Dream Team (29 page)

“And he said it almost every time we played. I’d go back at him: ‘Don’t even think about it. I will take you out of the air.’ ” (Even the tone of Robinson’s threat sounds churchlike.) “And Michael would always promise to get me.”

And did he?

“Eventually. It was a two-on-one with him and Scottie, and one of them was going to get me. Michael took the shot and I went up to block it because that’s how I played. I went after shots. But I didn’t get there and he dunked it and the crowd went crazy. It wasn’t really a poster dunk, but he got me. And he remembered. ‘Told you I was going to get you one day,’ he said.”

Robinson shakes his head. “Man, what a competitor. He never forgot anything, never let you get away with
anything
.”

By Dream Team time, Robinson had, as he puts it, “been born again in Christ.” He had gotten married six months earlier to a deeply religious woman named Valerie Hoggatt, who is still his wife. David didn’t drink or swear and was finding it uncomfortable to be around those who did, just as some found it uncomfortable, at times, to be around him.

“I first got saved in 1991,” he told me years later. “It was something that was really emerging in my life, and I was just trying to understand it myself. I probably did talk about it a little too much in the locker room. Larry Brown [the San Antonio coach at the time] and some other people didn’t like it. Guys are like, ‘Christians are soft. They’re not going to cut your throat out when it’s throat-cutting time.’ That was the thinking.

“But my mentality was, I want to help my teammates. If I can stop someone from running around in circles in their private life, I want to do that. I just had to find the right way to go about it. I was struggling about when to say something and when to keep my mouth shut.”

Robinson’s overt faith was never an issue on the Dream Team,
a mature group (you can point to Barkley as an exception to that, but by now you understand how he blended in) that was able to gather in all the individual foibles, expose them to some kind of cleansing process, and have it all come out okay. But a golf course—certainly one with Charles Barkley on it—is a very tough place for a true believer. Our fivesome went on, insults flying like molecules under heat, four-letter words our lingua franca, at least for Barkley, Drexler, Hubbard, and me. I could tell Robinson was getting squirmy with all the blue being thrown around, and at one point he complained to Hubbard about Drexler’s cussing and also wanted Barkley to tone it down. Charles seemed to comply, but then at one point—I believe around the fourteenth hole—he let loose with another barrage, all of it in good humor, of course, but salty.

So Robinson shook his head, smiled beatifically, picked up his bag, and left.

On the way home, I drove the rental car, Drexler beside me, Barkley and Hubbard in the back. I felt compelled to challenge the mountain passes like a thief fleeing from a heist because, well, when in the Riviera … We later discovered that it was on that road in 1982 that Princess Grace had suffered a stroke, which caused her to crash her Rover P6. She died from injuries the next day at Monaco Hospital.

“At the top of the mountain, the four of us were talking/arguing but in between educating/correcting us all on every subject, Barkley noticed that you were driving faster and the curves on the mountain were getting sharper,” remembers Hubbard.

“ ‘Damn, Jack, slow down!’ Barkley yelled. ‘You’re gonna get us all killed. Nobody will give a shit about you, but the NBA’s gonna be pissed!’ ”

According to Hubbard’s memory, I continued at the same pace, and a nervous Drexler actually raised his voice and implored me to slow down. He couldn’t be heard, however, because Barkley was screaming louder and threatening me with bodily harm. “Charles, the guy behind me is on my ass,” I said. “I can’t slow down. He’ll hit me.”

As we got closer to the bottom of the mountain, we began ruminating about the headlines that would ensue from a fatal crash.

“ ‘Barkley, Drexler, Two Others Die in Monte Carlo!’ ” Hubbard suggested.

“They’ll probably just make it ‘Two Dream Teamers Killed in Crash’ and leave us out entirely,” I said.

“Shit, they won’t even care about Clyde,” Barkley offered. “ ‘Charles Barkley Dead!’ That’s what it would say.”

“That is cold, Charles,” Drexler said.

Later, in Barcelona, Robinson and Barkley would have a conversation about Christianity, Apollo sitting down with Dionysus. They were lifting weights—“Well, I was lifting and Charles was just sitting there,” says Robinson—and Barkley said to him, “David, you need to say what’s on your mind. You need to be more honest.” Robinson responded this way: “What you mean to say is not more
honest
. You mean more
controversial
. That’s two different things.”

And then Robinson opened up to him.

“Charles, I love the fact that you’re not afraid to say what you want to say even if it’s going to get you in trouble. And that will be an even better thing if you ever give your heart to the Lord. You’re going to need that quality of talking plain because people will not necessarily want to hear what you’re saying.”

After Robinson told me that story, I said that while Charles had not yet given his heart to the Lord, the Lord clearly had not yet smitten him for all his wicked ways; indeed, the Lord might have been laughing along with everyone else at Barkley’s TNT act. “How do you explain that?” I asked.

Robinson laughed. “I’m still praying about that,” he said. “I love Charles. I still love talking to him. It’s not my job to make him do something. All I can do is plant seeds.”

In my mind’s eye, I still see Robinson walking off the course on that day. I didn’t necessarily want to be like him, but I knew that it
took much personal commitment, inner strength, and conviction to do that. Most athletic teams and most athletic relationships are built on a foundation of sophomoric humor, insults, and dick jokes, all of it wrapped in testosterone. To stand with your team, yet somehow to have the guts to stand alone from time to time … now, that takes a particular kind of man.

I am in the quietest school I ever heard, talking to the tallest academic CEO in the world. Ten years ago, when David Robinson was still a productive starting center for the Spurs, he launched Carver Academy, a five-acre kindergarten-through-sixth-grade private school built on blocks of ugly urban blight in San Antonio. “There were crack houses, prostitutes, drugs all around,” says Robinson, shaking his head at the memory before adding unnecessarily, “it was not a great neighborhood.”

I remember when Robinson started talking of his dream for Carver—how animated he would get about the idea of offering a private-school-quality education to an underserved class of kids, how he had been reading up on George Washington Carver, the African American scientist, botanist, and educator after whom he would name his school. Red McCombs, who owned the Spurs at the time, would tell him, “David, you’re underestimating how much
time and money this is going to take.” And though Robinson had been the exception to so many rules over the years, there was a lot of reason to doubt him. Lots of athletes—lots of anybodys—start out with grand plans only to see them fade in the harsh light of reality. When you’ve made enough money to live for a lifetime, it’s easier to become a broadcaster, a real estate magnate, or a full-time recreational golfer.

But Robinson never lost sight of his goal. He put up $10 million in seed money—even for a highly compensated athlete, $10 million is walking the walk—started the school from scratch, and is still at it. After he retired in 2003, a year in which the Spurs won a championship, he bought a small interest (about 2 percent) in the franchise. But the vast majority of his time and money go to Carver. He and his wife, Valerie, have put in additional millions as the school has flourished, and Robinson continues to spend the majority of his waking hours keeping the school humming, raising money for scholarships and facility upgrades, supervising curriculum, hiring and firing, traveling to conferences—all those day-to-day things that define the lives of most of us, though generally not the lives of Hall of Fame athletes.

“I’ve been asked to franchise the idea,” says Robinson, pursing his lips and shaking his head, “and I would really like to do it. But right now … I just don’t know. There’s too much to do here.” He sounds vaguely guilty that he hasn’t peppered the nation with other Carver Academies. “Man, Red was right,” he says. “This is more work than I ever thought.” On the day we talked, Robinson had just arrived back in San Antonio from New York, where he had toured an Abyssinian school in Harlem. “I’m always looking for other models, other ways to do things,” said Robinson. “It’s just what you need to do.”

Hadn’t it been tempting, I ask him, to just kick back after retirement? I know that might be hard for a navy man who used to build TVs from scratch, but …

“This is what my calling is,” says Robinson. “I mean, what’s your goal in life? Just to enjoy money? Is that fulfilling? If I do less
than this, I’ve taken all those gifts I’ve been given and buried them under a rug. I want my own kids and the kids at Carver to understand about passion, that there is a calling in life and that you have to find it.”

Carver is a faith-based school because Robinson, as you’ve already learned, is a faith-based person. At this writing, Robinson was leading, as he has for many years, a morning devotional group for men at Oak Hills Church, the home of superstar preacher Max Lucado. The crowd is usually around two hundred, many of whom originally came to see the pivot-man preacher but now just see him as a big man with a message.

“My faith is much stronger now than it was when I was playing,” Robinson says, “because when I look back I see how little I had to do with it. Okay, God, you blessed my career ridiculously. Two championships as a player and two as a part owner. Two Olympics. The Dream Team. I have these three amazing boys. My wife is just the best. I’m still learning about her. You’re going to nourish her and cherish her and encourage her. The Bible says to present her to God. You can’t ever quit on that.”

Being unsaved myself, as well as one whose wife rarely needs “encouragement,” I never know exactly where to go when Robinson talks about his faith. Several years ago I had a friendly debate with Lucado himself (I was interviewing him because Robinson and teammate Tim Duncan shared
SI
’s Sportsman of the Year Award) about his church’s fundamentalist position against homosexuality. Lucado is a far more skilled rhetorician than I, and I didn’t get far.

“Well, the Bible is clear on its message about homosexuality,” Robinson tells me when I broach the subject with him. “It’s against it. But I think our role is the compassionate role, the same role I had when I went into the locker room, which is not to start preaching and say, ‘Hey, you guys have to stop cheating on your wives,’ but to love those guys and encourage those guys and lead them to want to live better lives.”

I protest that that still sounds like double-talk, like you’re fervently against someone who’s different and telling him he’s wrong
for living that way, but then making it sound like a benevolent position.

“It’s not about making them feel bad,” answers Robinson. “It’s not my job to run around making people feel like, ‘Hey, you’re a freak of nature.’ Look,
I’m
a freak of nature. All I’m saying is live in a way that honors the word of God.”

Still, no one is cudgeled with fundamentalism at Carver. Faith is only one of the “six pillars” that form the bedrock philosophy of the school, along with service, leadership, initiative, integrity, and discipline. “We keep the kids thinking about those pillars all the time,” says Robinson. He makes a special point of this next comment, sounding as earnest as a Sunday school teacher stressing perfect attendance. “You learn the six pillars inside and out,” he says, “and you earn your Carver pin.”

As he leads me around the school, I can see his deserved pride, though to a man who follows the Word, pride goeth before a fall. So Robinson keeps his pride in check. There are no more than fifteen students in any classroom. Discipline problems are almost nonexistent, he says, and I believe it. The only sounds I hear in classrooms are a teacher’s voice or the higher register of a student’s response. About 95 percent of Carver students, who pay $10,000 for tuition, get some kind of need-based aid, which comes from fund-raising, an investment fund, and Robinson.

“Anyone, rich or poor, can come here,” says Robinson. “But I did want to particularly impact the kids in this neighborhood, offer scholarship opportunities, build a real fire in the community.”

He shows me the broadcast studio, the music room with fifteen Casio keyboards (the man whose DNA is more about music than basketball, as Jordan put it, still bangs out some chords for the students from time to time), the library, and the reading center (donated by the Spurs). He points to the signs, all quotations from Carver, that dot the walls—no graffiti here: “There is no shortcut to achievement.” “Life requires thorough preparation.” “Veneer isn’t worth anything.”