Dream Team - Jack McCallum

The 1992 U.S. Men's Basketball team was the first time the U.S. approved actually letting professional basketball players participate. Before that, all Olympians were supposedly "amateurs", which is a joke since most other countries best players were being paid. It was just those other countries would say the player was officially a fireman or something, wink wink.

McCallum details the whole thing, going back to the U.S. finishing third in the 1988 Olympics with college players, and even further back, to the 1970s, when a man named Boris Stankovic came to the U.S. on behalf of FIBA to study American basketball, and became certain the pros needed to be allowed to play, if you're truly showcasing the best athletes a country has to offer. Also, he thought it would propel the other countries' teams, once they saw how large the gap actually was (and he was certainly right about that).

McCallum's style, as with Seven Seconds or Less, is to break things up in to many short, distinct chapters, usually focused on one particular player or event. So each member of the team gets a chapter, detailing where they were in their careers at that point, and any difficulties that arose in getting them on the team. Larry Bird wasn't sure his back would allow him to play, and he wasn't going to be some token, lifetime achievement member. Magic Johnson had just been diagnosed with HIV, no one was sure if he could play. USA Basketball wasn't sure Charles Barkley wouldn't create an international incident. Michael Jordan was insistent Isiah Thomas not be on the team, which meant Thomas was shit outta luck. Nobody was going to take him over Jordan (except deranged Pistons' fans, maybe).

There's a lot in there that's fascinating to me, like how much everyone seemed to enjoy playing together. Probably because even though your average NBA player is a tremendous athlete, to the true greats, the average dude is slow, or half-blind. He can't see what they can, can't anticipate. But all these guys could, so the stuff they could do together was insane, and they knew it was the only shot they were going to get at that. The intense public interest in the team in Barcelona, or anywhere they went, really (which annoyed the U.S. Olympics officials, who felt the Dream Team were no different from any other Olympians, and tried repeatedly to throw their weight around, to little effect). Some of the scrimmages, both the ones against the college players, and the famous one the Dream Team had against itself, with Magic leading one team, and Jordan the other.

It's well-written, flows easily, doesn't get overly bogged down in unnecessary details. McCallum does feel it necessary at points when he's praising a player for x or y to mention he's not suggesting they deserve a Medal of Honor or whatever, which, you'd hope someone reading this book about a basketball team would understand that implicitly, but maybe he felt he was descending into hagiography. I was more bothered at the end, when he was discussing subsequent U.S. Men's Basketball teams, and he started to fall into "old man griping about disrespectful kids" mode. I'm not going to defend '90s NBA, which was a tedious slog to watch most of the time, but McCallum does come off as one of those sportswriters who loves to tell younger people how the stuff they like ain't shit compared to the stuff he liked. I get enough of that from baseball writers.

The praise of Bird seemed over-the-top, he seems like McCallum's favorite. But all the other players talk about Bird the same way, even Jordan, which I didn't expect. The personality dynamics are intriguing. Jordan telling Chuck Daly that Bird and Magic should be the captains and not him, but Jordan and Magic being the ones who keep everyone on the same page (not that there's much need for that). Magic being the only one who won't acknowledge that Jordan is just flat-out better than the rest of them by that point. Pippen being the guy who was most friendly to the college players brought in to scrimmage with them. Drexler honestly believing he was every bit as good as Jordan at everything.

'Doing a lot of the asking were two members of the United States Olympic Committee, LeRoy Walker and Mary T. Meagher. They gave Jordan the standard lecture, intent on sending the message that the Dream Team was nothing special, that it had its Olympic responsibilities, that revenue produced by the Dream Team was being used to support other athletes who weren't staying in luxury hotels and who weren't highly compensated, and. . . on and on.

"They went at Michael with the attitude of, 'Don't be an asshole," says Barkley. "So you know how well that shit went over with Michael."'