New Job Gives Daly a Can’t-Lose Situation

Chuck Daly is a fine choice as coach of the U.S. Olympic basketball squad. Chuck is a complete professional, which is exactly what we intend to send to Barcelona next summer--complete professionals.

Get ready for Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley and Karl Malone versus Puerto Rico, Poland, Switzerland, Canada and Bulgaria. You won’t want to miss a single minute as we wipe up the floor with those poor Uruguayans, in living color on NBC.

No longer will we send boys to do a man’s job. Only three of the 12 players are expected to be collegians. No more taking Yugoslavia and Brazil for granted. No more being outhustled and outmuscled by the Soviet Union’s big red machine. We are the United States of America, dammit, and we invented the game of basketball and don’t you forget it.

Daly, the coach of the two-time NBA champion Detroit Pistons, got the appointment the other day. He will run the show at the 1992 Olympics, as opposed to Bob Knight, John Thompson and other collegiate-level types who preceded him.

For Daly, it was an offer that he couldn’t refuse.

“I don’t know how much longer I intend to keep coaching,” he said. “But this is one team it will be my absolute privilege to coach. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

Neither, apparently, will America’s greatest players.

Once it was thought the NBA’s superstars would rather take the summer off than bother flying halfway around the world to win a medal. And imagine the indignity of a team of American professionals losing an Olympic game. No doubt Daly already has thought about that.

But the stars are saying they would be proud to represent the stars and stripes.

“Count me in,” Barkley recently said at the All-Star festivities in Charlotte. “Be my pleasure to jam the ball on some Russian.”

Magic Johnson, meanwhile, not only says to count him in, but he wants a word or two with the coach before it all happens.

“Yes, I’ll be talking with Chuck Daly very soon,” Johnson said Friday night, after Daly got the job. “There are a few things we need to straighten out.”

Like what?

“I’ll tell you after I’ve told him,” Magic said, rather cryptically.

Oh, c’mon, like what?

“Well, like preparation,” Magic said. “We have to talk this thing over about what they expect. Our season is already so long. We need to be consulted when it comes to planning the training, how many weeks of work they’re going to expect from us, how the whole thing’s going to be handled.

“We need a say in it. So, that’s why I’m going to call Chuck. To have my say in what happens.”

One of the reasons these Olympics matter so much to players such as Magic is that he and certain others missed their one chance at the Games due to circumstances beyond their control.

Magic already had turned pro by the time 1980 rolled around, making him ineligible. And then came the 1980 U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games, which meant that selections such as Isiah Thomas and Mark Aguirre never knew the joys of representing their country in the Olympics. Instead, they played an exhibition tour against an NBA all-star team, which was hardly the same.

As Thomas said: “That was one of the few real disappointments of my basketball career. I’m like Earvin. I’ve won the college championship and won the pro championship. The Olympics is the one thing that got away from us, because we never had the chance.”

Funny thing is, the kind of team America expects to send to the next Olympics will be so loaded with talent, a player the caliber of Aguirre probably won’t be good enough to go. Heck, what if Ewing, David Robinson and Shaquille O’Neal all feel like going? We hardly need three centers. Who gets left home?

Well, Daly will worry about that bridge when he crosses it.

“First we’ll see who wants to play and who doesn’t,” he said. “Then we’ll see who’s injured or who’s tired from the season. Then we’ll worry about who gets left out. I don’t see it as any problem.”

Chuck Daly deserves the position. He has been a coach on every level, from high school on up, and has made his bones. He is 60 now and before long will slide into a front-office job or early retirement. This should be the capstone to his career, provided all goes well.

And if an American all-star team gets beaten by, say, Cuba?

“Then I’ll hide in my closet and come out around 1996,” Daly said, laughing.

Is such a thing even possible?

“Well, let me put it this way,” said the coach of the 1992 U.S. Olympic team. “No.”