Dream Team (22 page)

Daly was giving them another version of one of his favorite sayings: “It’s good to be hard of hearing.” Over time, Daly had learned that teams grumble about coaches, argue about women, engage in petty squabbles and even fistfights over shooting games, and fall in and out of relationships like love-struck teens. The only thing that truly mattered, as he saw it, was that they came together most of the time when they were playing basketball.

“We have the best players in the world, and, as college coaches, you guys are going to look at every little thing like you have to do back with your own teams,” Daly told them. “I understand that. But at this level most of it is not that important. Follow my lead, and don’t go nuts about little things. We’re going to need you to work the guys out because you’re the young legs. But you have to ignore stuff within that. If there’s something important, I’ll know it. Keep your eyes open and tell me anything you want and bring any suggestions to me. Treat them not just like professionals but the
professionals
of professionals.”

Krzyzewski left that meeting with one thought: Chuck Daly understood the superstar intellect better than anyone.

Daly was true to his word. Years later, when I talked to Drexler about Daly, he actually used the word
ignore
. “As time went on, we’d try to get under Chuck’s skin at practice just to see if we could do it,” said Drexler. “We’d always pretend to whine, ‘Chuck, man, you’re killing us. We want to get out of here.’ And he ignored everything.”

Daly then divvied up the coaching assignments. Wilkens, wise in the ways of the NBA, would be his general overseer. Krzyzewski would have more responsibility for the defense, particularly transition defense, while Carlesimo would be more of an offensive specialist and have the yeoman’s job of breaking down tape. Krzyzewski said that he made a key strategic decision by volunteering to run the drills and leave the intrasquad refereeing to Carlesimo. “P.J. got
immense crap when he had that whistle around his neck,” says Krzyzewski. “And I mean
immense
.”

Krzyzewski and Carlesimo left the meeting in awe of Daly’s command of the situation. “The feeling now is, anyone could’ve coached that team to the gold medal,” says Carlesimo, “In fact, I’m not sure anyone but Chuck could’ve done it.”

To prepare the Dream Team for competition, USA Basketball lined up nine college players. Other pros would’ve been better, but asking an NBA player to volunteer his time at a party to which he was not invited was a nonstarter. Still, the mind is free to wonder how hard Isiah Thomas would’ve played in those scrimmages.

The college kids arrived in La Jolla a couple of days before the Dream Teamers, and one day, as they were returning from practice and boarding the elevator, Bird was just completing his check-in. They held the door for him.

“I hope you young boys are ready,” Bird said, flashing his smile, which was somewhere between simple smirk and outright contemptuousness. “We’re coming at you hard.” Bird also told them he couldn’t wait until they got to the NBA, “so I can bust all your asses.” Then he got off.

The collegians were tongue-tied. “At that time,” says Grant Hill,
“none of us knew that Larry was a notorious trash-talker.” The collegians managed a couple of mumbled responses, but as soon as Bird got off, they started chattering among themselves, in awe of what had just transpired:
Larry Bird is talking trash. To us!

For the next few days the college kids lived the dream. The pros treated them with respect, Pippen being the one, as most remember, who went out of his way to play tour guide. Perhaps Scottie remembered what it had been like for him as a rookie playing next to an ascendant Jordan, that feeling of alienation upon entering someone else’s magic kingdom.

The collegians knew that their big day was coming—June 24, the first scrimmage against the Dream Team. When they arrived at the UC San Diego gym that day, feeling very much, as Hill puts it, “like sacrificial lambs,” the Dream Team was going through its paces. Laettner looked up and saw them and felt how strange it was that Duke teammates Hill and Bobby Hurley were up there and he was down here.

“As they were coming in, Barkley, at that moment, turned and dunked on Karl Malone,” remembers Laettner. “The power of it was amazing, and I looked up at them and saw that amazed expression on their faces.”

By then the college kids had their instructions from coach Roy Williams, who had gotten his instructions from Chuck Daly and USA Basketball. Hurley was to dribble-penetrate every time he could. The idea was not to finish at the rim—which Hurley couldn’t do anyway and would not be able to do when he subsequently reached the pros—but to kick to jump shooters such as Alan Houston and Jamal Mashburn. The big men, Chris Webber, Eric Montross, and Rodney Rogers, were to battle underneath with ferocity, pretend that they were mature players such as Lithuania’s Arvydas Sabonis. And the athletic all-arounders, Hill and Penny Hardaway, were to be relentless on offense and play at a pace to which the Dream Teamers were not accustomed. “Play like the Europeans,” Williams instructed them.

As the collegians gathered at the sideline, Hill still remembers
the chilling words from Williams: “Grant, you got M.J.”
Oh, crap
, thought Hill.
I’m guarding Michael Jordan!
And Hill’s heart skipped a beat when Magic Johnson ambled out to center court. He was the player after whom Hill tried to pattern his style, “and I do mean try,” says Hill.

The Dream Teamers were at this early stage trying to figure each other out, over-passing and trying not to step on one another’s game. The collegians, by contrast, were tuned-up high-performing automobiles impatiently waiting for the starter’s flag.

Hurley was the key. He was an unusual player, a pallid six-footer with no discernible athleticism. But he had been schooled by two of the world’s best coaches—his father, Bob Hurley Sr., at St. Anthony’s in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Krzyzewski at Duke—so his basic chops were in order. And he wasn’t a robot designed according to some instructional manual. There was a lot of street in Hurley. What he had was the best point-guard quality, albeit an ineffable one: he could get where he wanted to go.

And where he wanted to go was by Magic Johnson, who guarded him much of the time. The collegians won the game 88–80, Hurley its star. When the media were allowed in, I distinctly remember that the Dream Teamers looked a bit down in the mouth. When word filtered out that they had been beaten by the college kids, there was a certain and predictable it-was-only-practice tone to their comments. But it went deeper than that.

Now, let’s keep this in perspective. There’s no reason to believe that without the loss to the collegians, the Dream Team would’ve been in trouble in Barcelona. As Hill says, “I don’t think they were alarmed or anything like that. It was more a wake-up call.” Krzyzewski says that Daly “orchestrated” the loss, pulling Jordan out at crucial times and deliberately letting the action continue even though there were obvious times to stop it and make corrections.

I watched a tape of the game and can confirm that that is the case. It sounds like a fascinating historical document—as the intrasquad scrimmage in Monte Carlo would prove to be (
Chapter 28
)—but it isn’t. It has too much the feel of a loose practice session.
“Chuck just wanted for one day to plant the idea that we could
conceivably
lose,” says Krzyzewski.

Still, even though Magic was the one telling the team, “This is bullshit. We gotta get together,” he was the focus of minor concern behind the scenes. Magic was never good at staying in front of small, quick guards, preferring to lurk in the passing lanes and use his wits and experience to make steals. Hurley had exposed him, and at that night’s meeting the decision was made that Jordan and Pippen would defend quick point guards who might present problems.

Which didn’t surprise Pippen. “I knew why I was on that team,” Pippen told me years later. “I knew I was there more to defend than anything else. And that was fine with me.”

That policy was enacted in the following day’s practice. Jordan played Hurley some of the time, and the Duke quarterback struggled to even get the ball to midcourt. Then Daly put Pippen on Hurley and it was just as bad. Without a penetrating offense, the Dream Team drilled the collegians. I never saw a videotape of that game, but the rumored margin of victory was about 40 points, not that anyone remembers exactly. “We beat ’em like they stole something,” said Barkley.

From that point on the Dream Team became a
team
, finding its own identity, cutting the corners that could be cut, discovering those little important details (
Robinson likes to post up here; Jordan will be available as a bailout there; Barkley likes to get the ball right away in transition but wait until Malone gets moving to give it to him
), adding the grace notes that give a team its harmony.

Years later, one of the best explanations of the Dream Team’s level of play came from Laettner, to whom it was newest.

“The first thing I remember was how unbelievable their transition was from defense to offense,” Laettner told me in 2011. “It was instantaneous, at least three steps faster than in college. That was a huge adjustment, even for a player who was used to running. It was the anticipation along with the quickness.

“And then what I remember is that, suddenly, all I had to do was
move around and catch the ball. It was like I was a fourteen-year-old kid again playing with my dad’s thirty-five-year-old men’s league team. You’re young and quick, so you do all the cutting and you run through with your hands up, and they’re old and good and they will always find you. You don’t have to do any one-on-one moves. You just move, put your hands up and the ball is there.”

Most fun of all for the Dream Teamers, though, was finding a teammate’s weak spot and grinding him into pulp. Ewing took grief for shooting outside too much. Barkley was derided for fading during scrimmages. Drexler would be torched for his proclivity to dribble with his head down and always to his right, after which he would try to go left, get fouled up, and then get verbally ground up again.

One way to put that college week in perspective, to gauge what it takes to become a truly great player—the sacrifices, the hard work, the good fortune—is to consider what happened in the NBA to those collegians who at that time represented the best and the brightest.

Hill was a terrific pro, still going strong at age thirty-nine at this writing. But his potential Hall of Fame, Dream Teamer type of career was derailed by injuries. Ditto for Hardaway, a splendid talent who made four All-Star teams but proved also to be a petulant locker-room lawyer. (Plus I, like so many others, wanted to terminate with extreme prejudice that damn Lil’ Penny doll, a Nike marketing idea.) Like so many in the post-Jordan era, Hardaway’s game never matched his hype. Houston was limited by a knee injury and by the stigma of being vastly overpaid, having gotten about $20 million per year from the New York Knicks before the 2001–02 season, one of the worst NBA contracts ever and representative of what the Knicks would do throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Hurley never recovered from injuries suffered in a near-fatal car crash in his rookie season with the Sacramento Kings, 1993–94.
It’s anyone’s guess if he would’ve made himself into a great NBA player. My guess is no, but he would’ve been dependable and productive.

Webber had a fine NBA career with averages of 20.7 points and 9.8 rebounds, but he never pushed himself like Malone to be a truly dominant player, never developed a jump shot like Ewing, never glided around the court to block shots like Robinson, never got within sniffing distance of the Hall of Fame. Mashburn turned out to be a volume shooter who made only one All-Star team. Montross was a stiff, Erector-set-style center who never made an impact. Rodney Rogers was an okay pro who, sad to say, was paralyzed from the shoulders down in a post-retirement dirt bike accident in 2008.

So much promise. So much went wrong.

When the collegians got back to their rooms on that golden day after beating the Dream Team, they talked excitedly among themselves, theorizing that, with a few more good players, they could probably go out and win the gold medal. Only later would the realistic among them realize that that was not the case. But they still have the memories of mingling with the immortals and the distinction of being the only team in the world to get the best of the Dream Team, however briefly.

“It was unbelievable,” says Hill, who shared his memories of San Diego with me for a solid hour. “I mean, with all due respect to the birth of my children and my marriage, it was the best week of my life.” He smiled. “Make sure you go easy on that.”