Dream Team (39 page)

“I’m more of a mystique person, and Magic is more of a showman,” says Jordan on that afternoon in Charlotte. (I didn’t even bring up Magic; Jordan did it himself.) “Magic is out there, ‘I own this, I got this. I got real estate.’ To me, if you have to say all those things, you feel like you haven’t gotten the respect and it worries you. He’s a master at maximizing his Magic Johnson name. I wanted to
control
my name.

“Look, my most valuable asset is my time. I could make a lot of money and have my name out there, but that doesn’t drive me the way it drives Magic. The fact that I’ve only given exactly what I’ve wanted to, as opposed to giving everybody everything, is one of the reasons I’ve been able to sustain popularity.”

There are many metrics through which to judge that popularity, none better than the Google Alerts I had set up to keep tabs on these guys. Rarely did a day go by when a Dream Teamer was not mentioned, in some context, once or twice. Magic, Bird, and Barkley came in somewhere around four to six items daily because of, respectively, business deals, running the Indiana Pacers, and exercising his vocal cords on TNT and wherever anyone else was holding a mic.

Jordan’s daily count was more like forty items, relatively little of it having to do with his stewardship of the Bobcats. Unless you check these almost every day, as I have been doing for the purposes of research, you simply wouldn’t believe how often “Michael Jordan” is mentioned in police reports from all over the country, either because a piece of Jordan apparel has been stolen or because a suspect is wearing Air Jordans. In any given week, there are more stories about Jordan footwear than there are about most of the Dream Teamers. For three weeks in the summer of 2011, Scottie Pippen’s Google Alerts went way up. Why? Because that’s when Pippen hinted that LeBron James was as good a player as Jordan; essentially Pippen’s hits were about Jordan.

“Michael Jordan plays basketball better,” author Scott Turow once wrote, “than anyone else in the world does anything else.” I don’t know whether that’s true, but Jordan is indeed a frame of reference unto himself. Someone wrote recently—and wrongly—that Miles Davis “was the Michael Jordan of his time,” when, in fact, Jordan was the Miles Davis of his time. But a quick roundup from various newspapers and magazines over a four-month period reveals Jordan’s primacy as a cultural touchstone.

Patricia Zhou from the Royal Ballet of London will be the Michael Jordan of ballet. Jordan’s own guy at Nike, Tinker Hatfield, is the Michael Jordan of shoe design. Itzhak Perlman is the Michael Jordan of the violin. A character on ABC’s
Happy Endings
(author’s obligatory note: never saw it) is the Michael Jordan of ruining relationships. Joey Chestnut is the Michael Jordan of eating hog dogs. The Large Hadron Collider is the Michael Jordan of particle accelerators.
Ira Pressman is the Michael Jordan of Ponzi schemers. Yelena Isinbayeva is the Michael Jordan of women’s pole vaulting. Dr. Drew Pinsky is the Michael Jordan of televised addiction treatment. The HTC ThunderBolt 4G is the Michael Jordan of mobile phones. Kelly Slater is the Michael Jordan of surfing; keeping it in the water, Dallas Friday is the Michael Jordan of wakeboarding. Human resources guru Bill Taylor is the Michael Jordan of hiring. Donnie Burns is the Michael Jordan of professional ballroom dancing. BroLoaf is the Michael Jordan of hardcore; keeping it hardcore, Anderson Silva is the Michael Jordan of mixed martial arts. Lionel Messi is the Michael Jordan of soccer. Bill Clinton and Joe Biden are the Michael Jordan of schmoozers. Cesar Millan is the Michael Jordan of dog whisperers and Buck Brannaman is the Michael Jordan of horse whisperers. Doyle Brunson is the Michael Jordan of poker. Jan-Ove Waldner is the Michael Jordan of table tennis (though there is little doubt Jordan thinks he could beat him).

Trust me, that’s not the end. There are thousands and thousands of Michael Jordan Google Alerts left in my email, and I’m just not going to get to them. I am the Michael Jordan of Not Getting to Google Alerts About Michael Jordan.

Oh yes: Yale’s Susan Gibbons is the Michael Jordan of librarians. That’s my favorite.

Jordan and I talked about a lot of things—the old Bulls, the Dream Team selection, Magic and Larry—and some of his comments have been peppered through this manuscript. The conversation edges toward the events surrounding his first retirement in 1993, a year after the Dream Team phenomenon. I had never had a protracted discussion with Jordan about the gambling revelations. He went away from the game and joined up with the Birmingham Barons, got into an epic dispute with
Sports Illustrated
over a cover line that read “Bag It, Michael,” suggesting that he was disgracing baseball with his minor-league career, and I left the NBA beat for a while. I wrote neither the inside story nor the cover line that Jordan hated,
and Jordan wasn’t mad at me. But he was furious with
SI
, to which he never gave—and never will give, he says—another interview, his legendary intransigence and competitiveness in full locomotion.

“I never had to meet with the league about gambling because I never did anything illegal outside of gamble when I golfed,” Jordan says, bringing up the topic himself. “But David Stern never corrected the record. It was never addressed. I felt like I had given my heart to the game of basketball and it helped the NBA’s business. But they let all the articles come out, all the speculation continues.”

I felt that Jordan was putting it too strongly and told him so. “I thought the commissioner did try,” I said. “At least when I asked him about it, he just about took my head off and—”

Jordan interrupts me. “You know that David Stern’s voice commands respect. David Stern says, ‘Don’t even go there,’ and nobody goes there. But we
did
go there. He allowed it to fester, and all those ideas came out that were totally bogus. They allowed all this peripheral stuff to happen. They knew I never had a connection with any kind of crazy thing. They knew there was no Mafia hit on my father. Yet they never defended me.” (Stern, obviously, does not agree with Jordan’s opinion.)

Jordan continues: “So that was a big part of why I said to myself, ‘I’m tired of this game.’ And then my father died and that made it worse and I knew I had to get away.

“And you know what? I’m
glad
I got away. I wouldn’t have traded those nights in minor-league baseball for all the world, all my championships. People thought it was failure. Well, I thought it was the winningest thing I ever did.”

Ever so carefully, I ask him about James Jordan. “I can’t imagine what you went through,” I say. “A brutal death. You were close. We later found out the autopsy was botched. And some people thought your gambling might have something to do with his death. You must’ve felt … violated. I always wondered if you think you’ve dealt with it or if you ever felt you needed help.”

“I dealt with it and I don’t need help,” he snaps. “In my own way I dealt with it. These guys, they had my father’s championship rings
that I had given him, a lot of other personal stuff, a watch inscribed with ‘Love from Michael and Juanita.’ When they found out who they had killed, they videotaped the whole scene. The police tracked them because one of those idiots was showing the tape to his friends.”

“That’s what I mean,” I say. “That is incredibly hard. You know that one of the suspects was wearing—”

“I know,” Jordan interrupts. “He was wearing a Michael Jordan T-shirt when he was arrested.” He’s silent for a moment.

“So, how
did
you handle this whole thing?” I ask.

Jordan’s answer is emphatic.

“It was baseball,” he said. “The Barons. There were a lot of lonely nights out there, just me and George [Koehler, who has been his driver and loyal companion from his first day in Chicago in 1984] on the road, talking. And I’d think about my father, and how he loved baseball and how we always talked about it. And I knew he was up there watching me, and that made him happy and that made me happy, too.”

At that, he stood and we shook hands and he left the room, the best basketball player ever (I’ll argue anyone who says otherwise), still an icon, the reference for a librarian from Yale and a violinist from Tel Aviv, the once and future king, the Chosen One, but sometimes just a kid who lost his father and his best friend way too soon.

There was one other hugely popular men’s basketball team in Barcelona—Lithuania. It was one of three countries that had come to the Games under trying political circumstances but was clearly the only one that engendered almost universal sympathy. Croatia was torn apart by a horrible civil war, but the roots of that conflict tested the understanding of most on the outside. Similarly, few could get a handle on what exactly the Russian entry was. Officially called the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), it had been hastily patched together in 1991 by leaders from the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and the Republic of Belarus. It came to be known as the Unified Team, but to many—especially the Lithuanians—it represented the old, repressive Soviet Union.

Lithuania’s struggle and ultimate independence from the Soviets, by contrast, was something we could all throw our arms around. Plus Lithuania had something else going for it: marketing, baby,
marketing. Yes, the shirt bearing the likeness of all the Dream Team members, the one the tourist was wearing when Stockton met her on Las Ramblas, the one that swelled the bottom line of Magic Johnson tees, was only the second-best-selling shirt at the Barcelona Olympics.

The Lithuanian tie-dyed T-shirt, a stoned-out psychedelic masterpiece splashed with the nation’s official colors of green, red, and yellow and anchored by the Grateful Dead’s skeleton symbol, was the one to have. (Mine, now threadbare, still rests in the bottom drawer of my dresser, probably my most prized sports memento. The competition is not strong.) Whenever I glance at it, I don’t think of the Dream Team–Lithuania semifinal game, which ended in the predictable rout. I remember the remarkable story behind the genesis of the T-shirt, the competitive spirit of the great Sarunas Marciulionis, and the legendary talents of the bloated giant Arvydas Sabonis, who, owing to an engagement with Comrade Vodka, could not quite roust himself for the medal ceremony.

Lithuania had declared its independence from the Soviet Union on March 11, 1990, but massive inflation and unemployment plagued the new nation, which was in fact divided from within, a conflict manifested in a schism between the chairman of the Parliament and the prime minister. In January 1991, Soviet military units made their presence felt in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, allegedly to quell internal dissent but mostly to reestablish its hold on this small runaway republic.

To patriots such as Marciulionis, who early in his career was obligated by the conditions of his “release” from the Soviet Union to give about half of his Golden State Warriors salary to various Russian agencies, the reasons didn’t matter. A free and independent Lithuania, without a Soviet military presence, was all that mattered. Lithuanians took to the streets, some of them brandishing primitive weapons such as pitchforks and ax handles. Inevitably, armed conflict erupted, Soviet tanks rumbled through the streets,
and soldiers killed thirteen Lithuanians on January 13, 1991, a day that the Lithuanians refer to as “Bloody Sunday.”

Strong anti-Soviet reaction from the West helped force a treaty—remember that Mikhail Gorbachev, a relative peacenik, was the head of the Soviet state, which was itself crumbling. Marciulionis, by then a solid NBA player with the Golden State Warriors, was one of the new nation’s best-known figures, and he convinced the government that it should organize a team that would attempt to qualify for the Olympics.

His suggestion was met favorably. The problem was, the country was bankrupt.

Marciulionis had already tapped his good friend Donnie Nelson, a Warriors scout, to be an assistant coach, and, as the 1991–92 season got under way, coach and player also began the arduous task of fund-raising in the Bay Area. Marciulionis would handle some of the funding from his $1.28 million Warriors contract but more was needed. “We’d go to great lengths to make speeches at a hundred dollars a whack,” remembers Nelson. “We talked to season-ticket holders and told them about Lithuania. We’d call
anybody
. ‘Hey, what if Sarunas and I showed up at your Key Club? You got any money?’ ”

Eventually they got a call from a representative of the Grateful Dead, whose members had been inspired by Lithuania’s struggle for independence. Nelson and Marciulionis showed up at the address they were given in San Francisco, which was a small, nondescript garage. “I thought we were the victim of a practical joke until we opened the door and there was a state-of-the-art recording studio,” says Nelson.

“I still remember the Dead were trying out Beatles covers, doing stuff like ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and ‘Hey Jude,’ ” Nelson recalls. “But they were just kind of working through things and sounding kind of nasally and, well, maybe there was a little pot going on. So Sarunas pulls me aside and says, ‘Donnie, no way these guys are famous. They’re terrible.’ ” (Marciulionis grew to like them a little more, but he was speaking as a musician; on a memorable evening, sitting on
a dock on the Black Sea in the summer of 1988, I had listened to Marciulionis knock out Lithuanian folk songs on his guitar. He wasn’t half bad.)