ask yourself what you would have done. Would you have selected Isiah Thomas over Michael Jordan in the summer of 1992? Or any other summer?

Even though he had assurances that Isiah would not be on the team, Jordan continued to be coy. Magic played the role of ambassador, calling Jordan from time to time. As late as August 19, when they shared the podium at Magic’s annual summer all-star game in L.A. to benefit the United Negro College Fund, Jordan was still playing footsy. But I still maintain that Jordan knew early on that he was playing, once it was clear that Isiah would not be invited and that Daly would leave sufficient time for golf. From the beginning, Jordan was set; he just wasn’t
set
set, as screenwriter William Goldman once wrote in
Adventures in the Screen Trade
about the peculiar way that deals were set up in Hollywood.

Bird was another matter. That task, less crucial than landing Jordan but ceremonially significant, fell primarily to Gavitt, who by then was in his first year of running the Boston Celtics. The committee didn’t
need
the thirty-four-year-old Bird in the way that it
needed the twenty-eight-year-old Jordan, who was in the prime of his career. But the members desperately
wanted
Bird, which was almost the same thing.

The extent to which Jordan, Magic, and Bird formed a subset within the universe of great players cannot be overestimated. Magic and Bird had been measured against each other for over a decade by that time, and Jordan had come along to join them; the three formed the golden tripod on which the NBA was standing strong. No one else could join this exclusive club. Some players, like Barkley, understood this and carved out a comfortable position outside the tripod but friend to all three. Others, like Malone, may have resented the primacy of Michael/Magic/Larry but remained on the outside, smoldering but seemingly unconcerned.

Isiah was different. It was an enduring frustration for him that he could not break into this select society, that, as great as he was, he was on the outside looking in. Had he been as tall as Magic or Larry, or even Michael, yes, perhaps it would’ve been a Big Four. (Isiah would make that point, in typically ham-handed fashion, years later.) But at 6′1″ he just couldn’t dominate like the others, and it gnawed at him that he was, in his view, perpetually unappreciated. What hurt more was that Magic, his old friend, was growing closer and closer to Jordan, his enemy. Most of us are familiar with, and perhaps even subject to, this dynamic … in junior high.

Gavitt thought he had a chance with Bird. They had hit it off when Bird returned for the 1990–91 season and saw that Gavitt, now the Celtics CEO, had upgraded the facilities at Hellenic College, the old-school venue where the Celtics practiced. “Hey, we’re serious about winning again, huh?” Bird said to him.

Gavitt first broached the subject of Barcelona at Bird’s house in Needham, Massachusetts.

“Larry, we want you to be on the Olympic team,” he said.

“I’m past history,” said Bird. “It’s for the young guys.”

Gavitt let it go. There would be time.

Bird desperately did not want to be a token, but his aching back was forcing him to conclude that that’s exactly what he would be. I
was around him a lot in those days, writing a book on the Celtics’ season, and Bird’s aching back was the defining leitmotif of that season.
How is Larry? Will Larry announce his retirement? Is Larry getting treatment? Is Larry answering questions today?

Gavitt, his political powers tested to the max, decided that all missives about Bird would come from him. To this day, when I see Celtics trainer Ed Lacerte (who was also the Dream Team trainer), I’ll ask him, “Any update on Larry?” and Lacerte, the nicest of men and the most capable of trainers, will smile and say, “Dave will have a statement soon.”

In truth, the issue of Olympic participation was pushed to the background by Bird, who had worries that his career was over. Midway through that 1990–91 season, as I went to work on what became the “Dream Team” story in
Sports Illustrated
, Magic let it be known that he would not appear on the cover without Bird.

“But Larry says he’s not playing,” I told him.

“I’m going to check myself,” said Johnson.

A couple of dozen phone calls transpired before Magic finally said okay, convinced that Bird was not going to Barcelona.

Looking back at Bird’s storied career, one could do worse than studying the 1990–91 season to capture the man’s greatness. There were mornings that he could barely walk. I saw it with my own eyes. That doesn’t make him a messiah, a saint, or a war hero, but it makes the numbers he put up that season over 60 games, much of them played in pain, quite remarkable. He averaged 19.4 points, 8.5 rebounds, and 7.2 assists and mixed in an epic game or two along the way, one of them against Jordan’s Bulls on the last day of March, when he scored 34 points as the Celtics won 135–132.

“Man can still play,” said Jordan, shaking his head after the game.

Aside from the Golden Tripod, the committee had a few easy choices. Robinson and Ewing were locks, considering the dearth of quality centers. Karl Malone was a lock. Pippen had by then distinguished himself on the way to the Bulls’ championship, and he was
a lock. Some committee members didn’t think quite as highly of Mullin as Daly did, but Mullin’s smarts and his ability to play both shooting guard and small forward turned the tide. He was in.

There was much discussion about Barkley, who had been charged with a misdemeanor count of battery stemming from the incident in Milwaukee after a game against the Bucks. Barkley contended that a group of men followed him for a city block, taunting him, and eventually one of them, a twenty-five-year-old named James R. McCarthy, walked up to him with a balled fist. Charles hit him.

Okay
, thought some of the committee members,
we can overlook that
.

But then there was Charles’s presence at a nasty incident in the lobby of a Chicago hotel when teammate Jayson Williams had smashed a glass beer mug against the head of a Chicago man, who, according to the players, had advanced upon them in a threatening manner. Barkley wasn’t charged—as a matter of fact, Williams wasn’t, either—and the incident took on its sharpest focus years later when Williams was revealed to have a capacious dark side. (Williams pleaded guilty in 2010 to reckless manslaughter in the death of his limousine driver in an ugly 2002 incident that dragged on for years.)