Dream Team (19 page)

Cattle call notwithstanding, there was going to be something special about the first glance of these guys together. At All-Star Weekends I had seen almost all of the Dream Teamers in one place at one time, but this was different. They would be wearing the same uniform and going for the same goal.

You have to remember that the big question at this time was: how were they all going to play together? The rock star analogy that has been made ad nauseam about the Dream Team eventually came to fit, but it wasn’t apt in the beginning. These guys, unlike the Rolling Stones, had never played together. They didn’t know when to trade leads or let someone go off on a solo.

And as the days wore on, I came to realize that the truly remarkable aspect of all this was that the players bought into its remarkability. Experts at seizing the moment on their own teams, they saw right away that
this
was the moment. They weren’t students of history, but they sure as hell heard the distant thunder and could sense the super-sized storm front that was moving toward them. “Normally you don’t talk about the past when you’re in it,” Mullin told me recently. “But that wasn’t the case here. We talked about how it was all going to look later. We were aware it was special even as it was going on.”

They exchanged souvenirs like middle schoolers. I remember Barkley interrupting an interview to ask Bird for a pair of sneakers and adding, “I wouldn’t mind a jersey, either.” He said he was starting a “Dream Team museum” in his den. Twenty years later, any number of them would show me mementos from that time in their lives.

Yes, Jordan, Magic, and Bird all expected to be there and, needless to say, felt like they belonged. If I were guessing, I’d say that Barkley, Malone, and Ewing were next on the list of feeling they deserved it. But this was big stuff to all of them.

Here’s Pippen talking to me about it years later: “I was astounded to have been invited. Yeah, we had won a championship by that time, and another one by the time we got ready for Barcelona, but I never saw myself as one of those in-crowd guys. I was overwhelmed when I was asked.”

And John Stockton: “To be honest, the first time I ever thought about it was when Rod Thorn called me and invited me to be on the team. I never thought I would be considered. I was floored.”

Years later, when I told Mullin that he had been one of the committee’s first targets, he smiled like a fifth grader who had just won the spelling bee. “Well, I heard that, too,” he said shyly.

So the gates to the gym swung open, and there they were, doing much the same thing as any team does after formal practice has concluded, some idly shooting free throws, some chatting, some just standing around. The only difference was that these guys represented what could become the best team ever.

There is something jarring about seeing a basketball team in the full blush of summer, when their gym-rat pallid complexions have changed hue. There was Bird, whose season had ended six weeks earlier, looking like he had just stepped off the beach. Bird, as was his wont, was shooting around with Mullin in what would become a post- and pre-practice pas de deux throughout their days together. Jordan and Barkley were jawing at each other as Ewing leaned in and smiled. Chuck Daly was chatting with NBA and USA Basketball officials, being briefed, no doubt, about his endless promotional and media responsibilities.

And there, in one corner, filibustering the masses, was Magic Johnson. By dint of all that had happened to him, this was Magic’s Dream Team and it would be Magic’s Olympics.

He was, after all, the only one of them who was playing with a death sentence.

A couple of weeks before perhaps the most dramatic press conference in sports history, the one at which Magic Johnson announced to the world that he had “attained” the AIDS virus, he was in Paris with the Lakers for the McDonald’s Open. The bloom had clearly gone off the Stern-Stankovic rose by that time. It is impossible to overestimate the low esteem in which most high-level athletes hold international travel, augmenting cross-cultural IQ rarely being a priority for them. We need only conjure up the example of a young Shaquille O’Neal, who upon being asked if he had visited the Parthenon during a college basketball trip to Greece, responded, “I can’t remember the names of all the clubs we went to.”

But Magic, being Magic, gamely put himself out front, the point man at press conferences, hospital visits, and promotional stops. Besides, there was a lot to talk about, Barcelona being one of those subjects, and he made it clear that he had appointed himself Dream Team captain.

“Ma-jeek, what will you do in Barcelona, if somebody on your team gets out of line?” a French journalist asked him during a press conference at the McDonald’s Open in Paris.

“I won’t
let
any somebodies get out of line,” he answered. “If any players get out of line, I’ll take care of it. That’s my job, and I’m going to do it.”

That was a classic Magic response. Had Bird been asked the same question, he might’ve said: “Hell, I ain’t no damn babysitter. Those guys can take care of themselves.” Jordan? He might’ve said: “We’ll all take care of each other.” But Magic was emphatic:
It’s
my
job
. That’s what some of his teammates loved about Magic—the fact that he would shoulder responsibility. That’s also what some of his teammates hated about Magic—the fact that it was always
his
team.

It was at that tournament in Paris that I realized the extent to which Magic had wedged one foot in the business world. He had been talking about becoming a mogul for a long time—he’d owned a radio station in suburban Denver when he was a rookie; hell, he’d had his own lawn mowing business in Lansing, Michigan, when he was ten—but I never much pursued the subject because it didn’t interest me. And I doubt if anyone knew then how far he was going to take it. Whenever a microphone was around he spoke of the philosophy behind his company, Magic Johnson T’s, and how the Olympics “are going to put a whole new light on things in the business world for NBA stars. Michael and myself are really going to be able to cash in on it.” What do you do with a guy like that? Praise his candor? Or condemn his capitalistic soul?

Magic Johnson T’s was actually an official licensee of NBA Properties, Inc., empowered to sell NBA products. That meant that Magic was making money off the sale of T-shirts bearing the likenesses of Jordan, Bird, and the other Dream Team players. Magic even admitted, with a broad smile, that Jordan tees outsold Magic tees.

Magic was savant-like in his grasp of business. Ask him to sign an autograph to “Jim,” and there would be a chance he would spell it “G-y-m”; he was even known to misspell Johnson as “Jonson.” In
later years he said he was dyslexic. But ask him the contract specifics of any player in the league and he could give you dollar figures and length of deal. His head worked in figures and numbers, not letters and words.

When Magic got back to L.A. from Paris, his doctor informed him that he had the AIDS virus, the shocking revelation from a physical Magic had taken weeks earlier. It was confirmed by a retest. Among the first calls Magic made were to Bird, Jordan, and Isiah. His doctors decided that he should retire from the game to work on fighting the disease. Then, with startling speed, came Magic’s press conference, his tour of the talk shows, and his clear pronouncements that he had contracted the disease through heterosexual contact.

To describe Magic’s sexual adventures as “conquests” is to vastly overrate the difficulty with which they came about. Women threw themselves at him, and Magic was a discerning fielder, catching the ones he wanted, letting the others sail by. Remember, too, that he had been a bachelor until the autumn of 1991, though only the woman who was then his fiancée and is now his wife, Cookie, knows what pain his lifestyle caused her during their relationship before they married. But at least his sexual adventures were not technically adulterous.

I never considered an athlete’s extracurricular sexual activity to be my business—these days it’s practically a beat—and Magic was reasonably discreet. Though there were later revelations that he would sometimes indulge in quickie postgame dalliances in the locker room’s private sauna before presenting himself to soliloquize about, say, the efficiency of the Celtics’ half-court offense, he rarely brought anyone to team functions except Cookie, whom he had been dating for a number of years. His most frequent date was Lakers PR man Josh Rosenfeld. “Magic used to tell me, ‘Josh, you can’t get a date, and I can’t bring anybody else except Cookie because of all the other wives,’ ” Rosenfeld says.

I have an extremely reliable account of Magic, on one occasion in the late 1980s, arranging multiple trysts at the same time. “You
go with me tonight, I’ll see you next week in L.A., and when I get back a month from now you and I will get together,” he said, directing each comment to a different woman. That’s somewhat paraphrased but close to the truth. He handled it like a true point guard, getting this one the ball on a fast break, promising to set up this one next time down the floor, pledging goodies in a future game to a third.

(It seems necessary to mention that Magic and his generation didn’t invent philandering. Lakers general manager Jerry West, for example, was celebrated for getting around. One day in the late 1980s, as I interviewed West at a Lakers practice session, he shook his head when he came upon a story in that morning’s
Los Angeles Times
about NBA star Roy Tarpley getting suspended for drugs. “Whatever happened to pussy?” West said, almost to himself, not trying to draw a laugh, just one man ruefully pondering how strange this modern world had become.)

After the announcement that he was HIV positive, Magic’s crusade began with riotous incongruity. He created a foundation to fight AIDS without including a single gay man or woman. He tossed off corny lines like “Keep your cap on,” a reference to condom use. He urged sexual restraint but his wink-wink proclamations about the number and variety of his affairs seemed to send a different message. Any slings and arrows tossed by the vox populi seemingly bounced off him. “If it had happened to a heterosexual woman who had been with a hundred or two hundred men,” complained tennis star Martina Navratilova, “they’d call her a whore and a slut and the corporations would drop her like a lead balloon.” And what if it had happened to Navratilova, who had paid a heavy price for her bisexual lifestyle? “They’d say I had it coming,” said Navratilova—accurately, it must be added.

At
Sports Illustrated
, meanwhile, plans were under way at that time to make Magic the magazine’s first male swimsuit model. He was scheduled to be in the 1992 edition of the annual cash cow/journalistic enterprise. It was the idea of editor John Papanek to feature the upcoming Barcelona Games with the usual cluster of
scantily clad women and one superstar Olympian. Magic, whom Papanek had covered in his days on the NBA beat, was his first choice, and Magic had been enthusiastic about it. They would be shooting it soon.

After Papanek heard the HIV news, his first thought was that the Magic shoot, of course, was history. So he was surprised when he got a call almost immediately from Lon Rosen, Magic’s representative, who said, “Magic wants you to confirm, John, that he’s still going to be in the swimsuit issue. He’s been looking forward to it and doesn’t think this development should change things.” Papanek had the idea that Rosen was presenting it as a condition for future interviews with Magic, including one that my colleague, Roy Johnson, was en route to Los Angeles at that moment to accomplish. Papanek told Rosen that it was a nonstarter and wrote years later in
ESPN The Magazine:
“I had to give it to Rosen straight.” He told Rosen that Magic was admitting to unprotected sex with lots of women and said, “I don’t think he, or anyone connected with him, will feel good seeing a picture of him in February cavorting in his underwear with bikini-clad women.”

It took chutzpah for Magic to believe that
SI
would still want to do the shoot. But, then, it took a particular kind of grace for Magic to not only accept the decision and go ahead with the interview but also, upon seeing Papanek some weeks later, say, “Hey, John, next year can I be in the swimsuit issue?” (It never happened, by the way.) And Magic never brought it up to me in succeeding years, either.

Eventually, Magic began to pay attention to the drumbreat of criticism. In his defense, remember that this was new ground. He dialed down the cutesy sayings and reached out to the gay community, all seemingly without missing a beat. The man even backpedaled with irrepressibility. Perhaps inevitably, Magic proclaimed: “The further I go with this, the more I believe God picked me. If I didn’t believe that, I’m not sure how I could go on the way I have.”

I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t cop to sometimes finding it difficult to buy into the whole Magic rap. One could say that Jordan was
overly political, but it was more that he was apolitical. I never got the idea that Jordan was anyone else but Jordan. That goes double for Bird. Magic seemed to be a bit contrived, as if he had an on switch that he activated every time a camera was in his radar range. He came close to admitting it himself, stressing that “Magic and Earvin are two different people.”