How the "Dream Team" changed the world

As a legendary basketball cast is honored, reflections on a global phenomenon

Mark StarrSeptember 5, 2009 08:16Updated May 30, 2010 12:06

Magic Johnson of the U.S. wears his gold medal after the American "Dream Team" won gold in basketball at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. (Ray Stubblebine/Reuters)

BOSTON — On Aug. 12 in Chicago, the United States Olympic Hall of Fame held its ceremonies with its usual starry roster, and before a crowd of an estimated 3,600 people.

But even amid an induction class that included sprinter Michael Johnson, whose Atlanta ’96 performance sent shivers up my spine, and executive Peter Ueberroth, who is credited with saving the modern Olympic movement with his profit-turning ’84 L.A. Games, the glitteriest will be the ’92 men’s Olympic basketball team, better known as “The Dream Team.”

There has never been a basketball assemblage — possibly never a team in any sport — to rival both the talent and celebrity of that ’92 team. It started with basketball’s holy trinity of Michael, Magic and Larry — they who need no last names — along with a supporting cast of basketball Hall-of-Famers including Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, John Stockton, Clyde Drexler and David Robinson.

The ’92 Barcelona Games was the first Olympics at which basketball featured National Basketball Association stars. It was not, however, at the insistence of the United States, but rather at the urging of the rest of the basketball universe that believed an NBA showcase at the Olympics would help propel the growth of the game elsewhere.

Vancouver 2010 will be my 12th Olympics and I don’t remember another where an athlete or a group of athletes owned the city as that basketball team did in Barcelona. It was something like “Entourage” on steroids, where the Dream Teamers were not only the star actors, but the directors, producers and studio magnates too. On the court, the team delivered basketball wizardry. They opened with a 68-point rout of Somalia, averaged an almost unimaginable 117 points a game throughout the tourney and finally faced their toughest challenge in gold-medal game when they slipped past Croatia by only 32 points.

There was some concern expressed in journalistic circles that the team was not exemplifying good sportsmanship and Olympic values in running up the scores. But you didn’t hear that from opposition players or coaches. Perhaps you had to be there to fully appreciate how much the other teams wanted the Dream Team to hit them with its best shot — sometimes appearing to stand around to watch in awe and other times appearing to have to restrain themselves from breaking into applause.

The U.S. team delivered in the larger sense too, just as the international basketball establishment had dreamed. The NBA had been a visionary league well before Barcelona, proselytizing internationally and promoting its game in Europe, Asia and Africa. The Dream Team in effect sealed the deal, delivering a basketball clinic that demonstrated to the world that soccer was not the only beautiful game.