Bird does not display his gold medal. But, then, he doesn’t display anything, his fingers bereft of championship rings. “The rings don’t mean anything to me,” says Bird. “Now, the banners in Boston Garden? They mean something because they’ll be there forever.” But don’t think that his gold medal is insignificant to him. He knows right where his medal rests, and every four years he takes it out of a box for some show-and-tell.
“I’ll take it to high schools just so kids can touch it, leave it there a few days, then get somebody to take it somewhere else,” said Bird. “I took it to my kids’ school and to my own high school back in French Lick. Just so kids, when they’re talking about the Olympics, they get to see what the prize is, what it really means. I would’ve liked to have touched gold when I was a kid.”
I ask him what he remembers most about the Dream Team experience. He doesn’t even have to stop to think about it. He brings up his father, Joe Bird, that dark soul who took his own life and never got to see the boy he raised become one of the immortals.
“When I was a kid, my dad was big on the Olympics,” said Bird. “He’d turn it on—we only got about two stations—and my dad would hear the national anthem and he’d turn to us and say, ‘The United States won gold.’ He didn’t care whether it was track and field or gymnastics or whatever. He just cared that the United States won.
“So when we stood on that platform in Barcelona to get our gold medals, that was the most exciting thing for me. I was thinking back to my dad and remembering that when he heard that anthem he was happy. And I was happy, too.”
Talking to Bird has a way of simplifying things. Our games, and our Olympic Games, have a way of getting wrapped up in money and bureaucracy and politics and petty squabbles. But sometimes they’re about the simplest things, about an arena that arises like magic out of a cornfield and about fathers and sons and what they mean to one another.
To Donna, Chris, Jamie,
Jill, and Oliver
—my Dream Team
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the cooperation of the Dream Team members, all of whom I interviewed face-to-face. Anyone who has ever dealt with pro athletes knows that rounding them up is like herding cats … if the cats were millionaires with handlers, busy schedules, and global fame. But the process was enjoyable (in some strange way) and, more to the point, rewarding when I got to them. They were not easy to pin down, but, once I had them in front of me, it was their memories of, and passion for, this team that most colors the tone of this book.
I spent hours with several of them in their own habitat: a long Long Island breakfast with Mullin and another with Pippen in Florida; lunch at Drexler’s house; a tour of Spokane conducted by Stockton; a morning at his school with Robinson; a morning and afternoon staring at the taxidermied conquests in Malone’s Louisiana home; dinner and drinks (not too many) with Barkley in Phoenix—these are all pleasant memories that also bore journalistic fruit.
I hadn’t seen many of them in a while, but past patterns reemerged immediately. Jordan aired out some ancient grudges about Sports Illustrated, and Bird took one look at me as I waited for him by his office in Indianapolis, and said, “What are you doing here? Thought you’d be driving around Magic in a limousine.” At least he didn’t say anything more … graphic.
There are many others who helped, and I hope I haven’t forgotten anyone, but four names stand out for their institutional memory about this team—Mike Krzyzewski, P. J. Carlesimo, Russ Granik, and Jan Hubbard. I went back to the well more than once with all four of them. Mike Wilbon, with a memory as sharp as his barbs on Kornheiser, was a great source during a long breakfast talk.
Pete Skorich, formerly a Detroit Pistons executive and the man who shot most of the Dream Team live footage, was of enormous importance. And a big shout-out to Sports Illustrated editor Chris Stone for encouragement, as well as to Mickey Steiner for editorial assistance.
My agent, Scott Waxman, and my editor, Mark Tavani, deserve tips of the hat, as does former Random House editor Paul Taunton and ESPN’s Steve Wulf.
Here are others who were generous with their time and memories, organized by the way I remember them. They are basketball and TV executives, Dream Team committee members, coaches, public relations people, print journalists, photographers, and players.
David Stern, Boris Stankovic, Rod Thorn, Dick Ebersol, Kim Bohuny, Rick Welts, Steve Mills, C. M. Newton, Harvey Schiller, Bill Wall, Tom McGrath, and Horace Balmer.
Donnie Nelson, Rick Carlisle, and Lenny Wilkens.
Jeffrey Orridge, Donnie Walsh, Quinn Buckner, and Charles Grantham.
David Falk, Lon Rosen, and Fred Whitfield.
Brian McIntyre, Terry Lyons, Don Sperling, Julie Fie, Josh Rosenfeld, Craig Miller, Nat Butler, Andy Bernstein, Florian Wanninger from FIBA, and Dion Cocoros and Paul Hirschheimer from NBA Entertainment.
Jackie MacMullan and Sam Smith, both of whose books are conjured up frequently in the manuscript, and, to the best of my ability, were given fair attributional recognition. Also, I single out Bill Simmons, a much younger man than myself who is capable of writing much longer books and achieving much greater cultural relevancy. Also, David Dupree, my eternal courtside colleague, and Bob Ryan, the eternal “Commish.”
Grant Hill and Bill Laimbeer shared their very differing experiences with the Dream Team, as did, with considerably more reticence, one of my all-time favorites, Joe Dumars. (This is the time to point out that Laimbeer and Dumars’s erstwhile Detroit Pistons teammate Isiah Thomas, a non–Dream Teamer who is a big part of this story, declined my request for an interview.)
Of the international players, Dirk Nowitzki (well, he’s more a Dallas Maverick these days), Sarunas Marciulionis, and Juan Antonio Orenga were terrific and candid, and Toni Kukoc also gamely offered his thoughts on the night that he got legally assaulted by Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan.
Two people who were close to the Dream Team died as I was finishing this manuscript—Matt Dobek, who was a friend of mine, and Dave Gavitt, without whose steady diplomacy there might not have been a Dream Team, at least not in the form that finally transpired. I had already collected their thoughts and memories, and I remembered them often as I wrote these words.
Chuck Daly died before I began the project. Over the years we had talked often about his Dream Team experience, and I could feel his steady presence throughout.
ALSO BY JACK MCCALLUM
FICTION
Foul Lines: A Pro Basketball Novel (with L. Jon Wertheim)
NONFICTION
Unfinished Business: On and Off the Court with the 1990–91 Boston Celtics
Shaq Attaq!
Full Circle: An Olympic Champion Shares His Breakthrough Story
Seven Seconds or Less: My Season on the Bench with the Runnin’ and Gunnin’ Phoenix Suns
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JACK MCCALLUM is the author of two previously critically acclaimed basketball books, Unfinished Business and Seven Seconds or Less, both of which chronicled the season of an NBA team, the 1990–91 Boston Celtics in the former, the 2005–06 Phoenix Suns in the latter. In 2005, he won the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’s Curt Gowdy Award for excellence in basketball writing. A senior writer at Sports Illustrated for 30 years, he lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, and is the father of two and the grandfather of one.
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