2 And He saw that it was good, verily, real good, a team made in His own image, considerably better even than the ‘27 Yankees.
3 And the Dream Team gathered by the salt sea at a place the name of it called La Jolla, which was like unto a golf resort; but mornings there was some practice.
4 And the players, who had been taken away from their sneaker companies, became a dozen even.
5 The numbers of them were the sons of Nike most; Michael, though, was first among them all upon the earth.
6 But also came the sons of Converse.
7 These were the elders Magic and Bird, who had both lived many seasons but prospered still.
8 And it came to pass that the Dream Team would travel to the land of Oregon and there set upon the pitiful hoopsters of the other tribes of the Americas who had likewise been called to try for the Olympics.
9 But yea, it is written: it would be slaughter.
10 The Dream Team would fall upon their rivals’ guards, but also they rivals’ power forwards.
11 So the Dream Team would go then for yet more practice at a place by the great Sea called Monte Carlo.
12 They actually go practice in Monte Carlo?
13 Yea, behold, even there; and the Dream Team would at last arrive at the city of Barcelona, where they would finish the chores given them, even as the fans of all the other lands begged for mercy.
14 But from the Dream Team there would be None.
15 And NBC was well pleased.
Trust NEWSWEEK. The foregoing is not hyperbole; it is only proper. The Dream Team, notwithstanding its sappy name (from the same culture that labored and brought forth “Super Bowl”), is fairly of Biblical proportions. Both historically and spiritually, it is the greatest athletic team ever assembled, and, at least in the United States, it threatens to swamp the whole event whose rib it was born of. By now, this is the way the Summer Olympics are being presented to us: ..CN.-MICHAEL JORDAN LARRY BIRD MAGIC JOHNSON in THE DREAM TEAM GOES TO BARCELONA Also starring Track and Field Swimming Gymnastics Boxing Boris Becker and Some Other Foreigners
The coach of the Dream Team, or, in jock-speak, Team Dream, the dapper Chuck Daly, has been known as the “Prince of Pessimism” since long before he took his most recent winter job, coach of the perennially hapless New Jersey Nets. In character, then, as soon as Daly assembled his star-spangled charges last Sunday in La Jolla, Calif., he began by telling them that off Barcelona there are twin islands, Majorca and Minorca, and whereas Majorca features wonderful beaches and is “swinging,” Minorca is a dismal isle, full of dark caves and heavy on resident suicide. Now, Daly went on, reluctantly he had come to the conclusion that should Team Dream lose a game, its members would get no farther than Minorca for the rest of their natural-born lives.
Meanwhile, for the similar benefit of outsiders, “who expect us to win big,” Daly cannot get a sentence out without reminding them about how the Soviet hockey juggernaut lost to callow American college boys in 1980 at Lake Placid. And yes, it is also true that David TKOed Goliath, Truman did defeat Dewey, Upset Man o’War, truth is stranger than fiction, pride goeth before a fall and for want of a nail, etc. But the Dream Team is the closest thing to a sure dream extant. Roxy Roxborough, the premier Vegas oddsmaker, will not even put a price on U.S. basketball; you’ll be able to bet only the silver medal. Among the wisest basketball cognoscenti in all the world, consulting all the tea leaves in China, only one possibility for defeat is reasonably accepted:
Food poisoning.
Why, only one non-American could even presume to be a serious candidate for the Dream Squad: the fabled Euro Magic, 6-foot-10 Toni Kukoc of Croatia. Moreover, the two nations that placed ahead of the United States at Seoul, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, are, ironically (but conveniently for America), exactly the two national squads most eviscerated by nationalism.
Surely there will never again be such an assemblage of talent, for there is a crusader quality to ‘92, the quest to regain the gold that Uncle Sam lost so inexcusably in ‘88. Once the United States has displayed to the world an America rampant upon the hardwood, there will never again be the impulse, the-even-patriotic impulse to hold high the standard. No 35-year-old Larry Bird, with a bad back, is ever going to go through a summer of this monkey business again.
This summer, too, the self-flagellation of the republic–can’t we do anything right anymore?–can at least be turned aside symbolically, manfully, thusly: “We’ve got to regain our sense of pride, our dignity,” Michael Jordan said one day. “Some way–even if it’s just basketball. We can at least show the world that we can take control of something.”
On the other bench, the opposition is improving, the Yugoslavian/U.S.S.R. setback only a political aberration. Indeed, the United States was one of only a handful of nations to vote against the inclusion of pros in the Olympics-that’s right, America’s own federation actually voted against itself. The Western European basketball powers all balloted in favor, concluding that their basketball prowess could not improve until they were tested against the best. “We Europeans expect to lose everything for now,” says Borislav Stankovic, the head of the International Basketball Federation.
But keep in mind that basketball requires a relatively small crew to form a successful national team–no matter how strong in depth the United States may eternally be. The tennis Davis Cup is a choice analogous example, for such small nations as Sweden and Czechoslovakia have won despite the American mass of tennis talent. The basketball gap will close with each season so that the planets will nevermore be aligned quite like this. No men of sport should ever again be able to hold the notes in chorus that no one else can yet reach in solo.
“When I sat down to dinner,” Charles Barkley said … and he shook his head, recalling the training table. “‘Oh, my God,’ I thought, ’this is frightening . . .’” There was a lump in Sir Charles’s throat–and he a man of so many moods, none previously associated with either awe or rhapsody.
Coach Daly doesn’t want to hear such sweet nothings, hear his tigers swooning like giddy America-first fans. “The coming together has been more difficult than I imagined,” sighs the Prince of Pessimism. This particular practice day a group of puppy collegians, brought in as sparring partners, have whipped the mighty by impersonating a foreign five, setting zones and popping the short three-pointers. International rules differ in a number of respects from the way good old ‘Mercans, who invented the game, play. It has been ever thus; when the U.S. team showed up in Berlin for the first basketball Olympics, in 1936, the heirs of Naismith discovered that the alien authorities had arbitrarily decreed that basketball was an outdoor game and that no one over 6 feet 2 could suit up. The Americans-who boasted three players 6 feet 7 and up-successfully demanded that the height limitation be rescinded, but the first gold medal was won, 19 to 8, in a downpour that turned the court into an undribbleable mud pie.
The current international rules differ in a number of ways from how the NBA does things. For example, for all Olympic Games, beginning this week at the qualifying tournament in Portland, Ore., the lane is somewhat larger, and in the shape of a trapezoid (for those who might recall junior-high geometry). Zone defense is permitted, and, indeed, against the quick, large American bodies may be assumed to be de rigueur. “Anybody who doesn’t play zone against us is just plain crazy,” says Karl Malone, the Mailman, preaching to a world surely converted already.
All the different international ordinances taken together, however, concern Daly and his staff less than does one other variation, to wit: the three-point arc in the international game is drawn at about 201/2 feet, a full 3 feet, 3 inches closer than the NBA’s. The NBA behemoths fancy a defense where they collapse on their monster alter egos, doubling up under and inviting long shots as just that: long shots. The Dream Team must be housebroken of this instinctive behavior or watch foreign sharpshooters pop in uncontested 20-footers that are gimmies to them. It is the biggest worry for Daly and his brain trust, but it hardly seems to be mischief enough to end up putting the flower of the basketball republic on the next steamer to Minorca.
Besides, the Dream Teamers have exhibited the best of two good attitudes. On the one hand, they arrived in good shape, confident but nowhere near as cocky as this article. On the other, expressions of camaraderie would qualify the lot of them for Up With People. “It’s just great to be with the boys,” oohed Larry Bird. “I don’t even care if I start,” aahed Magic Johnson. Daly named them co-captains, and so then they gushed some more about one another. “It’s like summer camp,” Jordan said, and so then Magic explained that M.J. was really a captain, too.
Christian Laettner, just out of Duke, the token collegian, decided that his celebrity colleagues were acting “as unegotistical as possible.” Not since Sylvester Stallone last looked in the mirror has there been such an overwhelming aura of good feeling.
Daly chuckled. “Let me tell you, these guys are no different from the group I had back at Punxsutawney High. They’re just basketball players. They still want more shots, and they still want more minutes.”
Daly is nature’s nobleman, the equivalent of all those great baseball managers–Earl Weaver, Walt Alston, Sparky Anderson–who couldn’t play the game worth a damn, but somehow rose to the top through the servants’ entrance. There are a couple of players on the team John Stockton and Scottie Pippen foremost, perhaps who came to stardom late, unawares, but Daly’s experience is truly unique. It is quite dear, really, that the coach of the greatest team ever is a man who has been so much a part of all of his sport, of the gritty viscera as much as the glamorous soul. All Chuck Daly ever wanted was to be a basketball coach, to dress well and make 10 grand a year.
He played at Bloomsburg State, somewhere in Pennsylvania, and when he came out he got a highschool job at Punxsutawney, where the groundhog has top billing. One time, past his 30th birthday, he hitchhiked to Louisville and bought a scalped bleacher seat just to see the Final Four. Just to see it. It appeared as if he was stalled, a hoops Mr. Chips, but he wrote a letter blind, got an assistant’s job at Duke and started up the ladder late. “I was pretty anonymous for the first, oh, 30 years of my career,” he says. When he finally became a rookie head coach in the NBA, he was 51, and he lasted 39 games. But Detroit gave him a second chance and he won back-to-back NBA titles and matched suits, thread for thread, with Pat Riley. The reputation he gained was that he was a players’ coach without being a roundheel. So, he’s a lifer; 61 and trying to resuscitate a franchise, the Nets, that’s been lost so long not even Ross Perot knows it was ever missing.
Sixty-one, for God’s sake. Why, Chuck?
“I really don’t know. But I know this: I still love to search for knowledge in this game. I see something new out there, and it’s still exciting, a thrill. But the people skills I have. Nothing new. You can’t manufacture that. Besides, I always said, ‘You can fool everybody but dogs, kids and NBA players’.”
Practice was over. Time for golf Most of the members of Team Dream are crazy about golf–except, in the extreme, Malone, the Louisiana farm boy. Like Mark Twain (“golf is a good walk spoiled”), Malone goes into an anti-golf routine on cue. “Golf is just a waste of good pastureland,” the Mailman begins, warming up. But he is alone. Magic doesn’t play, but he even went out one day and sort of caddied a round for Clyde Drexler.
All of this probably means the most to Magic, of course. He feels so well, the HIV infection notwithstanding, that he is talking to his friends, pondering whether he should go back to the NBA this fall. But whether he does or not, the Olympics are his season this time, and he simply would not tolerate defeat in Portland or Barcelona.
Long before Seoul, where the United States lost fair and square, even before the Munich cheat, America was getting beaten in international basketball. Argentina whipped the Yanks in the world championships way back in 1950, when Chuck Daly was still at Bloomsburg State. But each time the United States lost, the voices were always raised in a whine: it doesn’t really count. Our best guys are back home. Well, nobody can dance to that tune anymore. Banishment to Minorca would be easy; returning to the United States in defeat would be a death much worse.
But it can’t happen. It can’t. Not, anyway, if they hire a food taster.
