Dream Team (16 page)

“Of course,” he said.

But unless you’re holding a scalpel and your target is lying on an operating table, you can’t arrange
that
kind of hit, right?

“Look, I tried to hit him,” Malone answered. “I wanted to hit him. But that hard? No, you don’t have time to plan that. But I hit him, I know that.”

Had Malone’s victim been someone other than Isiah, league reaction might’ve been massive outrage. Accusations that Malone was a dirty player were nothing new, and the best reaction came, of course, from Barkley, who mused about what would happen if Isiah were added to the Dream Team roster. “I have no problem with Isiah being on the Olympic team,” said Barkley, “but there would be at least three guys he wouldn’t be roommates with. Michael and Scottie don’t want to, and I guess Karl’s out of the picture now. I’d wind up rooming with him by default.” (The idea of the players actually having to bunk with someone was hilarious in itself.)

For me, the most interesting part of Malone’s hatchet job was Chuck Daly’s reaction. As soon as Isiah went down, the Pistons’ coach flew off the bench in a rage, charging over to the scene of the crime. It was absolutely not an act—his captain had gone down and Chuck was mad. But what could he do? Rip off his custom sport jacket and challenge Malone to a fight? Pick one with his Jazz counterpart Jerry Sloan, a bare-knuckles brawler from way back? In the end, what Daly did was go ballistic in the time-honored I-want-to-hit-somebody-but-I-don’t-know-whom-to-hit manner that we’ve seen from so many coaches.

Perhaps because Stockton was so sensitive to the Isiah issue, and because he also respected him as a player, Stockton never said anything remotely negative about Thomas. (Then again, Mostly Silent John never said that much anyway.) And Thomas, for his part, never hung Stockton out to dry. There is no doubt that Isiah considered himself the superior player, but he never denigrated the Jazz point guard, and after the Dream Team business had finished, Isiah placed a phone call to Jack and Dan’s Bar and Grill in Spokane and asked to speak to the owner.

“I just want to let you know, Mr. Stockton,” Isiah said to John’s
father, Jack, “that anything I had to say about the Dream Team had nothing to do with your son. He’s a great player.”

Neither Stockton nor his father ever forgot that call. And when Stockton was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2009, he asked Isiah to stand onstage and represent him. It may have been 50 percent theater, but it was 50 percent legit.

When Daly was asked after the game about the Malone foul, he did the customary bobbing and weaving. He had to stick up for his captain and star, but he didn’t have much to gain by trashing a player he would be coaching in Barcelona. “They ask if it was a flagrant foul, and Isiah had forty stitches, fifteen inside and twenty-five outside,” Chuck answered. “The league office will determine how malicious.”

Before Chuck died, I never got a chance to ask him, after years of reflection, whether he regretted not advocating for Isiah to be on the Dream Team. I know he agonized about it at the time, even though “It was tough … really hard … I really wanted him, but …” was about all I managed out of him. But as I watched him kneel over the bleeding Isiah, I wonder: did he wish at that moment that he had pushed harder for the inclusion of this complex kid from Chicago, this lightning rod who had brought him two championships and so many magic moments?

With the exception of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird, one could argue that Christian Laettner, who turned out to be the least important player on the twelve-man roster, was the next surest player to be an Olympic invitee. In the earliest stages of negotiating among the committee members who would pick the team, the idea that college players would have equal representation was quickly squelched. Then eight and four bit the dust. The idea of ten pros and two collegians remained alive, but—with players such as Isiah Thomas, Clyde Drexler, and Dominique Wilkens not among the initial ten chosen—it soon became clear that only one collegian would be among the twelve roster players, “the gift to the college guys,” as committee member Donnie Walsh put it.

And it became clear who that guy was going to be.

“Nobody said it out loud,” says C. M. Newton, “but Christian Laettner was going to be on this team.”

Certainly his college coach, Mike Krzyzewski, a committee member, pushed that idea. Laettner says that early in his senior year, 1991, Coach K told him, “They’re going to take one collegian. Your goal should be to be that guy. And you
will
be that guy if we have a great season and you play great.”

Duke did have a great season and Laettner did play great, and if there were still some holding out throughout the winter months for Shaquille O’Neal, the man-child from Louisiana State University, that all changed on the fateful afternoon of March 28, about two months before the committee would announce the final two players. That was when Christian Laettner became a legend.

In the Eastern Regional final at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, a game that would determine one Final Four entry, Kentucky led Duke 103–102 with just 2.1 seconds left. “We’re gonna win,” Krzyzewski told his team in the time-out huddle that would precede a full-court pass. That’s what a coach is supposed to say, of course, but Krzyzewski felt he had a chance. Everyone knew the final shot would go to Laettner, and there was a precedent for success; two years earlier, in a regional final against Connecticut, Laettner had hit a lunging, twisting double-pump jumper to win the game and put Duke into the Final Four.

Krzyzewski designated Grant Hill to throw the pass. Hill’s father, Calvin, had been an NFL star with the Dallas Cowboys, quite possibly an irrelevant fact but hard to avoid mentioning considering how perfectly Hill threw the ball. Earlier in the season, in the same game situation at Wake Forest, Hill had given Laettner a screwball that drove him out of bounds. But this time Hill’s toss was perfect, straight, true, and high enough that the 6′11″ Laettner, a decent jumper but no aerial acrobat, caught the ball.

It would be impossible to calculate how badly Kentuckians wanted Laettner to screw up the play. Earlier in the game, with Duke leading 73–68, Laettner and Kentucky’s Aminu Timberlake had collided, Timberlake falling to the floor. Laettner promptly planted his right foot into Timberlake’s stomach, not with a great deal of pressure but enough to make him feel it. As Alexander Wolff
of
Sports Illustrated
later put it: “It was just a chippy, I’m-Christian-Laettner-and-you’re-not thing to do.”

Laettner, so often the villain, was not often the goat. He took one dribble, wheel-faked right, then spun left and unleashed a fallaway jumper, the twentieth shot that he had attempted that day. To that point, all nineteen—nine from the field, ten from the foul line—had gone in. Krzyzewski said later that, had he been aware of that fact, he might not have called Laettner’s number, fearing the law of averages was against him. I doubt that, though.

Laettner’s shot soared toward the basket, the rotation perfect, and those Kentucky fans who had started to head toward the exits stopped in their tracks, looks of horror beginning to take shape on their faces.

Bonnie Laettner admired Marlon Brando’s performances in
Mutiny on the Bounty
and
The Young Lions
so much that she put “Christian,” the name Brando had given to his son, on the birth certificate of her firstborn, even though she had unofficially named him Christopher. Laettner looked like what he was—a product of the Nichols School, a small, mostly white, coats-and-ties-mandatory preppy depot in his native Buffalo. Laettner loved to talk about Nichols, to the point that his Duke teammates grew sick of hearing about it.

He seemed tailor-made for Duke, a magnet for highly regarded Caucasian players who end up irritating the masses (Danny Ferry, Cherokee Parks, Chris Collins, Greg Paulus, Steve Wojciechowski, and J. J. Redick among them), but his mother, a strong influence in his life, loved the University of North Carolina and coach Dean Smith. She urged Christian to go to Chapel Hill, and he considered it. But, eventually, he was just too much a Dukie not to become a Dukie. And it is simply impossible to overestimate the hatred that, almost immediately, Laettner engendered in the opposition.

“Duke was like America’s team and Christian Laettner was like God and I didn’t like him,” Juwan Howard said in the documentary
The Fab Five
, which chronicles the celebrated freshman class at the
University of Michigan that acted as a kind of cultural cross-reference to Duke back in the early 1990s.

“I thought Christian Laettner was soft,” Jimmy King said.

“Overrated,” Ray Jackson said.

“Pretty boy,” Howard said.

Laettner was neither soft nor overrated, not as a college player. “Pretty boy” is right on. He looked (still looks) impossibly like a soap-opera star, with wavy hair, piercing blue eyes, and all that height. He would be cast either as the cad head surgeon who beds the OR nurses or, in a modern version, as the gay seducer of vulnerable young residents. Reports did surface that Laettner was gay, specifically that he was in a relationship with teammate Brian Davis. That was not surprising considering that the fan bases at rival schools, bent on out-crazying the Cameron Crazies who support Duke basketball, are brutal. What
was
surprising was how much Laettner defiantly encouraged those rumors, kissing Davis after he dunked in one game and, on other occasions, extending his arm and flopping his wrist while attempting a free throw, daring the crowd to insult him.

At the same time, Laettner was also, in the words of teammate Hill, a bully. “Christian was bigger than everybody and he could fight, and he always wanted to fight,” says Hill. “He’d pick a fight with guys just to see if that guy had heart.” Bobby Hurley, Duke’s All-American point guard, was a favorite target. It drove Laettner nuts—still does—that Krzyzewski handed Hurley the ball and a starting job as soon as he hit campus, whereas Laettner was treated like the freshman he was.

He always played the role of alpha Dukie. One night in 1990, when he was a freshman, Hill answered a knock at his door around midnight. It was Laettner, who ordered him to get his coat. It was raining hard, but Laettner insisted they were going out and led him to his car. He drove through the night fast until he came to the empty parking lot of Duke Medical Center, at which point he began doing full-speed donuts by suddenly yanking on the emergency brake while traveling at a high rate of speed. Hill was afraid to say
much because, well, he was only a freshman and Laettner was
Laettner
.

Hill says that the white-bread kid from Nichols School also wanted to be black. “One year Bobby [Hurley] got hurt and Tony Lang was starting for him and Christian’s in the huddle clapping his hands and going, ‘Okay, we got five brothers starting.’ And it didn’t seem like he was kidding.”

By the time he was a senior, you could get a debate on whether Laettner was the best player in the country, but he was unquestionably the most-watched, the beloved idol of the Duke fans, the embodiment of frat-boy evil for the opponents. He was also a recognized archetype—the immortal collegian who would not be as good in the pros, everybody’s All-American turned standard issue. Whereas Jordan was constrained by North Carolina’s share-the-wealth-take-care-of-the-ball-philosophy, Laettner’s talents were maximized in Krzyzewski’s get-up-and-go system. Laettner, with talent all around him, could get off his perimeter shot with ease but was also able to post up and dominate with his size. He wouldn’t be able to do that in the pros. He was a little soft, a little disinclined to improve, a little slow—a little of this and a little of that. It all adds up to a lot when you’re talking about becoming an NBA star on the level of his Dream Team playmates.

But man, what a college player he was.

And so Laettner’s shot settled into the basket, as it seemed destined to do, completing his 31-point perfect afternoon, one comparable to the near-perfect 44-point performance that UCLA’s Bill Walton had famously inflicted on Memphis State in the 1973 NCAA championship game. At press row after the Laettner shot went in, veteran
Boston Globe
columnist Bob Ryan wrote out a question on a piece of notebook paper, “Greatest Game Ever?” and held it up. Many agreed, and Laettner was its unquestioned star.

Volumes have been written about that game, a predictable luncheon stop for anyone grazing through NCAA history. The late
Chris Farley, playing the role of Laettner, did an NCAA video promo about it. The shot has been replayed, by conservative estimate, a couple of thousand times since then. Laettner professes that he doesn’t watch it, but Hill admits that he pauses each time it comes on—the perfect pass, the catch and graceful turn, the perfect shot, the orgiastic celebration. “That’s the great thing about it,” says Hill, “You get to relive it every year.”

In the wake of that game, C. M. Newton, who was the athletic director at Kentucky as well as chairman of the Olympic selection committee, astonished the Kentucky seniors by retiring their jerseys even though they had been beaten. That’s what kind of impact that game had.