SUMMER GAMES SPOTLIGHT : BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 16 : WALKER EXPLAINS HIS POSITION

Get ready for Dream Team II.

LeRoy Walker, expected to win election in October to a four-year term as president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, said Sunday that he would welcome the return of NBA players for the 1996 Summer Games at Atlanta.

“Don’t give the impression that the USOC or any part of the USOC, or me in particular, doesn’t want all of our best athletes in the Olympics,” Walker said.

“I may be whistling in the wind, but I think there ought to be a selection process,” Walker said. “I think we have some very good college players. I don’t believe there aren’t some that could fit into this process and we’d still be able to have our best team.”

Walker said that USOC, USA Basketball and NBA officials will meet within the next few months to begin formulating a selection process for the team in 1996.

Walker said comments he made last week that he would prefer for all U.S. competitors, including the men’s basketball team, to reside in the athletes’ village at Atlanta were misconstrued as criticism of the NBA players.

“I am not against having professionals compete in the Olympic Games,” said Walker, head of the U.S. delegation here.

But he repeated that he would like for all U.S. athletes, including professionals, to live in the village in the future. The men’s basketball team stayed in $900-per-night hotel rooms here, but they were not the only athletes to shun the village. Several prominent track and field athletes and at least one tennis player, Pete Sampras, stayed in either hotels or villas.

“Maybe I’m naive about it,” Walker said. “But after being in the village and speaking with Olympians, my feeling is that no one athlete or group of athletes should receive preferential treatment.

“My concern is, and will continue to be, that I want all of the athletes to feel that they are a part of the Olympic Games. The whole is greater than any of the parts. I do not feel that Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan have given any more to their sport than Janet Evans or Oscar De La Hoya.”

But Evans, who added gold and silver medals to the three golds she won in swimming four years ago at Seoul, said Sunday that she sympathizes with the NBA players’ needs to reside in secure hotels rather than the village.

“I saw Charles Barkley in the village one day, and he was just mobbed by the other athletes,” she said. “There’s absolutely no way they could stay there and get a moment’s rest.

“Arnold Schwarzenegger was visiting the rooms the other day, and the maids went crazy. I can’t image what it would be like for the NBA players to be in the village 24 hours a day.”

This a daily roundup of Olympic-related items from reporters in Barcelona from the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and Baltimore Sun, all Times-Mirror newspapers.