June 29, 2020 • 28 mins
Some of the Dream died quickly. Larry Bird retired right away. Magic’s HIV became big news again, a year later, Michael was gone…to baseball, after one of sports history’s most mysterious retirements. But what remains is the Dream Team’s enduring legacy, one many did not see while they were beating teams by fifty points. Their participation in the Olympic did exactly what Boris Stankovic said it would do—it grew the game around the world. The course that the NBA is on right now, as the most international of all sports, was set in that fateful year of 1992.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is The Dream Team Tapes, a Diversion Podcasts original
series in association with I Heart Radio. This is the
story of the United States Olympic basketball team that won
gold in Barcelona, known worldwide as the Dream Team. You know,
(00:23):
I would like to play it a little bit longer,
maybe a year or two more, but there's just no
way possible I was going to be able to do that.
So today I'm retiring, and uh, I'm still gonna be around,
but not in the capacity I once was. And now
all of a sudden, we get in a game and
he he has this scratch. It's an open wound, but
(00:45):
you know it's a non bloody wound in a control situation,
and you know, I have to dress it, and I
have these gloves in my pocket, and I look up
and all these eyes are on the all his teammates
and the cameras on me, and I said, I just
can't do it because it's it would be sending a
(01:07):
mixed message to everything. Man. That stuff start happening almost
from the moment the Dream Team plane touched back in
the United States. The first voice you heard was that
of Larry Bird. The second voice was that of Gary VT.
The long time, much respected trainer of the Los Angeles Lakers.
We're going to get to that in a second, but
(01:28):
let's go back to Bird. The last game in which
he ever played was not against his ancient and forever rivals,
the Los Angeles Lakers, or the seventies sixers or the Knicks.
It was against Croatia and the gold medal game of
the Olympics. Bird hardly played. He had zero points, zero assists,
and to rebounds. His back had given out completely. He
(01:50):
flew home on the team's charter plane in a reclined position,
and a couple of days later he said goodbye, not
to basketball altogether. He became an advisor, a team president
Dave Gabbett, and later a successful coach in execut with
the Indiana Pacers, but he did say goodbye to his
immortal playing career now Gary Vedi, as I said, the
(02:11):
Lakers trainer Magic Johnson had come triumphantly home from Barcelona
clutching a gold medal, his HIV apparently in the rear
view mirror, but it wasn't. The comment from Karl Malone,
which we'll talk about later, followed by this preseason game
in Charlotte and back it came, and because of that,
(02:32):
Magic Johnson followed his good friend Bird out the door.
Hello and welcome to episode eight, the final episode of
the Dream Team tapes. I'm Jack McCallum. The story has
taken lots of twists and turns, but in the immediate
aftermath of the Barcelona glory, this one was a pronounced dip.
Bird had decided to retire even before he went to Barcelona,
(02:54):
but according to him, he hadn't even told his wife,
so his retirement press conference was sudden, but not really shocking.
It was hard to realize how long Bird had been playing,
not in top physical shape. His back had started to
go out as long ago as the last time his
Celtics had won the title. Remember that although Larry and
(03:15):
Magic had come into the league together, Bird was more
than three years older than Johnson. We would miss him,
but it was time. So at the point when he left,
there had been no Lebron, no Kobe, no Tim Duncan,
no Shack. So where would Bird rank? Top five? That
would be a stretch. Top ten absolutely. Meanwhile, Magic, who
(03:39):
had turned thirty three dority Olympics, was still, as he
saw it, a force. He was rare to go for
the season, still believing wrongly. I might add that the
Lakers could challenge Jordan's bulls. And then and then there
was this preseason game between them alone and Stockton Jazz
and the New York Knicks. Magic wasn't even involved. He
(04:01):
wasn't there. Harvey Araton, the Hall of Fame writer from
the New York Times, wandered over to talk to Karl Malone,
and suddenly the mailman started to talk about Magic and
what he perceived as unspoken fears about playing against someone
with HIV. This is from Harvey's story. Look at this,
scabs and cuts all over me, said Malone. He pressed
(04:22):
a finger to a small pinkish hole on his thigh
that was developing into a scab. I get these every night,
every game, he said. They can't tell you that you're
not at risk, and you can't tell me there's one
guy in the NBA who hasn't thought about it. Now,
where did that come from? Why did it come up suddenly?
Was he really voicing widespread concerns years later? It remains
(04:45):
a mystery. I couldn't get Malone to talk about it
during our long interview for my Dream Team book, but
it has been cleared throughout that Malone just didn't like
the showman side of Irvin Magic Johnson, and during our interview,
Carl kept making several references to people he thought were real. Pointedly,
Magic was not one of them. Barkley was one of
(05:06):
those real guys, and these two guys were another. I've
seen people that it's kind of different when the cameras.
You know, some people when the camera's one and depend
on who it is for consaying, that's why I thought
the world and that's why Stott was saying. Chris Mother
and Conor was one of my favorite. Magic says that
he and Malone never talked about it when they got back,
never talked about it at all over the course of
(05:27):
now going on twenty seven years. Only Carl knows whether
his personal resentment of Magic was the reason he made
the comment, or was he genuinely frightened about HIV, despite
the fact that he had spent much of the summer
in Magic's company. I just don't know, but it's worth
hearing all of what Magic said when I asked him
about it in two thousand and eleven. We did a
(05:50):
great job of educating not just to play it, but
the world because the world was not educated and we
stely think about all the misinformation that was out there.
So I had to be the person who could now, okay,
let me give you the right information. Let me education.
And then the Olympics actually gave me the platform to
(06:11):
show the world that a guy what HIV could still
play play at a high level and he wasn't going
to get HIV by playing against me. So when carl
want to come back, and he said that, that's kind
of set what I had did, and the Olympics said
it back zones that now I got more work to do.
But the fatal blow to Magic's return were the optics
(06:33):
from that night in Charlotte that Gary VD was talking
about the pressure got to be too much for him.
It was one of those moments that you understand the
power of image. Metaphorically speaking. The whole world was watching
Gary VD treat Magic Johnson's cut without gloves. Magic realized
that almost right away he saw the uproar and uncomfortable
(06:58):
nous it caused, and heng it up for the second time.
Now there would be a third after an abbreviated return,
but for all intents and purposes, Magic went out with
the man he came in with bird. Now a word
about Gary VT, the Lakers trainer, A wonderful man. He
is in anyone's Hall of fame a trainers, but there
(07:19):
are others like him in the NBA. You could hear
the emotion in Gary's voice during that radio interview. Trainers
get extremely close to players and they carry secrets to
the grave, and I've known very few that will betray confidences.
I should know. I've tried. What else was going on
(07:40):
after Barcelona, Well, let's go to Jordan's He led the
Bulls to their third straight championship and I can still
see him celebrating with his father in the Bulls locker
room in Phoenix. Five weeks later, James R. Jordan's Sr.
Was found murdered in his car, and a few months
after that October six, I'm very solid with my decision
(08:04):
of not to play the game of basketball name b A.
The reason being, I've heard a lot of different speculations
about my reasons for not playing, but I've always stressed
to people that have known me and the media that
has followed me that when I lose the sense of
motivation and the sense of to prove something as a
(08:27):
basketball player. It's time for me to move away from
the game of basketball. For whatever reason, Michael always loved
to say the game of basketball. He was like those
football coaches and commentators who feel compelled to say football
all the time. We moved the football real well, we're
a good football team right now. We just got to
become a better football team. Jordan loved to say the
(08:48):
game of basketball. The Jordan's story has been told endlessly,
so I won't tell it again in detail. Michael went
on to minor league baseball. Questions dogged him about whether
or not his gambling debts or something else was behind
his father's murder. They continue today, but I don't believe them.
And the league going into the season, found itself without
(09:10):
Michael Magic Larry. I'm trying to think of something comparable. Hey,
let's go see the Beatles. But listen, John, Paul and
George are all out, but Ringo will still be there
on drums. And the NBA was also without Jack McCallum.
I know the loss wasn't quite on a par with
Jordan's Magic and Bird, but something felt empty. How could
(09:32):
it get any better than covering the league during its
renaissance and that's what I had done. The last of
dr Ja, the best of Magic and Bird, the brilliantly
tough bad boy Pistons, the creation of All Star Weekend,
and the Duncan three point contests. Really good players who
didn't make the Dream Team, like James Worthy, Dominique Wilkins,
(09:52):
Isaiah Thomas. He had the ascendancy of Jordan's and then
you had the dream Team. So I left after the
any three season, did some editing, covered college basketball for
a year general stuff, and did return to the NBA
until early in the two thousand's, just in time to
see Jordan's swansong with the Washington Wizards. Now, after this
(10:24):
first dream team, nobody could figure out if the term
dream team could be used again. The US Olympic basketball
team was called in some quarters dream team too, but
in other quarters, how about this was a nightmare. That
was Barkley who played on the team, as did Pippin
the loan, Robinson and Stockton. But it was kind of
(10:46):
an f and nightmare. It had the same unmerciful on
court beatings of without the charm and well maturity of
that first team. Now, in a way it was inevitable.
It was like when you and your partner were young
and rented a cabin in the woods, and the weather
was perfect, and the cabin was quaint, and you cook
scrambled eggs in an old cast iron pan, and you
(11:07):
made love under a blanket on the couch. And then
you went back four years later and replicated that rained
every day, The cabin roof leaked, the sex blanket was
wet and moldy, and by the end of the weekend
you're throwing the eggs at each other. By the way,
this absolutely never happened to me. More on Dream Team too, No,
I can't call it that, but more on that in
(11:27):
a minute. In the immediate aftermath of the first Dream Team,
the biggest winner was probably Barkley. He went to Phoenix,
won an MVP award, carried his team to the finals,
where of course he was disposed of by Jordan's. He
talked endlessly as to others like Pippin, David Robinson and
Chris Mullen about how the experience had made him better,
(11:50):
gave him ideas about leadership the kind showed by Magic
and Michael, and commitment the kind showed by Karl Malone.
Was during that Championship series, of Barkley told his daughter Christiana, Honey,
no matter how good I am and I believe I'm
the second best player in the league, there's no way
I'm better than that some bitch in Chicago. Another player
(12:11):
to make out well in the aftermath of the Dream
Team was David Robinson. He didn't win a championship right away.
That wouldn't come until the strike the late season of
and again in two thousand three, and it didn't come
at all until he got Tim Duncan as a running mate.
In fact, one of the whispers about the Admiral was
that he never would have won without Tim. But that's
another story. But in the wake of the Dream Team,
(12:33):
Robinson clearly became a very impactful center, the very ideal
of the mobile, athletic, versatile center who was still a center,
not a seven foot stretch for but back to the
basket pivot man. On on the evening of one of
the most amazing statistical anomalies in the history of the
(12:55):
NBA occurred in a late season game against the Los
Angeles Clippers. San Antonio's David Robinson put up seventy one
points at that time, the seventh highest single game total
in the history of the NBA, the same point total
that Elgin Baylor had scored for the Los Angeles Lakers
(13:15):
in nineteen sixty five. Of the others came from Will
Chamberlain and the sixth from David Thompson. Parenthetical alert. Twelve
years after the Admiral's explosion, the late great Kobe Bryant,
as many of you remember, got eighty one against the
Toronto Raptors. Now, what was going on in that Robinson came. Well,
he had been battling Shaquille O'Neil for the scoring title.
(13:38):
But those were long ago days, huh, when Sentators actually
scored a lot of points, and this outburst gave David
the title. He talks about the guidance he got that
night from John Lucas, who was in the Spurs coach. Yes,
there was a time before Gregg Popovich coached the Spurs.
I'm gonna make sure every shot and I was like,
(13:59):
are you crazy? Like you know, the last thing I
want to do is go out there and try to
do something like that. Man, that's classic Robinson. I don't
want to take every shot. Coach. Remember what Jordan's said
about him. Basketball wasn't in David's DNA. I wonder what
Robinson would have been like had he had the mentality
(14:20):
to get seventy one every night. Another Dream Teamer who
made out well was Clyde Drexler, who was traded from
Portland to Houston halfway through season and his Rockets won
the championship. As Clyde saw it, this finally provided a
comeback line to all the crap he took from the
Dream Team in the media about getting torched by Jordan's
(14:41):
and being on teams that weren't very smart. This is
Clyde talking about the comeback he used when the alpha
male antagonists primarily Jordan and Magic, used to get on
his ass and let's side of I couldn't help laughing
(15:01):
when I interviewed Clyde. His answer to almost every question
was some version of how much he was disrespected. And
as far as shutting up Magic and Bird and Jordan's
real quick I doubt it. Those guys never shut up
far less quickly. But Drexler's point was that when he
got to Euston, he had a great center in a
Chemo La Juan, and that's what he always needed to
(15:24):
be a champion. Another great player now He's correct to
an extent, but even then Drexler couldn't escape Jordan's shadow.
Jordan was off playing baseball for the season, came back late,
not enough time to get the Bulls completely right. So
the Rockets, who won two straight titles will never be
(15:45):
fully appreciated. They were the team that won when the
Bulls were without Jordan's and without being fully Jordanized. While
on that subject, you have to remember how many fingers
and whose fingers were left ringless by and being around
the fingers of Barkley Malone, Stockton, Ewing Gary Payton were
(16:05):
all directly impacted by Jordan's particularly those of Malone and Stockton,
who lost to the Bulls in both the finals. And
So back to the Olympics in Atlanta, the one that
followed the original Dream team, the US again rolled through.
Their closest game was predictably against Lithuania, and they won
that by twenty two points. But but almost nobody cared.
(16:30):
There just wasn't much. Buzz I wasn't covering basketball that Olympics,
but I was free to go anywhere, and I rarely
even went to watch basketball. I went to the semifinal
against Australia, saw Barkley and he said, jack get me
the funk out of here. But that team was in
a tough position. Remember the right stuff. Immortal movie adapted
(16:52):
from Tom Wolfe's Immortal nonfiction book. When Alan Shepard, the
first man into space, returns after his fifth teen minute
suborbital successful mission, he's greeted with national acclaim JFK Jackie
the whole bit. Less than three months later, Gus Grissom
goes up on a similar mission and almost nobody cares.
(17:15):
And when the capsule's hatch blows open prematurely and Grissom
is blamed, the nation went out of its way to
ignore the fact that somebody had squeezed himself into what
amounts to a hole in the wall, risk his life
by flying into space and crashing into a cold ocean.
In the movie, Grissom's wife is offended and she should
(17:37):
be by the lack of attention. Where's Jackie this time?
She wants to know did anyone ever get more screwed
than Gus Grissom? By the way, six years after this
Mercury mission, he along with two other astronauts, dies in
a fire during the testing for the Apollo missions. Forgotten
Hero So the second dream team in the third which
(17:57):
won the gold in Australian two thousand, just couldn't win
even though they want. There wasn't the glamour, the glitz,
the excitement and most of all the preternatural novelty of
seeing all these guys together. And the two thousand team
almost didn't win. It beat Lithuania by only nine points,
then beat them again by only two points in the semifinals.
(18:19):
Lithuania muster three pointer at the buzzer that would have
given them the win, and Dream Team three. By now
nobody was calling them that only won the gold medal
game against France by ten points. That USA team was
composed of solid players Jason Kidd, Ray Allen Vince Carter, Alonso,
Morning Gary Peyton, Kevin Garnett. But they weren't the dream team.
(18:42):
That's the burden they carry. They weren't the dream team.
And by two thousand and four Athens, even with NBA players,
they won the bronze medal. Coming back, if you could
call at that after an opening to seventy three lost
to Puerto Rico. Let me repeat that, after a seventy
(19:04):
three loss to Puerto Rico. So the pressure of living
up to the first Dream Team. The only dream Team
wasn't the primary reason that US primacy began to evaporate.
The world had gotten better. See, there had already been
a foundational cast of international players in the NBA by
the turn of the century, a La Joan ric Smits,
(19:25):
Bloody divach To Kembe Matumbo and earlier my friend Shrunus
Marshalonis and the late great Drazen Petrovitch who died in
a car accident the year after the Barcelona Games. But
the Dream Team's arrival in Barcelona, and that was the key,
that was the explosion. It was almost like a door
(19:45):
to a different world had been blown open. Why well,
fifteen year old Manu Ginobili was watching the games from Argentina.
Fourteen year old Dirk now Whiskey, already heading towards seven
tall with a sweet jump shot, was watching from Germany.
Another growing boy, Pau Gasoul, was twelve, watching from Spain,
(20:08):
and he had a younger brother named Mark who was
also watching. Hato Turkulo was twelve. He was watching from Turkey.
Two eleven year olds were watching from different parts of
the world. Andre Carolinko was cheering on the unified team
from Russia, and Yao Ming was watching from China. A
giant eight year old named Andrew Bogatt was watching from Australia,
(20:31):
and Australia was already pretty good. A lightning fast ten
year old named Tony Parker was watching from France. And
seven years after the Barcelona games, the Spurs got Genoble
with the fifty seven pick of the draft, and two
years later they got Parker with the final pick of
the first round. They helped the Spurs become the team
(20:53):
of the first decade of this century. You see, so
many of us saw the lopsided results of the Dream
Team games and saw only slaughters, mismatches, one team so
far ahead of the other that standard metrics of comparison
didn't even apply. But the players in these other countries,
the real players at least, saw something else. They saw
(21:16):
a game that was demystified. Hey, the Dream Team isn't gods.
They're not ten ft tall, they don't have the speed
of Mercury. They passed the screen away, they find the
open man, they go back door. When it's there, they
box out. Okay, Barkley never did, but he got the
rebound anyway. They play the game the same way we do,
only a hundred times better. That's the difference we can
(21:39):
get there. One game, one world. And now there were
a hundred and eight international players a hundred and eight
on NBA rosters at the beginning of the two thousand,
nineteen twenty season. There have been as many as a
hundred and thirteen, with forty two countries represented forty two.
(22:00):
It was once a novelty. Now it's just standard operating procedure,
and they're not marginal players. They include some of the
best players in the game. The Greek freak in Milwaukee,
Janis andez Copo. That's how he says to pronounce it,
Luka don Chick and Christaps Porcingis in Dallas, Nicolo Jokich
in Denver, Joel Embiad in Philadelphia, Pascal Siakim in Toronto,
(22:23):
Taco Fall in Boston, and Demontus Sabonis in Indiana. He is,
by the way, the son of the great Arvidas Sabonis,
who played for Lithuania in the nine two Olympics, a
great Samonas story. By the way, he was not present
for the podium ceremony. The reason was widely believed to
be too much vodka. That was Sabonis. So the great
(22:45):
irony of the Dream Team was that it started out
as a celebration of American basketball and ended up as
a launch pad for basketball around the world. And remember
who was telling us that over thirty years ago, the
inspector of Beat Good Old Boris Stankovic. The only way
we grow the game is if everybody plays against each other.
(23:18):
That was my pleasure to take you on this journey,
and that's what it felt like. Remember that Mad Men
episode when Don Draper creates a campaign for the slide
Projector and he talks about being a time machine that
makes you ache with nostalgia and etcetera, etcetera. Well, this
wasn't that. I don't feel nostalgic about the Dream Team.
I don't want to go back there. But what the
(23:40):
podcast has given me the opportunity to do, though, is
remember from time to time how lucky it was to
be on the journey. There was a place in a
Dream Team book when I conjured up the idea of
concentrated greatness being in one place at one time. There's
a legendary photo taken in by Art Kane of a
group of jazz musicians in Harlem. The names are Staggering,
(24:03):
Count Basie, are Blaky, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman, Hawk and Steen, Cruper,
Charlie Mingus, the Loneous Monk, Jerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins. Where
the hell Miles Davis is I don't know, but he
was around at that time too. I also brought up
a photo that was in Ronald W. Clark's biography Einstein
The Life and Times. There at one time was a
(24:25):
physics symposium attended by most of the great minds of
the time, Einstein, Madame Marie Curie, Andre Lorenz, Max Planck,
and the famous French mathematician on the three point Kari,
whom Einstein considered his loan intellectual equal. I used to
stare at it, fascinated that all those visionary thinkers were
(24:45):
gathered together at one time, a fortuitous accident of history.
No basketball inc jazz, well, to a certain extent, it is,
but it certainly ain't physics. But it was still all
that concentration of greatness, a delicious acts of timing. That
was a dream team. I'll leave you with two sound bites.
The first is from John Stockton. I can't think of
(25:07):
anyone less likely to talk about basketball, heaven and poetry
and stock Well, that's why I mean, all the way
up to drinking the way of absolutely immediately upon the
body language of him cutting to the slot, the other
guys were making reciprocal moves or coordinating news and it was.
(25:28):
He was a no nonsense, straight ahead thinker who never
got dewy eyed about anything anything I saw at least,
But this is what playing on his team meant to him.
These guys, you see, formed their basketball character before the
age of height. They were hooped children of the sixties
and seventies, not the nineties and the aughts, when you
could make a king's ransom for being mediocre, largely because
(25:51):
of what the Dream Team created. Sure, richest endorsements, fame
glory followed the Dream Team, but that is not what
was in their DNA. I'm not saying they were the
last generation to come up that way, though Barkley says it,
and they weren't the last players to play for the
love of the game, but basketball basketball only playing the
game the right way, that was what made them. The
(26:14):
final bite is from Bird, and you heard it much
earlier in the podcast, but it's worth repeating Larry Bird,
Grandpa Larry, the oldest player on the Dream Team, whose
hoop chops were formed in a kind of darkness on
the edge of town atmosphere. As a lower class kid
from a berg that quite literally sounds like it conjures
up hard times French lique. Bird's last regular season game
(26:37):
was at Richfield Coliseum in suburban Cleveland. Bird describes why
he loved to play there. The second game I played
an NBA, we played Ritchfield. We pulled up there and
I couldn't believe See It's what I always dreamed, freaking
basketball building into color Field. Bird would have been happy
playing anywhere. It just turned out that his final game
(27:00):
was in Barcelona, Spain, on the biggest stage in the world,
on the best team ever put together. This has been
great for me and I hope you've enjoyed it too.
Dream Team the book is still available. I'm Jack McCallum,
and thanks for listening. If you enjoyed The Dream Team Tapes,
(27:24):
please follow, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts.
The Dream Team Tapes is written and hosted by Jack McCallum.
Executive producers Mark Francis and Scott Waxman. Executive producer for
I heart Media, is shown to tone. The Dream Team
Tapes is a Diversion Podcasts original series in association with
(27:47):
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
This is The Dream Team Tapes, a Diversion Podcasts original
series in association with I Heart Radio. This is the
story of the United States Olympic basketball team that won
gold in Barcelona, known worldwide as the Dream Team. You know,
(00:23):
I would like to play it a little bit longer,
maybe a year or two more, but there's just no
way possible I was going to be able to do that.
So today I'm retiring, and uh, I'm still gonna be around,
but not in the capacity I once was. And now
all of a sudden, we get in a game and
he he has this scratch. It's an open wound, but
(00:45):
you know it's a non bloody wound in a control situation,
and you know, I have to dress it, and I
have these gloves in my pocket, and I look up
and all these eyes are on the all his teammates
and the cameras on me, and I said, I just
can't do it because it's it would be sending a
(01:07):
mixed message to everything. Man. That stuff start happening almost
from the moment the Dream Team plane touched back in
the United States. The first voice you heard was that
of Larry Bird. The second voice was that of Gary VT.
The long time, much respected trainer of the Los Angeles Lakers.
We're going to get to that in a second, but
(01:28):
let's go back to Bird. The last game in which
he ever played was not against his ancient and forever rivals,
the Los Angeles Lakers, or the seventies sixers or the Knicks.
It was against Croatia and the gold medal game of
the Olympics. Bird hardly played. He had zero points, zero assists,
and to rebounds. His back had given out completely. He
(01:50):
flew home on the team's charter plane in a reclined position,
and a couple of days later he said goodbye, not
to basketball altogether. He became an advisor, a team president
Dave Gabbett, and later a successful coach in execut with
the Indiana Pacers, but he did say goodbye to his
immortal playing career now Gary Vedi, as I said, the
(02:11):
Lakers trainer Magic Johnson had come triumphantly home from Barcelona
clutching a gold medal, his HIV apparently in the rear
view mirror, but it wasn't. The comment from Karl Malone,
which we'll talk about later, followed by this preseason game
in Charlotte and back it came, and because of that,
(02:32):
Magic Johnson followed his good friend Bird out the door.
Hello and welcome to episode eight, the final episode of
the Dream Team tapes. I'm Jack McCallum. The story has
taken lots of twists and turns, but in the immediate
aftermath of the Barcelona glory, this one was a pronounced dip.
Bird had decided to retire even before he went to Barcelona,
(02:54):
but according to him, he hadn't even told his wife,
so his retirement press conference was sudden, but not really shocking.
It was hard to realize how long Bird had been playing,
not in top physical shape. His back had started to
go out as long ago as the last time his
Celtics had won the title. Remember that although Larry and
(03:15):
Magic had come into the league together, Bird was more
than three years older than Johnson. We would miss him,
but it was time. So at the point when he left,
there had been no Lebron, no Kobe, no Tim Duncan,
no Shack. So where would Bird rank? Top five? That
would be a stretch. Top ten absolutely. Meanwhile, Magic, who
(03:39):
had turned thirty three dority Olympics, was still, as he
saw it, a force. He was rare to go for
the season, still believing wrongly. I might add that the
Lakers could challenge Jordan's bulls. And then and then there
was this preseason game between them alone and Stockton Jazz
and the New York Knicks. Magic wasn't even involved. He
(04:01):
wasn't there. Harvey Araton, the Hall of Fame writer from
the New York Times, wandered over to talk to Karl Malone,
and suddenly the mailman started to talk about Magic and
what he perceived as unspoken fears about playing against someone
with HIV. This is from Harvey's story. Look at this,
scabs and cuts all over me, said Malone. He pressed
(04:22):
a finger to a small pinkish hole on his thigh
that was developing into a scab. I get these every night,
every game, he said. They can't tell you that you're
not at risk, and you can't tell me there's one
guy in the NBA who hasn't thought about it. Now,
where did that come from? Why did it come up suddenly?
Was he really voicing widespread concerns years later? It remains
(04:45):
a mystery. I couldn't get Malone to talk about it
during our long interview for my Dream Team book, but
it has been cleared throughout that Malone just didn't like
the showman side of Irvin Magic Johnson, and during our interview,
Carl kept making several references to people he thought were real. Pointedly,
Magic was not one of them. Barkley was one of
(05:06):
those real guys, and these two guys were another. I've
seen people that it's kind of different when the cameras.
You know, some people when the camera's one and depend
on who it is for consaying, that's why I thought
the world and that's why Stott was saying. Chris Mother
and Conor was one of my favorite. Magic says that
he and Malone never talked about it when they got back,
never talked about it at all over the course of
(05:27):
now going on twenty seven years. Only Carl knows whether
his personal resentment of Magic was the reason he made
the comment, or was he genuinely frightened about HIV, despite
the fact that he had spent much of the summer
in Magic's company. I just don't know, but it's worth
hearing all of what Magic said when I asked him
about it in two thousand and eleven. We did a
(05:50):
great job of educating not just to play it, but
the world because the world was not educated and we
stely think about all the misinformation that was out there.
So I had to be the person who could now, okay,
let me give you the right information. Let me education.
And then the Olympics actually gave me the platform to
(06:11):
show the world that a guy what HIV could still
play play at a high level and he wasn't going
to get HIV by playing against me. So when carl
want to come back, and he said that, that's kind
of set what I had did, and the Olympics said
it back zones that now I got more work to do.
But the fatal blow to Magic's return were the optics
(06:33):
from that night in Charlotte that Gary VD was talking
about the pressure got to be too much for him.
It was one of those moments that you understand the
power of image. Metaphorically speaking. The whole world was watching
Gary VD treat Magic Johnson's cut without gloves. Magic realized
that almost right away he saw the uproar and uncomfortable
(06:58):
nous it caused, and heng it up for the second time.
Now there would be a third after an abbreviated return,
but for all intents and purposes, Magic went out with
the man he came in with bird. Now a word
about Gary VT, the Lakers trainer, A wonderful man. He
is in anyone's Hall of fame a trainers, but there
(07:19):
are others like him in the NBA. You could hear
the emotion in Gary's voice during that radio interview. Trainers
get extremely close to players and they carry secrets to
the grave, and I've known very few that will betray confidences.
I should know. I've tried. What else was going on
(07:40):
after Barcelona, Well, let's go to Jordan's He led the
Bulls to their third straight championship and I can still
see him celebrating with his father in the Bulls locker
room in Phoenix. Five weeks later, James R. Jordan's Sr.
Was found murdered in his car, and a few months
after that October six, I'm very solid with my decision
(08:04):
of not to play the game of basketball name b A.
The reason being, I've heard a lot of different speculations
about my reasons for not playing, but I've always stressed
to people that have known me and the media that
has followed me that when I lose the sense of
motivation and the sense of to prove something as a
(08:27):
basketball player. It's time for me to move away from
the game of basketball. For whatever reason, Michael always loved
to say the game of basketball. He was like those
football coaches and commentators who feel compelled to say football
all the time. We moved the football real well, we're
a good football team right now. We just got to
become a better football team. Jordan loved to say the
(08:48):
game of basketball. The Jordan's story has been told endlessly,
so I won't tell it again in detail. Michael went
on to minor league baseball. Questions dogged him about whether
or not his gambling debts or something else was behind
his father's murder. They continue today, but I don't believe them.
And the league going into the season, found itself without
(09:10):
Michael Magic Larry. I'm trying to think of something comparable. Hey,
let's go see the Beatles. But listen, John, Paul and
George are all out, but Ringo will still be there
on drums. And the NBA was also without Jack McCallum.
I know the loss wasn't quite on a par with
Jordan's Magic and Bird, but something felt empty. How could
(09:32):
it get any better than covering the league during its
renaissance and that's what I had done. The last of
dr Ja, the best of Magic and Bird, the brilliantly
tough bad boy Pistons, the creation of All Star Weekend,
and the Duncan three point contests. Really good players who
didn't make the Dream Team, like James Worthy, Dominique Wilkins,
(09:52):
Isaiah Thomas. He had the ascendancy of Jordan's and then
you had the dream Team. So I left after the
any three season, did some editing, covered college basketball for
a year general stuff, and did return to the NBA
until early in the two thousand's, just in time to
see Jordan's swansong with the Washington Wizards. Now, after this
(10:24):
first dream team, nobody could figure out if the term
dream team could be used again. The US Olympic basketball
team was called in some quarters dream team too, but
in other quarters, how about this was a nightmare. That
was Barkley who played on the team, as did Pippin
the loan, Robinson and Stockton. But it was kind of
(10:46):
an f and nightmare. It had the same unmerciful on
court beatings of without the charm and well maturity of
that first team. Now, in a way it was inevitable.
It was like when you and your partner were young
and rented a cabin in the woods, and the weather
was perfect, and the cabin was quaint, and you cook
scrambled eggs in an old cast iron pan, and you
(11:07):
made love under a blanket on the couch. And then
you went back four years later and replicated that rained
every day, The cabin roof leaked, the sex blanket was
wet and moldy, and by the end of the weekend
you're throwing the eggs at each other. By the way,
this absolutely never happened to me. More on Dream Team too, No,
I can't call it that, but more on that in
(11:27):
a minute. In the immediate aftermath of the first Dream Team,
the biggest winner was probably Barkley. He went to Phoenix,
won an MVP award, carried his team to the finals,
where of course he was disposed of by Jordan's. He
talked endlessly as to others like Pippin, David Robinson and
Chris Mullen about how the experience had made him better,
(11:50):
gave him ideas about leadership the kind showed by Magic
and Michael, and commitment the kind showed by Karl Malone.
Was during that Championship series, of Barkley told his daughter Christiana, Honey,
no matter how good I am and I believe I'm
the second best player in the league, there's no way
I'm better than that some bitch in Chicago. Another player
(12:11):
to make out well in the aftermath of the Dream
Team was David Robinson. He didn't win a championship right away.
That wouldn't come until the strike the late season of
and again in two thousand three, and it didn't come
at all until he got Tim Duncan as a running mate.
In fact, one of the whispers about the Admiral was
that he never would have won without Tim. But that's
another story. But in the wake of the Dream Team,
(12:33):
Robinson clearly became a very impactful center, the very ideal
of the mobile, athletic, versatile center who was still a center,
not a seven foot stretch for but back to the
basket pivot man. On on the evening of one of
the most amazing statistical anomalies in the history of the
(12:55):
NBA occurred in a late season game against the Los
Angeles Clippers. San Antonio's David Robinson put up seventy one
points at that time, the seventh highest single game total
in the history of the NBA, the same point total
that Elgin Baylor had scored for the Los Angeles Lakers
(13:15):
in nineteen sixty five. Of the others came from Will
Chamberlain and the sixth from David Thompson. Parenthetical alert. Twelve
years after the Admiral's explosion, the late great Kobe Bryant,
as many of you remember, got eighty one against the
Toronto Raptors. Now, what was going on in that Robinson came. Well,
he had been battling Shaquille O'Neil for the scoring title.
(13:38):
But those were long ago days, huh, when Sentators actually
scored a lot of points, and this outburst gave David
the title. He talks about the guidance he got that
night from John Lucas, who was in the Spurs coach. Yes,
there was a time before Gregg Popovich coached the Spurs.
I'm gonna make sure every shot and I was like,
(13:59):
are you crazy? Like you know, the last thing I
want to do is go out there and try to
do something like that. Man, that's classic Robinson. I don't
want to take every shot. Coach. Remember what Jordan's said
about him. Basketball wasn't in David's DNA. I wonder what
Robinson would have been like had he had the mentality
(14:20):
to get seventy one every night. Another Dream Teamer who
made out well was Clyde Drexler, who was traded from
Portland to Houston halfway through season and his Rockets won
the championship. As Clyde saw it, this finally provided a
comeback line to all the crap he took from the
Dream Team in the media about getting torched by Jordan's
(14:41):
and being on teams that weren't very smart. This is
Clyde talking about the comeback he used when the alpha
male antagonists primarily Jordan and Magic, used to get on
his ass and let's side of I couldn't help laughing
(15:01):
when I interviewed Clyde. His answer to almost every question
was some version of how much he was disrespected. And
as far as shutting up Magic and Bird and Jordan's
real quick I doubt it. Those guys never shut up
far less quickly. But Drexler's point was that when he
got to Euston, he had a great center in a
Chemo La Juan, and that's what he always needed to
(15:24):
be a champion. Another great player now He's correct to
an extent, but even then Drexler couldn't escape Jordan's shadow.
Jordan was off playing baseball for the season, came back late,
not enough time to get the Bulls completely right. So
the Rockets, who won two straight titles will never be
(15:45):
fully appreciated. They were the team that won when the
Bulls were without Jordan's and without being fully Jordanized. While
on that subject, you have to remember how many fingers
and whose fingers were left ringless by and being around
the fingers of Barkley Malone, Stockton, Ewing Gary Payton were
(16:05):
all directly impacted by Jordan's particularly those of Malone and Stockton,
who lost to the Bulls in both the finals. And
So back to the Olympics in Atlanta, the one that
followed the original Dream team, the US again rolled through.
Their closest game was predictably against Lithuania, and they won
that by twenty two points. But but almost nobody cared.
(16:30):
There just wasn't much. Buzz I wasn't covering basketball that Olympics,
but I was free to go anywhere, and I rarely
even went to watch basketball. I went to the semifinal
against Australia, saw Barkley and he said, jack get me
the funk out of here. But that team was in
a tough position. Remember the right stuff. Immortal movie adapted
(16:52):
from Tom Wolfe's Immortal nonfiction book. When Alan Shepard, the
first man into space, returns after his fifth teen minute
suborbital successful mission, he's greeted with national acclaim JFK Jackie
the whole bit. Less than three months later, Gus Grissom
goes up on a similar mission and almost nobody cares.
(17:15):
And when the capsule's hatch blows open prematurely and Grissom
is blamed, the nation went out of its way to
ignore the fact that somebody had squeezed himself into what
amounts to a hole in the wall, risk his life
by flying into space and crashing into a cold ocean.
In the movie, Grissom's wife is offended and she should
(17:37):
be by the lack of attention. Where's Jackie this time?
She wants to know did anyone ever get more screwed
than Gus Grissom? By the way, six years after this
Mercury mission, he along with two other astronauts, dies in
a fire during the testing for the Apollo missions. Forgotten
Hero So the second dream team in the third which
(17:57):
won the gold in Australian two thousand, just couldn't win
even though they want. There wasn't the glamour, the glitz,
the excitement and most of all the preternatural novelty of
seeing all these guys together. And the two thousand team
almost didn't win. It beat Lithuania by only nine points,
then beat them again by only two points in the semifinals.
(18:19):
Lithuania muster three pointer at the buzzer that would have
given them the win, and Dream Team three. By now
nobody was calling them that only won the gold medal
game against France by ten points. That USA team was
composed of solid players Jason Kidd, Ray Allen Vince Carter, Alonso,
Morning Gary Peyton, Kevin Garnett. But they weren't the dream team.
(18:42):
That's the burden they carry. They weren't the dream team.
And by two thousand and four Athens, even with NBA players,
they won the bronze medal. Coming back, if you could
call at that after an opening to seventy three lost
to Puerto Rico. Let me repeat that, after a seventy
(19:04):
three loss to Puerto Rico. So the pressure of living
up to the first Dream Team. The only dream Team
wasn't the primary reason that US primacy began to evaporate.
The world had gotten better. See, there had already been
a foundational cast of international players in the NBA by
the turn of the century, a La Joan ric Smits,
(19:25):
Bloody divach To Kembe Matumbo and earlier my friend Shrunus
Marshalonis and the late great Drazen Petrovitch who died in
a car accident the year after the Barcelona Games. But
the Dream Team's arrival in Barcelona, and that was the key,
that was the explosion. It was almost like a door
(19:45):
to a different world had been blown open. Why well,
fifteen year old Manu Ginobili was watching the games from Argentina.
Fourteen year old Dirk now Whiskey, already heading towards seven
tall with a sweet jump shot, was watching from Germany.
Another growing boy, Pau Gasoul, was twelve, watching from Spain,
(20:08):
and he had a younger brother named Mark who was
also watching. Hato Turkulo was twelve. He was watching from Turkey.
Two eleven year olds were watching from different parts of
the world. Andre Carolinko was cheering on the unified team
from Russia, and Yao Ming was watching from China. A
giant eight year old named Andrew Bogatt was watching from Australia,
(20:31):
and Australia was already pretty good. A lightning fast ten
year old named Tony Parker was watching from France. And
seven years after the Barcelona games, the Spurs got Genoble
with the fifty seven pick of the draft, and two
years later they got Parker with the final pick of
the first round. They helped the Spurs become the team
(20:53):
of the first decade of this century. You see, so
many of us saw the lopsided results of the Dream
Team games and saw only slaughters, mismatches, one team so
far ahead of the other that standard metrics of comparison
didn't even apply. But the players in these other countries,
the real players at least, saw something else. They saw
(21:16):
a game that was demystified. Hey, the Dream Team isn't gods.
They're not ten ft tall, they don't have the speed
of Mercury. They passed the screen away, they find the
open man, they go back door. When it's there, they
box out. Okay, Barkley never did, but he got the
rebound anyway. They play the game the same way we do,
only a hundred times better. That's the difference we can
(21:39):
get there. One game, one world. And now there were
a hundred and eight international players a hundred and eight
on NBA rosters at the beginning of the two thousand,
nineteen twenty season. There have been as many as a
hundred and thirteen, with forty two countries represented forty two.
(22:00):
It was once a novelty. Now it's just standard operating procedure,
and they're not marginal players. They include some of the
best players in the game. The Greek freak in Milwaukee,
Janis andez Copo. That's how he says to pronounce it,
Luka don Chick and Christaps Porcingis in Dallas, Nicolo Jokich
in Denver, Joel Embiad in Philadelphia, Pascal Siakim in Toronto,
(22:23):
Taco Fall in Boston, and Demontus Sabonis in Indiana. He is,
by the way, the son of the great Arvidas Sabonis,
who played for Lithuania in the nine two Olympics, a
great Samonas story. By the way, he was not present
for the podium ceremony. The reason was widely believed to
be too much vodka. That was Sabonis. So the great
(22:45):
irony of the Dream Team was that it started out
as a celebration of American basketball and ended up as
a launch pad for basketball around the world. And remember
who was telling us that over thirty years ago, the
inspector of Beat Good Old Boris Stankovic. The only way
we grow the game is if everybody plays against each other.
(23:18):
That was my pleasure to take you on this journey,
and that's what it felt like. Remember that Mad Men
episode when Don Draper creates a campaign for the slide
Projector and he talks about being a time machine that
makes you ache with nostalgia and etcetera, etcetera. Well, this
wasn't that. I don't feel nostalgic about the Dream Team.
I don't want to go back there. But what the
(23:40):
podcast has given me the opportunity to do, though, is
remember from time to time how lucky it was to
be on the journey. There was a place in a
Dream Team book when I conjured up the idea of
concentrated greatness being in one place at one time. There's
a legendary photo taken in by Art Kane of a
group of jazz musicians in Harlem. The names are Staggering,
(24:03):
Count Basie, are Blaky, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman, Hawk and Steen, Cruper,
Charlie Mingus, the Loneous Monk, Jerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins. Where
the hell Miles Davis is I don't know, but he
was around at that time too. I also brought up
a photo that was in Ronald W. Clark's biography Einstein
The Life and Times. There at one time was a
(24:25):
physics symposium attended by most of the great minds of
the time, Einstein, Madame Marie Curie, Andre Lorenz, Max Planck,
and the famous French mathematician on the three point Kari,
whom Einstein considered his loan intellectual equal. I used to
stare at it, fascinated that all those visionary thinkers were
(24:45):
gathered together at one time, a fortuitous accident of history.
No basketball inc jazz, well, to a certain extent, it is,
but it certainly ain't physics. But it was still all
that concentration of greatness, a delicious acts of timing. That
was a dream team. I'll leave you with two sound bites.
The first is from John Stockton. I can't think of
(25:07):
anyone less likely to talk about basketball, heaven and poetry
and stock Well, that's why I mean, all the way
up to drinking the way of absolutely immediately upon the
body language of him cutting to the slot, the other
guys were making reciprocal moves or coordinating news and it was.
(25:28):
He was a no nonsense, straight ahead thinker who never
got dewy eyed about anything anything I saw at least,
But this is what playing on his team meant to him.
These guys, you see, formed their basketball character before the
age of height. They were hooped children of the sixties
and seventies, not the nineties and the aughts, when you
could make a king's ransom for being mediocre, largely because
(25:51):
of what the Dream Team created. Sure, richest endorsements, fame
glory followed the Dream Team, but that is not what
was in their DNA. I'm not saying they were the
last generation to come up that way, though Barkley says it,
and they weren't the last players to play for the
love of the game, but basketball basketball only playing the
game the right way, that was what made them. The
(26:14):
final bite is from Bird, and you heard it much
earlier in the podcast, but it's worth repeating Larry Bird,
Grandpa Larry, the oldest player on the Dream Team, whose
hoop chops were formed in a kind of darkness on
the edge of town atmosphere. As a lower class kid
from a berg that quite literally sounds like it conjures
up hard times French lique. Bird's last regular season game
(26:37):
was at Richfield Coliseum in suburban Cleveland. Bird describes why
he loved to play there. The second game I played
an NBA, we played Ritchfield. We pulled up there and
I couldn't believe See It's what I always dreamed, freaking
basketball building into color Field. Bird would have been happy
playing anywhere. It just turned out that his final game
(27:00):
was in Barcelona, Spain, on the biggest stage in the world,
on the best team ever put together. This has been
great for me and I hope you've enjoyed it too.
Dream Team the book is still available. I'm Jack McCallum,
and thanks for listening. If you enjoyed The Dream Team Tapes,
(27:24):
please follow, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts.
The Dream Team Tapes is written and hosted by Jack McCallum.
Executive producers Mark Francis and Scott Waxman. Executive producer for
I heart Media, is shown to tone. The Dream Team
Tapes is a Diversion Podcasts original series in association with
(27:47):
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Popular Podcasts
1. Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
2. Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
3. Crime Junkie
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.