Authors: Jack McCallum
For much of June and early July, Portland, Oregon, turned out to be the basketball capital of the world. The City of Roses had outbid Seattle, Hartford, and Indianapolis to host the Tournament of the Americas, through which the United States had to qualify for the Olympics, and by chance the Trail Blazers had also hosted Games 3, 4, and 5 of the NBA Finals, winning two of those but ultimately losing the decisive Game 6 to the Jordan and Pippen Bulls in Chicago.
So to those of us covering the playoffs and then the Dream Team, Portland had become a second home, and it couldn’t have been more perfect. Portland was (still is) a fantastic city, hard by the Willamette River, funky and not overly gentrified, clean and comfortable, a city for your grandmother, your budding punk rocker, your underachieving intellectual driving hack. The citizenry took its Blazers extremely seriously but not itself. The city had great restaurants,
an iconic local treasure called Powell’s Books where one could lose himself for an afternoon, and an immortal bar on First Avenue called the Veritable Quandary (still there), where they had a lot on tap and a lot on tape. You wanted Stevie Ray Vaughan one night, you got it; you wanted the Clash the next night, you got that, too.
The tournament wasn’t originally called the Tournament of the Americas and in fact wasn’t even supposed to be in the United States. The FIBA schedule had called for the North and South American Zone Qualifying Tournament to be held in Brazil in March 1992, right around the time that NBA teams would be jockeying for playoff position and the NCAA was in full tournament mode. Had someone—be it the International Olympic Committee, FIBA, or the other qualifying teams—won a power struggle to keep that tournament in that place at that date, not only would there have been no Michael, Magic, or Larry, but there wouldn’t even have been Hill, Hurley, or Webber.
But that was never going to happen. A little not-so-gentle arm-twisting by the NBA, Dave Gavitt, and the Inspector of Meat was all that was needed to move this clambake to friendly soil.
The broadcast rights belonged to COPABA, a corporate entity owned by a wealthy Brazilian named Jorge Ramos. Gavitt had been hanging around the NBA folks long enough by now to know what he had to do—put up some cold cash, a language Ramos could understand. It was between $3 million and $4 million and was supplied by the United States Olympic Committee, which had a surplus from the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. USA Basketball then bought television time from both NBC and TNT, the latter having recently come aboard as a broadcast partner, and handed the whole thing over to NBA Properties.
It was in Portland that one first realized the far-reaching scope of the Dream Team. La Jolla/San Diego had been crawling with American reporters, but at the Tournament of the Americas it turned international. The opposing teams were Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela,
each of which brought with it a local hero, most notably Brazil, whose high-scoring Oscar Schmidt was a legend overseas. At last the United States had a couple of flesh-and-blood targets.
“Ooh, Oscar Schmidt!” said Barkley. “I’m shaking in my boots.” When Barkley would pause for a moment to actually offer a serious comment, it would go something like this. “I guard Larry Bird and James Worthy and Kevin McHale and Dominique Wilkins and a dozen other guys during the season,” he’d say. “Why the fuck would I be worried about Oscar Schmidt?” As for Oscar Schmidt, who once had been talked about as being a draftable NBA player, (my own feeling is that he could’ve played in the league in his prime, which was between 1980 and 1988), here was his goal for the tournament: “I want all the American team’s autographs if possible,” said Schmidt. “Larry Bird is my idol. If I could play against him, it would be a great satisfaction.” Now there was a real “Beat the USA!” battle cry. (Schmidt didn’t get his wish in Portland, where he received only an autographed copy of
Drive
, an early autobiography Bird wrote with Bob Ryan, but he did in Barcelona.)
A small army of team officials, federation executives, entourages, and press contingents were there, too. International teams are notorious homers, but there was a different feeling about these visitors, who, like almost everyone else in Portland, were de facto Dream Team groupies.
Also in evidence were members of the United States Olympic Committee, who were close to getting their claws into the Dream Team. Until the United States officially qualified for Barcelona, the Dream Team was under the aegis of USA Basketball, but an Olympic team answers to the USOC, which was sick and tired of hearing about these millionaires who wanted to make their own rules.
The most obvious additions to this ever-expanding universe were the sponsors that had glommed onto the Dream Team. Behind closed doors they had been fighting pitched battles for months, trying to maximize their brand by association with this gang of all-star pitchmen. It was serious business with serious business consequences, but there was also a ludicrous territoriality to the whole
thing that would culminate on the gold medal podium in Barcelona, where Nike god Michael Jordan would be forced to don a jacket made by Reebok. (Another topic for later.)
To those fighting the battles inside the NBA, USA Basketball, and the USOC, parsing out the conflicting contracts and relationships was a daily rat’s nest. These weren’t junior varsity sponsors that had come aboard; there were sixteen of them, and they were companies such as AT&T, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Gatorade, and Visa USA, all of which had paid seven figures for the privilege of association with USA Basketball, but really with Michael, Magic, Larry, et al.
A dizzying number of retailers, twenty-four of them, had also signed on with NBA Properties, which was now in full control of marketing and turning out all kinds of red-white-and-blue fiddle-faddle. NBA Properties hadn’t even existed a decade earlier, but by 1992 it had grown into one of the most sophisticated marketing juggernauts in the world. (David Stern would even suggest to Billy Payne, who was in charge of the 1996 Games in Atlanta, that NBA Properties assume all control of Olympic marketing; Payne, unwisely, said no.) In Portland, you couldn’t swing a cat without knocking over a USA Basketball cup or a USA Basketball calendar. My sons, who were fifteen and twelve at the time, had their instructions: they could buy anything they wanted with their own money, but we weren’t buying extra luggage to lug home a cache of Christian Laettner place mats. Then we took a trip to the Nike outlet store in Beaverton, Oregon, a requisite consumer journey, and had to buy an extra suitcase anyway.
The real intrigue came from the scrimmages about whose likeness could be put on what. Remember that the players had all sorts of endorsement deals of their own with companies that were not necessarily a part of Olympic marketing. And remember that no one can be a bigger pain in the ass than (a) agents who feel that their guy is getting screwed and (b) company execs who feel that they are not getting ultimate leverage out of their deals.
The earliest battles were fought over the feet. Converse was an
official sponsor of USA Basketball, not to mention a longtime supporter of the amateur basketball program and America’s de facto historical basketball shoe. Which made not a scintilla of difference to Jordan and Nike. Months before the team got together, Jordan’s agent, David Falk, had told USA Basketball officials that his client’s likeness was not to appear on Olympic apparel that was not sponsored by Nike. Some saber-rattling and tort-threatening ensued before a tentative compromise was worked out, one that, to echo once again the words of William Goldman, was set, just not
set
set, and would erupt in Barcelona.
The players were due some monies from the fast-flowing revenue stream that came from sponsorship and merchandise sales. Charles Grantham, a member of the USA Basketball committee but also president of the National Basketball Players Association, had insisted early on that the Dream Teamers get 33 percent of the pie, a figure that was unpopular both with his fellow committee members (who preferred something more like 0 percent) and other agents (who preferred something more like 50 percent). “As politically sensitive as all this was,” Grantham says today, “I didn’t want players to appear greedy. But neither did I want them to be exploited. So I thought one-third was fair.”
However, by that point Dave Gavitt—the political marvel—had already intervened, having buttonholed his Celtics captain, Bird, about giving the money back. “USA Basketball needs it, Larry,” Gavitt told him. “You’re the first guy I’m coming to.” Nobody was exactly sure what the sum would turn out to be, but Bird remembers it as somewhere between $600,000 and $800,000. “You’re crazy, Dave,” Bird told him. “But go ahead and ask.” Gavitt went to selected guys. Magic, of course, who said he would do what Bird did. Jordan, of course, who said he would give it back. Eventually, Gavitt secured enough pledges, and the deal was done. A couple of players may have kept the money. But not many. “That’s how smooth Dave Gavitt was,” Bird says today. “He got a bunch of basketball players to give up money.”
Still, there was much understandable cynicism attached to, say,
Jordan’s Olympic participation.
You mean to tell me he’s not doing this for the money?
Well, he wasn’t. In fact, the bigger the star, the
less
he prospered from Barcelona. The Olympics needed Jordan; Jordan didn’t need the Olympics. “Did it make Michael more international and give him a broader stage?” says David Falk. “Of course. But Michael already had that and we didn’t do any new deals because of the Olympics. From purely a commercial standpoint, the Dream Team didn’t have nearly as much impact on Michael, or, for that matter, on Patrick, as the 1984 Olympics.” Lon Rosen, Magic’s representative, says much the same thing: “The value of bigger stars, like Earvin and Michael, is always as individuals, and most of the Olympic marketing was as a group.”
But all that was backroom stuff, background noise. When I look back at Portland, I still feel it represented the last pure moment of the Dream Team experience, the last time you could feel that, despite the growing vastness of the thing, you could get your hands around it, caress it, enjoy it. You had partial ownership of it; you were
invested
.
The press was invited to an opening-night party at the Nike campus, and I cadged tickets for my family. Dutifully I trotted my sons over to meet the gods, interrupting the players in mid-bite or mid-sip. Jordan, sporting a Fu Manchu that he said was a favorite of his wife, Juanita, was polite and slapped the boys on the back. Barkley put an arm around each of them and said, mock seriously, “I know you can overcome the disadvantages of having a father like that.” There were fireworks and fresh seafood and booze, and while I made comments to my wife about the cultish, overly Nike-y aspects of the whole thing, I also thoroughly enjoyed it, wearing my half-price Jordans, the happy hypocrite, fortunate that I was walking this journalistic trail at this moment.
It was indeed a triumph of timing for all who were there. By then I was familiar with Art Kane’s famous black-and-white photo of jazz musicians that was taken in 1957 on the corner of Fifth and
Madison in Harlem: Count Basie, Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Gene Krupa, Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, et al. Later, in Ronald W. Clark’s terrific biography
Einstein: The Life and Times
, I came across an iconic photo of a physics symposium attended by the great minds of the time—Einstein, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Max Planck, and the famous French mathematician Henri Poincaré, whom Einstein considered his lone intellectual equal. I used to stare at it, fascinated that all those visionary thinkers were gathered there together at one time, a fortuitous accident of history.
The musicians and the scientists constituted Dream Teams in other universes. And while the ’92 Dream Team members weren’t as creative as jazz musicians or as brainy as physicists, they were, in their own world, the resident geniuses of their time, and most of them have endured as such. When you tunneled in and got closer, yes, they were at root a bunch of guys on a basketball team, the guys I covered from October to June. Ask Barkley about Jordan’s greatness, and you’d be liable to get, “Man, all I know is that he is the
blackest
sumbitch I ever saw.” Ask Bird to comment on Magic’s passing ability, and you’d be liable to get, “I don’t know. He hasn’t passed me the ball yet.” Maybe it was like that for the scientists, too; maybe if you got close, you’d hear,
Hey, Curie. Your last theorem? My Chihuahua figured it out in five minutes
.
But from afar it had a kind of majesty to it. It was a secret kingdom to which I had one of the keys, at least to a side door.
Others felt the same way. Not long ago I asked Dick Ebersol, who as president of NBC Sports had by that time presided over a hundred dramatic events, what he felt as he sat courtside in Portland with David Stern and Boris Stankovic, the Inspector of Meat, when the team ran out together for the first time. Up to that point, Ebersol had not been using the Dream Team for much of his Olympic promotion. “Prime time was still going to be about the cute little women’s gymnastic team, and the swimmers, people like Matt Biondi, Pablo Morales, Summer Sanders, and Janet Evans,” said Ebersol, who in May 2011 resigned as NBC sports chief. But then the doors
to the kingdom swung open, the Dream Team came out, and Ebersol was transfixed. “It was like nothing I had ever experienced before,” said Ebersol. “I had chills.”
Magic Johnson was leading the way. It had been decided moments earlier, back in the tunnel, that one of the co-captains was going to carry the American flag, and you knew how that was going to go. Taking the advice of NBA PR man Josh Rosenfeld, whom he had worked with for several years in Los Angeles, Magic had already selected jersey number 15, ensuring that he would always be announced last, since the numbers ran from 4 to 15.
“You carry the flag,” Bird said to Magic. By then Bird had ceded most of his captaincy duties to Magic. If he couldn’t play at full strength, he was not going to act like a full-strength captain.