Dream Team (21 page)

From the earliest moments of his career, Magic
did
approach people like Paul Allen, he
did
listen and take notes, and then he went out and did it, combining those lessons with the power of an inner drive and a thousand-megawatt personality. Pippen talked about it, dreamed about it. Magic did it.

What interests me most about the man, though, is that all this began to take place with a seeming death sentence hanging over his head. His sunny disposition was frequently the first thing anyone wrote about him from his rookie year, and that continues even now. I keep looking for the holes, wondering if it’s real.

“I’ve been working with Earvin for four years,” says Michael Wilbon, the ESPN commentator, “and during the playoffs that means I see him just about every day. And I’ve never seen him in a bad mood. I mean,
never
. How is that possible?”

Johnson’s disastrous eight-week stint in 1998 as host of
The Magic Hour
, a monument to grimace-inducing, nervous, obsequious television hosting? The man ripped right through it like it never happened, learning experience and all that, on to the next thing, onward, ever upward. I ask him if having HIV had anything to do with his later success and whether or not, early on, he encountered some prejudice about it and fought even harder to put his stamp on the business world.

“I never felt that anybody, you know,
forgot
to shake my hand or something like that,” he says. “The business world seemed pretty open about accepting me. But I guess HIV did launch my career faster in business. For one thing, I retired earlier than I would have. The disease brought a spotlight on me and what I was doing with business. And it probably made me a more disciplined businessman because it made me a more disciplined person.”

Pat Riley, Magic’s old coach with the Lakers and now the guiding force of the Miami Heat, comes over to join us. It feels like old times, almost makes me feel sentimental.

“You guys were tough to cover sometimes,” I say, “but man, I do miss those days. There was nothing like them—the Lakers, the Celtics, the Pistons, the Bulls.”

Magic and Riley agree, and for a moment we’re just three old geezers lost in the past.

“I always remember something Pat told me then,” says Magic. “He’d say, ‘Look, this is a special time and a special place. You will never forget these moments.’ But I didn’t realize it at the time. You’re too busy because—”

“You’re in the heat of battle,” says Riley. “You’re in the trenches.”

“Right,” says Magic. “And you can’t really enjoy it. But then, when it’s over, man, you realize, ‘Okay, that was special.’ ”

Riley and Magic embrace, and his old coach leaves.

“You know, when I look back on the Dream Team,” I say to Magic, “the one astounding thing is that everybody thought at the time that you were going to …”

“Die?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Did you ever think that?”

“No,” he answers immediately. “All right, there was one time, about a month after I learned that I had HIV, that I had to deal with death. I took a long walk on the beach with Lon [Rosen, his agent at the time], and we had to talk about getting all these things in order in case something happened.

“But other than that … never. And I have to believe that my mind-set is the thing that has really kept me alive, along with medicine
and diet. But you have to be good with your status. You’re living with HIV. You have to realize that. A lot of people aren’t happy with it and that means they’re stressing, so they compound everything. You have to realize it’s a disease, and stress and depression will compound the problems of any disease.”

We can be clear on one thing: few people have ever been as good with their status as Magic Johnson.

Chuck Daly carried himself like a guy who didn’t have a care in the world, but for much of his adult life he was a restless insomniac who usually read himself to sleep, historical nonfiction and detective fiction being his favorites. During the 2005 Finals a bunch of us were driving home late from a party in San Antonio, and Matt Dobek, who was the Detroit Pistons’ PR man and extremely close to Chuck, suggested we call him.

I reminded Matt that it was two hours after midnight.

“Trust me,” said Matt. “He’ll be awake.”

Chuck was in bed but answered on the first ring. He was reading, as I recall, a Michael Connelly novel. We passed the phone around, and I asked him if he owed me any money, beating him to the punch.

As his time to coach the Dream Team drew near, Daly was coming off a trying 1991–92 season, which ended with him resigning in May. He wasn’t pushed—his contract was up—but maybe he
was nudged a little. One of the best attributes an NBA veteran can have is the ability to realize when the gig is up.

To understand that the Dream Team job was a tough one, at least in the beginning, one must remember, again, that this began as a chemical mystery. Jordan was popular in his own way, but he was so competitive that it was difficult to assess whom he might rub the wrong way. Barkley was everybody’s friend, but would his unpredictability turn off his teammates when they got it in large doses? Bird, Malone, Stockton, Ewing … none was ever considered Mr. Congeniality. Mullin and Robinson weren’t part of the NBA’s in-crowd. Would it work? Or would it be a disaster? And what the hell to do with Laettner?

Daly knew that one of the keys was Magic. He and Bird were the natural choices to be co-captains, but Daly knew that that honor would be important only to Magic. Bird would be a leader just by dint of being Bird, but Magic would, to say the least, embrace the role, gather it in his arms, and hug it until he smothered it.

But it wasn’t Magic and Larry’s league anymore. It was Michael’s, and no one knew that more than the coach. Daly’s respect for Jordan as a player knew no bounds, stemming as it did from the years when Jordan came up on the losing end. No one knew better than Daly how hard his team had to play to beat this guy, and no one knew better how close he had come to losing to a one-man team. “This guy is so good,” Daly said once, “he’s an embarrassment to the league.”

So soon after Daly checked into suite 4117 at the Sheraton Grande, the one with the view of the Torrey Pines golf course and the Pacific beyond, he called on Jordan.

“Magic and Larry are obvious choices to be captains, but so are you,” said Daly. “I just want to know if you’d be interested in a leadership triumvirate.” It sounded almost Roman.

“No way,” Jordan told him. “It should be Magic and Larry. I have too much respect for those guys. I’ll hang back.”

If that sounds at odds with Jordan’s competitive personality, it’s not. Saying that Jordan knew his place sounds a bit plantation-like, so that’s not what I mean. But he was (is) a smart man, wise in the
ways of basketball tradition, more astute than most of his peers (faint praise acknowledged) at realizing how things should be. Mike Krzyzewski found that out at the first practice the next day. He didn’t know Jordan well and wondered how he, a mere college coach, would be treated by the best player on the planet, especially one who wore his hatred of Duke on his sleeve and his Carolina blue skivvies under his uniform. But Jordan, his better angels prevailing, approached Krzyzewski and said, “Coach K, you got time? There’s some stuff I want to work on.”

When I talked to Krzyzewski about it not long ago, he teared up at the memory. “Michael didn’t have to do that,” the coach said. “It was his way of saying, ‘You’re important and none of that other bullshit means anything. We’re all on the same team.’ ”

Anyway, by Dream Team time, Jordan was weary of endless responsibility. For two consecutive seasons he had dragged teams to the championship finish line, and he didn’t need the tri-captainship. Everybody knew that, from a players’ aspect, this would be Jordan’s team, and if he wasn’t captain, he’d be freer to make that point clear … which on many occasions in the upcoming weeks he did.

As time went on, Magic and Jordan made the team decisions together. As Magic remembers it: “Chuck would say, ‘Okay, do we want to practice tomorrow?’ and Michael and I would look at each other, and if he didn’t want to, we’d tell Chuck no. Or Chuck would say, ‘What time you want to go tomorrow?’ and Michael would say, ‘Early because I want to play golf,’ then that’s what we did. Michael had the things that were important to him, and that’s when he made himself clear. We played off each other very well.”

And the team knew the score. Magic was the sun, but Jordan was the North Star.

“So far as leading the team out, talking to the press, representing us, all that stuff, it was Magic,” Mullin told me years later. “But once we got in the gym? It was all Michael.”

In the weeks leading up to his Dream Team assignment, the Prince of Pessimism was especially nervous, grateful for the opportunity,
of course, but keenly aware of the historical weight. What would his spurned peers such as Larry Brown and Don Nelson have to say if he couldn’t take back the gold with these guys?

As he surveyed the immortal bunch that sat in front of him at the first Dream Team meeting at the hotel, Daly needed to strike a tone. Serious but not too serious. Light but not too light. Give the players a structure but give them room, too. It was tricky.

So Daly told them of two Spanish-owned Mediterranean islands: Majorca, a much-desired destination, the kind of place Dream Teamers would take their wives and girlfriends, and Minorca, which Daly described as a dark and dismal place with a high suicide rate. (Note to the Spanish Tourism Commission: I have no idea if this is true. I’m telling a story about a coach.)

“If we lose in Barcelona,” says Daly, “we won’t get beyond Minorca.”

I have no idea if Daly came up with that himself. But it wasn’t bad. Who knows, though, if it had any effect on a basketball team, which is fairly metaphor-proof. Anyway, Barkley had something to say. “Coach, we ain’t going to no motherfuckin’ Minorca,” he said.

Daly brought up the next subject a little more gingerly. A history buff, he read Cold War literature and espionage/thriller fiction, and, as he put it more than once, “Our next six weeks is a Tom Clancy novel waiting to happen.” He had read stories about the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes by Black September terrorists at the 1972 Munich Games. He knew about the Basque separatists in Spain. And his biggest nightmare—in a literal sense, since he confessed to dreaming about it—was a terrorist attack of some kind, with his team as the target.

His message was absorbed. This was a group of men used to the sight of mobs, benign though they might usually be.

Finally, Daly approached the most delicate subject, one even more frightening than terrorism since it was well within the realm of possibility.

“Look, there are twelve of you, and you’re all All-Stars and future Hall of Famers,” Daly said, “and there is no way I can get all of you the minutes you’re used to having on—”

Magic and Jordan interrupted him.

“That isn’t going to be a problem,” Jordan said.

“We’re here to win, and nobody is going to care about playing time, Chuck,” Magic said.

Such problems, particularly the knotty one of minutes, are rarely solved that easily. This one was. Magic and Jordan said there would not be a problem, and that was that.

The meeting, by all accounts, was a success. Everybody loved Chuck. Everybody would play hard for Chuck. He is gone now—dead of cancer at age seventy-eight—so perhaps I would’ve gone light on the criticism in any case. But believe this: I never heard one negative word about Chuck Daly in all my years of covering the NBA. Mullin told me this years later, and it’s the key to why Daly was so successful: “Before the Dream Team, I looked at Chuck as kind of a Pat Riley–type figure, you know, a big-timer who was able to beat the Lakers, won two straight championships, dressed like out of
GQ
. But after being with him from the first moment, man, I find out he’s from my neighborhood.”

After the dinner, it was time for Daly to meet with his three assistants: Lenny Wilkens, an old NBA hand; Krzyzewski, fresh off two straight NCAA championships at Duke; and P. J. Carlesimo, a fast-talking Jersey guy who had lifted a nondescript Seton Hall program into national prominence. Krzyzewski and Carlesimo felt like college freshmen entering their first lecture. In later years, Krzyzewski would talk about the holy-shit moment of stepping onto the court and seeing Magic, Jordan, and Bird shooting around.

“Look, for me it was a step up, not a step sideways,” says Krzyzewski. “I was a peon in this whole process. I was suddenly with basketball royalty. Not the best players in college; the best players
anywhere
. And I’m also with guys like Chuck, who had won two championships, and Lenny, who had won a million games.”

Krzyzewski and Carlesimo were wearing their USA Basketball regalia but otherwise looked like college coaches, notebook open, pen poised, ears wide open to hear what the coach of the world’s
greatest team was going to say. Here’s how Krzyzewski describes it: “Chuck says, ‘Listen, the very first thing I want you guys to do is …’ and P.J. and I are all, ‘Yes, yes, what is it, Coach?’ and Chuck says, ‘The first thing I want you to do is learn to … 
ignore
.’ ”