In the summer of 1992, the residents of Calle Pintor Fortuny they most likely had their most illustrious visitors crowded into the newly opened Ambassador Hotel, now the Silken Ramblas. The two weeks that passed the best basketball team in history in there they are part of the history of Olympism and world sport. Not that the stars didn’t take a walk from time to time, but the helicopters flying over the area and snipers stationed on the roofs they indicate the dimension of the matter for a Barcelona that was not, not even remotely, the world-renowned city of today.
The stars didn’t spend too much time in their 800 euro a night rooms, but instead spent most of their time in the reserved room they had for playing cards, smoking cigars and playing ping-pong or video games. Michael Jordan she got up early – some, looking at her schedules, would say that she was more like a splicer – to go to play golf in El Prat. In fact, there were days when MJ played on two different fields, and at night he dressed in shorts and swept the opposition. Another who did not stop, both on and off the pitch, was Charles Barkley. Al Gordo he liked Barcelona, a fantasy city for a boy from a small town in Alabama, so at night, when other classmates were playing or sleeping, he would sneak out the back door and took a walk down Las Ramblas.
“I can’t just sit in my room doing nothing,” Barkley explained to Jack McCallum, journalist from Sports Illustrated and author of the magnificent book Dream Team on the legendary 1992 USA team. “Of course it’s annoying to sign so many autographs, but I’d rather walk around and sign autographs than sit around. For me it is fun to go around and meet people”. Thus, Barkley would stroll through the mythical kiosks on the Ramblas, and as McCallum relates, he would have a few drinks sitting on a terrace in Plaça Reial. Charles went out to party, and thanks to those escapades, he helped reduce the tension that the VIP treatment to the stars of the NBA had generated in the Olympic Village.
The story of The last Dance focused, now a couple of years, on the experience of Michael Jordan in Barcelona 1992, an experience that was seen for an instant during the premiere of the documentary series when on the 23rd he walked through the Eixample right in front of a huge Nike billboard in which he himself was the protagonist. MJ has confessed on more than one occasion that he is in love with Barcelona, a city that he has been visiting over the years. In 1992, however, he did not see much more than the common room of the Ambassador, the parquet of the Olímpic and the grass of several golf courses in Catalonia. That did not prevent the Dream Team from sweeping the track, winning by an average of 43 points to their rivals in the eight games they played during the Olympics.
After training or beating up their opponents, the stars met in their peculiar operations center: it was a glass room located on the second floor of the Ambassador, and you could see from outside the video games, the pizza boxes and beer cans lying around on the floor, the butts of the cigars in the ashtray. There, the best basketball players of the moment challenged each other to ping-pong games. Michael Jordan, as in everything, wanted to win, but the irreverent Christian Laettner he was number one with the shovel. Jordan left the room pissed off on more than one occasion, and the then NBA commissioner also participated in the games, a David Star who was not bad at the ball game either.
Just like on the court, where Barkley elbowed an Angolan player out of the blue, the trash-talk came and went in the private room of the stars: “It is worth that anyone with five hundred million in the bank is attractive, but If you were a plumber, you wouldn’t eat a bagel.”Sir Charles joked with Jordan. Sometimes it was 4 in the morning when most of the team members retired to bed, but Barkley would still slip away and, according to McCallum, give a couple of $100 bills to the first Barcelonan he passed on the street. and told him: “Today you take me to a party”.
On the day of the grand final, poker bets led the squad to go to bed at six in the morning, and Jordan only took a shower before showing up at the reception to fulfill some publicity commitments. When he finished, in the early afternoon, he went to play a few holes at El Prat. He did not want and He didn’t miss a day. Then he went back to the hotel, changed and went to the Pavelló Olímpic in Badalona. A few hours later, the Dream Team bit into the olympic gold after beating Croatia 117-85 Drazen Petrovic, Dino Radja y Toni Kukocwho would join the Bulls a season later and would be part of the second dynasty that starred in the story of The Last Dance, main revitalizer of the fever for Chicago’s ’23’ in the 21st century.
In short, Michael Jordan’s first experience in Barcelona was peculiar. He barely slept and didn’t mess up at all: He scored 22 points in the Olympic final and went home that same morning on a charter flight with the rest of his teammates. The following year, MJ would complete his first triplet and retire for the first time in his career to seek new challenges as a baseball player, but that’s another story.
The presence of Jordan and the rest of the stars, the Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and companyplaced Barcelona on the world map of world basketball, which after the exhibition of the United States experienced its definitive emergence as a global sport. “Barcelona was the first impulse to go as far as basketball has come”reflected Mike Krzyzeswkithen a member of the coaching staff of Chuck Dalycoach of the Dream Team who defined the performance of his pupils in our country as that of the Beatles in the United States of the sixties With the bets, the golf games and the cigars involved, and despite all the anecdotes, Jordan and his teammates forever changed what we understand today by basketball.
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