Authors: Jack McCallum
Spain was next, making a 122–81 sacrifice on a night when Stockton’s healing leg finally allowed him some playing time—he scored 4 points in six minutes. And as the United States entered the medal round, Puerto Rico went down in the quarterfinals, 115–77, on a night when the outside shooting of Mullin (21 points) was the big story.
The team was by then a cliché—a well-oiled machine—turning it off and on at will, handing out points, rebounds, and assists according to some notion of democracy of which they were aware but couldn’t really elucidate. “It became kind of like playing your little brother,” Drexler told me years later. “You knew you were going to kill him, so it became only a matter of how much pain you wanted to give him.”
By the time they would finish, five players would average in double figures (Barkley led with 18 points and shot an absurd 71 percent from the floor) and three others would average 9 points or more. Laettner, predictably, was the only low scorer, with a 4.8 average. Nobody would average more than 5.3 rebounds (both Ewing and Malone), but everybody would get some. The only jaw-dropping number was Pippen’s assist total—he had a team-high 47 over eight games, and it’s hard to even remember him playing long stretches as a traditional point guard. Jordan had 37 steals and Pippen had 23 in the eight games, but here’s another remarkable number: Barkley had 21, demonstrating both his instincts and the extent to which he could play the passing lanes if so inclined.
None of the Dream Teamers ever glanced at a stat sheet—it just wasn’t important because the game
felt
right. Besides, it would be gauche, and if someone got caught doing it, well, it would’ve been all over. Their own stats didn’t matter and the opponents’ stats didn’t matter, so for the Dream Teamers the only way to measure oneself was against a teammate. Years later I would be surprised at how much they said they got from one another.
From Jordan and Pippen, Malone learned about single-minded mental focus. “When those guys honed in on their competitors,” said Malone, “you could just forget it. That time they were watching
films of Kukoc? You could’ve walked in front of Michael and Scottie a thousand times and their eyelashes would’ve never moved.”
From Malone, Pippen learned physical preparation. “You’d see Karl’s physique during the season, but until you’re with him you don’t realize that it’s not an accident. I started working out with Karl during the Dream Team, and that really pushed me.”
From Stockton, Jordan learned the value of synergy. “Karl Malone was a great player,” said Jordan, “but he could not play without John Stockton. John was his left hand to Karl’s right. That’s how important he was. That’s how important some teammates can be to others.”
From Michael/Magic/Larry, Robinson learned the lessons of leadership. “The Spurs had not been a championship team at the point when I went to Barcelona,” Robinson said, “so what I wanted to pick up on was, what do you need to do to be a leader, to lift your team up? And I took that commitment and focus back to San Antonio. Sure, I did the physical and mental work, but those guys made me understand that you have to require the same thing of everyone around you. You have to
demand
excellence from your teammates or you will not win a championship.”
And from the entire collective experience, Mullin learned something about himself. “I don’t think I realized this until years later,” he says now, “but the Dream Team turned out to be a very positive reinforcement about the way I was living my life. To come from where I was [alcohol rehab] to make that team … man, that really helped me beyond basketball.”
More specifically, Mullin remembers—indeed, treasures—the shooting games he had against Bird. The team rarely held formal practices in Barcelona, but a bus took volunteers to casual workouts. And on one such off-day afternoon, an hourlong game of H-O-R-S-E turned into an unseen masterpiece, something like the morning scrimmage in Monte Carlo.
“Larry and I would play for a hundred dollars a shot,” Mullin told me in the summer of 2011. “You shoot, you miss, just normal shots, not this crazy, bounce-the-ball-off-the-wall commercial shit.”
(Such a trick shot made by Mullin at the Bristol campus of ESPN when he was working as a playoff commentator has become a YouTube classic.)
“The stakes get up to about a thousand. I’m up considerably. I couldn’t miss. I remember looking over and David Robinson has stopped working out and he’s watching us. I don’t know, maybe I started letting down. Maybe I started thinking, ‘Holy shit, I’m kicking Larry Bird’s ass.’ But little by little Larry starts coming back, all the time telling me, ‘You know, I never lost one of these.’ Finally, he gets even and he says, ‘Okay, that’s it.’ He tosses me the ball and just walks away.”
Bird had been concerned even before the game began. “I needed to take lots of shots to prepare,” he told me in 2012, “and I hadn’t been doing that because of my back. When I got back to even, I knew that had to be it.”
Mullin is positively beaming as he finishes the story. “You know, before that … I mean, I knew I was a good shooter, better than most. But one of the guys I always thought was better than me was Larry. Of course he was better. It was
Larry Bird
. And that day, when I shot even with him, even though I didn’t really beat him … that day helped my career a lot.”
More and more, the center of the team became the family room at the Ambassador, their polestar. “By the time the Olympics were over,” said the NBA’s Kim Bohuny, “nobody cared what they looked like. Flip-flops, sweatpants, probably a pair of pajamas or two. You wore anything in there.”
At the beginning of the Games, Krzyzewski’s oldest daughter, Debbie, was overwhelmed the first time she was introduced to Magic, her favorite player. “She just burst into tears,” remembers her father. “Strangest thing.” But by the end of the Games, Debbie and Magic were simply friends.
The room was located on the second floor of the Ambassador, one flight up from the regular lobby, accessible either by stairs or by
elevator. I visited a couple of times, but, as was the case in the Monte Carlo casino, I felt a little hesitant about hanging around, almost like I was rummaging through someone’s bedroom. I remember looking in one afternoon and seeing Stockton and his sons horsing around. It figured that Stockton needed to get out of his room—he, his wife, and their three kids were all encamped in there, mattresses spread out on the floor like a slumber party.
The room was designated primarily as a gathering place for players and their families, though NBA and USA Basketball people were all over the place. The two “outsiders” who had carte blanche were Jordan’s guys, Ahmad Rashad and Spike Lee. Payne Stewart wandered in from time to time in between his high-stakes golf games with Jordan. So did Will Smith, a guest of NBC, whose executives were staying at a nearby hotel.
As was the case with the casino in the Loews Monte Carlo, the family room had a peanut gallery aspect to it: if an interloper somehow managed to elude security and gain entrance to the hotel, he could stare into the room, since the side facing the lobby was all windows and the door was frequently open.
By day, the family room was abuzz with the noise of beeping video games, the crack of pool balls, the rhythmic
plonk … plonk … plonk
of a ping-pong match, and the sound of a music video coming from a TV, usually Cypress Hill, since the selection of videotapes was small. The room functioned as a kind of drop-off center, where athletes and wives left their kids so they could attend other Olympic events. To this day Larry and Dinah Bird and Clyde and Gaynell Drexler greet Bohuny warmly as “our babysitter.”
Don Sperling, then the head of NBA Entertainment, remembers scooping up Jeffrey Michael Jordan seconds before the young boy would have tumbled down the elegant marble stairs into the lobby. Jordan gave him a grateful nod. Not so lucky were the pool balls thrown by Bird’s son, Connor, which from time to time clattered lobbyward.
C. M. Newton remembers with fondness the afternoon that his late wife, Evelyn, sat down to play a video game in an effort to improve
her skills so she could play with her grandchildren. Her partner was Patrick Ewing’s young nephew, Michael, and they were playing against Patrick Ewing Jr. and someone else. Mrs. Newton eventually blew the game, and she turned to apologize to Michael.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Next time you’ll have to get another partner.”
To which Michael replied: “That’s all right, Mrs. Newton. We’ll get those motherfuckers next time.”
Says C.M. today: “That was one of her fondest memories. She really felt like one of the boys.”
In the early evening, after golf, it might be ping-pong time, which meant Jordan time, which meant life was miserable for everyone if the man lost. Any number of people (including me) can relate horror stories of playing ping-pong against Jordan, who was very good but not great, beatable on paper but generally not in reality since he wore almost everyone down with his relentless aggression and psych game. At one point Steve Mills was playing him even until Jordan put down his racket, stared him in the eye, and announced, “I will
not
let you go home and tell your friends you beat me.” From that point on, his lacerating competitiveness simply rolled over Mills.
One major exception was Laettner, an outstanding player who repeatedly beat Jordan, at one point prompting the world’s most famous athlete to throw his paddle in disgust and storm out of the room. Later, one of Jordan’s buddies was tasked with finding a ping-pong table in Barcelona so Jordan could set it up in his room and practice, but it never came to pass.
(The identity of Laettner’s biggest rival, though, might be a surprise. “I could usually beat him,” remembers Laettner, “but Commissioner Stern was my toughest opponent by far.”)
I was glad Laettner had his table-tennis moments because the Olympic experience, while a pure joy for the Dream Teamers who had come from the NBA, was a mixed bag for Laettner. No matter what he said then or says now, he felt like a tag-along. Barkley, Bird,
Mullin, and Drexler went out of their way to befriend him, but Laettner was no fool—he knew he only half belonged.
Not his mother, though. Bonnie Laettner positively plunged into the Olympic experience, trading pins and cheerleading like mad at the arena. She developed a close relationship with Drexler’s wife and at one point almost got involved in fisticuffs at a game to protect Gaynell’s seat when she left to change a diaper.
It was after midnight when the family room achieved legendary status. Not everyone was a part of it. David Robinson, for example, floated blessedly above the fray, sometimes literally so, as when he and Branford Marsalis traded sax licks on the roof of the Ambassador. But most of the Dream Team was in there at one time or another, the hours moving steadily to dawn, the card game in full swing, the beer bottles and the glasses of vodka and lime (purchased at the nearby corner bar) starting to stack up, along with the empty pizza boxes, snuffed-out Jordan stogies, and, most of all, one-upmanship rhetoric.
There were moments of high comedy, as when one Dream Team member burst into the room and demanded, “Who’s got a rubber? I need one quick.” (That demonstrated, more than anything, that the NBA had officially joined the post-Magic HIV awareness era.) And Drexler’s ears are still ringing from the abuse he took in the room for mistakenly bringing two left sneakers to practice one day. (“I was dressing in the dark that morning,” he told me years later.) Clyde actually tried to get away with wearing them until Barkley stopped practice and exclaimed, “Wait a minute, Clyde’s got two damn left sneakers on.”
The room regulars were Jordan, Magic, Barkley, Pippen, and Ewing. They
owned
it, the first three in particular, of course, owing both to their personalities and to their status within the game. But Pippen and Ewing were full-fledged members as well. Pippen’s inclusion in the charmed circle was easy to understand. He was good company, he had proven himself to be Robin to Michael’s Batman, and he was now a champion. At first glance, Ewing
might not seem to belong, but there was never a question that he was one of the main guys. That rarely came across to outsiders. Ewing’s agent, David Falk, was always trying to convince me that Patrick was an engaging personality whose name sold a lot of shoes, but I never bought it. Ewing was never exactly rude, but to outsiders he was more or less dismissive, his postgame comments blander than broth. Whenever I wanted a one-on-one interview with him at practice, for example, I always had to do it as he got a post-practice rubdown from the athletic trainer, his version of multitasking.
“This doesn’t work when there’s somebody else around, Patrick,” I used to complain.
“Works for me,” he said. “I’m not going to change any answers because somebody else is around.”
“That’s because you never say anything,” I’d remind him.
Take it or leave it
was his position. Yet I, like many others, genuinely liked Ewing because, at the very least, he was consistent in his dismissiveness.
I was secretly happy years later, though, when Ewing told me, “The only thing I’d change about my career is that maybe I should’ve been a little more accessible to the media.” He also admitted that he regretted the four-team deal that sent him to Seattle late in his career, one that came about largely because he wanted out of Gotham. “After hearing rumblings for fifteen years that the team was ‘better without Ewing,’ I just got tired of it,” Ewing told me. “I reached my breaking point.” He tacked on a forgettable free-agent year in Orlando that ended his career in 2001–2, but his legacy remains as a New York warrior who couldn’t quite get his team to the finish line. I do believe that, even for those who didn’t appreciate his game, he was a respected player.
On non-game nights, the cards in the Coolest Room in the World came out around ten. Tonk fit their style—a form of knock rummy, it’s played at a high rate of speed, concentration helpful but not essential, so part of the brain could be devoted to insults.
The go-to insult for both Jordan and Magic was championships, as in who had won some and who hadn’t. Malone and Stockton got a pass—they weren’t particularly close to either player and woofing on those who are not return woofers is kind of like drowning puppies, even for those guys. Now, had Jordan known then what would transpire later—Finals victories over their Jazz teams in 1997 and 1998—perhaps he wouldn’t have been so kind.