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How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever
Ballantine
July 2012
On Sale: July 10, 2012
384 pages
ISBN: 0345520483
EAN: 9780345520487
Kindle: B005X0JRG0
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Sports
They were the Beatles of basketball, the Mercury
Seven in sneakers. In Dream Team, acclaimed sports journalist Jack
McCallum delivers the untold story of the greatest team ever
assembled: the 1992 U.S. Olympic Men’s Basketball Team that
captivated the world, kindled the hoop dreams of countless
children around the planet, and remade the NBA into a global
sensation. As a senior staff writer for Sports Illustrated,
McCallum enjoyed a courtside seat for the most exciting
basketball spectacle on earth, covering the Dream Team from
its inception to the gold medal ceremony in Barcelona. For
the duration of the Olympics, he lived with, golfed with,
and—most important—drank with some of the greatest players
of the NBA’s Golden Age: Magic Johnson, the ebullient
showman who shrugged off his recent diagnosis of HIV to
become the team’s unquestioned captain and leader; Michael
Jordan, the transcendent talent at the height of his powers
as a player—and a marketing juggernaut; and Charles Barkley,
the outspoken iconoclast whose utterances on and off the
court threatened to ignite an international incident.
Presiding over the entire traveling circus was the Dream
Team’s beloved coach, Chuck Daly, whose laissez-faire
approach proved instrumental in getting the most out of such
disparate personalities and superstars such as Larry Bird,
Patrick Ewing, and Scottie Pippen.
Drawing on fresh interviews with the players, McCallum
provides the definitive account of the Dream Team
phenomenon. He offers a behind-the-scenes look at the
controversial selection process. He takes us inside the
team’s Olympic suites for late-night card games and bull
sessions where the players debate both the finer points of
basketball and their respective places in the NBA pantheon.
And he narrates a riveting possession-by-possession account
of the legendary July 1992 intrasquad scrimmage that pitted
the Dream Teamers against one another in what may have been
the greatest pickup game—and the greatest exhibition of
trash talk—in history.
In the twenty years since the Dream Team first captivated
the world’s attention, its mystique has only grown—and so
has its influence. The NBA is now flush with international
stars, many of them inspired by the exuberant spirit of ’92.
Dream Team vividly re-creates the moment when a
once-in-a-millennium group of athletes came together,
outperformed the hype, and changed the future of sports—one
perfectly executed fast break at a time.
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