Welts’ Olympic dreams came true
When the U.S. Olympic basketball team takes the floor at Oracle Arena on Tuesday night, Warriors president Rick Welts will be on hand. Looking on like a proud papa.
This team — one with a heavy Warriors influence — is the seventh version of the NBAturned-Olympians. Though no one tosses around the term “Dream Team” anymore, Welts was instrumental in the development and birth of the concept, back in the late 1980s. And it was a concept that not only changed Olympic basketball, but also the course of the NBA.
“It moved the NBA’s popularity ahead by 20 years,” Welts said last week. “I don’t know that anyone could have foreseen the overall impact.”
The concept started even before the 1988 Olympics, in which the United States, still fielding an amateur team, took home bronze. The Americans lost in the semifinals to a Soviet Union team fielding professional players.
“We had international aspirations,” said Welts, who was the president of NBA Properties, responsible for marketing the game. “We knew we needed a better presence internationally.
“Plus, we thought we were the best in the world at basketball. But we weren’t winning.”
To foster a more formal relationship with the governing body of basketball, FIBA, the NBA created the McDonald’s Championship, a tournament that featured an NBA team, a foreign national team and an international club team. The first was in Milwaukee in 1987. The second was in Madrid in 1988. Both were deemed successes.
In 1989, FIBA modified its rules to allow NBA players into the Olympics; they had been the only professionals banned. The only countries voting against the proposal were the Soviet Union and the United States.
“Only in the U.S. would there be a debate that it was unfair to send our best athletes to the Olympics,” Welts said. “There was a sense of fair play, that it wouldn’t be a fair fight. It was not a popular decision.”
Maybe not with the U.S. Olympic Committee or some of the American public. But it was a very popular decision with NBA players and the companies interested in associating with the team.
‘Dream Team’ coined
In 1991, word began to leak out that this would be the greatest collection of stars ever assembled on one team. Sports Illustrated dubbed it “the Dream Team” even before it was official that every big name had signed on.
The first 10 players were committed by the fall of 1991: Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, John Stockton and Karl Malone, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, Charles Barkley and David Robinson. The only controversy came at the end of the bench: Clyde Drexler was selected over Isaiah Thomas, reportedly because Jordan said he wouldn’t play if Thomas was on the team. And the lone college player was Christian Laettner, though many thought Shaquille O’Neal deserved the spot.
Welts was the marketing point man for the team.
“It was the easiest sales job in history,” he said. “It was the most amazing experience I ever had, to just walk into a corporation like McDonald’s and walk out with a deal. I don’t remember any company we approached saying no. They wanted the showcase of the most popular team.”
The team qualified for the Barcelona Games in a “Tournament of the Americas” held in Portland, Ore. When the U.S. team took the court against Cuba, the Cuban players took out their cameras for photos. The Cubans then proceeded to be throttled 136-57, a sign of what was to come.
The team easily qualified and had training camp in Monaco. A team scrimmage that few witnessed was later dubbed “the greatest game nobody ever saw” as the alpha males gave everything they had against each other.
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Once in Barcelona, there was a controversy because the team stayed in a luxury hotel with a large security contingent. It turned out it was needed.
“As big as we thought it might be, it was so much bigger,” Welts said. “The hotel was surrounded by crowds 24 hours a day. I can’t imagine traveling with the Beatles was any different.”
Most of the players shuttled from their hotel to the arena. But Barkley ventured out on La Rambla without security and ended up with thousands of people following him.
The team won its eight games by an average of nearly 44 points. In the gold-medal game, the U.S. beat Croatia 117-85, the Dream Team’s closest contest of the tournament. The dominance still didn’t sit well with some Americans.
“The world was captivated, but in the U.S. it was controversial,” Welts said.
There was controversy when Barkley elbowed a player from Angola and was unapologetic, furthering the image of a team of bullies. There was also controversy when the Nike players on the team draped a flag over their uniform’s Reebok logo, causing criticism of millionaire mercenaries.
But there was little controversy over the inclusion of Johnson, who had retired from the Lakers the previous season after his diagnosis of HIV. In fact, his joy at playing with his teammates probably helped further acceptance of people diagnosed with HIV and AIDS.
The team’s legacy was undeniable. Interest in the NBA around the globe skyrocketed. Within a few years, the NBA had become an international league.
“So many of the international players in our league grew up with the legend of the Dream Team,” Welts said. “It helped our progress immensely. It would have happened eventually, but I really think that moved the whole process forward.”
Luster begins to fade
The subsequent iterations of the Dream Team were not quite as dazzling, and the nickname began to fade. And they continued to be criticized. In 1996 in Atlanta, while the rest of the Olympians sweltered in their villages, the men’s basketball players complained about room service at their hotel. In 2000, the Sydney team began to show vulnerability, beating Lithuania by two points in a semifinal, and beating France in the gold-medal game by just 10 points.
In 2004 in Athens, what the Dream Team had wrought around the globe came back to bite the U.S. team. Coming off a disappointing sixth-place finish in the 2002 World Championships, the Americans finished third, losing to Argentina in the semifinals. Many of the players gave the impression they didn’t want to be there. Other nations’ players seemed more invested.
After that, USA Basketball appointed Jerry Colangelo to oversee the program, and he sought only players who were fully committed. The team went on to win gold in both 2008 in Beijing and 2012 in London. It has a 63-game win streak, the last loss against Greece in the 2006 World Championship semifinals.
Though many star players opted out of this summer’s team due to injury or fatigue, the ones who are on board have made it clear it is a lifelong dream.
“For these guys, winning a gold medal is a really big deal to them,” Welts said. “There was a time after the original idea where we lost that, and it didn’t reflect well on the players. It was important to reset the whole program.”
The program is reset. The team will play at Oracle in one of its final tuneups before heading to Rio. There’s a new generation of NBA players who think winning a gold medal is a pretty cool thing.