Dream Team Answer

When I was living in Oxford with my buddy Ryan, we prided ourselves on going out of our way to never use our dishwasher. Then one time we mentioned this to somebody who asked us "why?", to which we were rendered speechless, "wait - what?"

This is what I thought of when I read this Mike Wilbon article on something I've wondered about before, ie why so little was actually written and filmed about the original Dream Team. Unlike me, Wilbon actually has an answer:

It's surprising it took 20 years to thoroughly examine the 1992 team, which Sports Illustrated's Jack McCallum did in his book "Dream Team." One big reason, unfortunately, is because Olympic beat writers of the day at the biggest newspapers in America held entirely too much sway with their editors. A half-dozen or so weren't shy about expressing how much they hated the very existence of the Dream Team, of having NBA players in the Olympics, of having attention taken away from gymnasts and swimmers and rowers. Those writers fixated on the fact that the most famous athletes in the world at the time (Jordan, Magic, Barkley and Bird, at the very least) were going to stay in a luxury hotel with security and not in minimal dorm rooms in the athletes' village, as was Olympic tradition.

Though the Dream Team had the greatest appeal to readers/viewers/listeners going into the Barcelona Olympics and remained the biggest story at the beginning of the Games, the beat writers bragged openly about never once seeing the team practice or play, which should have been embarrassing behavior for any journalist if only for the alarmingly poor news judgment it displayed. This, remember, was before 24/7 coverage and the Twitter age, before many cities had viable sports talk radio, before any alternative sources for Olympic news other than big city newspapers.

The reality was, at the time, the Dream Team was relatively ignored even though the basketball writers covering the squad were staying in the same hotel during training camp and often had unchecked access to every player and coach. Barkley, who had none of the, um, swing issues we know now, was actually available for golf himself, and McCallum, if memory serves, teed it up with him at least once. Yet, the greatest team ever assembled was back-burner stuff to the people. The rest of the world, nevertheless, was paying attention, sometimes fanatic attention.