Dream Team (25 page)

Good question. In 1988, NBA Entertainment mortared into place a marvelous capsulization of Bird’s career, a panoply of highlights that ran with John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Small Town.” NBA Entertainment debuted the video during All-Star Weekend in Chicago. As the lights went down, Bird slipped into the back of the room, accompanied by Dyrek. (Dyrek was a good guy and good company—I consulted with him for my own back problems—but it does say something when you pal around with the guy whose job it is to keep you upright.)

The video began. There is Bird anticipating the direction of one of his own misses, running to the spot, rebounding and left-handing in a layup, the video’s money shot. There is Bird with a two-handed, over-the-head feed to a trailing Robert Parish for a dunk. There is Bird making precision passes from a sitting position on the floor, and there is Bird making two back-to-the-basket moves on the same
play, finally knifing between two defenders for an underhand scoop shot.

We kept stealing glances back at Bird, to see his reaction, but his face was a blank.

There is Bird dribbling between two defenders and finally tapping a pass, à la Pete Maravich, back to McHale. There is Bird looking one way, then wrapping an entry pass around an opponent from the other direction. There is Bird, far under the basket, battling Milwaukee’s Jack Sikma for a rebound, somehow corralling it, and, almost in one motion, somehow left-handing an outlet under James Worthy’s outstretched arms to start a fast break.

Nobody makes those plays. Those plays are impossible. But Bird made them. And, finally, there is Bird stealing that fateful pass from Isiah in the ’87 playoffs.

The lights come on. Someone starts applauding and we look back at Bird. He smiles ever so slightly, raises his hand ever so slightly, and leaves the room.

In its own way, Bird’s career offers up more of a highlight reel than Magic’s. That is no slight to Magic. The success of the Lakers guard was built on flash, yes, but more on straight dash. With the ball, he got from point A to point B as quickly as anyone and, once there, could usually get where he wanted to go, often with that killer spin. He was an unstoppable combination of size, strength, and speed, a running back hitting the hole hard and then having enough open-field chops to find the end zone.

But Bird, not Magic, was the earthbound, 180-degree version of Jordan’s aerial artistry. Bird’s gems were the product of some kind of extraordinary muscle memory, strength, and vision. They often occurred in the midst of armed combat, when he suddenly emerged with the ball and, not content merely to have it, went on to make a play out of it, turn a positive into a positive-positive. In his own way, Bird, the fundamental master, made more spectacular plays than Magic, the architect of Showtime.

And then there was his mind. In one of the
SI
polls I did during the 1991–92 season, the question was: who is the league’s smartest
player? Though Bird was in and out of the lineup, he won the voting over Stockton 10–8. Since we’re on the subject, Mullin and Utah Jazz guard Jeff Hornacek got the next highest numbers of votes. That’s four white players. Isiah Thomas got 1.5 votes. Racist? I can’t say that. But I never saw any evidence that Thomas was not as smart a player as, say, Stockton, and that’s a compliment to both of them. One caveat: several GMs and coaches say that they would’ve voted for Magic, an African American, had he been active during the season. But then, I never saw any evidence that Thomas was not as smart a player as Magic, either.

The most conclusive case that I can offer that Bird may stand alone at the top of the list of heady players comes from former Pistons player Laimbeer. Laimbeer does not like Bird and the feeling is mutual. But not long ago Laimbeer told me: “Let’s face it, it would be hard to find a smarter player than Bird.”

In the months before the Dream Team got together, the sometimes hobbled Bird probably drew the most attention during the strange and sometimes surreal circumstances surrounding the maybe-I-am-and-maybe-I’m-not retirement of Magic Johnson.

Magic had picked the date of his ceremony as February 16 because the Celtics and Bird would be in Los Angeles. That was one of the times when Bird was sidelined, and he would not have flown cross-country had Magic not been hanging up his sneakers … or whatever the hell he was doing. Gamely and uncomfortably, Bird stood on the podium during the forty-five-minute ceremony. He wore a double-breasted suit and looked for all the world like an Indiana undertaker. (Later, after he had returned to his more comfortable sweats, he uttered the obligatory line: “I rented it out, now I gotta take it back.” It sounded funny coming from him because a lot of stuff sounded funny coming from him.)

Bird’s introduction drew such loud and sustained applause that he was prompted to say, “I’m not the one retiring here, but thank you very much.” Magic, standing a few feet away, asked with a
smile: “Soon?” To which Bird replied: “Very soon.” (Nobody but Bird knew how soon.) Bird then presented Magic with a piece of the Boston Garden parquet floor, the same memento the navel-gazing Celtics had given Kareem Abdul-Jabbar during his retirement tour in the 1988–89 season.

My best guess is that Bird honestly thought that Magic was retiring, because he was emotional during his brief remarks, promising, “We’re gonna go to Barcelona and bring back the gold”—quite an enthusiastic turnaround for one who had initially seemed so disinclined to play.

And Bird had by this time, with the reality of his basketball mortality settling in, begun to appreciate his relationship with Magic and understand their dual impact upon the NBA. This is not exactly new ground, having been covered in the outstanding HBO documentary
Magic and Bird: A Courtship of Rivals
and in
When the Game Was Ours
. Some players, most notably Michael Jordan, were dismissive of the “shared legacy” story line, believing it to be mostly a Magic creation. (See Jordan
interlude
.) But it’s worth another brief look.

Never in the history of sport has there been such a clear delineation of an era than the one that began when Magic and Bird came into the league, forever bound by blessed timing. Their rookie season, 1979–80, coincided with the coming of a new decade that would begin a new age in the NBA. They had been the two most-watched athletes in college basketball the previous season. They were dispatched not only to teams with contrasting styles but also to cities with a contrasting ethos—Magic’s Los Angeles, the glitzy and showy entertainment center, and Bird’s Boston, the conservative, traditional pride of the workingman.

The easy thing was to typecast the principals as reflections of their environment, the fast-breaking Magic as metaphor for fast-breaking Hollywood, the fundamentally sound Bird as metaphor for fundamentally sound Beantown. It worked at a certain surface level, but to draw such contrasts was to ignore the basic and all-important similarity between them: stylistic contrasts aside,
they played the game unselfishly and democratically, and, not coincidentally, their teams won championships. Magic and Bird were, to an extent,
the same person
, midwestern children of the working class, blue-collared, nothing handed to them on a platter. That’s what came out when they laced up their sneakers.

“What happened with Larry and Magic was they set a precedent of how the game should be approached, physically and mentally,” Chris Mullin said during that 1991–92 season. “They taught everybody to not just focus on the money they were making or not making, but to play every single game like it’s important. And when you have the best guys doing that, it rubs off. I think back to before I was playing, when the league had a bad name, there were only certain guys who would do that, a few on each team and maybe not even that. But just as bad habits are contagious on a team, so are good habits. And a lot of them started with Larry and Magic.”

Both later said that when the NBA schedule was released each year they would circle the games they were to play against each other. Between December 28, 1979, and February 16, 1992, that happened thirty-seven times, the Lakers winning twenty-two of those games, further evidence that Magic had the better career. Each Magic-goes-against-Bird game was a red-letter date not just for them and the NBA but also for the sports world at large. By the time they had finished hammering away at each other, the league had been fundamentally transformed by their construction work. Teams were truly better, so good that an immortal like Bill Walton was a sixth man on the Celtics and a legendary scoring machine named Bob McAdoo was the eighth man on the Lakers.

Early in his career, Bird never thought much about those legacies and shared contributions, or at least never wanted to speak of them. He was too busy trying to beat Magic rather than philosophize about him. Since Magic’s Michigan State team had defeated Bird’s Indiana State team in that 1979 NCAA final, and then Magic’s Lakers won the title in his rookie year, 1980, Bird felt like he was playing catch-up. When they finally got to spend extended off-court time together, during the filming of a Converse commercial in 1985, they enjoyed each other’s company.

On or off the record, background or deep background, I never heard one say a bad word about the other. And they treasured their competition. Steve Bulpett, the veteran Celtics reporter for the
Boston Herald
, told about encountering Bird, dressing alone, in the nearly deserted visitors’ locker room in the old Forum, home of the Lakers. “We’re playin’ the Lakers,” he sang almost to himself. “We’re playin’ the Lakers.”

And so there they were, in the same starting lineup on the day of that first game in Portland, soon-to-be-departed icons, so much history behind them. Magic got the tip and looked only for Larry. “I was only going one place,” Magic said years later, “and that was to him.”

And Larry looked only to the basket. “I knew I was going to shoot it,” Bird would joke later, “because I didn’t know if I’d get another chance to score.” Today he says: “I had a smaller man on me, and I was open. That’s all I ever needed.”

He rose and shot, somehow young again, backpedaling while the ball was still in the air, secure of its destination, just as he had been in all those three-point contests.

The Legend wouldn’t play in the next game because his back was stiff, and in fact he participated in only one more of the five remaining games in Portland. It was at the postgame interview session, in fact, when Bird felt such a severe stab of pain that he thought he’d be going home. But in those opening minutes he felt great, as if he had somehow gotten a cosmic reprieve just so he could catch that first pass from Magic and launch that shot.

For sure, the ball settled into the net, the first basket scored by the Best Team That Ever Played and also, in some way, the most glorious. “I’ll never forget that flash of joy on his face when he made that shot,” said Magic years later. “I can still see it today. I can still
feel
it today.”

The day after the United States opened the Tournament of the Americas with the rout of photo-snapping Cuba, it played Canada, a team that brought its elbows and knees, not its cameras. What else could a hockey nation do but try to hard-check the Dream Team into the boards? The result was a rough, shoddy game, and in the first half, on a defensive switch, John Stockton knocked knees with Jordan and went down. It didn’t look bad at first and Stockton started to walk it off, which is what Jordan did. But then Stockton collapsed. It was bad, a spiral fracture of the right leg that would take between six and eight weeks to heal.

In this first incarnation of pros in the Olympics, there was too much of the old red-white-and-blue bonhomie in the ether for anyone to have raised much of a fuss about the specter of injuries. But as much as the fans back home might’ve been rooting for their respective Dream Teamers, general managers and coaches were worried,
and, as time wore on, owners such as Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks began to complain about the injury risk to their assets. Frankly, it’s hard not to see their point. After Stockton went down, Malone said he was worried about communicating with Jazz coach Jerry Sloan. “I was afraid he’d tell me to come home,” said the Mailman.

(As time goes on, the prediction here is that owners will be less and less inclined to allow their best players to participate in the Olympic Games. That represents the principal threat to the continuance of the best pros playing for their national teams.)

On one level, Stockton’s injury was a nonstory. Magic was playing well and either Jordan or Pippen could move to the point if necessary; it wasn’t like exact positions were mandated anyway. But behind closed doors the injury did make for a lot of intrigue and, once again, brought Isiah into the conversation.

Daly’s mind was all but made up. He looked in on Stockton in the training room after the game and told him, “We’re going to need to replace you.” Stockton protested that he should sleep on it, wait a day. Daly said okay. The coach went to dinner at Jake’s, a Portland seafood institution popular with NBA types, and considered his options. Matt Dobek, who was rather like a son to Daly, was there, as were assistant Dream Team coach P. J. Carlesimo and USA Basketball committee member Rod Thorn, who was as inside as any executive.