Free Dream Team by Jack McCallum Page B

coach in Barcelona. Of course it would be a college coach, for aren’t they the resident geniuses of American sport?
    Of all the myths in sports, few are as entrenched—and as absolutely ridiculous—as the idea that college basketball coaches are better coaches than their counterparts in the NBA. With a longer game, more time-outs, constant matchup changes, doubling defenses, better athletes, and five-games-in-seven-nights drudgery, an NBA coach does more coaching in a week than the college coach does in an entire season. College coaches coach programs; NBA coaches coach games. The fact that pro coaches lose jobs as often as tulips lose petals does not disprove the point; it supports it. Yes, many NBA coaches do their job with a scythe swinging overhead, but still they design the plays during time-outs and find another way to get somebody open on a back screen with two seconds on the clock—and
then
they get fired. Doesn’t mean they can’t coach the hell out of this game.
    When the men returned to ABAUSA headquarters in Colorado Springs, questions about players and a coach had to take a backseat to more pragmatic agenda items. The name of the organization, for example, had to be changed to get “Amateur” out of it. So it became, simply, USA Basketball. The constitution had to be amended to provide for membership and representation of the NBA. Eventually Granik would come aboard as vice president, and, though he, like Gavitt, was a conciliator, a diplomat, the old guard could always feel the invisible presence of Stern behind him. Almost from the first meeting, Wall could see that he was gone.
    “The essential tension that existed between USA Basketball and the NBA came about because of the way the amateur organizationhad done business for twenty years under Bill’s guidance,” said Jeffrey Orridge, who was the staff attorney for USA Basketball and is now the executive director of sports properties for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “The vision and the level of business acumen, the sophistication the NBA had about growing the game … it was far, far different than the way USA Basketball had done it.”
    Orridge remembers one of USA Basketball’s first trips to New York when the management team went in to meet with Stern and Granik. “We weren’t rubes or anything like that, but there was an almost overwhelming atmosphere to the whole thing,” says Orridge, a native New Yorker himself. “Now, you combine that business sophistication with the fact that I never met harder-working, harder-driving people than NBA people, and you could see it was inevitable that the NBA was going to take over. They drove the whole thing, make no mistake about that.”
    And Wall, hardheaded and tough but also a realist, had to get out of the way of these mad drivers from New York City.
    “How should I say this?” Wall says today from his home in the California desert. “I didn’t like some of the stuff I saw coming, and they wanted to get rid of somebody who was going to say no. And it was probably my time.”
    It was. It was time for the NBA to come in and start throwing money around. The question nobody knew the answer to was this: who would sign on to play?

CHAPTER 11

THE SHADOW MAN

For the Kid from Nowheresville, Arkansas, Playing Alongside Michael Could Be a Real Headache
    Scottie Pippen was blinking furiously, trying to focus, trying to will away the pain of a migraine headache minutes before his Chicago Bulls went out to play the Detroit Pistons in Game 7 of the NBA Eastern Conference final at the Palace of Auburn Hills in 1990.
    Michael Jordan was no doubt rolling his eyes. Another hard game, another disappearing act by Scottie, another one-man battle against the cold, cruel Pistons, who were, to Jordan, the anti-Cavaliers. Jordan had Cleveland’s number, all the time, every time, but the Pistons had his, all the time, every time.
    For the first three years of his career, it was debatable whether Scottie