Dream Team

I still ain't heard anything about the HBO doc I've been whining for, but at least a book about the Dream Team will be coming out soon.

There has never been a team that handed out beatings and drew only plaudits. In the Tournament of the Americas pre-Olympic qualifier in Portland, Cuba coach Miguel Calderon Gomez had this to say after a do-the-math 136-57 loss in the Dream Team's opener: "For us it was an elegant game, a historic game. We can take back to Cuba a beautiful photograph of us with them." That sounds like the cruise director making the best of a widespread epidemic of dysentery: Be sure to take with you that beautiful portrait of Captain and Tennille from Karaoke Night!

Expect there to be plenty of Sir Charles:

Following Charles Barkley around Barcelona as he rambled Las Ramblas, "the only street in the world," as Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca wrote, "I wish would never end." Las Ramblas was a 24/7 carnival, a place for the high and mighty and the low and lowdown. And during the 1992 Olympics Sir Charles positively owned it.

Barkley was out and about most nights, collecting crowds of anywhere from 10 to 50, stopping at this bar, this tavern, always chattering, always spreading around mucho dolares and a joyous diplomacy that helped ease the pain of the beatings. Even when Barkley caused them. He famously threw an elbow at a skinny Angolan in the first U.S. game in Barcelona but succeeded mainly in turning Hector Coimbra into the best-known basketball player in the world for a couple of days.

Some Dream Team classics from the Round Mound of Rebound:

On the goal of the '92 Olympic Dream Team when playing Panama in the Tournament of the Americas: "To get the Canal back."

Before the Dream Team's game against Angola in the 1992 Olympics: "All I know about Angola is Angola's in trouble."