Dream Team Read Online Free PDF Page A

Magic had an immortal nickname, a thousand-kilowatt smile, a flashy game, a glitzy home base, and a championship resumé, yet in the early years of his career Converse didn’t come close to capitalizing on his appeal, a decision that cost both Magic and the company millions. “Way before Michael came into the league,” says Falk, “Magic could’ve owned the world.”
    At Nike, by contrast, executives such as Rob Strasser saw in Jordan a new horizon for the endorsement game. Plus, Nike needed to make a major move since the running boom of the 1970s had petered out. It was a company that prided itself on taking chances, soit had decided to blow its entire marketing budget, $500,000, on advertising that would feature Jordan, plus what it would have to pay him to wear the sneakers. Still, Jordan was resistant to Nike, which he had never worn and knew very little about. The night before he, his father, and Falk were to fly to Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, Jordan told his mom that he wasn’t going. But she wouldn’t hear of it.
    “You will be on that plane, Michael,” said Deloris Jordan. So he was on the plane.
    At that first meeting, Peter Moore, Nike’s head designer, showed Jordan and Falk the sketches he had made of Air Jordan shoes, warm-up suits, and apparel, all of it in black and red—“devil’s colors,” as Jordan told Falk. Jordan never blinked, never smiled, never said much of anything, and everybody in the room figured that he was underwhelmed. But after the meeting he admitted that he was swayed, and Falk negotiated a five-year $2.5 million deal that, like so many deals over the years, was supposed to bring the world to an end.
    So was born Air Jordan.
    At first Jordan hated the red-and-black shoe. “I’ll look like a clown,” he said. But he relented and wore them, after which the NBA ruled them illegal for some bizarre reason, fining Jordan $5,000 per game, a sum that Nike paid with a secret smile. A design compromise was eventually reached, and the major thing the fines had accomplished was to turn Jordan’s shoes into one of the biggest stories of the 1984–85 season and gather worldwide attention for Nike.
    Rod Thorn, the Bulls’ general manager at the time, asked Falk, “What are you trying to do? Turn him into a tennis player?”
    “Now you get it,” said the agent.

CHAPTER 3

THE COMMISSIONER AND THE INSPECTOR OF MEAT

The NBA Sticks a Tentative Toe into International Waters
    Late in 1985 David Stern and Russ Granik, commissioner and deputy commissioner of the NBA, received the Inspector of Meat in the league’s New York offices. The FIBA boss could hardly believe his good fortune. “You have to understand where I came from,” Stankovic told me recently, reflecting back on the meeting. “It was considered almost criminal just to communicate with the pro league. The amateur way was that we were not supposed to speak to them. And here I am sitting with the commissioner and we have a normal relationship.” He was positively beaming at the memory, sounding like Sally Field receiving her Best Actress award at the 1984 Oscars:
You like me!
    Stern did like him. Both men are attracted to power the way moths are to light, but there is a similar air of informality about them, too. They’re not exactly regular guys, but they’re smart enough to know that they should
act
like regular guys. AndGranik—cool, careful, collected, a lawyer who had started at the NBA in 1976—was the perfect complement to Stern, who could be quick-tempered, even volcanic.
    After a few get-acquainted moments, Stankovic went right to the point. “I don’t believe in these restrictions about who should play and who shouldn’t,” he said. “The best players in the world should be playing in everything, including the Olympics. But I can’t do that alone.”
    In some revisionist histories, Stern—all-seeing, all-knowing—instantly grasped the importance of aligning with FIBA, envisioning a day when