Dream Team (34 page)

“That was a valuable day for me, a lesson in life,” Magic told me years later. “The difference between being rich and being wealthy. The man had a
backup yacht
. I never forgot that.”

If a Dream Teamer wanted to go somewhere special with family or friends, he was supposed to inform Balmer or another member of security, who would either give them a lift in a van or accompany them surreptitiously. “Sometimes they didn’t even know we were there,” says Balmer.

Magic and Mullin knew they were there. When they run into each other these days they still talk about the afternoon walk they took with their families, both of the Dream Teamers pushing strollers.

“We had a couple bodyguards in front and a couple bodyguards in back,” remembers Johnson, “and they all were carrying these bags. We asked what was in them but they never said. Finally, near the end of the Olympics, they showed us. Machine guns.
That’s
what was in them.”

Balmer says it all worked out pretty well and that the players were largely cooperative, themselves realizing the security risks of famous millionaires out on the town. “Well, all except Charles,” says Balmer. “Charles had his own ideas on this.”

I feel fairly safe in declaring that there has never been, and never will be, a media gathering like the Dream Team introductory press conference in Barcelona. Some twelve hundred of the unwashed, including me, jammed the auditorium, and, when the team walked
in, the room rose to applaud, American reporters excepted. It was as if a giant box of action figures had been opened and out tumbled a parade of superheroes, some blessed with extraordinary speed, others with X-ray vision, all with super charisma.

That kind of reverential treatment should’ve been old hat by now, considering that we had seen opponents snap photos before and even during games. But I kept trying to get at why—beyond the obvious fact that the Dream Team was a collection of immortals gathered in one place at one time—the phenomenon was so large. “An awful lot of it had to do with Michael,” says Wilbon, who postulates that Jordan, at that time, was the most famous person in the world. “Oprah was not nearly as big as she got. Bill Clinton wasn’t president yet. Muhammad Ali was a relic. There was no Barack Obama. Who else you got? It was Michael.”

The NBA’s Kim Bohuny has a theory to explain the Dream Team’s fame. “There had been an air of mystery about these guys for a long time, and suddenly they came to life,” she says. “Always, across the pond, the NBA was that faraway thing they would never see live. Then, suddenly … it’s here! And all of these guys are together.”

Before the press conference, I caught the eye of Brian McIntyre, the NBA’s head of public relations, and we exchanged head-shaking glances. He and his other staffers had already held a draft, complete with “territorial picks,” to determine who would handle the media requests for which players. McIntyre, who had begun his professional life with the Bulls, got Jordan. Josh Rosenfeld had started with the Lakers, so he had Magic. “My next two picks were Harry and Larry,” says Rosenfeld, “because I figured they wouldn’t do anything anyway.”

Terry Lyons, who was at St. John’s with Mullin, took the lefty. USA Basketball’s Craig Miller took Christian Laettner, the amateur guy, and, since there wouldn’t be that many requests for America’s twelfth man, Miller was also assigned to Barkley, a nerve-racking job but at the end of the day an easy one since Charles, as Balmer put it, “had his own ideas” on being handled. Pistons PR man Matt
Dobek took, of course, Daly, all he could handle since the Dream Team coach got so many requests.

I suspect that the Dream Team was hardly astonished when the room rose to greet them. By this time they must have been figuring,
Isn’t this how everybody is supposed to act when we’re around?
By this time, too, the gravity of the moment had begun to sink in. Nobody realistically entertained the notion that they would lose, but there was always that little sliver of doubt.

We play like we should and nobody gets within 30
 … 
but what if our jumpers start missing?

There’s never been a team like ours
 … 
but what was that little island Daly was talking about in San Diego?

So to maintain the highest competitive mind-set, they began to construct a bogus narrative, one fraught with we’ll-show-them declarations and revenge leitmotifs.
We’re tired of hearing how a bunch of All-Stars could never play together. We’re tired of hearing that we should’ve stayed in the Olympic Village. We’re tired of watching the United States get beat up by other countries. We’re tired of hearing that we’re just a bunch of millionaires on summer vacation
.

True, all of those points had been raised, but the Dream Team did what most athletes do in those situations—pore through the pile and cherry-pick the negatives.

Magic at the press conference: “We gave up our summer. We share the Olympic spirit like any other athlete. Basketball players from other countries have been getting paid and nobody said nothing, and now we come over and we get paid and everybody is making a big deal out of it.”

Barkley: “None of these foreign athletes will admit it, but they don’t like Americans.”

Stockton: “The Olympic spirit for me is to beat teams from other countries, not to live with them.”

The most ginned-up subject was the one about Brazil overcelebrating a victory over the United States in the 1987 Pan Am Games. “They were throwing coaches in the air and high-fiving,” said Malone, always ready to don some metaphorical army gear. “It
looked like a little rubbing in the face.” In truth, nobody on the Dream Team cared a damn about the 1987 Pan Am Games, and anyway, Brazil celebrates days that end in
y
the same way.

But there were light moments, two of which have endured through the ages. Malone deftly fielded a question from a Japanese reporter who wanted to know “why it is that sometimes you shoot and it is worth two points and other times it is worth three points.” Said Malone: “That’s just how we do it, my man.”

And Barkley, asked about the Dream Team’s first opponent, Angola, offered: “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout Angola. But Angola’s in trouble.” The quote has lived on, and anyone with a decent Barkley impression can get a laugh out of it. From time to time, Wilbon will just up and text Barkley:
I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout
 …

Some of the most underrated lines came from Bird. “I felt pretty good,” he said when asked about his health, “until I sat here and listened to all this BS.” And this to a question about his possibly imminent retirement: “I’ve been retired for four years, but nobody’s noticed it yet.”

Las Ramblas is one of those streets that couldn’t exist anywhere but in Old Europe, “the only street in the world,” wrote poet Federico García Lorca, “I wish would never end.” It was a 24/7 carnival, a place for the high and mighty and the low and low-down.

Charles Barkley loved it. So let’s do the math: live chickens, unicycles, pickpockets, open containers, prime hashish from Amsterdam, lithe and callow señoritas with dewdrop eyes, and a famous American who’s not afraid to drop-kick drunks. What could possibly go wrong?

Early on in the competition Barkley told Balmer, the NBA’s director of security, “Dude, the notion that I’m going to be at the Olympics and stay in my room is crazy. This is the greatest sporting event in the world. I’m going out.” His itinerary generally went like this: Begin a card game with Magic, Michael, and Pippen around ten. Play for an hour or two, then slip out the back door of the Ambassador,
walk a couple of blocks, meet an elderly Spanish gentleman, slip him a couple of hundred dollars, and declare, “Okay, you’re my security for tonight. Let’s go.”

And off he went. Along the way, Charles picked up crowds of anywhere from ten to fifty, the Pied Piper of Barcelona. His nocturnal divagations drove the NBA security people nuts for a while, particularly when others were involved. One night special arrangements had been made for Magic, Ewing, and Barkley to attend the boxing venue, but Charles insisted on leaving the hotel early and the plans for a special entrance at a special time got all messed up. But, eventually and inevitably, the security folks got used to it and gave up, praying all the while that they would not receive a predawn call from the
policía
.

The best beat for any reporter in the ’92 Games was the Charles Barkley beat. I was on it for a couple of nights, trailing him down Las Ramblas, where I would’ve been in any case, getting paid for hanging out, the journalist’s dream. Other players visited Las Ramblas—that’s where Stockton found the tourist in the Dream Team shirt who didn’t recognize him—but rarely in darkness, when the place was teeming with night crawlers and the potential for trouble was everywhere. On the nights I followed Barkley, there were some strange moments. An older man, speed-freak skinny and crack-pipe crazy, walked in front of him for a while, pointing and laughing like a hyena, but Barkley just kept going, sipping his
cerveza
and eventually outlasting him. On another occasion a kid on a bicycle kept weaving in and out of his path until Barkley had to stare him down. Either one of those guys would’ve been put on a Homeland Security watch list these days. On one particularly glassy-eyed evening, Barkley asked a couple of kids if he could get on their motorcycle. He gunned the engine and the bike started forward, Barkley jumping off in horror. Charles pushed the social envelope, to be sure, but he wasn’t a thrill-seeker—witness his protestations about mountainside driving in Monte Carlo.

The hardest job of tracking Charles belonged to David Dupree, since he was ghostwriting Barkley’s daily journal for
USA Today
.
Universally recognized as the journalist least likely to keep night hours, teetotaler Dupree nevertheless found himself at every nightclub in Barcelona, receiving notes from bartenders, bouncers, and strippers on where he could catch up to Barkley. He always did. You can always find Charles because there are always lots of clues.

It’s a distinct art, this Barkleyian ability to make eye contact, mingle, and keep going forward, never stopping long enough to get really mobbed. “It’s not hard, but players think it’s hard,” Barkley told me years later. “I have two main principles. Don’t travel with security, because that’s what makes people mad and that’s when bad stuff happens. And don’t travel with an entourage, because that puts people off, too. I rolled alone. Still do.”

A few words about Charles Barkley and alcohol. He is familiar with it. But so am I, though probably not as familiar as Charles. Some of my fondest nights on the NBA beat involved having drinks with Charles somewhere in the immediate vicinity, so I am not the one to say whether or not he drinks too much. But drinking is part of the Charles Barkley story.

On December 31, 2008, he was famously pulled over in his hometown of Scottsdale and arrested after failing a field sobriety test. He was found to have a blood alcohol level of 0.149 percent, nearly twice the legal limit of 0.08 percent in Arizona, and later spent a weekend in prison. The typical story is to say that he came out of the experience a changed man, but that would not be accurate. Charles came out of it exactly as he went into it. There were those who wanted to see more public groveling and behavior modification from Barkley, those who have long felt that the media, seduced by the man’s antic charm, let him get away with far too much. Perhaps. But I saw Barkley shortly after the arrest and before he went to prison, and—I’m sorry if this comes out wrong—I had to respect the fact that he refused to offer up a bunch of phony platitudes. Yes, he had done his scripted act of contrition on TNT after serving a network-mandated suspension. But he would not
cop to the I-found-God-and-now-I’m-a-teetotaler attitude that would be predictable for others in his position.

“Look, drinking and driving is a very serious thing,” he told me. “It is unacceptable, and I embarrassed a lot of people who care about me.” (For the record, they were more embarrassed that he told the police he was looking for oral sex at the time he was pulled over.) “But come on now—everyone wants to be overly dramatic about it. I’m going to prison? Okay, big deal. For most people, when you go to jail, it’s a terrifying thing. You come out and you don’t have a house and you don’t have any money. When I get out, I’ll still have everything.”

It was his way of saying:
I’m still going to drink. I’ll be more careful and I’ll try not to get picked up by the police. But I’m still going to drink
.

And he still does. On a January night in 2011, I met him for dinner at a Phoenix restaurant to discuss the Dream Team. After exchanging greetings with practically every patron, he took a look at my chicken entrée and said, “I should’ve gotten that. Black people love chicken.”

So it went. We had a great time—the cell phone photos Brett Favre sent of his penis were a popular subject, at least with Charles—because you always have a great time with Charles. I almost performed a classic spit take as he delivered the punch line on a story he told involving an encounter with the boyfriend of his daughter, Christiana.