When the Game Was Ours (38 page)

"There were plenty of years when I knew in my heart I was the best guy in the room," Bird said. "That night I knew in my heart it wasn't me anymore. And it wasn't Magic either."

Rashad, a friend to both Michael and Magic, tried to soften the increasingly heated rhetoric. He was unsuccessful. Jordan wanted concessions from Johnson that Magic stubbornly refused to provide, and His Airness remained relentless in pursuing them.

"I just think it's too bad we couldn't all have been young together," Magic said. "We could have all been the face of the NBA at the same time."

"Your time has passed," Jordan said. "C'mon, old man, give it up."

"I'm not sure about that," Magic persisted.

"Magic," Bird finally interjected, "stop. We had our moment. There was a period when nobody was better than you and me. But not anymore. Michael is the best now.

"Let's pass the torch and be on our way."

Magic Johnson wouldn't stop pestering Larry Bird. Magic desperately wanted to play in the 1992 Olympic Games with him, but Bird's back was so badly damaged that he could barely run up and down the court for the Boston Celtics.

"I was in so much pain, I didn't even want to play basketball anymore," Bird said.

Although he had not told anyone except his wife and Dan Dyrek, Bird had already determined that the 1991–92 season would be his last. It had become a daily chore for him to lace up his sneakers without doubling over. He was 35 years old, and he was done.

But Magic wasn't taking no for an answer.

"Larry, we've got to do this," Magic implored him. "I've been waiting my whole career to play with you one more time."

Dave Gavitt, the CEO of the Celtics and president of USA Basketball, also wanted Bird in the fold. Four years earlier, in Seoul, South Korea, the U.S. team, made up completely of college players, suffered a stunning loss to the Soviet Union in the Olympic Games and trudged home with a bronze medal instead of the customary—and expected—gold. Even before the embarrassing defeat, there had been discussions about opening up Olympic competition to NBA players. In 1989 the International Basketball Federation voted to allow professionals to play.

Members of USA Basketball were split over the decision. Some were vehemently opposed to inviting NBA stars to compete internationally, and others worried that, since the pros would not receive financial compensation, they might be less committed. There was also the thorny issue of asking the stars to tack two months of training onto an already taxing NBA season.

Gavitt reasoned that the professionals would embrace the idea only if the team was turned into a phenomenon, a coveted, once-in-a-lifetime showcase with enough cachet to capture the curiosity of the world. The goal was to assemble the greatest basketball team in history, and to do that Gavitt needed three people: Magic, Larry, and Michael.

It had been nine months since Magic retired in the wake of his devastating HIV diagnosis, but he continued to feel physically strong and played basketball nearly every day. He enthusiastically endorsed the idea of playing for his country in Barcelona.

Jordan, who won a gold medal in Los Angeles in 1984 as an undergraduate at North Carolina, was intrigued with Gavitt's vision but remained noncommittal.

Bird, whose back continued to deteriorate, couldn't have been any more adamant.

"I'm not playing," he told Gavitt. "I'm too old. Give my spot to one of the younger guys."

Gavitt remained undeterred. He asked Bird if he followed the Olympics as a child and if he had ever dreamed of representing his country. Bird conceded that he had. The United States needed to reclaim the gold, Gavitt explained, and to do so they needed the finest available players. He had Magic. He was close to convincing Jordan.

"And if we have you, we'll make history," Gavitt said.

Bird was unmoved. Gavitt backed off, but in the interim he made it known that he wanted Bird on the roster. Boston's franchise forward was inundated with phone calls urging him to reconsider.

"Larry," Magic said during one of their conversations, "you can't let this opportunity go by. All I want to do is throw you one pass and
have you hit a shot. Do that, and then you don't have to play anymore."

Had he been healthy, Bird would have already signed on with the Dream Team, but his mobility was limited and his game had suffered. He was no longer the same player who was widely recognized as one of the greatest clutch performers of all time.

"I don't want to be a charity case," Bird told Gavitt.

"Larry," Gavitt said, "the Olympics are played under international rules. That includes zone defenses. You'll destroy them with your outside shooting."

Bird considered Gavitt's argument, the first valid reason that swayed him. He could still shoot. And he did always wonder what it would be like to have a gold medal around his neck.

"All right," Bird said. "I'm in."

Within days, Jordan and Barkley also joined the fold, and interest in the team swelled. Suddenly a spot on the Dream Team had become the most prestigious invitation in all of sports.

A committee made up of USA Basketball, NBA, and college officials fleshed out the remaining roster. Jordan's Chicago teammate Scottie Pippen was added, along with Utah's prolific duo of forward Karl Malone and point guard John Stockton. Ewing and Spurs big man David Robinson were invited to anchor the middle. Chris Mullin, a three-point shooter, was asked to help exploit the zone defenses. The final two spots were later filled by Portland guard Clyde Drexler and the lone college representative, Duke star Christian Laettner, who beat out a young, powerful center from Louisiana State University, Shaquille O'Neal, bypassed in favor of Laettner because the Duke star had logged more time with USA Basketball.

Predictably, the selection process was not without controversy. The list of snubbed NBA stars could have captured a gold medal of its own: Atlanta star Dominique Wilkins, Magic's Laker counterpart James Worthy, Indiana's clutch shooter Reggie Miller, and Detroit stars Joe Dumars and Dennis Rodman.

Yet the most glaring omission was Isiah Thomas, the point guard of the Pistons' back-to-back championships in 1988 and 1989.
Thomas was an eleven-time All-Star and three-time first-team All-NBA selection, and his coach, Chuck Daly, had been tabbed to coach the Dream Team.

Bird was startled that Thomas didn't make the cut. He shouldn't have been. Jordan had made it clear that he wanted no part of playing alongside Thomas in the backcourt. Michael had not forgotten the All-Star freeze-out in 1985 or the 1991 Eastern Conference Finals, when the Bulls supplanted the Pistons in the East and Isiah, Bill Laimbeer, and Mark Aguirre walked off the court with four seconds left on the game clock rather than congratulate the Bulls. It was a blatant sign of disrespect that was roundly condemned throughout the league.

Magic, still wounded by Thomas's reaction to his HIV diagnosis, did not hear from him during the Dream Team selection process. Pistons public relations director Matt Dobek called Magic on Isiah's behalf, but Magic refused to advocate for him.

"Our relationship was really strained at that point," Magic explained. "We didn't speak for years, and Isiah knew why. He questioned me when I got my HIV diagnosis. How can a so-called friend question your sexuality like that? I know why he did it, because we used to kiss before games, and now if people were wondering about me, that meant they were wondering about
him
too.

"I was so upset by that. When I started working for NBC, [
New York Post
reporter] Peter Vecsey tried to get us together. He was telling me, 'Isiah is hurting, you guys need to talk.' But I wasn't interested. I told him, 'Forget it.'

"Isiah killed his own chances when it came to the Olympics. Nobody on that team wanted to play with him.

"Isiah's problem was he always felt he had to fight for everything. Even when he finally got among the elite, he couldn't stop fighting.

"The comments about Larry being overrated [in the 1987 Conference Finals] were out of pure frustration. He was jealous. He felt Larry was getting too much attention and he wasn't getting his.

"He always wanted to be in that conversation when people talked about the great players. Michael, Larry, and I were always in that discussion. He could have been if he had handled things differently.
But because of the petty decisions he's made, no one gives him his due.

"I'm sad for Isiah. He has alienated so many people in his life, and he still doesn't get it. He doesn't understand why he wasn't chosen for that Olympic team, and that's really too bad. You should be aware when you have ticked off more than half of the NBA.

"If you went strictly on terms of ability, then Isiah should have been chosen for the Dream Team. But Michael didn't want to play with him. Scottie wanted no part of him. Bird wasn't pushing for him. Karl Malone didn't want him. Who was saying, 'We need this guy'? Nobody.

"Michael got singled out as the guy that kept Isiah off, but that really isn't fair. It was everybody. We all understood the camaraderie wouldn't be the same.

"What happened with Isiah has been the biggest personal disappointment of my life. Nothing else is even close. Here's a guy I trained with, I vacationed with, who I counseled, and he counseled me. And he threw it all away out of jealousy.

"When I see him now, we're cordial. That's about it. When the Knicks were looking for someone to run their team, [Madison Square Garden Sports president] Steve Mills, who is a good friend of mine, called me asking what I thought. I told him, 'Hey, you should talk to Isiah.'

"I can separate the personal from the professional. In spite of what happened between us, I still respect his knowledge of the game.

"But even with the Knicks situation, he had to be stubborn. When things went bad there, he kept fighting and fighting instead of saying, 'Okay, I better give up something here.' If he was willing to compromise, he might have saved himself a lot of trouble. But he couldn't. He doesn't know how.

"I don't wish anything bad on him. We will never be the same, and I will never trust him again, but I hope he finds peace with himself.

"In the meantime, I've moved on."

***

Once the Dream Team roster was finalized, the players hunkered down in La Jolla, California, at the Sheraton Grande Torre Pines Resort and went about the process of evolving from rivals into united teammates. The transition, Bird and Magic noted, was remarkably smooth, with the prospect of a gold medal outweighing any lingering disagreements from the NBA season.

It quickly became apparent to Daly that, if there was going to be a problem with the squad, it was their tendency to pass the ball
too much.
The players, often in competition to outdo each other on the court, delighted in making the dificult play.

Daly's private wish was to go through the entire Olympic process without ever having to call a time-out. Known as a player's coach for his ability to juggle egos and personalities, Daly was pleased at how self-motivated his players were in practice. Ewing would dominate play in the middle with jump hooks and turnarounds, then Robinson would counter with rainbow jumpers and fast-break jams. Barkley would post up Malone, declare his supremacy, then steel himself for Malone's response, which often involved a forearm in the back and a brute physical move around the basket. At stake were bragging rights to being the best power forward in the world that day. Yet all those battles paled in comparison to the verbal (and physical) skirmishes involving Magic and Michael.

In their mano-a-mano battles, the stakes were high: basketball legacies and superstar bragging rights.

"C'mon, Magic, keep up," Jordan would tease Johnson after blowing past him in the open court.

"Michael, you've got to see the whole floor," Magic would chastise him, after firing one of his pinpoint no-look passes into the hands of a startled teammate.

On June 23, USA Basketball assembled eight of its top college players to scrimmage against Daly's studs: Michigan forward Chris Webber, Memphis State guard Anfernee "Penny" Hardaway, Duke star Grant Hill, North Carolina center Eric Montross, Kentucky forward Jamal Mashburn, Tennessee sniper Allan Houston, Wake Forest scorer Rodney Rogers, and Duke point guard Bobby Hurley.

Daly instructed coach George Raveling to encourage his college
team to push tempo and shoot three-pointers. The kids buried 10 treys and outscored the Dream Team 62–54 in a 20-minute scrimmage.

"They beat the hell out of us," Bird said. "I was pretty ticked off. Allan Houston murdered us with the threes, and Bobby Hurley was absolutely killing us with his quickness. Nobody wanted to guard him because nobody could stay with him.

"Those kids embarrassed us. And they did us a favor. Our attitude changed after that. No fooling around."

The next day the Dream Team demanded a full-game rematch and beat the kids by 50. All eight of the college All-Stars graduated to the NBA and enjoyed lengthy careers, save Hurley, who was injured in a serious car accident and was never the same player.

The Dream Team migrated from La Jolla to Portland for the Tournament of the Americas, where four of the ten teams advanced from the zone qualifier to the Olympic Games. Months earlier, Rosen had fielded a call from USA Basketball asking him what number Magic wanted.

"How high do the numbers go?" Rosen asked.

"To 15," the official answered.

"Earvin will take 15," Rosen said.

That way, Magic's agent figured, his client would be introduced last.

The Americans pummeled Cuba 136–57 in the first game, with Bird and Magic re-creating the on-court chemistry they had demonstrated 14 years earlier at the World Invitational Tournament.

Magic repeatedly pushed tempo, penetrated the lane, then kicked it back out to Bird on the perimeter. Each time Larry buried the shot on a feed from Magic, the fans celebrated as if the gold medal had just been won. Seconds before halftime, Johnson drove all the way to the hoop, with Bird trailing on the wing. Magic was about to lay in the ball when he turned and fired a no-look bullet to Bird, who stopped and drained the three as the buzzer sounded.