There have been US Olympic basketball teams composed of NBA players since, but, according to Jack McCallum, there has only one Dream Team. That team—Larry, Michael, Magic, Scottie, Charles, Stockton, Malone, Ewing, Robinson, Mullin, Clyde the Glide, and Christian Laettner—represented the United States in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, the first time that NBA players were allowed to participate. The outcome of the tournament was never in question since the average margin of victory was more than forty points and they never called time out, but how the team came together and what their legacy was were stories unto themselves.
The NBA underwent a massive growth in popularity in the 1980s. Despite some racially-motivated fears about it being “too black,” the uptick was fueled by better play and stars such as Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Borislav Stankovic, a former Serbian basketball player and then administrator in FIBA, wanted to tap into this newfound popularity in order to grow basketball into a global game that could challenge soccer. For this he needed NBA players in international competition, but, in order to do this, he needed to change the rules governing amateurism in FIBA. In some ways, though, this was the easy part, because he then needed to get NBA buy-in and, after that, to wrangle NBA superstars into effectively volunteering their time and likenesses for the Olympics.
In the “Dream Team,” Stankovic was more successful than he ever could have hoped. What had been originally proposed as a team with half the roster composed of college players coached by person from the college roster turned into a team with single token college player (Laettner) and coached by a man with two NBA championships. Its roster didn’t have some very good NBA players so much as all the top stars excluding only Isiah Thomas, whose exclusion despite his coach guiding the team provides a significant amount of the drama in the book.
The Dream Team took the 1992 Olympics by storm, with the most competitive game they played being an intra-squad scrimmage in Monaco, but the combination of the personalities involved and the drama of the Lithuanian basketball team that famously received financial support from the Grateful Dead, made for plenty of drama. The Dream Team, in particular, was composed of larger-than-life characters, gods of the basketball universe, but this was no mere collection of the best players in the world. It was also a uniquely mature and experienced team where Magic Johnson had already retired once because of his HIV announcement and Larry Bird had just finished playing his final NBA season.
But what of McCallum’s contention that this was the one and only Dream Team? It is hard to imagine a team with a greater level of star-power on it, though later USA basketball teams have come close without quite the same dominant results. The differences in part come from the divergent legacies of 1992. International basketball players saw the Dream Team as not just particularly athletic, but also impossibly skilled in all facets of the game and worked to emulate them, demonstrating fulfillment of Stankovic’s vision; in contrast, US basketball players saw their on-court dominance and took it to indicate American invincibility in basketball, without recognizing either the unselfishness or determination that manifested in legitimate practice and Jordan and Pippen deciding that they were going to utterly annihilate their future teammate Tony Kukoc because of an imagined slight that really had nothing to do with the Croat. The United States still had a preponderance of basketball talent, but it was not talent alone that drove the Dream Team to such dominance.
McCallum covered the NBA in the 1980s and therefore was also one of the journalists covering the team in Barcelona; Dream Team weaves these recollections together with interviews he conducted in later years and reads like an extended feature article. The book is immensely readable, though, and the NBA players come alive on the pages, so much so that I found myself going back and watching old highlights of Larry Bird while reading. This is probably not a book for someone who is not at least a causal basketball fan, but for anyone who is, Dream Team needs to be necessary reading for a glimpse at the seed for the modern, globalized NBA.
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I have once again fallen behind on posts here, or, perhaps, I have had a little more time than usual for reading since, in addition to Dream Team, I have also finished Mo Yan’s strange novel The Republic of Wine and N.K. Jemisin’s excellent The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms since my last post. I haven’t decided what I am going to read next, but I am nonetheless looking forward to it.
Noodlings 