It’s not just that an engaging Dream Teamer who’s now an A- list TV star partially inspired Danger Mouse and Cee Lo Green to christen their hip- hop duo Gnarls Barkley. “If it would’ve happened today,” says Larry Bird, “it would’ve been one of those reality shows.”The names (Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley) remain familiar to fans two decades later, their cultural relevancy quotient still quite high. They were Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, the Allman Brothers at Fillmore East, Santana at Woodstock. and everyone had thought it would be pretty damn good. It couldn’t have been scripted any better, and when the Dreamers finally released all that star power into a collective effort, the show was better than everyone thought it would be. They were a star- spangled export for a country that still held a position of primacy around the world.
The world, having been offered only bite- sized nuggets of NBA games, was waiting for them, since Barcelona was the first Olympics in which professional basketball players were allowed to compete.
The team members were almost exclusively NBA veterans at or near the apex of their individual fame. The common matrices of statistical comparison, you see, are simply not relevant in the case of the Dream Team, whose members could be evaluated only when they played one another.A video of that game is the holy grail of basketball, and the account of it is here, in Chapter 28.A perfect storm hit Barcelona in the summer of the Dream Team. The United States engaged in fourteen games in that summer two decades gone- six in a pre- Olympic qualifying tournament and eight as they breezed to the gold medal in Barcelona- and the closest any opponent came was a fi ne Croatia team, which lost by 32 points in the gold medal fi nal. “It was the most fun I ever had on a basketball court.”It is reflective of the enduring legend of the Dream Team, arguably the most dominant squad ever assembled in any sport, that we are referring not to a real game but to an intrasquad scrimmage that the Dreamers played in Monte Carlo before the 1992 Olympic Games. “Of that game?”“I do,” I say.“Man, everybody asks me about that game,” he says. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpted from Dream Team by Jack McCallum Copyright (c) 2012 by Jack McCallum.
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