COMMENTARY : This “Dream Team” Is All Business for Games

Enough already with the Dream Team.

You can’t watch 10 minutes of the NBA Finals without getting a massive dose of propaganda about the Dream Team.

What’s going on here? Is this the U.S. Olympic basketball team, or a wholly owned subsidiary of NBC?

Coming soon . . . the Dream Team.

Sign up quick for . . . the Dream Team.

Stay tuned to NBC for even more self-promotional features about . . . the Dream Team. (Scottie Pippen reveals five new headache cures!)

Take a Carnival Cruise to Barcelona with . . . the Dream Team.

If they don’t deliver to your house within 30 minutes, you get $3 off . . . the Dream Team.

Does NBC think we’re idiots?

The Dream Team is The Big Lie.

Oh sure, it’s the greatest basketball team ever assembled. But nobody ever disputed that the NBA players are the best in the world. End of story.

Does anybody think that even one Olympic basketball game will be slightly competitive?

Let me put it another way. Is Patrick Ewing staying up nights worrying about how many guys from Egypt can block his shot?

This is who we’re going to put on the floor: Magic Johnson at point guard, Michael Jordan at shooting guard, Ewing at center, Karl Malone at big forward, and Chris Mullin or Charles Barkley at small forward.

How do you think Finland matches up with that?

They play a lot of zone in international basketball, a perfect opportunity for Larry Bird. Who have they got in, say, Paraguay who will say to his coach, “Put me in, Hoss. I can stop Bird.”

These games are going to be 140-32.

By halftime.

We are being sold a sow’s ear.

The gold medal was ours the moment the NBA said it would send any players at all, let alone the 11 best. (Oh, wasn’t it sweet to send one college senior along for the ride? Doesn’t that give college kids something to aspire to? Make the Final Four four straight times and win two NCAA championships, and maybe you too can play in the Olympics.) Not only are we fabulous, but the only two countries that ever gave even our collegian Olympians any trouble--Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union--don’t exist anymore. Poof! Gone-zo. We could send the University of Michigan over and win this one.

Chicago playing Portland is basketball.

College kids playing for the Olympic title is basketball.

The Dream Team playing Uganda is silly.

Drama makes for good games. Who pays money to see a bye?

Naturally, if you can’t sell competition, you sell flash.

MTV-type commercials with lightning-quick graphics, jolting pictures and a heavy soundtrack. The ol’ Dream Team hype-ola.

(That animated Nike commercial is especially offensive, as it portrays Mr. Barkley as a screaming, bloodthirsty leviathan. Why would anybody agree to this kind of characterization? Oh, I’m sorry. For the money.)

If you want to see every game of the Dream Team, you have to buy the Triple Cast. (That’s either a fly fishing technique, or a $125 package that allows you to get every single moment of the Olympics--UNINTERRUPTED!--on three cable channels. Talk about doomsday programming. Who signs up to see every last second of the Dream Team pounding the beejeezus out of the third world, the same people who root for Bambi to get shot? How about every breathtaking moment of weightlifting, or staying up until 3 a.m. to watch the equestrian time trial on Channel 180? I called up to find out who the announcers are for all this uninterrupted coverage, and I was told, “Everyone who isn’t dead at the present time. And Tim Brant.”)

I’m debating what a Dream Team game might look like:

1) A collection of Rodin sculptures that you can view as if they were on exhibit. Maybe they’ll simply stand in the middle of the court, and Bob Costas will conduct a walking tour around them.

2) The Globetrotters, since they’re certainly not playing any real games. I guess we’ll see John Stockton tuck the ball under the Burmese center’s shirt, or Barkley throwing what looks like a bucket of water at the ref-only it turns out to be confetti.

And don’t look for the Dream Team to live in the Athletes Village. Do these guys strike you as the kind who’ll have bunkies? They’re making $3 million a year. They’re used to terrycloth robes and heated towel racks. Oh, they all talk wistfully about “the Olympic experience,” but how many of them want it without air conditioning? They’ll probably stay in Monte Carlo, and hire a Lear jet to fly them to games.

Ewing and Jordan didn’t want to come in the first place. Why should they? They already won a gold medal in 1984.

The truth underpinning the Dream Team is that it’s a business deal. On a personal level, there’s a worldwide endorsement bonanza awaiting these guys. On the corporate level, the expansionist NBA wants to mine new foreign markets. The Dream Team is the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria of global b-ball.

The Olympics aren’t for athletes anymore, they’re for TV dollars. That’s why the Olympics wanted Steffi Graf and the NBA there. There was no reason to take the Olympic basketball team away from the college players. Why? Because the Soviets beat us two times in 50 years? At least the games were close.

Ironically, Tuesday USA Basketball named a team of eight undergraduates to assist the Dream Team in preparing for the Olympics. For five days in late June they will scrimmage against the Dream Team in San Diego (and probably turn down their beds and leave foil-wrapped chocolates on their pillows).

The eight are Bobby Hurley and Grant Hill of Duke, Kentucky’s Jamal Mashburn, Michigan’s Chris Webber, North Carolina’s Eric Montross, Allan Houston of Tennessee, Rodney Rogers of Wake Forest and Anfernee Hardaway of Memphis State. If you added last year’s big three of Christian Laettner, Shaquille O’Neal and Alonzo Mourning, you’d have one of the most formidable U.S. Olympic basketball teams ever. And we’d win the gold medal without having to endure this endless hype.