Vive Barcelona

hearing the national anthem and waving to the crowd. They did all that, but there was a subplot in between, and I'm going to tell you about that at the end of this episode seven of the Dream Team Tapes, which I'm calling Beva Barcelona because I Jack McCallum had three years of high school Spanish. We've been to practices in San Diego, to the Gaming tables and the Immortal Scrimmage, and Monte Carlo, and now the Dream Team at long last is in Barcelona, where the world awaits the epic

battle between the United States and Angola. Actually we do remember that battle, though epicott was not for a reason we'll get into later, and which involves, of course, Sir Charles Barkley himself. There's much to cover in this episode the attention given to the Dream Team, which will be

the hardest thing to describe. The so called family room in the Ambassador Hotel, where the alpha males Jordan, Magic, Barkley and Bird played cards all night and argued about championship rings, and where Bird's young son Connor used to

roll poolballs loudly down the stairs toward the lobby. There is a frightening intensity with which Jordan and Scottie Pippen faced their meeting with croatious Tony ku Coach, who drew their collective ire because Bulls general manager Jerry Krauss wanted to pay cou Coach a lot of money, which Pippen fell was being lifted from his pocket. There is a dramatic struggle of the Lithuania team to win the bronze medal.

The Grateful Dead had helped fund their unlikely path to the Olympics, and in the Dream Team book, I called Lithuania the tai Died Darlings. Like many others, I still have my Lithuania T shirt from those Barcelona games. And finally, after the gold medal was secured by the Dream Team, we had an unpleasant civil war of sorts between the Dream teamers and USA Basketball. All that is coming so

Barcelona for reasons that escaped me. Thirty years later, David Dupree, my closest buddy on the Dream Team, beat the Hall of Fame writer from USA today. He and I decided to drive from Monte Carlo to Barcelona. This was pre GPS, remember, and armed only with an unreadable road map and that elementary Spanish, David and I made the seven hour trip in a mirror ten hours, narrowly avoiding a wrong turn

that would have taken us to the Pyrenees Mountains. Credential check in at the airport was fairly organized, and I said to David, man, this is pretty calm. So when David I separated and I got to my hotel, I thought, you know, maybe I'll take a stroll over to where the Dream Team is staying, which was the newly built Ambassador Hotel, which, by the way, much to the horror of the U, S O C and USA Basketball, had been a large hole in the ground only a year earlier.

But maybe I'll go over the Ambassador, grab a beer with the great NBA pr men Brian McIntyre and Terry Lyons, grab a quote or two from Charles or carl and Malone, whoever else might be roaming around the lobby. And but what in the hell was I thinking? Eighteen months earlier, I had seen for the first time what happened the crowds that form when we took that photo in Charlotte, North Carolina. I had seen opposing teams stop practicing and

start taking photos when the Dream Team came out. So why did I not anticipate the thousands of people who surrounded the Ambassador Hotel where the Dream Team had checked in several hours earlier. It was chaos, was bedlam, thousands of fans, thousands grouped outside the hotel, dozens and dozens of police security men in riot gear. The hotel entrance was cordoned off, and there were barriers set up all

over the place, helicopters flying overhead. The metaphor that usually came to mind, and the one that was written the most, was the mayhem associated with the Beatles first trip to America in nineteen I remembered I was there, well, not there there in New York City, but I was watching on TV. Here's Dick Eversole, then the president of NBC Sports, the presenting network of the Olympics. On one explanation of the phenomenon, I'm not sure the same thing would have happen.

Different teams has been here, and they were in Chicago, l a New York about this was Europe, which also had its own, had its own and had its own lower share of basketball, and the gods of basketball and get sented l and they never had been there before, and this was their chance to touch him. As you know better than me, Spain is a huge basketball haven. In one respect, this level of attention that I can only call pornographics seemed I don't know, less innocent than

the attention given the mop heads from Liverpool. We were well into the age of terrorism. The massacre at the two Munich Olympics was never far from the minds of NBA security, and I learned later there were snipers with oozies in nearby buildings. Two things about this scene. Number One, it never changed. I kept waiting for the lines, the acclaim, the yelling, the waiting, the anticipation, the longing for the dream team. I kept waiting for it to change. It

never changed, not for two weeks of the Olympics. And number two, as far as we know, there were no terroristic threats against the Dream Team. It went off without a dangerous hitch. The biggest worry for the security people was Barkley's insistence that he would not be constrained from walking around town, particularly strolling along Los Rumbles in the midnight hours. I think of Times Square in the nineteen

seventies that was Lost Rumbless. Much has been written about that, including by me, whose final week story the Olympics was about following Barkley around on that fame stretch of Barcelona nightlife. I know, not a tough beat, right, I'm not going to go into it anymore. Google Barkley and Lost Rumbless and he can probably spend the whole day reading later on. I did get inside the Ambassador Hotel from time to time.

I interviewed Magic and Chuck daily. There. I saw the players kids running around, peeked into the private players sanked them, which in the Dream Team book I referred to as the coolest room in the world, which I'll talk about soon now. The night after we got to Barcelona, Dupre and I went out to dinner with Karl Malone. I was surprised the extent to which Carl was not pleased

about the Fame pickup game in Monte Carlo. He just did not like all the jive trash talking, and he did not like Magic kind of co opting the team as he saw it. Yet, when David and I asked about getting a photo of the Dream Team, the mailman quickly said, I'll ask Magic. He's our captain. He handles all that kind of stuff. I found it interesting that Malone, no fan of Magic, so quickly acknowledged that Magic was the boss for that kind of stuff. Now about that

photo request. On the list of people in the entire world who, under normal circumstances would be reluctant to request the photo with athletes, I would be second, most likely, most likely would be Dave Dupree. Yet he had the idea, and I quickly said, okay. It was an indication of what that summer of the Dream Team was, like, how special it was, how special we knew it would contin you to be. We did indeed get that photo taken under mortifying circumstances. That story to come the next day.

Two days before the Dream Team's first Olympic game on July, the team members trooped in for one of the most entertaining press conferences I've ever attended. For one thing, most of the international journalists began applauding as soon as the team walked in. That doesn't happen in America, though Donald

Trump would certainly like it to. Questions were all over the place, one of them from a journalist who had apparently never seen an NBA game and ask a question that can be summarized as sometimes you make a basket that's worth two points and sometimes it's worth three, to which Carl Malone responded, that's just the way we do it, my man. So many times in subsequent years, I'll answer an unanswerable question the same way. That's just the way

we do it, my man. It was out of this press conference that one of the most immortal Olympic lines was uttered by Charles, the one you heard about Angola. The weird thing is, for years, myself and almost everybody thought that Charles said, I don't know nothing about Angola, but Angola is in trouble. But he didn't. He actually used correct English. I don't know anything about Angola, but

Angola is in trouble. I'm not sure why it was so funny, but it was remained so Mike Wilbon, the great ESPN commentator, used to call Charles up from time to time and just leave a message, I don't know nothing about Angola and just left it there. There was an alternate theme going on in Barcelona before the Games, a theme that contrasted with the devotional manner with which the Dream Team was treated by adoring fans who camped

out outside of the Ambassador Hotel. It was a steam these damn millionaires are messing up the Olympics, steam echoed by many of the pooh bas in the U s o C and a few IOC officials. At first, it's entered on, hey, they're not even staying in the athletes village, something that had been made clear two years earlier when open competition was established. Everybody knew that Michael Jordan's and Magic Johnson and Larry Bird ain't going a bunk with nobody,

and they ain't sharing a communal bathroom. Jordan could have bought the entire Olympic Village with the money he laid out on a casual nassau bed on the golf course. Then word filtered out that most of the Dream Team would not attend the opening ceremonies, though several of them wanted to, it was thought to be way too chaotic.

Word got back to NBC Sports president Dick Eversol I've referred to him before, who sprung into action and moved heaven and earth to deliver the Dream teamers to the Olympic gate just minutes before they had to walk in. Everybody else had to get there three hours earlier, and

that was just not going to fly. It was like magic, and magic did come, and a fact, if memory serves, the only ones who did not were Jordan's who was still afraid of potential mauling and who had enjoyed the ceremonies back in, and Bird, who was thinking only of his back. Now, exactly what everybody feared would happen happened.

Upon spying the Dream Team in the procession. Athletes from all over the place broke ranks ran over to the players to take photos, grab autographs, or just genuinely hang on. I can still see in my mind's eye a diminutive gymnasts from somewhere jumping up to touch Magic and David Robinson. It was a splendid scene, and it spoke to this reality as much as the dream Team drew attention away from the other athletes. Most of them loved it. They loved being in the same arena with these guys. It

was a kind of transfer of importance to it. The objections came, for the most part from the executives, the bureaucrats, because that's usually where objections come from. Okay, time to play Game one, Angola. The hundreds of journalists who had come to Portland knew what to expect about the result, but there was still an air of anticipation before the game. Actually, I made that up. I didn't feel anything, but then

someone made it interesting. The elbow thrown by Barkley on an in Golden player named Herlando Coinbra was so unexpected that not many people saw it, and they certainly didn't know why it happened. And no, the officials did not throw Barkley out. When I interviewed Charles for the book in two thousand eleven, he still insisted that Herlando Coinbra,

the Herlando Coinbra had it coming. That bothered me that people didn't understand what happened at night, You know what, they started a full brawl like the next game against pain Charles Police. Here's Jordan's on the subject of Charles's elbow. The only other game that I remember that you know, they really did, Barkley, he said, we played here in total admiration about autographs before the game, and in the first quarter he hit the Grit album. Dude, total adiration

of everything we did. We killed him that way. I don't know. It wasn't even game even him down. You guys had to one run. It wasn't when he hit the Garedy album that was trying to take atographer beginning to game. It's comic relief now, but there was a certified big deal then because of this ugly American tag that had been attached to the Dream Team in some quarters.

What happened eventually, though, is that Barkley actually became the team's biggest ambassador, not just the teams, the entire United States Olympic delegation. He was out in public, he attended events, he worked the crowd, he shook hands with other athletes, and most of all, as I said before, he became a pied piper on law Rombliss well into the morning hours. Now. The Dream Team or second game, which was against Croatia, was just as memorable, but for an entirely different reason.

It became widely known as the Ku Coach Game. At the time, Bulls general manager Jerry Krauss was so intent on signing the young Yugoslavian star Tony ku Coach, who was a multi talented six ft ten inch left hander, that he had refused to extend Pippin's contract because he wanted to save money to offer it to kup Coach, whom he had selected in the draft that was not

going to fly. Pippin, with the help of Jordan's, decided they would absolutely destroy Ku Coach, who had no idea what was coming and was at any rate distracted by the imminent birth of his son, which in fact did occur a couple of days after the Ku Coach game. There were two things that every single Dream Teamer mentioned to me in the separate interviews I did for the book. The first was the unlikely Harry and Larry relationship between Ewing and Bird. The second was the Coup Coach game.

Now you have to understand the backdrop to an extent. The Dream teamers were tired of non competitive basketball. Their lifeblood was competition, and as fun as it was to play together with great players. They missed the taste of a real challenge. Strong Man though he might have been, cou Coach represented a real challenge. Here's magic remembering Jordan and Pippen before the Croatia game. But I'd say you, Michael and Scott was so ready for the Crocia They

were like, look, I don't want no help. I'm gonna shut them down. And we were like, wow, they are so focused and it made us all get focused because they really wanted to stopped telling me. And here's Jordan himself on the Coup Coach game. We're not gonna have

to get past, you know for Craft reperies. So much credibility hit you know what we've just earned in terms of you know, championship and saying well, we don't want that, you know, we want to hear what we you know, not what you know what Tony two coach is going to bring to this team. You mean, we won't without coming all you can talk about his Tony. So he created that enemy where they that concept and not focused in the dut with Okay, and you play Croatia, you

just not You're gonna shut down. The funny thing is Jordan and cou coach who eventually played on the Bulls, became really good friends, much better friends in Jordan and Piping Are. They play a lot of golf together and even shared victory in that noted event called the Michael Jordan's Celebrity Invitational. They also shared many a laugh about the coup coach game, harassed unmercifully by both Pippen and Jordan's Tony finished with four points and the US one

three to seventy. Now, the splendid team defense played by Jordan and Pippen was a subject offered up by several Dream teamers in interviews I did for the book Here's Larry Bird. The amazing thing for me throughout Home Olympics was what Michael. Every team we played, the Gardener point

guard was put the pressure on the point guard. I'm just sitting there watching them and they would turn in Scottie or somebody come and the kid would pay him and he just told the ball where and we just running and and just intercept every past you know, just I mean, just the pressure this guy was put on these kids were just unbelievable. Was there ever a better backcourt duo on the defensive end than Jordan and Pippen, Jerry Sloane, and Norm Van Leer back with the old Bulls.

Not quite. Will we ever be talking about Kauahi, Leonard and Paul George in that way? I don't think so. And when I talked to Pipping about it, his face lit up. It was one of the few areas where you could make the argument that he was almost as good as Jordan's and I would make that argument. Now Here's Rod Thorne, the NBA executive who was deep on the inside of most stream team decisions, talking about how much Coach Chuck Daily depended on the two Chicago Bulls

dream teamers coach system coach. As we talk about who would start in next game, he would always say, give me now. You can never fully divorced Jordan from offense, of course, but the primary reason Daily felt that way was defense. Maybe there would be one game when the jump shots weren't falling, Maybe Magic and Bird would be looking particularly old. Maybe Ewing and Robinson would get in

foul trouble. Maybe Charles had been out too late on the rhomblists and wasn't quite in the mood that night. But Daily knew that Jordan and Pippen would put everyone in the defensive vice gript and it just wouldn't matter. Nothing else would matter as the games went on, a one D eleven sixty eight win over Germany, a eighty three romp over Brazil. No word on whether or not Oscar Schmidt got Bird's autograph, but he did get twenty

four points. The man could shoot. The focus of the dream teamers became more and more what was called the family Room in the Ambassador Hotel kids play room by day, family room in the evening hours, and a cigar smoking beer,

drinking balls breaking cauldron of testosterone from midnight on. Everyone drifted in and out from time to time, but the principles were Jordan's magic, Pippen and Barkley with memorable cameos from bird Ewing two was part of the in crowd on the Ultimate in Crowd team that happened largely because

of his long history with Jordan's. They first met as teenage scholastic stars and they were teammates on the eighty four gold medal winning Olympic team and his sudden new friendship with Larry bird Ewing the Harry of Larry at Harry talks about it. You know I grew up in Boston. I hated itself because I hated Larry Bird in high school and high school. I thought he's stuck. Then I got to I got to the NB. I call all my friends back in Boston. I say, look, you know this,

we were talking this mother. I love that quote. This motherfucker is the truth. Ewing, by the way, thinks that it was Jordan's who came up with Harry and Larry. There's a thousand stories that came out of the room. One of my favorites is little known. It involves the wife of C. M. Newton, one of the USA basketball executives, a lifelong college guy who started out reviling the idea of prose taking over the Olympics, but ended up a

dream team convert. I wish I had CM's voice for you to hear, but the tape of my interview with him is scratchy. Anyway. He describes the afternoon that his wife, Evelyn, a very proper wife of a proper man, in an effort to improve her video game skills to play with her grandchildren, sat down and partnered with Patrick Ewing's young nephew, Michael. Predictably, Mrs Newton played poorly, and she apologized to Michael, that's okay.

Michael told her we'll get those motherfucker's next time. She happily reported to her husband, feeling like now she was in the in crowd. Evelyn died in and see Him died in two thousand and eighteen. Well, they always had

the video game in Barcelona. The storylines that evolved from the coolest room in the world ran predictably through Jordan's his endless, boundless super human energy, his endless appetite for ball busting, particularly about championships, and finally the refusal of Magic Johnson to accept that Jordan was now king of the hill. Here's bird. Michael was the best player in our league before that started, I had no problem. You know, we had our run. You know I had my run.

My run was over, and my run was over. A couple of years before that, I think Michael ruined aimless would itself very well over there. But it was up there one night and we're talking. I just said, you have you out of your mind if you think you still repeat this guy, And there's no there's no way. He's by far the best player ear league, even though we have great players. Let it go, Man, let it go.

It was a reprise, of course, of what had started with the greatest game nobody ever saw, and Magic finally had to admit there was a new sheriff in town. It was hard to go at the relentless Jordan. Barkley tried. And please remember these are Barkley's words. Oh he's so damn black, and he's not the best looking guy in the world. And my favorite day, uh sucking women thought about Michael Jordan's good looking. Michael Jordan was a fucking pama. He wouldn't be good looking any guy I got fired

at me and don looked good. Repeat these are Barkley's words. And here's youing on Jordan's proclivity to talk trash. You know, Michael, he's been talking trash from the first day I met him. We were both seventeen, visiting North Carolina and he was already did he was not the first time I ever met him, and he told he was talking trash that day. And he is not stuff. He is not stuff. No matter who cracked on, who about what, Jordan's always brought

it back to championships. And remember that he had only won two at this point. Four more were to come. Bird had three, Magic, the leader in the clubhouse, had five. No one else on that team had any, and only two other Dream teamers Drexler with the Rockets in and David Robinson with the Spurs in n and two thousand three, would ever get one. This is Barkley, It always thought, cracking on these other good locker room wheel now you can always say when you're getting out of this and Michael,

you know, he's such an asshole. He started cracking on Michael, crack on the everybody else you start cracking on him. It was that winning thing. Remember what I said, Magic, not Jordan's, was the leader at that point so far as Championships one, and that led Magic to repeatedly challenged Jordan's primacy as the best player in the game. That

invariably drew Bird into the conversation. And here's Jordan talking about birden Magic and who was king of the game from a memorable night in the Coolest room in the world. Jordan's obvious affection for Bird comes through in this clip. The one time I fell that he stood up to Magic saying, hey, you just shut up and just you know, let's just let let's just rip into the sunset. He

had well, you know, the mostly lack of everything. I never knew even that type of book with the type of person, never thought he even laughed and everybody, you know, he was pretty honest, really honest about you know how you for saw the game and the players at that time and taking itself out of you know you allowing me and step in and say, okay, you gotta better than we are. You know you better if you better of defense he gave out. Those types would magic with. Now.

The one area where magic never challenged Jordan's was in the area of energy expended. I could do an hour podcast on Dream Team teammates talking about Jordan's super human RoboCop million Dollar Man level of energy. Remember that the Dream Team always played the late game, so on game nights, they never got back to the hotel until well after midnight, at which point the card game began. Well play all the way to almost six in the morning. See, I'm in it, so nobody can tell me I'm in it

with this man. He would go upstairs, stay for our our half. He would meet you whoever he was going to play golf with. They go out at eight o'clock. Now, we've just left at six. He would go play they say eighteen holes sometimes even more. Come back taking that for two hours. We are we get on the but go play the game and didn't do the same thing Nick make And then I was telling him, Man, I'm getting tired because I was not used to this. Right. No, j you can't go to sleep, I was saying, Man.

So I said, man, you are unbelievable to be able to and then go get twenty points in the act. Of course, it was nothing like I was like wow. When I'm I was speaking to groups and I tell them these stories, they be like, wow, they can't believable. The one time Jordan's hardly get any sleep at all routine really freaked out Chuck Daily was before the Lithuania game, the semifinal game. Daily really respected Lithuania's two best players, r Vitas Sabonis and Sharonus Marshal Lonis, and Jordan had

gotten very little sleep and had played golf on game day. Well, then again, his playing partner had been Daily, so really, how much could the coach complain The final score that Lithuanian game, a hundred and twenty seven to seventy six, was probably the dream Team's most devastating performance. Daily managed to get everyone substantial minutes. Nine Dream teamers had ten or more points, led by Jordan's with twenty one, but

his scoring wasn't the main thing. At one point in the first half, Daily told Jordan to really go after Martial Alonis, not let him get the ball, disrupt the Lithuania offense, and turn this thing into a route so everybody could relax and he could put a lot of players in the game. That's what Jordan did, and for years later Chuck used to talk about it. I really wish I had his voice saying it, but I don't. But here's what he said. For six minutes, Michael did

not let Marcia Alonis get the ball. He couldn't even get the damn ball. I heard that over and over from Chuck. Every time I saw him, I would deliberately bring up the Lithuania game. He wouldn't even let him get the damn ball. Now, this seems like a great time to talk about Lithuania, which could be the subject of a podcast series on its own. Memo to self look into that. Actually, Lithuania was the subject of a great documentary called The Other Dream Team try to check

it out. In the briefest terms, the Lithuania team, like your high school band or your local cub Scout troupe, had to raise money to even qualify. The country was ravaged by a Soviet invasion just weeks before the Lithuanian team had to begin qualifying for the Olympics. Yes, there were great players in the country who had formally played for the national team, particularly Sabonis and Martialonis, but this

was another level of pluck and determination. The team was coached by Donnie Nelson's son of don who we know eternally as Nellie and Donnie never got a penny for coaching Lithuania, and he understandably choked up by his association with these guys. There was something going on here that

was deeper. You know. I almost felt like I really felt like I was in this time capsule and instead of you know, George Washington and Tallar Beer, and I really felt like, you know, I grew up in Boston, so I knew all the history, all that kind of stuff, right, always felt like this little republic was doing the same thing that the Moldies did or whatever year Marshallonis was By the time of the ninety two Olympics, solidly entrenched as an NBA player for the Golden State Warriors, coach

by Nellie. The Warriors beat writer at the time, the late great George Shirk, wrote a peace about how Nellie Jr. And Sharonas were going around collecting a hundred bucks. Two hundred bucks is shot by making speeches. Now the grateful Dead manager read it and said, yeah, man, we can plug into this. We're like into peace and freedom. I'm paraphrasing here. Now. The memories of Nellie Jr. And Marshallonus diverge on this point as to when they actually met

the Dead. Nelly said it was in San Francisco. Sharuna says it was at a concert in Detroit. But their memories of the let's call it the ambiance was exactly the same. You went to have a Dead concert in To see that, you have to see the Rex Foundation guy. Yeah, I don't know whether you could understand or not. But Sharuna said there was an interesting smell. I'm sure there was. Now.

The Dead never gave as much money to the Lithuanian team as was advertised, maybe a couple of grand but they did give proceeds of the sales of the distinctive TIEDI Dead Skeleton logo t shirts, and it was the prize souvenir from the ninety two Olympics. I think I mentioned this earlier. I still have mine. The Lithuanians war

it on their warm ups, coolest warmups ever. Several hours before the US played for the gold medal against Croatia, the absolute best game of the basketball tournament took place Lithuania's bronze medal game against the Unified team, which was basically the Russian national team. Lithuania playing against the representative of a country that had sent tanks into its streets a year earlier. It was incredible, as was the game Lithuania eight Serunus and Sabonis were monsters with twenty nine

and twenty seven points respectively. Nobody that I ever saw played harder than those two played in that game. And I will never forget something Marciallonis told me when I interviewed him for the Dream Team book in two thousand and eleven. I wish I had his voice on tape for it, but I don't. He said that he remembers showering after the game and not really being able to enjoy the moment. Here's my pression of what he said. The thought that we could have lost that game was

stronger than the thrill that we had won it. Wow. The United States never had those kind of stakes when they went into a basketball game. Okay, at last, the gold medal game for the Dream Team Croatia. It wasn't another coup coach game. To be quite honest, it wasn't much of anything, none of the usual gold medal tension. The US was gonna win. There was only one bit of suspense. It had nothing to do with the game.

But before we go there, remember I told you about this photo request that had been made through Karl Malone. David and I had heard nothing about it and it was all but forgotten, which was fine with me. But suddenly, before the damn gold medal game, NBA photographer Andy Bernstein approaches Dupre and me and says, Hey, we're gonna take a phoe to of you guys when they come out. Now, both Dupri and I say, so we get these special passes. Hurriedly go back meet the Dream Team as they're coming

out for the gold medal game. The shout, so let's go let's get it done. When all of a sudden, Magic says, hold up, guys, and nobody knows what the hell is going on, and Dave and I creep into place and Aye aimess camera, and from the back row I hear Bird make an X rated joking comment, good God, and then they move on. Just another night, with another photo with another couple of shlubs. I still have the picture,

along with an embarrassed grin. I'm wearing shorts and some kind of Hawaiian print shirt and look like I'm heading for a barbecue where they're gonna be playing Jimmy Buffett all night. The photo isn't much, but I still have birds joking comment ringing in my ears. And I used the line early in the Dream Team book. Years later I brought it up to him and he says he doesn't remember saying it, Just another well aimed insult in

a long line of them. The USB Croatia for the gold one s Jordan was great, but no greater than draz And Petrovich, the Croatian guard who finished with a game high twenty four points. Petrovich, he was the Magic Johnson of Yugoslavia, possibly the Magic Johnson of all of Europe. He was great. It was fun to watch. He was combative, he was cocky. I loved him. And on June seven, about ten months after he won silver for Croatia in

the Barcelona Olympics, he was dead. Petrovisch was a front seat passenger in a car driven by his girlfriend when it plowed into the back of a truck on a rain drent section of the auto Bahn in Bavaria. He was killed instantly. He was twenty eight. One hundred thousand people attended his funeral in Zagreb. One hundred thousand. Now it was never ever a podium ceremony like the one

for basketball in bar Salona. In It wasn't as iconic, and it really wasn't as important as the one in Mexico City in n when Tommy Smith and John Carlos held up black glove fist to signify their protests against racism in America. But it was strange. First out came the Lithuanians wearing their tie dyed warmups in clear violation

of Olympic podium rules. They were told no tide eyes, only official podium where to which marsh Loanas, the captain, basically said fu or however, you say that in Lithuanian the dead believed in us when we were nobody. He said, the friend of the devil is a friend of mine. Man you thought would get out of here without a dead lyric Croatia came out overjoyed with the silver medal. And then it was the Dream Team, three of whom came out with American flags draped around their shoulder the

TV commentator's notice, but on a sleep. I'm not sure how many in the crowd did. This had been brewing for a while. Were the Dream teamers affiliated with Nike going to wear the U s o C mandated Reebok podium jackets. Incredibly, the issue had not been settled, even though it had been talked about for days and days. Here's Jordan's look. You know, I don't want to be a partis to Rebok experiences. I have all business. I've been tied and is it disrespected? Might be? They said,

don't worry about it. You figured that out time. And then it comes win a gold mel and they come in and says, you guys got ready uniforms. If you don't wear the uniforms you came podium, I'm saying that's not because no, I don't know. I'm saying that the podium.

You know, I'm just in America, you know, because I see business bigger than the experience of being he was staying up there and win the gold medal, which is I never wanted to be put in that position, which is one of the reasons why I initially said to you to day Gavid into the rock, into all the guys that you know, this is not gonna work because of the business of this, cot into this and I don't only disrespect up and he got what's happening with, you know, with the U s o C. They assured

me that that was not going to be an issue. At least three different people tell me it was their idea to get flags to drape over the shoulders of the players to hide the Reebok logo. Jordan's said it was his. He asked Tom McGrath, the USA basketball official, to get a few flags from the stands. Tom did. Whose idea was it, I don't know, and who cares anymore. The disagreement was petty and the players took some crap for it, but really was the U s o C.

Any Less to blame. The Reebok warm up jacket was a business transaction for them, just as Jordan's loyally to Nike, which had been ongoing for eight years by then, was a business transaction. There were no virgins in a fair podium, But who came out looking to those who even noticed Jordan's Magic and Barkley, who were the three players who wore the flags? Why look how patriotic these guys are. They're wearing the American flag. There were some moments I

remember about the podium. The national anthem, a tear coming from the eye of Chuck Daly, who always always stayed in the background, Harry and Larry ewing and Bird exchanging high fives, Barkley blowing kisses, Malone putting his arm around Clyde Drexler, Jordan and Clyde mortal enemies under normal circumstances, chatting and pointing into the crowd. And Magic Johnson, a man who was supposed to be dead, pumping his right fist, then his left fist, then taking Barkley in his arms,

and then it was over. The Dream teamers want to plane back home within ninety minutes of winning goal. As I wrote in Dream Team the lights dimmed, the Palo Municipal emptied workers picked up trash, and it was like the day after your birthday, when the world seemed a little less bright. The fine edges of joy scrub flat. But it wasn't the end of the story, not by any means. Reverberations about the Dream Team continued back in America,

and to an extent they continue today. I'll talk about that in the eighth and final episode of The Dream Team Tapes. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed The Dream Team Tapes, please follow, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. The Dream Team Tapes is written and hosted by Jack McCallum. Executive producers Mark Francis and Scott Waxman, Executive producer for I Heart Media. Is shown to tone. The Dream Team Tapes is a Diversion Podcasts original series

in association with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.