The United States amazed the world during the Barcelona 92 Games by attending the basketball tournament with the best team in its history. Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Pat Ewing, Karl Malone and Charles Barkley led what went down in history as the ‘Dream Team’, an invincible team that stole the show at the Olympic Games, unleashed madness in the Catalan capital among fans and participating athletes and swept its way to gold.
The team coached by Chuck Daly won its eight games by an average margin of 43.75 points over its rivals, scoring an average of 117 points per game and putting on a show in all of them. The five games in the first phase were settled with a 229-point difference in their favor after crushing Angola (48-116), Croatia (70-103), Germany (111-68), Brazil (127-83) and Spain (81-122). In the quarter-finals they buried Puerto Rico (115-71), in the semi-finals Lithuania (127-76) and in the final Croatia (117-85).
They swept the field… and off it
Their superiority was so overwhelming that they did not even have to work hard to leave ‘corpses’ in their path with astonishing ease. They swept the court… and off it too, as one of the members of that super team, Charles Barkley, has just revealed during his appearance on the ‘Pardon My Take’ podcast in which the now TV commentator spoke openly about the nocturnal partying of that dream team.
At that time, Charles Barkley had been having a very tense relationship with Michael Jordan, the star among the stars of that team, but during the games in Barcelona they made peace and strengthened their friendship to unsuspected limits. Especially on the warm nights in Barcelona, when the poker games without limit and the rivers of beer, also without measure, livened up their early mornings.
‘Fat’ Barkley fondly remembers those weeks they spent in Spain. “It was crazy. You know what? The best thing is that the guys were great. We got along great. We respected each other a lot. The training sessions were crazy. We tried to kill each other because there were a lot of egos, but we had a great time”.
Training was crazy. We tried to kill each other because there were so many egos, but we had a lot of fun.
Unforgettable for him were the endless games of no-limit poker in which some of these billionaires would raise the stakes to infinity without realizing that they all had the capacity to match them. “It was so much fun hanging out with the guys. For example, Magic, Michael, Scottie and I would play cards every night for three, four, five hours… Michael would try to raise the stakes. The idiot didn’t realize that we were all rich. I mean, well, we all have money, man. Yes. He always tried to raise the stakes and threaten us. ‘I’m going to raise the stakes,’ he would say to us.”
Magic, Michael, Scottie and I would play cards every night for four or five hours… Michael always raised the stakes. The idiot didn’t realize that we were all rich
Alcohol was never missing from those gatherings. “We drank at least a couple of boxes of beer every night while we played,” Barkley confesses, revealing how they messed with two of his teammates who became inseparable during the tournament. “Larry Bird and Patrick Ewing became very good friends,” he says. “We made some T-shirts that said Harry and Larry to make fun of them. I mean, they became very good friends, man. It was great.”
The Dream Team roster at Barcelona 92
Michael Jordan (Chicago Bulls)
Scottie Pippen (Chicago Bulls)
Larry Bird (Boston Celtics)
Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson (Los Angeles Lakers)
Patrick Ewing (New York Knicks)
Charles Barkley (Phoenix Suns)
Clyde Drexler (Portland Trail Blazers)
Karl Malone (Utah Jazz)
John Stockton (Utah Jazz)
David Robinson (San Antonio Spurs)
Chris Mullin (Golden State Warriors)
Christian Laettner (Duke University)
Barkley led all scorers on the US team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, averaging 18 points per game, while Michael Jordan, the player who attracted the most attention in that dream team, averaged 14.9 points per game. Despite those numbers, Barkley always admitted that Jordan played better than him. Other legends such as Karl Malone, Clyde Drexler and Chris Mullin also contributed to the US gold medal, averaging more than ten points.
Barkley continues to recall how Chuck Daly motivated the ‘Dream Team’ to “destroy” their opponents. “He told us that if we didn’t win gold that year it would be the biggest upset in sports history,” he said. So, while the team focused on crushing their opponents on the court, they had fun off it.
A photo of Michael Jordan playing table tennis while Larry Bird drinks beer in the background iconically sums up the combination of work and fun that the ‘Dream Team’ undertook in Barcelona to write their names in the pages of Olympic history.
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