“As they were coming in, Barkley, at that moment, turned and dunked on Karl Malone,” remembers Laettner. “The power of it was amazing, and I looked up at them and saw that amazed expression on their faces.”
By then the college kids had their instructions from coach Roy Williams, who had gotten his instructions from Chuck Daly and USA Basketball. Hurley was to dribble-penetrate every time he could. The idea was not to finish at the rim—which Hurley couldn’t do anyway and would not be able to do when he subsequently reached the pros—but to kick to jump shooters such as Alan Houston and Jamal Mashburn. The big men, Chris Webber, Eric Montross, and Rodney Rogers, were to battle underneath with ferocity, pretend that they were mature players such as Lithuania’s Arvydas Sabonis. And the athletic all-arounders, Hill and Penny Hardaway, were to be relentless on offense and play at a pace to which the Dream Teamers were not accustomed. “Play like the Europeans,” Williams instructed them.
As the collegians gathered at the sideline, Hill still remembers the chilling words from Williams: “Grant, you got M.J.” Oh, crap, thought Hill. I’m guarding Michael Jordan! And Hill’s heart skipped a beat when Magic Johnson ambled out to center court. He was the player after whom Hill tried to pattern his style, “and I do mean try,” says Hill.
The Dream Teamers were at this early stage trying to figure each other out, over-passing and trying not to step on one another’s game. The collegians, by contrast, were tuned-up high-performing automobiles impatiently waiting for the starter’s flag.
Hurley was the key. He was an unusual player, a pallid six-footer with no discernible athleticism. But he had been schooled by two of the world’s best coaches—his father, Bob Hurley Sr., at St. Anthony’s in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Krzyzewski at Duke—so his basic chops were in order. And he wasn’t a robot designed according to some instructional manual. There was a lot of street in Hurley. What he had was the best point-guard quality, albeit an ineffable one: he could get where he wanted to go.
And where he wanted to go was by Magic Johnson, who guarded him much of the time. The collegians won the game 88–80, Hurley its star. When the media were allowed in, I distinctly remember that the Dream Teamers looked a bit down in the mouth. When word filtered out that they had been beaten by the college kids, there was a certain and predictable it-was-only-practice tone to their comments. But it went deeper than that.
Now, let’s keep this in perspective. There’s no reason to believe that without the loss to the collegians, the Dream Team would’ve been in trouble in Barcelona. As Hill says, “I don’t think they were alarmed or anything like that. It was more a wake-up call.” Krzyzewski says that Daly “orchestrated” the loss, pulling Jordan out at crucial times and deliberately letting the action continue even though there were obvious times to stop it and make corrections.
I watched a tape of the game and can confirm that that is the case. It sounds like a fascinating historical document—as the intrasquad scrimmage in Monte Carlo would prove to be (Chapter 28)—but it isn’t. It has too much the feel of a loose practice session. “Chuck just wanted for one day to plant the idea that we could conceivably lose,” says Krzyzewski.
Still, even though Magic was the one telling the team, “This is bullshit. We gotta get together,” he was the focus of minor concern behind the scenes. Magic was never good at staying in front of small, quick guards, preferring to lurk in the passing lanes and use his wits and experience to make steals. Hurley had exposed him, and at that night’s meeting the decision was made that Jordan and Pippen would defend quick point guards who might present problems.
Which didn’t surprise Pippen. “I knew why I was on that team,” Pippen told me years later. “I knew I was there more to defend than anything else. And that was fine with me.”
That policy was enacted in the following day’s practice. Jordan played Hurley some of the time, and the Duke quarterback struggled to even get the ball to midcourt. Then Daly put Pippen on Hurley and it was just as bad. Without a penetrating offense, the Dream Team drilled the collegians. I never saw a videotape of that game, but the rumored margin of victory was about 40 points, not that anyone remembers exactly. “We beat ’em like they stole something,” said Barkley.
From that point on the Dream Team became a team, finding its own identity, cutting the corners that could be cut, discovering those little important details (Robinson likes to post up here; Jordan will be available as a bailout there; Barkley likes to get the ball right away in transition but wait until Malone gets moving to give it to him), adding the grace notes that give a team its harmony.
Years later, one of the best explanations of the Dream Team’s level of play came from Laettner, to whom it was newest.
“The first thing I remember was how unbelievable their transition was from defense to offense,” Laettner told me in 2011. “It was instantaneous, at least three steps faster than in college. That was a huge adjustment, even for a player who was used to running. It was the anticipation along with the quickness.
“And then what I remember is that, suddenly, all I had to do was move around and catch the ball. It was like I was a fourteen-year-old kid again playing with my dad’s thirty-five-year-old men’s league team. You’re young and quick, so you do all the cutting and you run through with your hands up, and they’re old and good and they will always find you. You don’t have to do any one-on-one moves. You just move, put your hands up and the ball is there.”
Most fun of all for the Dream Teamers, though, was finding a teammate’s weak spot and grinding him into pulp. Ewing took grief for shooting outside too much. Barkley was derided for fading during scrimmages. Drexler would be torched for his proclivity to dribble with his head down and always to his right, after which he would try to go left, get fouled up, and then get verbally ground up again.
One way to put that college week in perspective, to gauge what it takes to become a truly great player—the sacrifices, the hard work, the good fortune—is to consider what happened in the NBA to those collegians who at that time represented the best and the brightest.
Hill was a terrific pro, still going strong at age thirty-nine at this writing. But his potential Hall of Fame, Dream Teamer type of career was derailed by injuries. Ditto for Hardaway, a splendid talent who made four All-Star teams but proved also to be a petulant locker-room lawyer. (Plus I, like so many others, wanted to terminate with extreme prejudice that damn Lil’ Penny doll, a Nike marketing idea.) Like so many in the post-Jordan era, Hardaway’s game never matched his hype. Houston was limited by a knee injury and by the stigma of being vastly overpaid, having gotten about $20 million per year from the New York Knicks before the 2001–02 season, one of the worst NBA contracts ever and representative of what the Knicks would do throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Hurley never recovered from injuries suffered in a near-fatal car crash in his rookie season with the Sacramento Kings, 1993–94. It’s anyone’s guess if he would’ve made himself into a great NBA player. My guess is no, but he would’ve been dependable and productive.
Webber had a fine NBA career with averages of 20.7 points and 9.8 rebounds, but he never pushed himself like Malone to be a truly dominant player, never developed a jump shot like Ewing, never glided around the court to block shots like Robinson, never got within sniffing distance of the Hall of Fame. Mashburn turned out to be a volume shooter who made only one All-Star team. Montross was a stiff, Erector-set-style center who never made an impact. Rodney Rogers was an okay pro who, sad to say, was paralyzed from the shoulders down in a post-retirement dirt bike accident in 2008.
So much promise. So much went wrong.
When the collegians got back to their rooms on that golden day after beating the Dream Team, they talked excitedly among themselves, theorizing that, with a few more good players, they could probably go out and win the gold medal. Only later would the realistic among them realize that that was not the case. But they still have the memories of mingling wi
th the immortals and the distinction of being the only team in the world to get the best of the Dream Team, however briefly.
“It was unbelievable,” says Hill, who shared his memories of San Diego with me for a solid hour. “I mean, with all due respect to the birth of my children and my marriage, it was the best week of my life.” He smiled. “Make sure you go easy on that.”
CHAPTER 23
THE WRITER
The Action Begins in Portland and Everyone Wants a Piece
For much of June and early July, Portland, Oregon, turned out to be the basketball capital of the world. The City of Roses had outbid Seattle, Hartford, and Indianapolis to host the Tournament of the Americas, through which the United States had to qualify for the Olympics, and by chance the Trail Blazers had also hosted Games 3, 4, and 5 of the NBA Finals, winning two of those but ultimately losing the decisive Game 6 to the Jordan and Pippen Bulls in Chicago.
So to those of us covering the playoffs and then the Dream Team, Portland had become a second home, and it couldn’t have been more perfect. Portland was (still is) a fantastic city, hard by the Willamette River, funky and not overly gentrified, clean and comfortable, a city for your grandmother, your budding punk rocker, your underachieving intellectual driving hack. The citizenry took its Blazers extremely seriously but not itself. The city had great restaurants, an iconic local treasure called Powell’s Books where one could lose himself for an afternoon, and an immortal bar on First Avenue called the Veritable Quandary (still there), where they had a lot on tap and a lot on tape. You wanted Stevie Ray Vaughan one night, you got it; you wanted the Clash the next night, you got that, too.
The tournament wasn’t originally called the Tournament of the Americas and in fact wasn’t even supposed to be in the United States. The FIBA schedule had called for the North and South American Zone Qualifying Tournament to be held in Brazil in March 1992, right around the time that NBA teams would be jockeying for playoff position and the NCAA was in full tournament mode. Had someone—be it the International Olympic Committee, FIBA, or the other qualifying teams—won a power struggle to keep that tournament in that place at that date, not only would there have been no Michael, Magic, or Larry, but there wouldn’t even have been Hill, Hurley, or Webber.
But that was never going to happen. A little not-so-gentle arm-twisting by the NBA, Dave Gavitt, and the Inspector of Meat was all that was needed to move this clambake to friendly soil.
The broadcast rights belonged to COPABA, a corporate entity owned by a wealthy Brazilian named Jorge Ramos. Gavitt had been hanging around the NBA folks long enough by now to know what he had to do—put up some cold cash, a language Ramos could understand. It was between $3 million and $4 million and was supplied by the United States Olympic Committee, which had a surplus from the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. USA Basketball then bought television time from both NBC and TNT, the latter having recently come aboard as a broadcast partner, and handed the whole thing over to NBA Properties.
It was in Portland that one first realized the far-reaching scope of the Dream Team. La Jolla/San Diego had been crawling with American reporters, but at the Tournament of the Americas it turned international. The opposing teams were Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela, each of which brought with it a local hero, most notably Brazil, whose high-scoring Oscar Schmidt was a legend overseas. At last the United States had a couple of flesh-and-blood targets.
“Ooh, Oscar Schmidt!” said Barkley. “I’m shaking in my boots.” When Barkley would pause for a moment to actually offer a serious comment, it would go something like this. “I guard Larry Bird and James Worthy and Kevin McHale and Dominique Wilkins and a dozen other guys during the season,” he’d say. “Why the fuck would I be worried about Oscar Schmidt?” As for Oscar Schmidt, who once had been talked about as being a draftable NBA player, (my own feeling is that he could’ve played in the league in his prime, which was between 1980 and 1988), here was his goal for the tournament: “I want all the American team’s autographs if possible,” said Schmidt. “Larry Bird is my idol. If I could play against him, it would be a great satisfaction.” Now there was a real “Beat the USA!” battle cry. (Schmidt didn’t get his wish in Portland, where he received only an autographed copy of Drive, an early autobiography Bird wrote with Bob Ryan, but he did in Barcelona.)
A small army of team officials, federation executives, entourages, and press contingents were there, too. International teams are notorious homers, but there was a different feeling about these visitors, who, like almost everyone else in Portland, were de facto Dream Team groupies.
Also in evidence were members of the United States Olympic Committee, who were close to getting their claws into the Dream Team. Until the United States officially qualified for Barcelona, the Dream Team was under the aegis of USA Basketball, but an Olympic team answers to the USOC, which was sick and tired of hearing about these millionaires who wanted to make their own rules.
The most obvious additions to this ever-expanding universe were the sponsors that had glommed onto the Dream Team. Behind closed doors they had been fighting pitched battles for months, trying to maximize their brand by association with this gang of all-star pitchmen. It was serious business with serious business consequences, but there was also a ludicrous territoriality to the whole thing that would culminate on the gold medal podium in Barcelona, where Nike god Michael Jordan would be forced to don a jacket made by Reebok. (Another topic for later.)
To those fighting the battles inside the NBA, USA Basketball, and the USOC, parsing out the conflicting contracts and relationships was a daily rat’s nest. These weren’t junior varsity sponsors that had come aboard; there were sixteen of them, and they were companies such as AT&T, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Gatorade, and Visa USA, all of which had paid seven figures for the privilege of association with USA Basketball, but really with Michael, Magic, Larry, et al.
A dizzying number of retailers, twenty-four of them, had also signed on with NBA Properties, which was now in full control of marketing and turning out all kinds of red-white-and-blue fiddle-faddle. NBA Properties hadn’t even existed a decade earlier, but by 1992 it had grown into one of the most sophisticated marketing juggernauts in the world. (David Stern would even suggest to Billy Payne, who was in charge of the 1996 Games in Atlanta, that NBA Properties assume all control of Olympic marketing; Payne, unwisely, said no.) In Portland, you couldn’t swing a cat without knocking over a USA Basketball cup or a USA Basketball calendar. My sons, who were fifteen and twelve at the time, had their instructions: they could buy anything they wanted with their own money, but we weren’t buying extra luggage to lug home a cache of Christian Laettner place mats. Then we took a trip to the Nike outlet store in Beaverton, Oregon, a requisite consumer journey, and had to buy an extra suitcase anyway.
The real intrigue came from the scrimmages about whose likeness could be put on what. Remember that the players had all sorts of endorsement deals of their own with companies that were not necessarily a part of Olympic marketing. And remember that no one can be a bigger pain in the ass than (a) agents who feel that their guy is getting screwed and (b) company execs who feel that they are not getting ultimate leverage out of their deals.
The earliest battles were fought over the feet. Converse was an official sponsor of USA Basketball, not to mention a longtime supporter of the amateur basketball program and America’s de facto historical basketball shoe. Which made not a scintilla of difference to Jordan and Nike. Months before the team got together, Jordan’s agent, David Falk, had told USA Basketball officials that his client’s likeness was not to appear on Olympic apparel that was not sponsored by Nike. Some saber-rattling and tort-threatening ensued before a tentative compromise was worked out, one that, to echo once again the words of William Goldman, was set, just not set set, and would erupt in Barcelona.
The players were due some monies from the fast-flowing revenue stream that came from sponsorship and merchandi
se sales. Charles Grantham, a member of the USA Basketball committee but also president of the National Basketball Players Association, had insisted early on that the Dream Teamers get 33 percent of the pie, a figure that was unpopular both with his fellow committee members (who preferred something more like 0 percent) and other agents (who preferred something more like 50 percent). “As politically sensitive as all this was,” Grantham says today, “I didn’t want players to appear greedy. But neither did I want them to be exploited. So I thought one-third was fair.”
However, by that point Dave Gavitt—the political marvel—had already intervened, having buttonholed his Celtics captain, Bird, about giving the money back. “USA Basketball needs it, Larry,” Gavitt told him. “You’re the first guy I’m coming to.” Nobody was exactly sure what the sum would turn out to be, but Bird remembers it as somewhere between $600,000 and $800,000. “You’re crazy, Dave,” Bird told him. “But go ahead and ask.” Gavitt went to selected guys. Magic, of course, who said he would do what Bird did. Jordan, of course, who said he would give it back. Eventually, Gavitt secured enough pledges, and the deal was done. A couple of players may have kept the money. But not many. “That’s how smooth Dave Gavitt was,” Bird says today. “He got a bunch of basketball players to give up money.”
Still, there was much understandable cynicism attached to, say, Jordan’s Olympic participation. You mean to tell me he’s not doing this for the money? Well, he wasn’t. In fact, the bigger the star, the less he prospered from Barcelona. The Olympics needed Jordan; Jordan didn’t need the Olympics. “Did it make Michael more international and give him a broader stage?” says David Falk. “Of course. But Michael already had that and we didn’t do any new deals because of the Olympics. From purely a commercial standpoint, the Dream Team didn’t have nearly as much impact on Michael, or, for that matter, on Patrick, as the 1984 Olympics.” Lon Rosen, Magic’s representative, says much the same thing: “The value of bigger stars, like Earvin and Michael, is always as individuals, and most of the Olympic marketing was as a group.”
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