The 'Dream Team', the symbolism of a peak

“It was like traveling with 12 rock stars.

Or like putting Elvis and the Beatles together”, recalled Chuck Daly, US men's basketball coach during the unforgettable Barcelona Olympics (1992), about the media impact of the human group at his disposal.

Daly, lucid like few others, was always aware that in his hands he did not only have a basketball team.

Those two weeks, between the end of July and the beginning of August, would serve as a turning point for the sport of basket ball, which hypnotized the planet —embracing globalization— hand in hand with a perfect cocktail between the divine and the human.

Between the astonishment and the tangible.

Barcelona would enjoy the

of the American team, but the entire world was enchanted by its symbolism.

The

, as Sports Illustrated magazine prophetically dubbed it in February 1991, went unchallenged to gold, winning all eight games by an average of 43.8 points.

He never won by less than 32 and exceeded 117 goals scored per game.

Daly, in fact, did not request a single timeout during the entire championship.

The sufficiency was absolute, and yet it only revealed the visible part of the iceberg.

Because, indeed, that was not just a basketball team.

It wasn't just a machine for pulverizing rivals and entertaining fans hungry for a show.

In sports and affection they were unbeatable.

But there was more.

The NBA premiere

His mission consisted, above all, in taking advantage of a privileged setting to recover his position of power and dominance within his sport, being able, in the second instance, to convince those fans —in practice, the entire world— that they could never again live without that adrenaline.

The seductive tentacles of the NBA were here to stay.

For the first time in the history of the Olympic event, the United States attended the basketball tournament with professional players from its major league.

It was no accident, the royalty of old Europe had drawn the colors of the inventors of the game.

His university teams had just fallen in the semifinals in the previous two major tournaments (against the USSR in the Seoul Games, in 1988; and against Yugoslavia in the World Cup, two years later), a reflection of a changing reality that he clinically recognized even then. coach Mike Krzyzewski, Daly's assistant in Barcelona.

“With our young people it is no longer enough.

There are men's teams in front of us”, explained Krzyzewski.

Borislav Stankovic, FIBA ​​Secretary General, had been chasing the United States since the mid-1980s to compete in full conditions.

And he found in David Stern, commissioner of the NBA, the perfect ally to execute an idea that ended up materializing, after a previous vote, in April 1989. The doors to a new world were opened.

Stern then had enough to deal with internally with a competition that under his command was taking flight, but his prodigious nose for business led him to join Stankovic in that initiative.

The reason was simple: for the NBA that was a great market opportunity.

And it was, above all, because it had three incomparable protagonists: Michael Jordan, Earvin Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.

They represented, to perfection, what could dazzle more and better.

The great treasure to expose.

Jordan, unanimously the best player in the world and having the sweetest moment of his career, was the closest thing to an alien that the game had to offer.

And, at the same time, a commercial icon of maximum dimension.

HIV positive

Magic and Bird, although far from their sporting fullness (the first had retired the previous year after testing positive for HIV and the second, with a battered back, would leave basketball after the Olympic event), they added -as if that were not enough- a irresistible emotional component.

Both symbolized the glory of the Lakers and Celtics dynasties, the rivalry that had already trapped part of their generation, together with a fascinating style that raised technique and intelligence to the nth degree.

In fact, the fact that Magic wore number 15 —the last to be presented each game— was not arbitrary: the Americans saved the man with the eternal smile for last, the one who aroused the greatest natural sympathy among the fans.

It would, by the way, also be the Magic himself who convinced Bird - then 36 years old - to join the team, through a sick telephone insistence, as revealed by the journalist Jack McCallum in his fantastic work

(2012) .

His stubbornness was justified: that team —not exempt from controversy in its formation, especially due to Jordan's veto of Isiah Thomas, star of the Detroit

, due to the pending accounts between the two— would manage to transcend their own era.

On the field those men were gods.

Athletes above good and evil.

Chosen outside even the Olympic village, staying at the newly opened Ambassador hotel and protected there by a legion of professionals at your service.

However, off the track they seemed, with some exceptions due to their condition —such as Jordan's constant trips to play golf at the El Prat club—, mortals on foot.

Thus, seeing John Stockton walking along Las Ramblas —camera in hand— with total normality and without being recognized, drew the perfect paradox of that mixture.

That of a team so unattainable as to be kept forever in the retina of millions of people but, at the same time, so accessible as to internalize that, at any moment, you could meet those idols without prior notice.

With the

everything seemed possible and under that power, that of the subconscious, they built an eternal reign.

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