Then, too, Gomelsky was prepared for Thompson’s stifling press, which had intimidated and shut down so many collegiate opponents. Gomelsky worked on little else during the practice sessions in Seoul, insisting on an elaborate set of screens to free Marciulionis and get open shots for players such as Sabonis and Volkov. He didn’t want backcourt turnovers to be converted into dunks. “Don’t let them fast-break dunk,” Gomelsky told his charges. “When they do that, their arms turn into wings.” The man knew his way around a phrase.
The Soviets won 82–76, thus becoming somewhat the Darwin’s finches of worldwide basketball, the marker of the evolutionary changes that had come upon us. Unlike 1972, this loss to the Soviets was no fluke, no give-’em-three-chances-to-win. The United States just got beat.
The Admiral averaged a respectable 12.8 points and 6.8 rebounds in Seoul, but he didn’t dominate, didn’t snarl his way through the competition. And he took it very hard. “I thought, obviously, I had missed my one and only chance to get a gold medal,” he says today. “And it was an embarrassment because I thought we were good enough. The ’72 team was robbed. We just got beat. And man, I grew up with the Olympics. I loved the Olympics. This was a big, big black mark.”
In the United States, the 1988 team is still looked upon as an abject failure. That is wrongheaded. With a different approach, yes, the United States could’ve won, but its defeat wasn’t necessarily an upset. That was the message conveyed by anyone who had his eyes open.
Gold medal: the Soviet Union. Silver medal: Yugoslavia. Bronze medal: the United States.
We’re number three! We’re number three!
Nobody in charge ever wanted to see that again. But, seemingly, there was nothing that could be done about it.
Robinson was disappointed and discouraged that he had been blamed. But he wasn’t all that surprised. He had played on touring U.S. teams before and seen the growth in European basketball, his nimble mind uncovering the fact that, though he himself was athletically blessed, there was more to this game than running and jumping.
And there was more to life than basketball. It was around this time that Robinson began feeling the first stirrings of discontent with his life’s path, not the basketball so much but the spiritual part of it. He felt empty inside, and he began searching for something else.
CHAPTER 9
THE CHOSEN ONE
And So Does a Fork Become a Holy Relic
On the morning of May 7, 1989, I came down to breakfast at a suburban Cleveland hotel, the same one at which the Chicago Bulls were staying for their semifinal Eastern Conference series against the Cleveland Cavaliers. The deciding Game 5 was that afternoon. At breakfast I chatted up coach Doug Collins and his assistants, Johnny Bach and Tex Winter, both of whom spun more stories than Scheherazade, and I even collected a quote or two from Jordan. That sort of impromptu meeting rarely happens these days. While reporters may graze away at the make-your-own-waffles station, players are eating in a private room or skipping breakfast altogether. But the Bulls in those days were a young team—Jordan, Pippen, Horace Grant—and they made their own waffles.
Jordan was in his fifth season, engaged in the heavy-lifting process of trying to get a championship ring. He had no peer as a player, but there was still a resistance to him. Was he a winner, like Bird and Magic? He had become the individual face of the NBA, so seemingly comfortable in the spotlight that few people remembered that he had once been a tongue-tied kid who in 1985 was so nervous that he couldn’t get through his lines in his first McDonald’s commercial.
Although Jordan was cordial, he was not particularly enamored of me at that moment. About seven weeks earlier I had come to Chicago to do a story on Jordan, and he invited me to his suburban townhouse to hang out with him and his boys. One of the delightful aspects of Jordan’s life at that point was how close he had remained to his boyhood chums, who included Adolph Shiver, Fred Whitfield, and Fred Kearns. It was a variation on the customary leader-of-the-pack syndrome that so often gets star athletes into trouble. Some athletes cannot or will not disentangle themselves from their past and end up giving too much money and too much power to guys who shouldn’t be around. But Jordan’s circle consisted of good guys and solid citizens, the whole scene a kind of early Entourage, African American style, without the Cristal and the blow. (Whitfield is today president of the Charlotte Bobcats, the franchise partially owned and run by Jordan.)
At the end of the afternoon, a young lady, Juanita Vanoy—who later became Mrs. Michael Jordan, and, years after that, the very rich ex–Mrs. Michael Jordan when she received about $168 million in a divorce settlement—came down the stairs holding a baby. I was astonished because I hadn’t heard that Jordan was a father, and we spent the next thirty minutes billing and cooing over the kid.
Later that night, at the game at Chicago Stadium, Tim Hallam, the Bulls’ PR chief, collared me and said: “You know, Michael expects that you won’t write that he has a son.” Tim was just doing his job.
“But, Tim, I saw the baby,” I answered. “We talked about diapers and stuff like that. He didn’t say anything about not writing it.”
“Well, he told me to tell you that. A couple other guys know it and haven’t written it.”
To me, it was a journalistic dilemma, not a moral one. The list of human beings who have had children out of wedlock is quite long and includes friends and relatives of mine. What did I care? But I didn’t see how I could hide the fact that Jordan had a baby—what was he going to do, store Jeffrey Michael in a closet?—so I put it in that week’s story as the last paragraph.
I was criticized in Chicago both for burying it and for writing it at all. And Jordan let it be known that he was upset. But those were different times, when détente was possible between journalist and subject, and he let it go.
Anyway, at breakfast that morning in Cleveland, the Bulls left, and a teenager stealthily approached the table and grabbed a utensil.
“Look!” he shouted. “Michael Jordan’s fork! Michael Jordan ate with this fork!” He stuck it in his pocket and walked out of the restaurant.
I’ve thought about that fork from time to time. Does he still have it in a collection somewhere? Is it on eBay? Encased in glass at his law office?
When you hung around Jordan, your story quite often almost wrote itself. A year earlier during a visit to Chicago, I was waiting for Jordan after practice, and he told me to jump into his car so he could dodge the autograph hounds. As we cruised through the parking lot of a shopping center in his Porsche 911 Turbo, two cars just about cut him off, forcing Jordan to brake. A man jumped from one car holding a sweatsuit to which he had affixed an Air Jordan logo, while two autograph seekers leaped from the other. Jordan dutifully signed his name and took the sweatsuit guy’s card, all of that theater supplying invaluable material for a journalist.
As for the fork, well, it became a collectible after Jordan stuck a metaphorical one in the Cavaliers. That was the day he made an impossible double-clutch jump shot (his 43rd and 44th points of the game), with 6′7″ Cavaliers defender Craig Ehlo hanging all over him, to give the Bulls an absurdly dramatic 101–100 victory and the series. My favorite part of the clip, which you’ve seen about a thousand times, is Ehlo wistfully throwing up his hands, as if to say, This just isn’t fair. Which it wasn’t.
Before the Bulls broke from the huddle, Jordan had whispered to his teammate Craig Hodges, “I’m going to make it.” The Bulls frequently ran what Bach called “the Archangel Offense,” defined by the assistant as “getting the ball to Jordan and saying, ‘Save us, Michael.’ ” After this game, Doug Collins, who looked more exhausted than Jordan, said this about the play, “That was the give-the-ball-to-Michael-and-everybody-else-get-the-fuck-out-of-the-way play.” Jordan cracked up but looked embarrassed that Collins had used the F-word. Indeed, at that time, in casual conversation Jordan would say things like “Eff you” and “that MF-er.” There was an innocence about him, and I always thought that it might n
ever have been better for him than it was on that day in Cleveland, his star rising, his future bright and unclouded, his breakfast utensils sacred tokens.
CHAPTER 10
THE OLD GUARD
Here Today … Gone Real Soon
In April 1989, about a month before Jordan made his oft-replayed shot over Ehlo, the Inspector of Meat got his wish. Boris Stankovic had never wavered in his crusade to get open competition into the Olympics, not even after his first attempt at passing the resolution, at the FIBA Congress in Madrid in 1986, failed. Getting the NBA into FIBA had by this time taken on a pragmatic aspect for Stankovic, too: After the 1980 Moscow Games, the Olympics boycotted by the United States, FIBA had been hemorrhaging money and was heading for bankruptcy. It needed both the sizzle and the steak that would come with the addition of NBA players.
So at a specially convened FIBA Congress in Munich, which had been preceded by much behind-the-scenes arm-twisting, a resolution passed that allowed NBA players to participate in the Olympics. The vote was 56–13, the United States and the Soviet Union being among the nay votes.
“We knew it was going to pass,” said Commissioner David Stern, “but we were absolutely not enthusiastic about it. It was sort of like, ‘Okay, what do we do now?’ ”
That’s a slight exaggeration, but it’s absolutely true that no full-scale mobilization was under way at the NBA offices in mid-town Manhattan. In fact, the vote got relatively scant attention in the United States because many observers believed there was no practical application. Nobody would ever get NBA players to go to the Olympics. Among the most skeptical was college hoops commentator Billy Packer, who said that NBA owners would not let their players play, and anyway, selfish NBA players would not want to give up their vacation. The late Al McGuire, a commentator of whom you couldn’t make any sense but whom you liked to hear talk anyway, said the same thing. Besides, this was spring, the opening of Major League Baseball, and, more than ever, there was Michael Jordan. Who could think of something that might or might not happen at the Olympics three years in the future?
In one corner of the United States, however, there was considerable interest. Immediately after the Final Four in Seattle, a group of men from ABAUSA, the body that governed amateur basketball in the United States, flew to Munich for the FIBA meeting. Their official role was to cast a no vote on the resolution, a vote they all knew was pointless because it was obvious that the Inspector of Meat would not have called the meeting if he didn’t have the votes.
Dave Gavitt had just been elected ABAUSA president and, as such, would be the official voter. He voted no, but what he really wanted to say was yes. By that time, Gavitt had already paid a visit to the NBA offices, where he told Stern and Granik: “Look, we’re going to vote no, but it’s going to pass. You better get ready to decide how you want to handle this.”
Stern had an idea: the NBA would simply buy the Olympic team from ABAUSA.
“It’s not for sale,” Gavitt told him. “It’s the country’s team. What you need to do is become part of ABAUSA, and I promise you that in putting together the committee we will protect you and make sure you have the majority of representation coming from the NBA.”
It was Gavitt’s insistence that the NBA buy in lock, stock, and barrel that made all the difference in the end. While others feared the coming of the monolithic NBA, Gavitt saw the advantages. For one thing, the amateur organization—which depended primarily on funding from the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) and a half-assed contract with Converse that was worth about $300,000, a sum that Nike was tucking into the soles of Jordan’s shoes by then—was nearly broke. The NBA, its Michael/Magic/Larry renaissance still building, was awash in cash. Gavitt suggested that if NBA Properties could step in and do the marketing, everyone would benefit. Stern said okay.
In amateur basketball circles, Gavitt had done it all, seen it all. He had been a successful and respected coach and athletic director, one of the masterminds behind the creation of the Big East Conference, and, most impressive, the moving force behind the expansion of the NCAA basketball tournament into a billion-dollar bonanza. Soon after the amateur vote, the Boston Celtics would come calling, naming Gavitt CEO. Like many college guys who went to the pros in some capacity—Rick Pitino, Jerry Tarkanian, John Calipari, Lon Kruger, Leonard Hamilton, Tim Floyd, and that is not the end of the list—Gavitt would find that jump a long one, Beamonesque in its difficulty. But that would have no bearing on his importance in what was to become a sea change in Olympic basketball. “In many ways, Dave was the classic college guy,” says Russ Granik, “but he was also someone who saw the whole picture.”
About basketball, Gavitt was both visionary and romantic. He died at 73 in September of 2011, but in 2010, during a memorable lunch in his hometown, Providence, he conjured up a long-ago evening from the mid-1970s, when he was coaching a college all-star team in Athens. “We were playing a night game and there must’ve been thirty thousand people there and the Acropolis was in the background with a full moon,” Gavitt remembered. “I had chills.”
Gavitt never spoke from a bully pulpit. He was smooth, a work-the-room diplomat who played both sides and from the beginning knew which side was going to win. Still, Gavitt had to mute his enthusiasm for the idea of open competition, for he was, after all, heading a group that was observing its own extinction.
“For me it was kind of simple,” Gavitt told me. “I felt that people in our country should have the same rights to represent their country as everyone else. I never bothered to lobby the college community with that opinion because they were squarely against it. They were against pros playing in the Olympics. Period.”
After Gavitt had cast the no vote on behalf of the United States and the resolution had passed, he asked for the floor. “Now that we’ve done this,” Gavitt told the FIBA reps, “you need to realize a few things and help us. We’re dealing with a powerful organization in the NBA, and we’re going to have to get your cooperation with dates and things like that.”
There were questions from other nations about how the United States would get its NBA players to participate—it wasn’t only Packer and McGuire who thought the idea of pros giving up their summer was folly. But Stankovic would have none of it. “That’s not our problem,” the Inspector of Meat told the delegates sternly. “That’s the problem of the United States. What we have to do is the right thing, and then let them work it out.”
After the vote, the U.S. delegation had a layover in Amsterdam on their way back. Gavitt had dinner with Bill Wall and Tom McGrath, the executive and assistant executive director, respectively, of ABAUSA. The future was uncertain, particularly for Wall, who had run the organization since the mid-1970s. That’s when ABAUSA was created to supplant the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), the confederation of stuffed shirts and clueless bureaucrats who, with an infuriating arbitrariness, had run amateur sports in this country for decades.
McGrath was an ABAUSA guy all the way, but he was younger than Wall and more politically nimble. He might’ve resented the NBA intrusion, but he saw the future and knew that much of the old organization’s resistance came from, as he puts it today, “not wanting to vote ourselves out of office.” Wall could see that his time was up and absolutely resented it. At the 1986 FIBA Congress, when the resolution of open competition was first brought up by Stankovic and soundly defeated, Wall had spoken out passionately against admitting pros, and he still felt the same way. Wall was aligned with George Killian, a politician of the first order who would later become a U.S. delegate to the International Olympic Committee. Gavitt and Killian never got along, so Wall didn’t get along well with Gavitt, either.
But Wall did grasp the irony, too: the NBA was about to do to ABAUSA exactly what his group had once done to the AAU—turn it into the Edsel.
“You have to understand how much change this was for the college guys, and I was one of them,” said C. M. Newton, who, like Granik and Gavitt, was an important person in keeping the peace between the c
ollege types and the pro types. “Charter flights and exclusive hotels and the idea that we were going to train in Monte Carlo? These were things that David [Stern] and Russ [Granik] insisted on, and they were foreign to us.”
There would be talk later, from both Wall and McGrath, about how well the NBA had treated ABAUSA. But much of that is attributable to the fact that it’s not wise to piss off David Stern, not then, not now, not ever. Make no mistake about it: by the time the vote for open competition had been taken, the NBA had angered the amateur organization. The McDonald’s Open, for example, should’ve been an ABAUSA operation, but it turned into largely a Stern-Stankovic operation. The two men—oligarchs both, masters of their respective kingdoms—had become simpatico and done much of the planning and negotiation with their own people, their eyes now on a joint prize.
But at that dinner in Amsterdam, there was still business to discuss, as hazy as the future might be. Wall wasn’t out yet, and he, Gavitt, and McGrath began talking. Nobody could be sure of how substantial the NBA participation was going to be. The group finally reasoned that six NBA players, probably none of them top-flight stars, would sign on. They figured that elite NBA players would never sacrifice playing time for the sake of pursuing a gold medal.
There was also the matter of a coach. All discussions were premature, but none of these men thought for a moment that the monarchial progression would not take place, which meant that, in all likelihood, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski would be the 1992 Olympic coach in Barcelona. Of course it would be a college coach, for aren’t they the resident geniuses of American sport?
Dream Team Page 6
