“Meester, get us pleez Ma-jeek’s autograph,” I’d hear on my way in.
Around town and in the arena, one achieved a certain celebrity just by being associated with the Dream Team. I gave a dozen interviews, not because anyone had the slightest interest in me or the clever way I had around an adjective, but because I could shed light on the Dreamers. It is impossible to overstate how invested most international reporters are in their respective teams. It’s not like in the United States, where there is a distance (or supposed to be) between journalist and subject. I still have a vivid memory from the 2010 FIBA World Championships in Istanbul of a dozen Lithuanian reporters hugging, celebrating, and singing songs with the team members after they won the bronze medal.
Therefore, most of the international press assumed that since I covered the Dream Team I was a de facto member of it. One Japanese reporter even said that he wanted to follow me around on a day when the team wasn’t playing.
“Why in the hell would you want to do that?” I asked.
“I will follow because you will probably see Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson, no?” he said.
“No,” I said. “Actually I’m going to do an hour at the Picasso museum, then go watch the table tennis.”
He wisely withdrew his request.
Among other American journalists who specialized in Olympic coverage—“Ringheads,” as they were known, even among themselves—the Dream Team chroniclers were either an alien species or some version of the Rodney Dangerfield character in Caddyshack, an obnoxious trespassing outsider. A few of the Ringheads made a statement by refusing to watch the Dream Team play, so it must’ve made them gag when International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch, who didn’t know a three-point shot from three-card monte, was a conspicuous Dream Team observer at the Palau Municipal d’Esports de Badalona. “There was a lot of jealousy and pettiness about this from the Olympics press,” said ESPN’s Michael Wilbon, who covered the Games for the Washington Post. “It was like their show was taken away from them and, suddenly, there was a bunch of non-amateurs in the Olympics. Like [sprinter] Michael Johnson was an amateur, right?”
At one level, I could understand how ridiculously overblown the Dream Team scene was, how absurd that so much of the world’s attention was focused on a group of men who put a ball through a hoop. True, that is the sports journalist’s game, but this was the game times a thousand.
But there was a serious side to covering the Dream Team. The possibility that something could happen was always there, and not just because the memory of the massacres at the Munich Games was only two decades old. The world was coming apart in the early 1990s. War and revolution had torn apart Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, whose teams in Barcelona bore those scars. Basque separatists, whose MO was placing bombs in parked cars outside public buildings, were a constant threat. Spain itself was a country not even a generation removed from the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco, and I could not help thinking that some of those itchy-fingered policía brandishing weapons outside the Ambassador had worked for him. With the first Gulf War still fresh in everyone’s mind, there was no clearer target than the Dream Team if one wanted to make a political statement about millionaire Americans.
This same kind of dichotomy was later captured by David O. Russell in Three Kings, a thriller set during the latter part of the first Gulf War. Outside was the constant threat of war, death, and destruction. But inside the bubble there were hijinks and insults and soldiers riding to war in luxury vehicles as Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” played on the radio, the sappy sound track of the war.
Years later, when I talked to retired NBA security chief Horace Balmer, he still sounded relieved that nothing had happened in Barcelona. “Biggest assignment of my life,” said Balmer, unnecessarily. “But in the end, Atlanta was much worse.” Balmer was on duty when a bomb went off in Olympic Park at the 1996 Games.
Not coincidentally, the McDonald’s Open had been played in Barcelona in 1990 (it was an Olympics testing ground with the New York Knicks as the NBA entrant), so Balmer knew his way around. He says that he had worked for months with the State Department and various Spanish agencies to coordinate security and that even the French government had been involved, obligingly locking up hundreds of Basque separatists to keep them from coming to Barcelona. (That doesn’t sound legal.)
Still, when Balmer saw the crowds outside the hotel, he decided that reinforcements were necessary from local law enforcement, which was already stretched thin by the demands of security at the Olympic Village. “They had the attitude of, ‘Why can’t these guys stay in the Village like everybody else?’ ” says Balmer. So he convened a meeting at the hotel and had Jordan, Barkley, and Malone drop by to offer their opinion that more was better. And so did it happen.
(Balmer grew so close to the local authorities that eventually a pickup basketball game was arranged between the NBA group and the Spanish police. During that game, which was good-naturedly refereed by Barkley and Drexler, assistant coach Lenny Wilkens tore his Achilles tendon, the fifty-four-year-old Hall of Famer thus becoming the most seriously injured member of the Dream Team.)
Inside the hotel was “a soft security presence,” as Balmer put it, consisting of well-dressed undercover forces. But outside the presence was hard. Snipers crouched on top of the buildings surrounding the team hotel, and no vehicles could be parked within two blocks of the Ambassador. When Dupree and I had our dinner with Malone, the first thing he said was, “There’s helicopters up there. This shit is serious.” Balmer said that “these were the most protected guys in Barcelona,” and I don’t doubt that for a minute.
On game nights, two buses pulled out of the Ambassador en route to the Palau Municipal d’Esports in the suburb of Badalona, one bearing the players, one a decoy, the same technique the feds use to get a Mafia don to trial. Routes were constantly changed. Roads and freeways were cleared when the Dream Team bus headed to practice and tip-off. Stockton sheepishly remembers the police pulling over the bus of that night’s opponent, Puerto Rico, so the Dream Team bus could get by; Stockton caught a glimpse of his Utah Jazz teammate Jose Ortiz, a starting guard for Puerto Rico, as he roared by.
“That night, when we lined up to exchange gifts, Jose and I were across from each other,” said Stockton. “I could see all the Puerto Rican team angling to shake hands with Magic, Michael, or Larry. That’s the way it always was. And I motioned to Jose, ‘You better come over here.’ We hugged, and I felt a little better about it.”
Daredevil police motorcyclists were omnipresent. European police forces love their bikes, and I can only imagine the intramural clamor to get that gig. The cyclists in front of the bus went so frightfully fast that Bird eventually urged officials to tell them to slow up with the provision that the team would leave fifteen minutes earlier.
Besides trips to games, the Dream Team was largely tethered to the Ambassador, locked in a golden, twenty-four-hour-room-service prison that had been constructed by their own collective fame, prison being a curious term since the mob outside would’ve given a year’s salary just to get inside. On at least two occasions, players (Magic, Stockton, and Mullin for sure) got off a caught-in-traffic Dream Team bus and grabbed the metro, driving security out of its mind.
Stockton, in fact, was the only Dream Teamer who was able to get around normally, being, as he puts it, “a six-foot white guy who looks like everybody else.” He even filmed a segment for NBA Entertainment that centered around his anonymity. As Stockton held a camera, he spotted a tourist wearing a Dream Team T-shirt, and he asked if she had seen any of the players. “Well, we saw Charles Barkley,” she said, having that in common with thousands of others.
“Anyone else?” asks Stockton before two of his children pointed to her shirt and said, “There’s Daddy!”
Enticing invitations were tossed out like confetti at a wedding, but most fell to the ground ungathered. Michael Douglas, most recently seen bedding Sharon Stone in
Basic Instinct, something that had to impress even these guys, wanted to entertain the team, but the Dreamers said no thanks. They did take up the offer of Miami Heat owner Micky Arison for an afternoon on his yacht. When they arrived, they were informed that the air-conditioning was down, so Arison was bringing over his other yacht.
“That was a valuable day for me, a lesson in life,” Magic told me years later. “The difference between being rich and being wealthy. The man had a backup yacht. I never forgot that.”
If a Dream Teamer wanted to go somewhere special with family or friends, he was supposed to inform Balmer or another member of security, who would either give them a lift in a van or accompany them surreptitiously. “Sometimes they didn’t even know we were there,” says Balmer.
Magic and Mullin knew they were there. When they run into each other these days they still talk about the afternoon walk they took with their families, both of the Dream Teamers pushing strollers.
“We had a couple bodyguards in front and a couple bodyguards in back,” remembers Johnson, “and they all were carrying these bags. We asked what was in them but they never said. Finally, near the end of the Olympics, they showed us. Machine guns. That’s what was in them.”
Balmer says it all worked out pretty well and that the players were largely cooperative, themselves realizing the security risks of famous millionaires out on the town. “Well, all except Charles,” says Balmer. “Charles had his own ideas on this.”
I feel fairly safe in declaring that there has never been, and never will be, a media gathering like the Dream Team introductory press conference in Barcelona. Some twelve hundred of the unwashed, including me, jammed the auditorium, and, when the team walked in, the room rose to applaud, American reporters excepted. It was as if a giant box of action figures had been opened and out tumbled a parade of superheroes, some blessed with extraordinary speed, others with X-ray vision, all with super charisma.
That kind of reverential treatment should’ve been old hat by now, considering that we had seen opponents snap photos before and even during games. But I kept trying to get at why—beyond the obvious fact that the Dream Team was a collection of immortals gathered in one place at one time—the phenomenon was so large. “An awful lot of it had to do with Michael,” says Wilbon, who postulates that Jordan, at that time, was the most famous person in the world. “Oprah was not nearly as big as she got. Bill Clinton wasn’t president yet. Muhammad Ali was a relic. There was no Barack Obama. Who else you got? It was Michael.”
The NBA’s Kim Bohuny has a theory to explain the Dream Team’s fame. “There had been an air of mystery about these guys for a long time, and suddenly they came to life,” she says. “Always, across the pond, the NBA was that faraway thing they would never see live. Then, suddenly … it’s here! And all of these guys are together.”
Before the press conference, I caught the eye of Brian McIntyre, the NBA’s head of public relations, and we exchanged head-shaking glances. He and his other staffers had already held a draft, complete with “territorial picks,” to determine who would handle the media requests for which players. McIntyre, who had begun his professional life with the Bulls, got Jordan. Josh Rosenfeld had started with the Lakers, so he had Magic. “My next two picks were Harry and Larry,” says Rosenfeld, “because I figured they wouldn’t do anything anyway.”
Terry Lyons, who was at St. John’s with Mullin, took the lefty. USA Basketball’s Craig Miller took Christian Laettner, the amateur guy, and, since there wouldn’t be that many requests for America’s twelfth man, Miller was also assigned to Barkley, a nerve-racking job but at the end of the day an easy one since Charles, as Balmer put it, “had his own ideas” on being handled. Pistons PR man Matt Dobek took, of course, Daly, all he could handle since the Dream Team coach got so many requests.
I suspect that the Dream Team was hardly astonished when the room rose to greet them. By this time they must have been figuring, Isn’t this how everybody is supposed to act when we’re around? By this time, too, the gravity of the moment had begun to sink in. Nobody realistically entertained the notion that they would lose, but there was always that little sliver of doubt.
We play like we should and nobody gets within 30 … but what if our jumpers start missing?
There’s never been a team like ours … but what was that little island Daly was talking about in San Diego?
So to maintain the highest competitive mind-set, they began to construct a bogus narrative, one fraught with we’ll-show-them declarations and revenge leitmotifs. We’re tired of hearing how a bunch of All-Stars could never play together. We’re tired of hearing that we should’ve stayed in the Olympic Village. We’re tired of watching the United States get beat up by other countries. We’re tired of hearing that we’re just a bunch of millionaires on summer vacation.
True, all of those points had been raised, but the Dream Team did what most athletes do in those situations—pore through the pile and cherry-pick the negatives.
Magic at the press conference: “We gave up our summer. We share the Olympic spirit like any other athlete. Basketball players from other countries have been getting paid and nobody said nothing, and now we come over and we get paid and everybody is making a big deal out of it.”
Barkley: “None of these foreign athletes will admit it, but they don’t like Americans.”
Stockton: “The Olympic spirit for me is to beat teams from other countries, not to live with them.”
The most ginned-up subject was the one about Brazil overcelebrating a victory over the United States in the 1987 Pan Am Games. “They were throwing coaches in the air and high-fiving,” said Malone, always ready to don some metaphorical army gear. “It looked like a little rubbing in the face.” In truth, nobody on the Dream Team cared a damn about the 1987 Pan Am Games, and anyway, Brazil celebrates days that end in y the same way.
But there were light moments, two of which have endured through the ages. Malone deftly fielded a question from a Japanese reporter who wanted to know “why it is that sometimes you shoot and it is worth two points and other times it is worth three points.” Said Malone: “That’s just how we do it, my man.”
And Barkley, asked about the Dream Team’s first opponent, Angola, offered: “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout Angola. But Angola’s in trouble.” The quote has lived on, and anyone with a decent Barkley impression can get a laugh out of it. From time to time, Wilbon will just up and text Barkley: I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout …
Some of the most underrated lines came from Bird. “I felt pretty good,” he said when asked about his health, “until I sat here and listened to all this BS.” And this to a question about his possibly imminent retirement: “I’ve been retired for four years, but nobody’s noticed it yet.”
CHAPTER 30
THE JESTER AND THE ANGOLAN
“I Did Not Know That He Would Make Violence with Me”
Las Ramblas is one of those streets that couldn’t exist anywhere but in Old Europe, “the only street in the world,” wrote poet Federico García Lorca, “I wish would never end.” It was a 24/7 carnival, a place for the high and mighty and the low and low-down.
Charles Barkley loved it. So let’s do the math: live chickens, unicycles, pickpockets, open containers, prime hashish from Amsterdam, lithe and callow señoritas with dewdrop eyes, and a famous American who’s not afraid to drop-kick drunks. What could possibly go wrong?
Early on in the competition Barkley told Balmer, the NBA’s director of security, “Dude, the notion that I’m going to be at the Olympics and stay in my room is crazy. This is the greatest sporting event in the world. I’m going out.” His itinerary generally went like this: Begin a card game with Magic, Michael, and Pippen around ten. Play for an hour or two, then slip out the back door of the Ambassador, walk a couple of blocks, meet an elderly Spanish gentleman, slip him a couple of hundred dollars, and declare, “Okay, you’re my security for tonight. Let’s go.”
And off he went. Along
the way, Charles picked up crowds of anywhere from ten to fifty, the Pied Piper of Barcelona. His nocturnal divagations drove the NBA security people nuts for a while, particularly when others were involved. One night special arrangements had been made for Magic, Ewing, and Barkley to attend the boxing venue, but Charles insisted on leaving the hotel early and the plans for a special entrance at a special time got all messed up. But, eventually and inevitably, the security folks got used to it and gave up, praying all the while that they would not receive a predawn call from the policía.
The best beat for any reporter in the ’92 Games was the Charles Barkley beat. I was on it for a couple of nights, trailing him down Las Ramblas, where I would’ve been in any case, getting paid for hanging out, the journalist’s dream. Other players visited Las Ramblas—that’s where Stockton found the tourist in the Dream Team shirt who didn’t recognize him—but rarely in darkness, when the place was teeming with night crawlers and the potential for trouble was everywhere. On the nights I followed Barkley, there were some strange moments. An older man, speed-freak skinny and crack-pipe crazy, walked in front of him for a while, pointing and laughing like a hyena, but Barkley just kept going, sipping his cerveza and eventually outlasting him. On another occasion a kid on a bicycle kept weaving in and out of his path until Barkley had to stare him down. Either one of those guys would’ve been put on a Homeland Security watch list these days. On one particularly glassy-eyed evening, Barkley asked a couple of kids if he could get on their motorcycle. He gunned the engine and the bike started forward, Barkley jumping off in horror. Charles pushed the social envelope, to be sure, but he wasn’t a thrill-seeker—witness his protestations about mountainside driving in Monte Carlo.
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