Dream Team (5 page)

“David and I thought that global basketball came with as many burdens as benefits,” says Granik today, “and that’s what we told Boris.”

However, when Stankovic suggested a competition that would include an NBA team and a couple of FIBA teams, a kind of first step, Stern said yes. “We’ll host it,” he said immediately. It was out of that meeting that the first McDonald’s Open, which was eventually held in Milwaukee in 1987, was born. But it was never Stern’s plan to get his players into the Olympics, in large part because he faced far more pressing issues.

The tide was beginning to turn by the time of Stankovic’s visit, but the NBA was still on relatively shaky ground. The popular
how-bad-was-the-NBA? nugget to offer is the 1980 NBA Finals, which was on tape delay even though it pitted the Los Angeles Lakers (rookie Magic Johnson, superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) against the Philadelphia 76ers (Julius Erving). But there are other ways to measure the NBA’s low-water marks. When Rick Welts was hired in 1982 to head up sponsorship—“Like all of David’s guys back then, I was perfect for the job because I was young, dumb, and poor,” Welts says today—the NBA literally had no business plan. It sold nothing to no one. Welts and the other young, dumb, and poor soldiers found a nation that not only didn’t care about the NBA but downright loathed it.

“The perception was that the NBA was mismanaged, too many African Americans, too many drug accusations, too many teams going out of business,” Welts told me in 2011. “I’d call advertising agencies, and to get a return call was remarkable if you had NBA attached to your name. The priority was NFL, Major League Baseball, and college sports. The NHL would get the calls before they’d even think of investing in the NBA.”

As his young band of committed warriors tried to chip away at the NBA’s image, it was always Stern cajoling, conniving, caterwauling. “The power of everybody saying the same thing over and over again is pretty significant,” says Welts. “I’d come home beaten and battered after twelve hours of rejection, and the phone would ring in my room at the Summit Hotel on Lexington Avenue at ten o’clock. It would be David, and after fifteen minutes I’d be charged up and ready to go again.”

Stern is so commonly called the best sports commissioner ever that he has all but retired the term, but there was certainly a bit of serendipity in his rise. It was under his watch, after all, that Michael/Magic/Larry descended from the heavens, and at the end of the day, the only thing a marketing man can do is shine a brighter light on the stage. If the people don’t like what they see, nothing is going to happen. But Stern and others in his office figured out how to maximize the appeal of these players and leverage their popularity.

And while he didn’t see the full road ahead of him, the commissioner always kept an ear open to the sermons by the Inspector of Meat, who thought that great things would happen if the United States was able to put its stars together, bundle them up in red, white, and blue packaging, and send them off to play under a sacred set of rings.

Larry Bird stood on the floor of Reunion Arena in Dallas on the morning of February 8, 1986, where eight hours later he would compete in the NBA’s first three-point shooting contest during All-Star Weekend. Standing nearby was Leon Wood of the New Jersey Nets, who is now an NBA referee but who was then one of the favorites in the competition.

“Hey, Leon,” Bird said, “you changed your shot lately? It looks different.”

That was nonsense, of course. But Wood, a second-year player known for his three-point range—he wasn’t shy about attempting shots from a couple of feet behind the three-point line—looked stricken.
Man, if Larry Bird says my shot has changed, I wonder if …

Then Bird started talking about the red-white-and-blue balls, the ones that would be worth two points (instead of one) at each of the five racks of five balls that were set up for the competition. Bird said they felt slippery. Wood looked stricken again.

Scratch Leon Wood from the list of potential winners. The others would come later.

At this point in time—midseason, 1986—Larry Joe Bird was the undisputed king of the NBA. He was on his way to his third straight Most Valuable Player award, and his Boston Celtics were on their way to the NBA title. But it went beyond that. It was Bird’s bravado, his utter belief in himself, his trash talk (legendary around the league, if largely unknown to the general public, since Bird did it subtly), the street game that came wrapped in a pasty package that made the early-to-mid-1980s
his
game,
his
time.

Bird’s package of skills—shooting, rebounding, passing, court savvy, competitiveness—had been there since his rookie season, 1979–80. We tend to think of him as the ultimate workaholic, endlessly polishing a shooting stroke that he had fabricated back in his high school days, and to an extent he was. But he was also a natural, someone to whom, as he always admitted, the game came easily. He just
saw
it differently from most everybody else.

Bird well knew that at age twenty-nine and seven years into his Hall of Fame career, there was nobody like him. And that was even taking into account his creaky back, which he first injured in the summer of 1985 when he was shoveling gravel at the home he had built for his mother in his native French Lick, Indiana. Even early in that marvelous 1985–86 season, Bird had sometimes needed the magic hands of his physiotherapist, Dan Dyrek, just to get out of a prone position. A month into the season Dyrek had been called to Bird’s suburban Boston home and couldn’t believe that the star was in that much pain. But the back gradually improved—it would never really get better—and Bird was on his way to another transcendent year.

Shortly after All-Star Weekend,
SI
sent me to write a story about whether Bird was, in fact, the greatest player ever. Magazines love these greatest-ever stories—men, in particular, are inveterate list makers, adept at wasting hour after hour in fervent arguments about whether Keith Moon or John Bonham was the greater drummer or whether
Taxi Driver
or
Raging Bull
was the greater De Niro vehicle—and, predictably, I got into the spirit and pretty much decided
that Bird was the greatest ever, backed up by several quotes from unbiased observers, one being John Wooden. “I’ve always considered Oscar Robertson to be the best player in the game,” the Wizard of Westwood told me. “Now I’m not so sure that Larry Bird isn’t.”

(Never mind that the following season I would find a different all-time best, Magic, and a couple of years after that another, Jordan. That’s how it goes in the list-making business; you have to have a short memory.)

I recall several things from that Bird story, beyond him telling me that
Bonanza
was his favorite TV show. Chuck Daly, later his Dream Team coach, told me that Bird deliberately “once knocked me ass over tin cups” after he drilled a jumper in front of the Detroit Pistons bench. Celtics teammate Danny Ainge told me that Bird was so good that from time to time he deliberately dribbled into trouble just to increase the degree of difficulty on the play, something that Bird confirmed. (Years later Kobe Bryant would be crucified when Phil Jackson claimed that Kobe did the same thing.) Bill Walton related a night when Bird dribbled into the corner, drew a triple-team, then zipped him a pass that traveled through Joe Barry Carroll’s legs.

Bird was also not shy about professing his proficiency at other sports, something that always fascinates me about pro athletes. (Jordan always mused about how well he could’ve done not only in baseball, a question to which we later got an answer, but also at sports such as track and football.) Bird told me, in all seriousness, that he was as adept at backyard badminton as he was at basketball. He also said that he wasn’t “weight-room strong but cock-strong,” a farmer’s expression that has nothing to do with the penis. And he loved to brag about his softball skills (a sport he enjoyed playing with his brothers for Terre Haute’s Platolene 500–Carpet Center team) as a power hitter and first baseman/outfielder. Bird had shattered a knuckle in a softball injury he had suffered years later and always claimed he couldn’t feel the basketball as well after that. I never knew whether to believe that.

I was particularly intrigued by Bird’s ambidexterity, which went
well beyond his ability to dribble with his left hand. Bird looked utterly comfortable shooting left-handed, as he did from time to time, and he both ate and signed autographs with his left. He just grew up that way. He says that he always picked up a pencil and wrote with his left, yet when a teacher sent him to the blackboard to write he used his right hand.

There was about Bird the mystique of a street hustler, always with something up his sleeve, always some kind of trump-card chicanery at the ready. Quinn Buckner, a former Bird teammate who would later be on the committee that would select the Dream Team, tells of Bird’s wizardry during a practice shooting game called Knockout. “You’d be ready to win, and all of a sudden—I’m not making this up—Larry would throw up a shot that would not only knock your ball away from the basket but would also
go in itself
,” says Buckner. “The man could play pool and basketball at the same time.”

Buckner conjures up a moment during a game when he was streaking downcourt and Bird wound up to throw him a long pass despite the fact that a defender was directly in the line between them. “So Larry throws this thing that starts way out to the left, veers around the defender, and curves
right into my hands
,” Buckner says. “Nobody in history—nobody—threw those kinds of passes.”

That Bird had even agreed to compete in this 1986 three-point contest was a triumph for the NBA because no one was quite sure how that particular sideshow was going to turn out. But Bird had signed on for a few reasons. It appealed to the gunslinger aspect of his game—he loved the pre- and post-practice shooting games in which he engaged with teammates Ainge and Jerry Sichting. He loved the idea that, as talk about the three-point contest heated up, he was not necessarily considered the favorite since players such as Craig Hodges, Dale Ellis, and Wood were long-distance specialists. With a game on the line, Bird was everybody’s choice, of course, but that was not necessarily the case in an exhibition, where his relatively slow delivery would be a liability. Bird wanted to show that such an analysis was flawed.

And so, a few minutes before the competition in Dallas was to begin and seven of the eight players who would be participating in the three-point contest were gathered in a locker room, suddenly the door burst open and in strode Bird, asking, “Who’s comin’ in second?” Then he reiterated his feelings about the slippery red-white-and-blue balls.

It was pretty much over at that point. Bird didn’t even remove his warm-up jacket for the first two rounds—he always insisted that it was not a fuck-you move but just how he felt comfortable—and went up against sharpshooter Hodges in the final. It was no contest. Now in his absurdly bright red East All-Star uniform, Bird drained nine shots in a row at one point and even deliberately banked in the red-white-and-blue ball near the end.

Bird was ecstatic. His first comments were directed to his Boston teammates who had kidded him that he wouldn’t win, and specifically to veteran M. L. Carr, who used to claim that he was the “three-point king.” So Bird stole his line. “I’m the three-point king,” Bird yelped, over and over. “I’m the three-point king.” Even later in his career, it would bring a smile to his face when someone called him the three-point king. He was, too, in a way that Bird didn’t even intend at the time. He probably wasn’t the first great three-point shooter, a title that might belong to Dale Ellis. But he was the first true superstar to incorporate the three-point shot into his game, and he remains the greatest combination of player and three-point shooter in NBA history.

Bird would win the contest the next two years, too, but there was something about that first one. It came in the middle of a championship season, and it seemed to say everything about Bird—the deadly concentration, the balls-out confidence, the pure joy he got from playing the game better than anyone else. There was just something about Larry, something that earned him the sobriquet of “Legend” even if we allow for the fact that Jordan was a better all-around player and Magic (five championships to Bird’s three) was a greater winner.

We cannot, ever, divorce Bird from his ethnicity. The fact that
millions of white youngsters all over the world gravitated to Bird, found him almost godlike, is not racist, but it is certainly racial. Ditto for the millions who detested him purely because he was white, theorizing that his fame, trumpeted by a mostly white press, was chimerical.

But those who knew him knew that his grittiness was hard-earned, legit, that his darkness-on-the-edge-of-town upbringing (his alcoholic father committed suicide when Bird was eighteen) was the foundation of his character.