So Robinson shook his head, smiled beatifically, picked up his bag, and left.
On the way home, I drove the rental car, Drexler beside me, Barkley and Hubbard in the back. I felt compelled to challenge the mountain passes like a thief fleeing from a heist because, well, when in the Riviera … We later discovered that it was on that road in 1982 that Princess Grace had suffered a stroke, which caused her to crash her Rover P6. She died from injuries the next day at Monaco Hospital.
“At the top of the mountain, the four of us were talking/arguing but in between educating/correcting us all on every subject, Barkley noticed that you were driving faster and the curves on the mountain were getting sharper,” remembers Hubbard.
“ ‘Damn, Jack, slow down!’ Barkley yelled. ‘You’re gonna get us all killed. Nobody will give a shit about you, but the NBA’s gonna be pissed!’ ”
According to Hubbard’s memory, I continued at the same pace, and a nervous Drexler actually raised his voice and implored me to slow down. He couldn’t be heard, however, because Barkley was screaming louder and threatening me with bodily harm. “Charles, the guy behind me is on my ass,” I said. “I can’t slow down. He’ll hit me.”
As we got closer to the bottom of the mountain, we began ruminating about the headlines that would ensue from a fatal crash.
“ ‘Barkley, Drexler, Two Others Die in Monte Carlo!’ ” Hubbard suggested.
“They’ll probably just make it ‘Two Dream Teamers Killed in Crash’ and leave us out entirely,” I said.
“Shit, they won’t even care about Clyde,” Barkley offered. “ ‘Charles Barkley Dead!’ That’s what it would say.”
“That is cold, Charles,” Drexler said.
Later, in Barcelona, Robinson and Barkley would have a conversation about Christianity, Apollo sitting down with Dionysus. They were lifting weights—“Well, I was lifting and Charles was just sitting there,” says Robinson—and Barkley said to him, “David, you need to say what’s on your mind. You need to be more honest.” Robinson responded this way: “What you mean to say is not more honest. You mean more controversial. That’s two different things.”
And then Robinson opened up to him.
“Charles, I love the fact that you’re not afraid to say what you want to say even if it’s going to get you in trouble. And that will be an even better thing if you ever give your heart to the Lord. You’re going to need that quality of talking plain because people will not necessarily want to hear what you’re saying.”
After Robinson told me that story, I said that while Charles had not yet given his heart to the Lord, the Lord clearly had not yet smitten him for all his wicked ways; indeed, the Lord might have been laughing along with everyone else at Barkley’s TNT act. “How do you explain that?” I asked.
Robinson laughed. “I’m still praying about that,” he said. “I love Charles. I still love talking to him. It’s not my job to make him do something. All I can do is plant seeds.”
In my mind’s eye, I still see Robinson walking off the course on that day. I didn’t necessarily want to be like him, but I knew that it took much personal commitment, inner strength, and conviction to do that. Most athletic teams and most athletic relationships are built on a foundation of sophomoric humor, insults, and dick jokes, all of it wrapped in testosterone. To stand with your team, yet somehow to have the guts to stand alone from time to time … now, that takes a particular kind of man.
INTERLUDE, 2011
THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIER
And What Shall a Man Do with All His Gifts?
San Antonio, Texas
I am in the quietest school I ever heard, talking to the tallest academic CEO in the world. Ten years ago, when David Robinson was still a productive starting center for the Spurs, he launched Carver Academy, a five-acre kindergarten-through-sixth-grade private school built on blocks of ugly urban blight in San Antonio. “There were crack houses, prostitutes, drugs all around,” says Robinson, shaking his head at the memory before adding unnecessarily, “it was not a great neighborhood.”
I remember when Robinson started talking of his dream for Carver—how animated he would get about the idea of offering a private-school-quality education to an underserved class of kids, how he had been reading up on George Washington Carver, the African American scientist, botanist, and educator after whom he would name his school. Red McCombs, who owned the Spurs at the time, would tell him, “David, you’re underestimating how much time and money this is going to take.” And though Robinson had been the exception to so many rules over the years, there was a lot of reason to doubt him. Lots of athletes—lots of anybodys—start out with grand plans only to see them fade in the harsh light of reality. When you’ve made enough money to live for a lifetime, it’s easier to become a broadcaster, a real estate magnate, or a full-time recreational golfer.
But Robinson never lost sight of his goal. He put up $10 million in seed money—even for a highly compensated athlete, $10 million is walking the walk—started the school from scratch, and is still at it. After he retired in 2003, a year in which the Spurs won a championship, he bought a small interest (about 2 percent) in the franchise. But the vast majority of his time and money go to Carver. He and his wife, Valerie, have put in additional millions as the school has flourished, and Robinson continues to spend the majority of his waking hours keeping the school humming, raising money for scholarships and facility upgrades, supervising curriculum, hiring and firing, traveling to conferences—all those day-to-day things that define the lives of most of us, though generally not the lives of Hall of Fame athletes.
“I’ve been asked to franchise the idea,” says Robinson, pursing his lips and shaking his head, “and I would really like to do it. But right now … I just don’t know. There’s too much to do here.” He sounds vaguely guilty that he hasn’t peppered the nation with other Carver Academies. “Man, Red was right,” he says. “This is more work than I ever thought.” On the day we talked, Robinson had just arrived back in San Antonio from New York, where he had toured an Abyssinian school in Harlem. “I’m always looking for other models, other ways to do things,” said Robinson. “It’s just what you need to do.”
Hadn’t it been tempting, I ask him, to just kick back after retirement? I know that might be hard for a navy man who used to build TVs from scratch, but …
“This is what my calling is,” says Robinson. “I mean, what’s your goal in life? Just to enjoy money? Is that fulfilling? If I do less than this, I’ve taken all those gifts I’ve been given and buried them under a rug. I want my own kids and the kids at Carver to understand about passion, that there is a calling in life and that you have to find it.”
Carver is a faith-based school because Robinson, as you’ve already learned, is a faith-based person. At this writing, Robinson was leading, as he has for many years, a morning devotional group for men at Oak Hills Church, the home of superstar preacher Max Lucado. The crowd is usually around two hundred, many of whom originally came to see the pivot-man preacher but now just see him as a big man with a message.
“My faith is much stronger now than it was when I was playing,” Robinson says, “because when I look back I see how little I had to do with it. Okay, God, you blessed my career ridiculously. Two championships as a player and two as a part owner. Two Olympics. The Dream Team. I have these three amazing boys. My wife is just the best. I’m still learning about her. You’re going to nourish her and cherish her and encourage her. The Bible says to present her to God. You can’t ever quit on that.”
Being unsaved myself, as well as one whose wife rarely needs “encouragement,” I never know exactly where to go when Robinson talks about his faith. Several years ago I had a friendly debate with Lucado himself (I was interviewing him because Robinson and teammate Tim Duncan shared SI’s Sportsman of the Year Award) about his church’s fundamentalist position against homosexuality. Lucado is a far more skilled rhetorician than I, and I didn’t get far.
“Well, the Bi
ble is clear on its message about homosexuality,” Robinson tells me when I broach the subject with him. “It’s against it. But I think our role is the compassionate role, the same role I had when I went into the locker room, which is not to start preaching and say, ‘Hey, you guys have to stop cheating on your wives,’ but to love those guys and encourage those guys and lead them to want to live better lives.”
I protest that that still sounds like double-talk, like you’re fervently against someone who’s different and telling him he’s wrong for living that way, but then making it sound like a benevolent position.
“It’s not about making them feel bad,” answers Robinson. “It’s not my job to run around making people feel like, ‘Hey, you’re a freak of nature.’ Look, I’m a freak of nature. All I’m saying is live in a way that honors the word of God.”
Still, no one is cudgeled with fundamentalism at Carver. Faith is only one of the “six pillars” that form the bedrock philosophy of the school, along with service, leadership, initiative, integrity, and discipline. “We keep the kids thinking about those pillars all the time,” says Robinson. He makes a special point of this next comment, sounding as earnest as a Sunday school teacher stressing perfect attendance. “You learn the six pillars inside and out,” he says, “and you earn your Carver pin.”
As he leads me around the school, I can see his deserved pride, though to a man who follows the Word, pride goeth before a fall. So Robinson keeps his pride in check. There are no more than fifteen students in any classroom. Discipline problems are almost nonexistent, he says, and I believe it. The only sounds I hear in classrooms are a teacher’s voice or the higher register of a student’s response. About 95 percent of Carver students, who pay $10,000 for tuition, get some kind of need-based aid, which comes from fund-raising, an investment fund, and Robinson.
“Anyone, rich or poor, can come here,” says Robinson. “But I did want to particularly impact the kids in this neighborhood, offer scholarship opportunities, build a real fire in the community.”
He shows me the broadcast studio, the music room with fifteen Casio keyboards (the man whose DNA is more about music than basketball, as Jordan put it, still bangs out some chords for the students from time to time), the library, and the reading center (donated by the Spurs). He points to the signs, all quotations from Carver, that dot the walls—no graffiti here: “There is no shortcut to achievement.” “Life requires thorough preparation.” “Veneer isn’t worth anything.”
There is nothing to indicate that the school’s founder played fourteen NBA seasons and retired with career averages of 21.2 points and 10.6 rebounds and once scored 71 points in a single game, one of only five players to reach that absurd number.
“We look for excellence in sports here, too, but that’s not what it’s about,” said Robinson. “It’s not corny to be a good student here. Man, I always loved school. That’s what I wanted to foster in these kids.”
Hanging around Carver with Robinson makes a man ponder, if only for a moment, what he’s done with his life, whether he’s made a mark. As I look back on these pages, I see how comparatively little I’ve written about Robinson, at least in comparison to Michael/Magic/Larry and Charles. I get Google Alerts that mention Michael Jordan virtually every day, but when the name David Robinson shows up in those alerts, it more likely refers to a reporter for the Morning Sentinel, a business writer for the Buffalo News, the sheriff of Kings County in California, the biographer of Charlie Chaplin, a Tyne-class lifeboat, a climatologist for the state of New Jersey, the executive chairman of Australian Food and Fibre, or the bass player for the Cars. There is scant mention of Carver Academy.
As I write this, Robinson will not be aboard the Celebrity Love Train in Canton, Ohio, with Mike Tyson, Patti LaBelle, the O’Jays, and Mo’Nique, as Magic was in the summer of 2011. He will not command airtime all over the country to comment on the size of Brett Favre’s penis, present his idea that mediocre teams should “throw games” to move up in the draft, quip that truTV is “the white BET,” or discuss any of a dozen other subjects on which Barkley is called upon to comment in any given week.
Robinson was sometimes an afterthought, too, on that immortal team, whose members admired his athleticism, his grace, and his integrity but didn’t know him particularly well, and who talked, as Jordan did, about how basketball wasn’t his passion, how his success was due to the accident of his astounding genetic composition.
But twenty years later, as the greatness of the 1992 Olympic gold medalists becomes more and more a flickering light in history, I think that Robinson might be the truest Dream Teamer, a gentle and complex man from two worlds who lived the dream and, through the power of his own sweat and blood and faith, now gives a dream to others.
CHAPTER 28
THE GREATEST GAME THAT NOBODY EVER SAW
“They Just Moved Chicago Stadium to Monte Carlo. That’s All They Did”
The referee, a gentleman from Italy whose name no one seems to remember, dribbles to midcourt and looks to his colleague, Dream Team assistant coach P. J. Carlesimo, to see if he is ready. Carlesimo is ready, though ready is relative in this case, since P.J.’s participation over the next forty minutes will be limited, bringing new dimension to the phrase “swallowing the whistle.”
If the gentleman from Italy had to do it all over again, I’m sure he would’ve tossed the ball to Carlesimo and proceeded rapidly to the nearest exit of Stade Louis II, the all-purpose arena in the Fontvieille section of Monte Carlo. For soon he would become the unluckiest person in town, including all those who were surrendering vast quantities of French francs at the tables.
He tosses the ball up between Patrick Ewing and David Robinson, and Robinson taps it—on the way up and illegally—toward his own basket. Robinson’s teammate on the Blue team, Christian Laettner, races Scottie Pippen for the ball. Take note, for this is the first and last time in recorded history that this sentence will be written: Laettner beats Pippen to the ball. Laettner sweeps it behind his back to Blue teammate Charles Barkley, who catches it, takes a couple of gathering dribbles, and knifes between Michael Jordan and Larry Bird. Jordan grabs Barkley’s wrist, the whistle blows, and Barkley makes the layup.
“Shoot the fouls, shoot the fouls,” Chuck Daly yells, sounding like that character in Goodfellas, Jimmy Two Times. It’s morning and almost no one is in the stands, and Daly is trying to install gamelike conditions because even the best of the best need a kick in the ass from time to time. As Jordan calls for a towel—it is extremely humid in the arena and almost everyone is sweating off a little alcohol—Barkley makes the free throw.
Magic Johnson’s Blue Team 3, Michael Jordan’s White Team 0.
And so the Greatest Game That Nobody Ever Saw gets under way.
About twelve hours earlier, the United States had finished an exhibition game against the French national team. Prince Rainier had requested that Daly, his birthday homeboy, sit with him to deconstruct any nuances of the game of which he might be unaware, such as, for example, the one about coaches sitting on the bench. After some explanation, Rainier accepted Dave Gavitt as a replacement.
The United States–France game looked exactly like one would think an exhibition game in Monte Carlo would look like. It was awful. The players were still getting used to conditions—meaning the hilly terrain at the Monte Carlo Country Club and the nocturnal bass-beat rhythms at Jimmy Z’s—and even the seemingly inexhaustible Jordan was tired after walking eighteen holes and arriving back at the Loews not long before the 8:30 p.m. tip-off. One of his playing partners had been Daly, who proclaimed, “It’s a two-Nuprin, three-Advil day.” The Dream Team was sloppy and even allowed France leads of 8–2 and 16–13 before it woke up and went on to win 111–71.
It didn’t matter to the fans, though, who had gobbled up the 3,500 available tickets in a fifteen-minute box office frenzy a few days earlier. As had been the case at the Tournament of the Americas in Portland, the opposing team’s guys, at least a half
dozen of whom had brought cameras to the bench, were deemed heroic by dint of being slain. And there was certainly no thought of fallen French pride among the royals—Rainier beamed like a schoolkid when Magic climbed into his box for a photo op.
Happiest of all was the French coach, a man named Francis Jordane. “He was very excited because he figured that his last name would give him special entrée to Michael,” remembers the NBA’s Terry Lyons. “We took a photo and, sure enough, there is Jordane right next to Jordan, with his arm around him.”
After the game, Daly’s pessimistic nature began to take over, and by breakfast the next morning he had decided that his team had better beat itself up a little bit. The Dream Team had scrimmaged several times before this fateful day, a couple of the games ending in a diplomatic tie as Daly refused to allow overtime. He normally tried to divvy up the teams by conference, but on this day Stockton was still on the shelf and Drexler was out with a minor injury. Lord only knows how this morning would’ve gone had Drexler been available. Jordan had already taken it upon himself to torture the Glide in scrimmages, conjuring up the just-completed Finals, taunting Drexler: “Stop me this time!”
Dream Team Page 21
