When the Game Was Ours - Larry Bird [133]
Jordan's fists clenched. He called for the ball, drove to the basket, elevated, then dunked it through.
"That good enough for you?" he said.
Pippen immediately perked up when he saw Jordan's suddenly glowering visage.
"Y'all have done it now," Pippen said, grinning.
Jordan swarmed the West team with traps and full-court pressure. He jumped the passing lanes, knocked down one-handed slams, pushed Magic off the block, and hit fadeaways, barking at the West's suddenly impotent squad as he continued his scoring rampage. Within minutes, the score was tied. Johnson, rankled by the calls (or no calls) of the coaching staff, complained, "It's like I'm in Chicago Stadium! They moved it to Monte Carlo!"
"Welcome to the nineties," Jordan retorted.
"You want to be like Mike?" Pippen baited Magic. "Try drinking some Gatorade!"
When the "regulation" scrimmage ended in a tie, both Jordan and Johnson instructed their respective teams to remain on the floor.
"We're going again," Jordan said.
"No," Daly interjected. "We don't need any more injuries."
For the first and only time, the players ignored Daly's pleas. Five more minutes of high-octane basketball followed, with Ewing and Robinson grinding in the post, Barkley and Malone wrestling for the boards, Bird angling for the perimeter dagger, and Magic controlling tempo. Yet it was Jordan who had the last word, with a melodious display of basketball trickery that Gavitt would later maintain was the most amazing five minutes of basketball he'd ever seen.
As Jordan and Bird skipped off the floor victorious, gloating shamelessly about their turnaround, Magic left the court demanding a new officiating crew.
"Magic was cursing at the refs, his teammates, and his coaches," Jordan recalled. "He couldn't stand that we beat them.
"It was the most fun I've ever had playing basketball."
Two days after that epic scrimmage, the Dream Team arrived in Barcelona and practiced lightly before Magic gathered them in a semicircle and reminded them of their duty, both as Americans and as representatives of the NBA. He stressed the need to focus despite all the alluring distractions and encouraged the young players on the squad to come to him with any questions or concerns.
"I don't know what was more impressive—his wealth of knowledge or his willingness to share it," Stockton noted.
Bird was cautiously optimistic about his prospects in Barcelona. Earlier during the Celtics season, his team doctors had prescribed oral steroid pills to alleviate the inflammation in his back and the burning pain down his leg. Although he took them only intermittently, once he committed to playing in the Olympics he stopped taking them altogether. Even though he was taking them for proper medicinal purposes, steroids were one of the many banned substances in the Games, and Bird was concerned that any remnants of his treatment in his system would automatically disqualify him.
The Olympic drug-testing techniques were surprisingly archaic. Moments after each game, officials approached the trainer, Lacerte, and had him randomly draw three numbers from a box. Bird's number 7 came up both the first and the second time. He submitted his sample with some uneasiness; for a moment, the worst-case scenario of being sent home fleetingly crossed his mind. He ended up passing both tests without incident, but admitted, "That was the most stressful part of the Olympics."
The actual basketball games turned out to be a mere formality. It was a foregone conclusion that the Dream Team would advance to the medal round, and they rarely practiced once they got to Barcelona. Jordan routinely played 36 holes of golf a day, sometimes finishing up 10 minutes before the team bus pulled out of the hotel.
Because they were the most high-profile athletes in the Games, the Dream Team was housed at the Ambassador during their entire stay. The hotel