Charles Barkley pulled off a rare double early last week. In the span of a single sentence, he found a way and more than enough room to insult members of both the United Auto Workers and the United States swim team.
"America may not make the best cars or have the best swimmers any more, but one thing we can control," Barkley said, "is basketball."Chuck was all smiles and clear conscience when he waded into the issue of American superiority, having just breezed into Chicago for the start of Dream Team III's training camp. And if he gets up on the gold medal platform in Atlanta with the mission accomplished and a grin that he came by just as honestly, even better.
Because that's the way this Dream Team business should end. Not with a bang, but with a chuckle. It's rare when something deserves a sequel, rarer still when it deserves two. As far as it goes, America has already been there, done that. Twice, in fact. And just as sure as audiences eventually turned on Rocky, two games into Dream Team III's exhibition season makes you believe it could happen here, too.
And so before it does, say sometime before the 2000 Games in Sydney, Australia, let's turn Olympic basketball back over to the college kids. After all, they almost stole it Saturday night, taking a 17-point lead at halftime and extending the smug set to 96-90 before folding up. Besides, imagine NBC trying to promote a Dream Team that had already been beaten by a collection of mostly second-line college players.
The original Dream Team was dispatched to Barcelona in 1992 with two objectives. First was to reclaim the gold medal a team of college all-stars coached by John Thompson of Georgetown failed somehow to bring home from the Seoul Games in 1988. Goal No. 2 figured to be only a little bit tougher: get the rest of the world to buy into basketball, which means they'll also buy more NBA stuff.
Considering who played on the original Dream Team, the success of the mission was never in doubt. With Barkley playing the comic foil to the trio of Michael, Magic and Larry, Dream Team I hit every mark. It crushed every opponent - the average margin of victory was 44 points - but did it with great style and humor. And after having them beamed into the living room, what kid in Lithuania, or Venezuela, or China, for that matter, didn't yearn for the sneakers and jerseys and ballcaps those guys wore?
The first game the first Dreamers played began with the Angolan guard who was supposed to cover Jordan wearing the latest Air Jordan model shoes, then ended 116-48. Afterward, the Angolans took as many pictures alongside their heroes as time and film allowed. It was one of the those rare chances to get flattened by history and have Polaroids to pass around with the grandchildren. The rest of the world did more than just buy NBA stuff, too; they actually used it, a fact that can be culled by a handful of foreign-born players being judged good enough to get taken in the first round of the NBA draft.
As for Dream Team II, the less said about it the better. Assembled to play the 1994 world championships, it was long on talent, stats, fat contracts and endorsement deals. But it always came up short in comparison. It had little of the grace and inspired very little of the adulation that attached itself to the original. The only area in which it excelled was attitude.
Dropping some of the bad actors from that bunch has cut down on outright hostility. But Dream Team III won't have it much easier.
They have to come up with a twist on a plot that always ends the same way - with the U.S. dominating. More than a few repeats of Sunday's mercenary performance won't do much for TV ratings. In the closing minutes Sunday against Brazil, with his team already 40 points ahead, coach Lenny Wilkens clamped on full-court pressure. At the end of the game, Reggie Miller tried a length-of-the-court trey.
"There was a sense of urgency today," Penny Hardaway said. "We had to show that we still had it."