Jack McCallum (1) (1949–)

For someone who doesn't get that into sports I freaking LOVE reading about them. The Real Hoosiers is magnificent, it's a breathtaking look at The Big O, Attucks, and basketball in Indiana. As a Hoosier, this content isn't brand new to me. I have read several other books on Hoosier basketball, and a young adult book on Attucks - however the framework of this book included so much background and depth that I learned a ton. This should be required reading. It talks in depth about how deep show more racism permeated in the Hoosier Heartland (on and off the court) and the hoops (see what I did there) that African American players faced just to play the game they love. I love Indiana and we've come a long way as a state - but boy... things were bad. It's amazing that we got such a great school and basketball team out of so much prejudice. Wonderful book, I loved all the footnotes and anecdotes! show less

"Ask Barkley about Jordan's greatness, and you'd be liable to get, 'Man, all I know is he's the blackest sumbitch I ever saw.' Ask Bird to comment on Magic's passing ability, and you'd be liable to get, 'I don't know. He hasn't passed me the ball yet." Maybe it was like that for the scientists, too; maybe if you got close, you'd hear, 'Hey Curie. Your last theorem? My chihuahua figured it out in five minutes.'"

To be interested in reading Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and show more the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever by Jack McCallum, you should be able to make it all the way through that title and have some idea of what it means. Even if you have cleared that first hurdle, you'll likely need to be a pro basketball nerd to enjoy this one. If you don't know who those people are, or what the Dream Team was (the 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team, which let pros participate for the first time), do yourself a favor and skip this review.

McCallum was on the inside, a respected writer for Sports Illustrated, who got to hang out with the players and coaches at clubs and casinos and hotel rooms and the "family room" and on and on, play cards and ping pong with them, and follow them on their unprecedented journey to the gold medal. The international hysteria over this team, often likened to the reception for the young Beatles, reaches absurd levels, like the Olympic teamers from other countries wanting to have their picture taken with a Dream Teamer more than even thinking about winning the game, and begging for their shoes and jerseys. The Dream Teamers in general handle it well, but there's always the unpredictable Charles Barkley, now an entertaining sports commentator, who "was at once the team's public relations nightmare and its greatest ambassador". He'd go off on unescorted adventures because security would just slow him down and interfere. Michael Jordan added to his legend, his fellow Hall of Famers unable to fathom his ability to play cards into the wee hours, sleep briefly, play 36 holes of golf, and then drop 35 points on some other Olympic team, dominating the game. While some briefly tried to keep up with him, no one could.

The amazing level of play by the Dream Team (they won by an average 40 points per game) opened the eyes of children all over the world, who suddenly wanted to play basketball more than any other sport. All these years later, the National Basketball Association is filled with highly skilled foreign players like Dirk Nowitzki, a German who led Dallas to an NBA championship and was the finals MVP. Looking back, a number of foreign players said that they knew, after seeing the Dream Team, that they couldn't play at the level of these "gods", but they also knew they wanted to try.

The book is full of fun anecdotes, including about the "Greatest Game Never Seen", the Dream Teamers playing against each other in a practice behind closed doors. All the competitiveness, all the trashtalking, all the pride, is on display, with Michael's team squaring off against Magic's. The Dream Team in the 1992 Olympics is a moment in history that will never be approached again, and, even with some unnecessary tangents and some labored writing, it was a joy to read this book about it. show less

There’s power in a name. Shakespeare said it, millions of moms agonize over it before/after the birth of their children and the rise of Paris Hilton/the Kardashian brood all confirm that names alone can be enough to overcome/ignore things like objective reality to create a more powerful illusion.

Just the name “the Dream Team” likely struck fear (and no small sense of awe) into its opponents. The name was apt: the team that took the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona — and, by extension, the show more world — by storm included 12 of the best basketball players of their era, at least a half dozen of those ranking among the greatest of all time, banding together as one team, united by their love of and pride in their country.

A team that was so impossibly better than every other team, even in defeat their opponents would ask for autographs. Even during the game opposing players instructed their teammates on the bench to get a photograph (with a camera smuggled onto the bench) of Michael Jordan stealing the ball from them. And a team largely credited with boosting the game’s popularity internationally, directly attributable to the careers of such current stars as Manu Ginobili, Dirk Nowitzki and Pau Gasol, to name but a few.

This book, then, is … not really their story.

It’s ostensibly their story. It’s supposed to be their story. But really it’s the story of one sports journalist (Jack McCallum) hanging around the players who would eventually become the Dream Team.
That’s not to say it’s entirely devoid of interesting tidbits about the Olympics and the mighty Adonises who trampled the competition en route to the basketball gold medal. There are some behind-the-scenes tidbits about the hotel room, about Sir Charles Barkley’s evening/early morning ramblings (surprisingly tamer than you’d expect), and even some good old-fashioned gossip/backstabbing perpetuated on Isaiah Thomas, widely acknowledged to have been left off the team at the sole whim of one Michael Jordan.

You can tell the book’s trajectory was off simply by tracing how much of it is devoted to the Dream Team playing basketball games. The answer, sadly, is “not much.” Of the book’s 36 chapters, we don’t even get to training camp until chapter 19, and we don’t get to Barcelona until well after chapter 28.

If you’re just wanting to pick this up because you’re a general fan of basketball (and because Twitter didn’t exist in 1992 to give us the execrable minutiae of celebrities’ lives) and want to learn more about the background of Dream Team stars (as well as what John Stockton eats at the restaurant his father used to co-own), this is probably worth picking up. But if you’re looking for the whole story of the Dream Team — the games, the locker room rivalries, the in-depth analysis of getting the world’s best to play together as a team — you may just want to go watch the incredible documentary from NBA.tv.

I imagine this tome at one time was simply supposed to a McCallum memoir before either he or his editor (who is quoted in the book as replying to McCallum’s supposed reluctance to put himself in the story with, “You can’t help it. You were along for the ride.”) decided that it would be a) easier marketing and b) more profitable to restructure it around the Dream Team in time for the 2012 Olympics.

There’s nothing wrong with choosing to do that, but the book’s title is “Dream Team,” not “Jack McCallum’s brief recollection of the Dream Team along with some interviews conducted 20-odd years later.”

That’s the trouble with names. They have the power to cow people over but, in the end, you have to be able to back them up. show less

I was raised a massive basketball fan, and remain one to this day, having graduated from watching games on the tiny TV on the porch (the TV being attached to the house by a giant bright orange extension cord) to cheering in the stands at the United Center. But while I loved and adored players like Michael Jordan and my beloved Scottie Pippen, I knew very little about them off the court, and almost nothing that went on behind the scenes of the Dream Team.

This was a great read by an author who show more quite literally had the inside scoop, and shares his stories with a fun, sometimes biting wit, telling about everything from the greatest game ever played (that no one got to see) to what exactly went down when Michael and Scottie froze out Toni Kukoc. I highly recommend this book to basketball fans. show less