The "Dream Team" needed buffers for their privacy and their safety. During their 16 days in Barcelona, the Ambassador's game room served as an exclusive club where the players could shoot pool, play cards, enjoy a beer, and invent occasions to compete with one another.
On the night of August 7th, [some of the players] were wide awake, embroiled in an emotional debate over a simple question posed by Bird: which NBA team was the greatest of all time?
"Obviously one of our Lakers teams," answered Magic, leaning on his pool stick. "We won five championships. More than all of you."
"No, it's the great Celtics teams with my man Bill Russell," said center Patrick Ewing, who played for the New York Knicks but was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "He won 11 rings."
"You're forgetting the '86 Celtics, with the best front line in the history of basketball, including this guy right here," added NBC commentator Ahmad Rashad, pointing to Bird.
"That Celtics front line was brutal," agreed Charles Barkley.
Jordan, refusing to allow the chatter to disrupt his concentration, knocked his ball into the corner pocket and puffed on his cigar. He was 29 years old and had just won his second straight championship and his sixth consecutive scoring title. His counterparts in the room were decorated NBA veterans, yet their body of work was nearly complete. The maestro of the Bulls was only just beginning to add new strokes to his championship canvas.
"You haven't even seen the best NBA team of all time yet," Jordan announced. "I'm just getting started. I'm going to win more championships than all of you guys. Tell you what. Let's have this conversation after I'm done playing."
"You aren't winning five championships," Magic protested.
"Michael, I'm going to steal at least one of them from you," Barkley shot back.
"Quiet," Bird said. "Charles, you ain't won nothing. You're out of this discussion. Ahmad, same thing. You're gone. Patrick, you don't have any championships either, so you need to shut up and sit down right here and learn some things."
Jordan insisted that his Chicago teams belonged in the conversation about the all-time greats; Bird reminded Jordan that he used to torture Scottie Pippen regularly before his back betrayed him.
"I feel sorry for you," Magic told Jordan. "You will never have what Larry and I had. We went two weeks without sleep knowing, if we made one mistake, the other guy was going to take it and use it to beat us. Who do you measure yourself against?"
Magic's last question, "Who do you measure yourself against?" particularly resonates in today's NBA. The League's current batch of stars has been criticized for being too friendly with each other, a criticism that reached its pinnacle this summer when LeBron, Wade, and Bosh joined the Heat together. But is "friendly" necessarily a bad thing?
Magic, Bird, and Jordan would have never played with each other. They said so themselves, and there's no reason to suggest otherwise. As the story goes, they were too preoccupied with trying to beat the other than to ever think of joining them. Fair enough.
From 1985 until the end of their careers, Magic and Bird had a friendly rivalry. They were cordial but still wanted to beat each other. Magic also wanted desperately to play with Bird -- in the 1992 Olympics. Battling chronic back problems, Bird had planned on foregoing the 1992 Olympic games. It was Magic that talked him into it. He was intrigued by the idea of playing with a comparably talented player who also exhibited the same competitive drive that separated him from the rest of his Laker teammates. Jordan called the Olympic experience, "The time of his life." Every member of the team relished the opportunity to play with teammates who pushed them everyday at practice.
Competitiveness is something we as fans often overlook. Great players, and teams for that matter, often get bored playing against inferior competition. Before this year, LeBron and Wade never played with anyone in their life that approached their skill set. The daily competition in practice will make them better players, in a way that competing against each other every so often couldn't.
That's not to say I agree with their decision to join the Heat. I still would have much rather seen them as the best player on two different teams. But the notion that one of them would have to scale down their game to accommodate the other has already been proven wrong. In fact, Wade and LeBron are better players this year than they were last year. I think just being around the other has brought out the best in them.
While never actualized, even members of the 1992 Dream Team recognized the vast potential of teaming up. LeBron and Wade were accused of lacking competitiveness because they took the dream of the 1992 Olympic squad and made it an NBA reality.
We may have all been wrong. The Heat may have done the competitive thing. They just did it in a way that the previous generation of players would have never conceived.
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