Team Global : World Waits to See What NBA Stars Will Do on Their Summer Vacation

We gave the Old World blue jeans and rock ‘n’ roll.

The Old World sent back the Beatles, designer water and enough upscale autos to reverse our balance of trade.

It’s morning in America again, if briefly. Nearly thirty years after the Fab Four flew into New York, the world waits, hushed, for another plane to land at a small field outside Barcelona, disembarking the latest in the line of cultural heroes-merchandising mules, our very own Dream Team.

Fascination with the U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team seems to grow daily and geometrically. Tuesday, a truck driver, waiting outside their seaside luxury hotel here for a peek at the American giants, forgot to set the brake on his vehicle, which rolled downhill and pushed a Mercedes-Benz and a Ford through a picture window and into the lobby.

In Barcelona, scalpers are asking more for tickets to the basketball final than the opening and closing ceremonies.

NBC, surprised at runaway ratings for games that are over five minutes after (before?) tipoff, is scrambling. After the 79-point rout of Cuba in the opener of the Tournament of the Americas drew a rating comparable to Game 7 of the Chicago Bulls-New York Knicks series, and the ho-hum 47-point victory over Venezuela in the final showed sustained interest, thenetwork added Monday’s U.S.-Croatia game and now prays for basketball to bail out its cable TripleCast partnership.

The sports pages can’t contain this folk movement, nor can the financial pages. Five days before the Democratic national convention, the staid New York Times offered not only an editorial supporting the team (“Why Not the Best?”) but an upbeat op-ed piece by hard-eyed columnist Anna Quindlen:

“Somewhere in the contract of the male columnist it is written that once a year he must wax poetic and philosophical about baseball, making it sound like a cross between the Kirov and Zen Buddhism. . . . The connection between a base hit and karma eludes me. But basketball is something different, sweatier and swifter and not likely to be likened to haiku, thank God.”

Such a rush to favorable judgment can only have one result and its name is hype.

The squad is universally known by its nickname, the Dream Team. It already is accepted by TV anchors in need of evermore sweeping compliments as not only the best basketball team ever but the finest sports team ever. Several days remain before the first game, so imagine what accolades remain: Best group of 12 men ever? The zenith of human evolution?

At the eye of the storm are 11 multimillionaires and one young tycoon-to-be, having the times of their lives, Magic and Michael and Larry’s incredible adventure. The world has served itself up to them like a banquet. All they have to do is make sure they don’t nod off during the speeches or stick an elbow in the soup.

To this point, they haven’t won by fewer than 38 points, and Charles Barkley hasn’t re-polarized the world.

So far, so good.

WILKOMMEN, BIENVENUE, WELCOME

How did it come to this?

Regardless of American preferences, NBA pros could never have come without the wholehearted approval of the European-dominated International Federation of Basketball (FIBA).

The NBA was only responding to FIBA’s express invitation, necessary to overcome the anti-pro posture of USA Basketball, the bureaucracy that sanctions the team.

The bureaucrats were prepared to grouse at the least, and perhaps to fight to preserve amateur participation--and their own preeminence--but the fair and square loss to the Soviet Union at Seoul in 1988 by a good U.S. squad cut the ground out from under them. Now the American public wants a pro show, too, and got one.

Why are the Europeans panting to have their heads handed to them?

International basketball has had a meteoric rise, fanned recently by the success of such Europeans as Vlade Divac, Detlef Schrempf and Sarunas Marciulionis, and Africans Hakeem Olajuwon and Dikembe Mutombo. NBA stars Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson have profiles almost as high overseas as at home.

To the Europeans, it was adoration and conceit.

On one hand, they revere the American stars and yearn to see them up close.

On the other, they believe they have only to join the issue to begin closing the gap. It’s a large gap, as they’re about to see, but history is on their side.

“I think there are a couple of reasons,” says Dan Peterson, a U.S. coach who became the Red Auerbach of Italy and an Italian TV commentator.

“First of all, they know this is the last card the U.S. can play, OK?

“In other words, after the great success of the university players--it’s just 32 years that they blew everybody away at Rome with Oscar Robertson and Jerry West--it looked like they could never catch up with those players and that coaching, Pete Newell. And then they did catch up. So now they think they have U.S. college basketball, at least, in a kind of a fix, to where they’ve got to run to the pros and ask ‘em for help a little bit.

“This may kind of surprise people in the United States, but the Europeans really want to go against the best. I think that’s human nature of every good athlete.

“When I was coaching in Milan, our conditioning coach was a former Italian 400-meter champion, and he told me about the day he went against Lee Evans, when Lee Evans had just set the record in the Olympic games. He said, ‘My only determination was to be ahead at the head of the curve, at 200 meters, but he blew by me. But I was so happy to test myself against Lee Evans, even though I knew he was going to beat me badly. I wanted to find out what the difference between me and Lee Evans was.’

“These guys want to find out what it’s like to guard Michael Jordan, what it’s like to guard Larry Bird. When I was coaching Milan, Dr. J (Julius Erving) came in with an all-star team and played against us. I made sure that each one of the 10 guys on my team guarded Dr. J for at least one play. Everybody wanted to--’Let me guard him, even if I get dunked on!’

“In fact, the teams that don’t get to play the USA are going to be the most disappointed teams in the Olympics, even though they know they’d get blown into the next universe.

“And then, of course, we won’t even talk about television and mass media. Like in Italy--if Italy plays the U.S. it’ll be the biggest media bombshell since they won the World Cup in soccer.”

Instead, Italy was ousted in the European qualifying tournament.

There is no joy in Milan.

THE RIGHT STUFF

What if they threw the game open to the NBA and nobody showed up?

Indeed, Jordan said privately he had no intention of cutting into his golf schedule to play in a second Olympics, and the oft-injured Bird had to be talked into it, too.

Who did the talking?

Magic Johnson.

It was Johnson who refused to do a dream-team cover for Sports Illustrated until Bird was added and who harangued Jordan, perhaps with help from Jordan’s corporate family.

Suddenly, no one could stand the thought of being left behind, as if the NBA stars were jet pilots written about by Tom Wolfe, hell-bent on proving their manhood by advancing to the next level with their fellow members of the elite.

Utah Coach Jerry Sloan, visiting Karl Malone and John Stockton at the Tournament of the Americas, said he felt like a college coach talking to two 18-year-old recruits.

Isiah Thomas, disconsolate at being passed over, waged a summer-long campaign to be included. A close friend wrote Cleveland General Manager Wayne Embry, a member of the selection committee, to protest. Thomas’ buddy said that he now knows why the Cavaliers’ drafts were so bad.

The assembled team meshed from the night it met for dinner in La Jolla.

Everyone is enjoying the experience hugely, Jordan included.

“When they talked about the pros coming into the Olympics, I reminisced about my participation in ‘84,” Jordan said. “It was a grueling participation--twice-a-day practices, film sessions. If that was going to be the case, there’s no way I would have been here. Coach (Chuck) Daly assured me this was was going to be a lot of relaxation, a lot of fun.”

Welcome to the Riviera.

The days of three-a-days and sleeping in barracks on Naval bases under Hank Iba, and enduring the slings and arrows of Bob Knight are over. Daly, the easy rider, chose this playground of the Western World for a European training site. Last week, you could to see the U.S. Olympic family gathered in its hotel casino after midnight, with strait-laced C.M. Newton, the Kentucky athletic director, watching Jordan play $125-a-hand blackjack and Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski feeding coins from a paper cup into a slot machine.

“I felt it would be good, but I didn’t think it’d be this great,” Johnson says. “I’d be lying if I said that.”

No one was supposed to be able to dominate this team, but someone does, by sheer will and the sense of joy he conveys.

Once again, it’s Magic Johnson.

Jordan, stung by recent controversies, shies away from a spokesman-for-the-game role, but the effervescent Johnson runs the team and plays to the crowd unabashedly. In an exhibition in Monte Carlo against France, the crowd chanted “Mah-ZHEEK! Mah-ZHEEK!” at two flashy assists and made him rise from the bench to take a curtain call late in the game, chanting his name once more.

In the same game, Jordan was scoring 21 points, many of them spectacular. The crowd oohed and aahed but only after Johnson stood and waved, did it chant “Jor-DAHN!” Mike stayed seated.

Afterward, Johnson was invited to the royal box where Prince Rainier and his son, Prince Albert, presented him with a plaque bearing the royal seal.

Said Johnson happily: “The younger one gave me a soul shake.”

For a man who loves the spotlight, coming off a forced retirement, it is too sweet for words. Unlike the controversy around his All-Star game return, no one ever mentions that he’s HIV positive.

Meanwhile, Johnson debates whether to return to the NBA, passing out increasing hints that he will.

He says he almost came back to the Lakers last January, decided to wait until after the All-Star game, and then intended to come back for the playoffs until injuries truncated Laker prospects.

“You watch them on TV and you see them struggle and you want to definitely come back,” Johnson said last week, sitting by the hotel’s rooftop pool, overlooking the Mediterranean.

“And then you say, ‘Nah, you’d just better wait. The All-Star game hasn’t come up yet, so I’ll just channel my energies all into that.

“I knew in my mind I could go out and play with the Lakers and still be me. If I ever came back, I didn’t want to come back as a regular player.

“After the All-Star game, you start thinking again, but after I looked at the team and the injuries--we had no chance.

“I know I feel good, but I don’t know actually what I’m going to do. It’s like, do I want to come back and go through all this, or do I want to sit here and relax?”

The days of wine and roses drone on. This team has everything it needs for a monthlong party, including a clown.

It’s Charles Barkley.

One day, he helps Daly explain U.S. domination: “What he means is, he’s got some brothers from the ‘hood who can flat-out hoop it up in the ghetto all day long.”

The next, he sneers at a match with Brazil and Oscar Schmidt: “I may not sleep. I been thinking about him all week. In the middle of my backswing, I think, ‘Oscar, Oscar.’ ”

The next, he accuses the Brazilians of throwing their semifinal game so they wouldn’t have to play the United States before the Olympics.

The next, when the United States takes an 18-0 lead on Puerto Rico, he yells from the bench: “Y’all ever gonna score?”

Last week he turned it up for the European media on a range of subjects:

--The scene at the hotel pool: “I’m announcing that I’m quitting this team to join the swim team. As long as those topless babes are out there, I’m at the pool every day. Pretty soon you’ll be thinking I’m Mark Spitz.”

--Protocol for Prince Rainier’s reception: “They tell us we can’t touch him. We have to call him His Majesty. I haven’t called anyone his majesty since Harold (Katz, owner of the Philadelphia 76ers). They tell us we have to stop eating when he stops eating. What if he’s not hungry and just has a snack and I’m starving?”

--After the reception: “I ate in a hurry, just in case.”

--On the debate over whether the U.S. Olympic basketball team sits out the opening ceremony: “It’d be an honor, but I’m not going to lose any sleep if I don’t. The thing is going to take three hours. You don’t want to be on your feet three hours ‘cause you’re playing a lot of games. It’s going to be real hot. Back-to-back-to-back games ain’t no joke.”

Next Olympiad: Sedan chairs?

The USOC might pay for them, too. For better or worse, the Olympics have hit the bigtime.