Dream Team (24 page)

“Okay,” said Magic, needing no convincing.

That was the best moment for me, watching the team jog out for the first time before the actual competition, a giant metaphorical jolt of electricity coursing through the arena. Terry Lyons, who headed up international public relations for the NBA, feels the same way. “It’s still in my mind watching them run out and peel off to begin their warm-ups,” said Lyons. “I was thinking to myself,
Ho-lee hell. It’s actually happening
.”

I looked up from the press section to where my sons were sitting, taking it all in, not processing what it all meant but knowing it was something special, and said to myself,
Man, I’m lucky to be here, a moment in time that won’t—can’t—be repeated
. Thousands of flashbulbs exploded, thousands of fans rose to their feet, and the Cubans sank to theirs, stopping their warm-up to pay homage like pilgrims to Mecca. But all of us, each in our own way—weren’t we pilgrims, too?

Before the first game, representatives of the Cuban basketball team had sought out Kim Bohuny, the NBA’s point person on matters related to the international teams.

“We would like to take photos of the Dream Team,” one of them asked her.

“I’m sure we can arrange that after the game,” Kim said.

“No, we want to do it before,” the man said. “So we make sure there is no problem with it.”

Kim shrugged, then sought out Chuck Daly and bounced it off him. “Whatever,” said Daly, upon hearing about the thousandth weird request put before him since he signed on. Terry Lyons nearly went apoplectic until Bohuny said that she had cleared it with Chuck. Had someone else—Pat Riley or Larry Brown—been in charge, perhaps the pregame photos never would have happened, and they became an irresistible part of the Dream Team lore.

And so the Cubans grabbed their cameras, waved posing instructions to their heroes, and snapped as many photos as they could, like doomed men demanding favors from their hooded executioners. I marveled at the absurdity of it, but in retrospect, I’m glad it happened. The Cubans were just a bunch of guys who recognized that this was their moment, guys who would never play in the NBA or even in Europe, but who could one day walk into their living room, point to a photo on the wall, and tell their grandchildren,
Mire, es tu abuelo. Con Michael Jordan!

The United States won 136–57, suggesting that this whole pros-in-the-Olympics might be a tad more unbalanced than anyone had thought. As I gazed at the Inspector of Meat in his courtside seat, I wondered if an Oscar Wilde quote had passed through his mind:
When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers
.

What would become the boilerplate reaction of the vanquished was provided by Miguel Calderón Gómez, coach of the overwhelmed victims: “For us it was an elegant game, a historic game. We can take back to Cuba a beautiful photograph of us with them.” He sounded like a cruise director making the best of a shipwide epidemic of dysentery:
Be sure to take with you that wonderful portrait of Captain & Tennille from Karaoke Night!

The loudest applause in the pregame introductions went not to Jordan, Magic, or Bird but to the hometown kid, Clyde Drexler. His smile was wide, and there was, perhaps, a tear in his eye. It was a great moment. Later, the Glide would walk over to Rod Thorn and say thank you for adding him to the roster. In later years, Drexler wouldn’t be happy about having been the add-on, but in this first flush of Dream Team competitive excitement there was nothing like it.

Daly could’ve made the hometown play and started Drexler. But he didn’t. The coach would later say—and the Dream Teamers to a man would insist—that starting lineups did not matter. Which came to be true. By the time this squad got to Barcelona, it could’ve started any five guys and won the day, and Daly did indeed institute a kind of mixed starting-lineup bag. But this was the
first
starting lineup
and it meant something. It was not assembled capriciously. “You better believe I wanted to start that first game,” Bird says today.

Magic and Bird had to start because they were … Magic and Bird, the men who had saved the league. Jordan had to start because … he was Jordan, the best player in the world. If Daly fretted at all about whom to start at center, a dislocated thumb suffered by Ewing during drills in San Diego had taken care of that; David Robinson walked to center circle. My own guess is that Daly would’ve started Robinson anyway. The coach had grown to respect Ewing’s ferocity and accurate jump shot, but at that stage he was still more enamored of Robinson’s jaw-dropping athleticism.

The final starting position went to Barkley, a guy who was not among the first players chosen for this Dream Team. To that point, he had been the team’s best performer in practices, and that would continue in games, his springboard jumping and single-minded ability to attack the basket giving him a clear edge over his foil, Karl Malone. Daly started Barkley because, simply, he deserved it.

The ball went up, flashbulbs went off like a thousand small suns, and David Robinson tapped it back to Magic, who dribbled quickly over the midcourt line. Magic was looking in only one direction. He passed to Bird on the right wing, which is what he had dreamed about doing. Bird caught it and took two aggressive dribbles into the lane with his left hand, then another that forced his defender backward. Then, looking amazingly spry, Bird fell away and released a soft jumper from just inside the free throw line that spun, rotation perfect, toward the basket.…

We tend to think of a superstar’s career as one long march into immortality, but in fact, near the end, it’s usually characterized by a slow and sometimes painful slog toward the finish line. Rare is the athlete who goes out at full throttle; Jordan would’ve been that rarity had he not come back to play for two seasons with the Washington Wizards in 2001.

You have to understand how long Bird had been in pain. His
slog, albeit well-disguised, had started as far back as 1986, and throughout the Olympic competition, in San Diego/La Jolla, Portland, Monte Carlo, and Barcelona, Bird would float in and float out, depending on his mood, which depended on his level of pain. Few people knew how hard he had worked to get ready. Once he decided to be a Dream Teamer, he called up one of his old Celtics workout buddies, Rick Carlisle, and asked him to come out to the Indiana homestead to help him get in shape.

“Everything in French Lick was based on getting up at five in the morning,” Carlisle, the coach of the 2011 NBA champion Dallas Mavericks, told me. “Things start early there. Our workouts were done by 9:00 a.m. We’d have something to eat, then go play golf or go fishing.”

By that point, Bird’s back had degenerated badly. There were times he couldn’t drive his car without frequently stopping to stretch. In lieu of running, Bird and Carlisle rode bikes. They stretched, lifted, and did resistance work in the pool, all of it low to medium impact. Then they shot on Bird’s outdoor full court, sometimes for an hour or more. With Bird, it was always about shooting, keeping the rhythm, keeping the stroke. If he did that, he believed, he could always be effective no matter how badly his body had betrayed him.

(There’s a terrific anecdote in
Those Guys Have All the Fun
, an oral history of ESPN, about Mickey Mantle catching Bird in one of his pregame shooting rituals at a deserted Boston Garden. As Bird makes shot after shot after shot, the baseball immortal watches entranced on an internal feed at a TV studio. “This boy doesn’t miss,” Mantle says. And then there is Florida coach Billy Donovan, once a New York Knicks backup guard, who tells of arriving early at Madison Square Garden one evening for a game against the Celtics. Workers were still assembling the floor, and Donovan stood transfixed as he watched Bird “standing on a piece of wood shooting shots.” Bird once estimated that when in rhythm, he could make as many as ninety-five out of a hundred shots moving around the floor in practice.)

During their French Lick workouts, Bird’s physiotherapist, Dan Dyrek, was, as Carlisle put it, “on speed dial.” The goal was to hold things together and maintain conditioning, just so Bird could get through the Dream Team games. Once in a while Bird would wonder if some magical surgical remedy would come along to extend his career, but he didn’t talk much about his long-range future. In the short term, he just wanted to be fit enough and pain-free enough to make some contribution in Barcelona.

The summer workouts had helped, but throughout the Dream Team’s time together Bird was in agony some of the time and just in plain pain some of the time. A fiberglass body brace gradually became full-time raiment, the armor that reminded him of his vulnerability.

Within the team structure, however, Bird was consistent in his role as the cantankerous but plain-speaking leader, the needler, the homespun humorist. When talking about Bird, one must be careful not to carry those midwestern attributes too far because you run the risk of making him sound dumb, which—trust me—he is not. I always regretted that in my book about the 1990–91 Celtics I used Bird’s Hoosier vernacular when I quoted him directly, throwing in “kin” for “can” and “jest” for “just” and clipping off most of his g’s. It was a kind of reverse racism. I didn’t dare quote Robert Parish’s distinctive Louisiana patois because I would’ve come across as a racist making fun of the way a black man talks. But I could do it with Bird because we’re both white. The rule here is: be sparing in your use of idiomatic language. Faulkner made it work; you probably won’t.

In any case, there was no one who was more fun to be around than Bird when he was feeling good, as I had discovered during that ’90–’91 season. Bird’s target that year, besides eternal target Danny Ainge, was Michael Smith, a handsome and athletically gifted forward who had about 2 percent of Bird’s heart and guts and consequently about 1 percent of his career. On a bus ride to a game around the NBA trading deadline, Smith related to Bird a trade that would send Milwaukee’s Ricky Pierce to Seattle for Dale Ellis. Smith said that his agent had gotten the news of the deal on his speakerphone.

“I can’t believe that,” said Bird.

“The trade?” said Smith. “I can’t believe it, either.”

“No,” said Bird. “I can’t believe
your
agent has a speakerphone.”

On the Dream Team, Magic was the public voice and Bird did the private things that set a tone. One day he had left his practice gear in the wrong place, and a team manager, Jay Price, now an assistant coach at Illinois, couldn’t find it.

“I’ll go get it, Larry,” said Price.

“It was my mistake, Jay,” said Bird. “I’ll get it.” And before Price could move, Bird was off. He doesn’t deserve the Medal of Honor for that, but it’s a telling little nugget that helps explain how the Dream Team operated. Ed Lacerte, the Celtics and Dream Team trainer, watched this and said to Price: “That’s why he is who he is.”

Throughout this Olympic journey, no story line recurred as much as the one about the unlikely friendship that grew between Bird and Ewing. They hung around so much together and hurled insults at each other with such ardor that Bird took to calling Ewing “Harry,” so together they would be known as Harry and Larry. It seemed to be a play on the ongoing series of Dan-and-Dave Reebok commercials that featured U.S. decathlete rivals Dan O’Brien and Dave Johnson. But in Jackie MacMullan’s
When the Game Was Ours
, Bird said that he picked Harry both because it rhymed with Larry and because he’d had a teammate at Indiana State named Harry Morgan.

Years later, virtually every Dream Teamer brings up Harry and Larry and starts chuckling about it even though no one can explain exactly why. It was just the goofy name of “Harry” and the sight of two head-bashing bitter rivals who never cared a whit about tailoring themselves for public consumption yukking it up, riffing on each other like a couple of high school lettermen. “They were just two unlikely guys to be close, I guess,” said Jordan, “but there they were, hanging out, every night.”

I can only remember one classic line that came out of it. Ewing, searching for something to say, told the cameras one day that he wanted to “pick Larry’s mind,” to which Bird responded, “I already picked Patrick’s, and it only took about three minutes.” Other than
that, Bird’s recurring theme was to insist to Ewing that he really wasn’t a center “because you’re always hanging around outside trying to shoot jump shots,” to which Ewing might add, “Come inside and we’ll find out who’s a center.” Not legendary comedic material, but it said a lot about the bond that the team members had formed with one another.

As I watched Bird throughout this competition, my mind kept going back to the regular season and how unlikely it was to see him on this team. The Celtics went a more-than-respectable 51–31, but Bird played in only forty-five games because of his back. It was excruciatingly painful for him, and not just on a literal level. He had desperately wanted to perform well during the season to prove that his Olympic inclusion had not been merely ceremonial, as some were writing. True, he got spirited defenses along the way from players such as Jordan. “You tell me this,” Jordan said one night. “What other forward in the league can shoot from the outside, pass the basketball, rebound, get the break started, play team defense, and has been as much of a winner as Larry Bird? I don’t care how many injuries he’s had and how old he is. Tell me who’s as good all-around as Larry Bird from the forward position.”