Authors: Jack McCallum
“And strategy, too. Zone defense was too prominent in the FIBA game. Americans made us think more about man-to-man, and the game just looks different that way, more intense, more …
energetic
.”
The way the Dream Team played flowed organically from who they were as players. Nobody had to up his game or take it to the next level, as the clichés go. “The main thing that happens when the best get together is that the game speeds up and you have to make plays a little quicker,” Bird said not long ago. “Basketball is so
simple. You can run the pick and roll to perfection, work for the open man, and, if you don’t have a shot, swing the ball. That’s how you play. It doesn’t always happen, but on this team it happened. It wasn’t about scoring because we could’ve just got it in to Charles. It was about playing the game correctly.”
There was something else going on, too. By dint of the Dream Team’s collective maturity, its knack for domination without irritation, it offered a blueprint for professionalism, the lesson that Eddie Felson, the pool veteran played by Paul Newman in
The Color of Money
, tries to communicate to Tom Cruise’s Vincent. “Pool excellence is not about excellent pool,” Felson tells him. “It’s about becoming someone.”
Before Spain’s game against the United States, Orenga remembers, he met some of the Dream Team members in the bowling area at the Olympic Village. Spain had had a tough Olympics by that time, having lost to Angola in the first game and never gotten its bearings, a humiliation for the host nation, which had been considered a candidate for the bronze medal. The players were feeling down when they met the Americans, but that changed quickly. “They knew us and told us how sorry they were that we had lost,” Orenga said. “Charles Barkley, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan. And they
knew
us. They knew they would beat us, but they treated us with respect. No one on our team ever forgot that.”
Marciulionis, who knew most of the Dream Teamers personally or at least competitively, put it more simply: “They didn’t hold their noses in the air. They were who they were.”
Watching it all as a somewhat awed college coach, Dream Team assistant Krzyzewski says: “There was more depth to the dream than the basketball. It was the type of people they were, what they had done together to build the NBA. So it was not only that they were responsible for the explosion of basketball around the world. It was that the game exploded in the right way.”
Chris Mullin added this: “More than winning or losing, what I remember was the feeling of responsibility that we all had. We never talked about it. But we all felt it. How you handle yourself.
Play with class. Play at the highest level.” He searched for another word. “Play,
ultimately
,” he added.
Oddly, a kind of reverse reaction happened at home. Almost as soon as the Dream Team had finished its mission, USA Basketball was tasked with rostering a team to play in the 1994 World Championships in Toronto. It was out of the question that any of the reigning gold medalists would play so shortly after the splendid show in Barcelona, so the goal became to select young players who would—along with a few of the original Dream Teamers—form the basis of the 1996 Olympic team in Atlanta.
Now, think of the enormousness of the mission for these guys: all they had to do was follow the best and most popular team in history. They were doomed from the beginning, and the smartest of them, such as Alonzo Mourning, knew it and said so. “Everything we do is compared to the first Dream Team,” said Mourning. “We can’t win.”
The Zeitgeist of that team was not to make nice while singing hosannas to the ’92ers. No, this was, almost quite literally, a different generation, one disinclined to play the role of dutiful progeny. They would act in accordance with their own code of comportment, which was, say, 10 percent Barkley and 90 percent bark.
The results were predictable. If the 1992 Olympic team produced a perfect chemical reaction, an ideal blend of talent, tenacity, and maturity, the 1994 team, which was prematurely and unfortunately labeled (not by me) Dream Team II, was an unholy concoction of all the wrong ingredients, a basketball dystopia, defiantly christened by forward Larry Johnson as “the all-principal’s-office team,” crotch-grabbers such as Derrick Coleman and Shawn Kemp, preeners such as Mourning, talented but incomplete players such as Johnson, whose game basically consisted of posting up with his back to the basket and waiting for the ball to be thrown in to him. Don Nelson got the gig that he had originally wanted two years earlier, and because he wasn’t the kind of coach who reined players in,
he was as helpless as anyone else as the United States arrogantly rampaged through the tournament while making comments such as “We’re basically taking a lot of countries to school” (Johnson again). Okay, that’s what the first Dream Team did, too, but the idea was not to advertise it, “not be arrogant with the ass-whuppings we were handing out,” as country boy Karl Malone put it.
A snapshot of the difference between the two teams came in the way that they spent their nocturnal hours. While the Dream Team hung around the family room in the Ambassador, playing cards and ragging on one another, DT II bragged about clubbing at all hours. That doesn’t make them bad people and doesn’t make them all that different from Barkley. But it does speak to a different culture and a different wellspring of team chemistry. Were an editorial cartoonist to put this on paper, one panel would show a bunch of young bucks out on the town, the other an old-folks’ home with card tables, afghans, and wheelchairs, the geezers trading stories and lies, children and beer bottles at their feet.
“That 1994 team was a disaster,” said Dick Ebersol, who got a migraine when he thought of what the 1996 Olympic basketball broadcast might look like.
“It was not a team to be proud of,” said Dave Gavitt. “And you know what the worst thing was? It was noticed immediately by the international opponents.”
“I don’t know if
vile
is the right word or
disgusting
,” said Andrew Gaze, a respected player who was the star of the Australian team that lost 103–74 to the United States. “There should be at least some pleasure in playing the game, some dignity.”
So just like that, the world went from taking pregame photos with the American heroes to calling them vile. Dream Team II won the Worlds but went a long way toward losing the world.
One footnote: Isiah Thomas had accepted an invitation to be on that 1994 team, at long last getting the chance to represent his country. But he tore his Achilles tendon in a late-season Pistons game, an injury that ended his career. Would DT II have been more mature with Isiah leading it? Or even more dysfunctional?
• • •
A sea change can never be explained simply. Obviously, seeds had been planted for the game to change domestically even before the first Dream Team came along. Remember that Magic and Bird had come into the league way back in 1979. Drexler’s rookie year was 1983, and Jordan, Barkley, and Stockton all came along in 1984. By 1994 and certainly by 1996, it was a new type of NBA player, tutored in a burgeoning AAU system that encouraged one-on-one performance art over teamwork. If you’ll permit a metaphor to be stretched to the breaking point, the 1992 team, as spectacular as it had been, was a well-made play, grounded in the fundamentals, a kind of moderned-up
Cherry Orchard
or
Hedda Gabler
. The ’94 team was a Cirque du Soleil show, an overproduced hodgepodge of high-wire acts, costumes, and over-the-top theatrics, a sexed-up mess.
I’ve long theorized that a major reason for the NBA’s post–Dream Team decline was that the new generation was not sufficiently invested in the league as an entity. Magic and Bird had come into an NBA that was perched on the precipice. They didn’t need to be sold the idea that it was in trouble, because the proof was manifest. And so they bought into the idea that they had to save it. Things had gotten better by the time Jordan came along, but he followed the Magic/Bird model and others followed him.
But the Shaqs, the Alonzos, and the Shawn Kemps had no such compunction about helping the game along. When they came in, everything was fine, the cash register was ringing, and the feeling was,
Just let me get mine
.
One could argue that Jordan, who called his teammates “my supporting cast” and whose singular appeal sold out arenas and created an empire out of a shoe company, had something to do with the attitudinal change in the game. Harvey Araton did argue exactly that in his 2005 book,
Crashing the Borders: How Basketball Won the World and Lost Its Soul at Home
. I can’t begin to offer a complete and cogent summary of Araton’s argument in these pages, so
I’m not going to try. Suffice it to say that what Araton says makes some sense, particularly when he writes that, because of the one-man cyclone that was Jordan, the NBA became more about individuals than teams.
“Even going back to the late eighties, David Stern and NBA Properties, which was a machine by then, was doing a very good job of marketing players as individuals and promoting individual stars,” says Grantham. “So, as part of a game plan, to the extent that it was, the Dream Team fell right into that.”
Grantham, whose job it was to promote players, sees it as a good thing, a brand maker. Araton, whose job it is to question and cast a skeptical eye on the deleterious effects of commercialism, sees it as bad. Reasonable men can gaze upon the same inkblot and one will see the secrets of the universe and the other will see a truckload of turnips.
But certainly Jordan wasn’t all to blame. In the summer of 1985, Converse, finally realizing that it had been years late to the party, arranged for Magic and Bird to film what became an iconic commercial that showed Johnson arriving, via limousine, in French Lick. So there were those two grind-it-out competitors, always about basketball first, blood rivals, locking arms in the name of commerce. The concept of players being marketed ahead of teams began with Magic and Bird, though there is no doubt that Jordan finished it.
But whatever anyone thought or wrote about any of those guys, they were always about basketball first. That’s more than obvious with Bird, who has never been comfortable in front of a camera, but it was the same for Magic and Michael. I always considered Jordan’s ultimate achievement to be that he was better than his hype, which is not easy when you’re hyped the way he was. Those who followed were passionate about themselves more than the game, wanted what Jordan
had
without becoming what Jordan was.
“People have written books about how Jordan became Jordan,” says David Falk, “but it can’t be figured out logically. You have all the individual components of his competitive personality. He had
the great coach at Carolina in Dean Smith. He was a late bloomer who wanted to prove himself. He came to an NBA that had gotten better with Magic and Larry but still needed him. And then you had to
ignite
that mixture somehow with something. You can’t just re-create it.
“In a similar vein, the Dream Team will never be replicated. The U.S. might someday put together a team that would win by 80 points and it still wouldn’t be the same. You wouldn’t have this combination of great players who were also icons.”
Only two players from the ’94 Nightmare Team (which was also called the Scream Team and the Preen Team), Shaquille O’Neal and Reggie Miller, were allowed onto the ’96 Olympic team, which won the gold medal in Atlanta. A sprinkling of original Dream Teamers—Barkley, Pippen, Malone, Stockton, and Robinson—also played. Lenny Wilkens was the coach and the team easily won the gold medal. But it wasn’t the same. It didn’t have the electricity, the magic (or the Magic). They knew it, too. They felt like the wife of Gus Grissom, the astronaut who flew the
second
Mercury mission, in the movie version of Tom Wolfe’s
The Right Stuff
; she feels slighted that her husband didn’t get the parades, the acclaim, and the plaudits from the Kennedys that had accompanied the return of the
first
man into space. “Where’s Jackie now?” she wonders.
“I played because they called me and, honestly, I still considered it almost a duty,” says Stockton today. “But I knew it wasn’t going to be the same. You can call all the teams that followed Dream Teams, but the fact is that there was only one. Every guy was a rock star.” Stockton suddenly realizes with alarm that he’s just described himself as a rock star, so he self-corrects. “Well, maybe not everyone. But the first five or six. You line up next to someone on the court and they’re saying stuff like, ‘I just touched Magic Johnson,’ or ‘I just talked to Michael Jordan.’ Now how are you going to match something like that?”
Barkley, also a ’96er, put it in stronger terms. “It was a fucking nightmare,” he told me recently. “I wasn’t going to play when Lenny called me the first time. I said, ‘Lenny, I loved 1992. It was such a
great experience and I want somebody else to have it.’ But he said, ‘I need you to play, but I need you more for leadership.’ So I said okay.
“I was just amazed at some of the things that went on,” Barkley continued. “We had a couple guys skip practice because they didn’t get to start and didn’t play as many minutes as they thought they should. Can you imagine that? Michael Jordan didn’t start some games in ’92. Michael
freaking
Jordan!” Barkley wouldn’t name the players, but they were Shaq and Penny Hardaway.
In some press reports, Hakeem Olajuwon, a native Nigerian who had just been granted U.S. citizenship, was presented as
the
model teammate on the ’96 squad. Pippen said that wasn’t the case. “Penny and Hakeem … there’s two guys who will whine when things don’t go their way. Hakeem got mad at Lenny because he didn’t play against Greece. ‘I’ve never had a DNP [Did Not Play] in my life!’ he was shouting at Lenny. He was so mad that tears were coming out of his eyes. I’m telling you, it was bad. I enjoyed Atlanta, I guess, but it wasn’t the same. And it wasn’t a Dream Team.”
Orenga was also on Spain’s ’96 team, and he recalls standing next to some of the U.S. team members at the Opening Ceremonies. “They looked at us and said, ‘Who do you play for, and who do you play in your first game?’ And we said, ‘We are from Spain and we play you.’ And it was like it was no big deal to them. Right away I didn’t see the same maturity and dedication as with the Dream Team.”