“I don’t know anything about Angola. But Angola is in trouble.” Charles Barkley’s words at the Palau Municipal d’Esports the day before the US basketball team began its run at the 1992 Olympics proved true on several levels, some more uplifting than others.
Barkley himself scored 24 points against Angola in a landslide victory, in the process elbowing an opponent in the neck to “show him what the NBA is like.” He would also end up being the top scorer on that Dream Team, a man who was having the time of his life, partying with the locals, playing cards all night with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, bringing the razor’s edge to a team that played with a kind of light. around. And in the process becoming part of another kind of story.
This week marks exactly 30 years since the Dream Team clinched gold in Barcelona. Sports anniversaries are often meaningless things. An event was held. Time passed. The end. This, however, is one of the good ones. Perhaps even one of the best, if only because the Dream Team is that kind of entity, always a question of ultimacy and greatness.
Not just because the team itself was extraordinarily good, possibly the greatest collection of sports talent ever assembled. Not only because they really performed as a team, winning their games by an average of 44 points. Not even because there was a strange kind of joy in the way they did it. Look back and what stands out is the look of shared amazement in the crowd as Jordan leaps not only straight up but also forward, maintaining altitude like a glider; o Magic Johnson throws passes so flat and crisp they elicit a kind of collective gasp, the men moving through a different kind of gravity, lighter air.
This was also one of those times when the sport seemed to shy away from something else. Even the way that team came about felt significant. Four years earlier, an American Olympic team made up of amateurs and minor leaguers had been soundly defeated by the USSR. A year after that, a vote was passed to allow NBA players to compete.
Politics entered into this. The Soviet Union opposed that move to the last, but the Soviet Union was also in the process of dissolving. Historians, and AJP Taylor was very adamant about this, may have decided that the keynote in the fall of the Berlin Wall was David Hasselhoff in a studded leather jacket imitating Looking For Freedom for a collection of perplexed East Berliners who They carried mallets. But the Dream Team, as featured on the February 1991 Sports Illustrated cover, also felt like something loosening up, an opening of sorts.
Michael Jordan (second right) flashes a victory sign as he celebrates with teammates Larry Bird, Scottie Pippen and Clyde Drexler after winning Olympic gold in Barcelona in 1992. Photograph: Ray Stubblebine/Reuters
Looking back through the blurry, loving sports glasses of a generation raised, even against its conscious will, to absorb American culture, American food, American movies, American certainties, it doesn’t seem like an exaggeration to say that the Dream Team felt, vaguely, like some sort of fanfare for the American century. This was a victory parade, a sporty version of Jack Kerouac eating East Coast apple pie, a chance to gorge on that sweetness.
Perhaps a chimera; but seductive. Mainly, this was just an amazing team. Jordan, Johnson, Barkley, Pippen, Larry Bird and Patrick Ewing all started in a group so strong that it could afford to overlook a guy named Shaquille O’Neal from Louisiana State as a symbolic college player.
Fans show their support for the US basketball team during their 117-85 victory over Croatia at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. Photograph: Ed Reinke/AP
The real glue in this project was Magic, who had retired the previous year after testing positive for HIV, and most of his teammates assumed he was on borrowed time. There would be protests over his inclusion, in particular from Australia’s team doctor, who suggested, based on zero evidence, that he would infect other athletes. Magic is still alive and in good health, he is 62 years old. He received the warmest welcome in Barcelona, dancing through the opening parade in a silky blue Jimmy Cagney suit and leading the team on and off the pitch.
And yet, for all the triumphalism, this was never a sure thing. Critics said there would be too many stars. Jordan admitted (you have to love him) that he was there to study his NBA opponents in order to beat them more convincingly the following year. An early practice went so bad that Johnson ended up kicking a ball into the stands. On June 28 they played their first competitive match and everything fell into place. As the Cuban coach said later: “You cannot cover the sun with your finger.”
And so on to Barcelona with a military helicopter escort, a gridlock of fans and a poignant sort of pre-globalization fame, those present were a bit surprised to discover how much people loved this team. Barcelona was the perfect setting, a city that is itself a work of art, a monument to the splendid things that human beings can do. The players went to museums and swam in the sea. The opponents asked for autographs. Local commentators sometimes laughed as Magic faked, faked, ducked, faked again, and then threw a beautiful velvet-touch layup from under the basket.
There is a tendency to see a kind of stalking imperialism in the dominance of the American team, but this is to overlook the fact that these are individual athletes, that their brilliance is hard-earned, the sport pushed to its physical and mental limits, and leave the most vivid of impressions.
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That Olympic run is routinely credited with helping to make basketball a global sport. But it felt like something more than that. The world was a fast-paced place in the early ’90s. And, in a way, this team felt like a coronation, blunt proof of the fact that the world would now be all open borders, Wendy’s on Red Square, Bill Clinton playing the saxophone, the end of the story, the removal of the constant threat of an impending nuclear mega-explosion. death.
And yes, this was, of course, an illusion. The same year there were race riots in Los Angeles. History did not end, although the American century did. And looking back now what remains of that team is its ability to express something of those confused and confused hopes; and beyond that, just the basic beauty, the grace of those phantom white shirts, floating, writhing through the analog air, like a dream in the truest sense.
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