Excellent, evenhanded, very entertaining account of the 1992 Dream Team, from a reporter who was there covering it. Can't believe that was 25 years ago. ( )

McCallum dives into the story of the Dream Team assembled for the 1992 Olympics. He goes behind the scenes and tells stories of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Charles Barkley-men he lived with, golfed with, and got to know really well. He interviews the players and takes a look at how these men came to be part of the U.S. Olympic Men's Basketball team in 1992, and the decisions that were made in order for these men to make it. ( )

A quick and fun read. It did make me look at Magic a bit differently. I loved him growing up but he should have stayed retired the first time and play the All Star game and the Olympics.

When Michael Jordan says that your image is too important to you, you need to take a second look.

I would love to hang out with Stockton, Mullin, and Barkley. That would be fun ( )

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 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. ( )

Really took me back to my childhood. I was not a basketball fan at that age but even I knew about and was enamored by the Dream Team. McCallum tells a great tale and I did not find myself disinterested in some of the "play-by-play" descriptions of games (but that could be because I grew up with these players). It was great to get some insight into the personalities of some of the legends: Magic Johnson's bubbly energy, Larry Bird's quiet wisdom, Michael Jordan's steel will... As a huge fan of Patrick Ewing, I wish there was some more about him in the book, but McCallum states, by Ewing's own admission, that he wasn't very accessible to the media.

If you grew up in the 90's and were a fan of the NBA of that era, you'll enjoy this in-depth look into how the Dream Team was created, who was in it and why it was a special team. I had never thought about it before, but the Dream Team made basketball and world sport, changing the game forever.