Dream Team by Jack McCallum Read Free Book Online Page B

off-putting at times, but the man was a great, great player, the point guard on most everyone’s all-time team, his 6′9″ size giving him a clear advantage over the 6′5″ Oscar Robertson. One could argue to exhaustion about whether he or Bird was the greater player … and then you could keep arguing some more. But over the twelve years when he was on top of his game, Magic almost always put it on the line when it counted. The man finished with thirty triple-doubles in the playoffs, a record that might never be touched. (Bird had ten. Of the other Dream Teamers, only Charles Barkley and Scottie Pippen are on the list, with four each.) And since both Magic and Bird defined their careers by rings—I heard Bird say “win a championship” so often that it began to sound like one word,
winachampionship
—my contention is that Magic had the better career. He had five rings, Bird had three. Yes, Johnson had a great supporting cast, but so did Bird.
    Purely as a basketball player, Jordan was better than either of them. (More on that later.) But Magic comes out on top in a singular aspect of the game—being influential on offense without needing to score. Hundreds of cases support that, but none better than this: in Game 6 of the 1982 Finals, Magic, who would win the series MVP, took exactly four shots yet totally dominated the game. He scored 13 points, grabbed 13 rebounds, and handed out 13 assists in a 114–104 win that closed out the Philadelphia 76ers.
    Johnson did two things better than any other player who ever lived. One was his ability to control and conduct the half-court offense. Owing to his height, he ruled from on high, his court vision unobscured, like a lighthouse operator scanning the horizon for fog. And those who tried to steal the ball from him met with a strong arm bar. In effect, the defense could never pressure the quarterback. Second, he executed full-speed, completely-under-control spins that weren’t for show but, rather, for eluding the defense. He gets very little credit for that.
    The rivalry between the Lakers and the Celtics (and thereforebetween Magic and Bird) was not nearly as protracted as one might believe. Their only truly epic mano-a-mano battle was in the 1984 Finals, when the Celtics won in seven games, a memory that still furrows Magic’s brow. By the time that Magic and Bird met again in the 1987 Finals, they had become more like bicoastal teammates, selling sneakers together and singing mutual hosannas, and by 1992, when they co-captained the greatest team ever, they were marching lockstep into history.

CHAPTER 7

THE SHOOTER

Mullin Puts Down the Bottle and Puts Up the Numbers
    Chris Mullin was comfortable being alone. The first sport at which he was proficient back in his native Flatbush was swimming, stroking away in the local Boys Club pool in the early-morning, chlorine-scented fog that hid the world. He was a sprinter—“a 25-meter guy,” in his words—and probably would’ve gone on to be a really good one.
    But he liked being part of a team, too, so when the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) coach at St. Thomas Aquinas told him he had to give up swimming if he was going to be really good in basketball, he said okay. He enjoyed the solitary aspects of basketball, too, and that’s why he got good. “I liked being in the gym alone,” Mullin told me recently. “No, I
loved
it. I’d put a tape player or radio near the floor, put on some Springsteen, really blast it, shoot it, get your own rebound, shoot it, get your own. I loved that. Or I’d go full-court thirty minutes by myself. I had no problem with that.”
    So he never minded drinking alone, either.
    Drinking was part of the family culture. His dad, Rod, a customs inspector at Kennedy Airport, was an alcoholic—a gentle one, but an alcoholic nonetheless. The mood swings scared Chris a little bit, but basically Rod always came out on the positive side. He was a “good drunk,” never a “mean