IT WAS THE RAGE OF THE ’84 GAMES : For 12 Basketball Stars, Dealing With Opponents En Route to Gold Medal Was a Lot Easier Than Dealing With the Coach, Who Demanded Things Be Done the Knight Way

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — It was the best of teams, it was the worst of times. It was the inevitable end product of the union of Robert Montgomery Knight and 12 of America’s best basketball players.

It was the summer of 1984 for the U.S. Olympic team, one its members won’t forget soon.

How to sum it up?

Try, three months of scaling Olympus, with occasional side trips to Hades.

As expected, the team played impressively, pocketed its gold medals and retired to greatness, undefeated, untied, unchallenged, if somewhat unnoticed. No Soviets, no competition, no drama, scant air time. Mary Lou Retton winds up on those Wheaties boxes instead of Bob Knight.

The U.S. team was hardly unmarked, though. It might have been the finest amateur team ever assembled. Or maybe that’s still the ’60 Olympic team. The game’s historians, such as they are, can argue it through the wee hours of the morning in tap rooms throughout this great land of ours.

But, of course, that’s not exactly how this team will be remembered.

It will be remembered for Knight, who dominated every moment of its short life, making himself the central issue, as he always does. This is a phenomenon that constantly recurs in his career and constantly mystifies Knight, himself, who is otherwise an intelligent man.

It won’t be remembered for Michael Jordan, its Hall of Famer-in-waiting, who held to the team concept, averaged a mere 17 points a game and went largely unacknowledged by the coach.

It wasn’t until four years later that Knight broke the news to Esquire’s Mike Lupica that Jordan “is the best that will ever play this game. Bird and Magic are great players--they just aren’t Michael Jordan.”

Why didn’t he say that in ‘84? Back then, Jordan was treated as just another grunt in red, white and blue.

It won’t be remembered for another candidate with Hall of Fame potential, Charles Barkley. Knight cut him, terminating their battle of wills decisively and predictably.

It won’t be remembered as Patrick Ewing’s team. The most talented Olympic center since Bill Russell didn’t play well for Knight, who made little secret of his distaste for Ewing.

“I don’t think anybody will ever be able to coach him,” Knight told Lupica. “We were a week into practice when I came off the court and said to my assistants, ‘One of you guys go coach that s.o.b. because I can’t.’ ”

It won’t be remembered for the coaching job Knight did, which was routinely brilliant.

Ask the players what they remember from ’84 and they’ll talk about Michael, Charles, the camaraderie, the pride, the feeling of omnipotence they had.

But most of all, they remember Bob.

THE TRIALS: SORRY CHARLIE

Only the best tuna get to be Starkist, as the commercial says, and only the best-mannered at the U.S. trials were going to get to be star-kissed.

And that left Charles Barkley out.

Not that he made a big thing out of his defiance. It was low-key and joking but it was there, all right, and if there was one man in the universe who could ferret it out and who would not stand for it, it was RMK.

Not that Barkley left one single thing to be desired as a player, at first, anyway. Weighing in at 284 pounds--he had tried to go on a crash diet of juices, landed in the hospital and gave up the effort--he blew the minds of all watching and playing, and most meaningful of all, scouting for the National Basketball Assn.

Said Northeastern forward Steve Halsel, who tried to block a dunk only to have Barkley throw him down with his left hand and jam with his right: “After that, me’n Charles, I’ve been trying to be his friend. He didn’t want me to interrupt him.”

Said Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim after two days of practice: “If they cut Charles Barkley, they’d better mail it in.”

Knight cut Barkley all right, in a mini-camp after the trials.

Barkley has since said he has a love-hate relationship with Knight: “I love to hate him.”

What had happened? Lots of things.

“Charles didn’t like anything about Coach Knight,” says Alvin Robertson, the Olympic guard who is now an all-star with the San Antonio Spurs. “There were a lot of confrontations with Knight.

“(The coaches) would talk about being on time. (Knight) was telling us all to be punctual and then he showed up about 10 minutes late.

“Charles got up and said, ‘It’s 10 after 5, where the hell have you been?’ And Knight just went off--’Let me tell you something, you fat s.o.b., there’s only one leader in this army’--he just went totally nuts.”

Actually, Barkley wasn’t sure he wanted to be there. Knight wasn’t sure he wanted him there. More’s the pity.

“Charles’ whole idea was to make the top five in the draft,” says former Olympic guard Leon Wood, now an Atlanta Hawks reserve, once Barkley’s road roommate with the Philadelphia 76ers.

“So he kicked butt. To me, he was the best player the first week. After his stock went up, and it was known that he was going to be in the top five, he pretty much coasted. I don’t think he really wanted to play.

“I guess he was supposed to come back at a certain weight and he didn’t. And the idea of him rebounding and going coast to coast, behind the back, slam dunking. I don’t think Bobby liked that too much, either.”

The trials themselves were a weeklong physical ordeal-cultist’s paradise. The players practiced three times a day. The monsters were pitted against each other over and over, including the heavyweight championship of Barkley vs. 250-pound Lorenzo Charles, which was fought all over the Indiana University armory. There were 250-pounders bashing each other to smithereens everywhere you looked: Antoine Carr, Karl Malone, Wayman Tisdale, Joe Kleine.

There was enough talent to stock a league. Eight No. 1 National Basketball Assn. draft picks would be cut. Six more seniors who eventually went No. 1 that year, such as Otis Thorpe and Kevin Willis, weren’t invited.

Twelve lucky players survived. There were Knight’s pets--Jordan, the incomparable; Sam Perkins and Chris Mullin, the coach’s dreams--plus Ewing, whom Knight farmed out to assistants C.M. Newton, Don Donoher and George Raveling--and eight other players who were about to discover new dimensions in rage.

EXHIBITION SEASON

‘WAYMAN, GET OUTTA HERE!’

Or, “Leon, get outta here!”

Or, fill in the blank.

It’s not unusual for Knight to rail at a player, or toss him out of practice. Actually, if there is anything to the war stories Indiana players whisper, the Olympians got off lightly, indeed. Never did Knight have them vote to see if one of their members deserved to stay on the team, as Knight is once said to have had the other Hoosiers do with Uwe Blab.

Everyone, however, learned how to play basketball the RMK way.

“One day in San Diego, Tisdale took a charge,” Alvin Robertson said. “Coach Knight stopped practice and got a magic marker and had him write his name on the floor of the court, for the first time ever (that Tisdale had taken one).”

Says Jon Koncak, an Olympic center now with the Hawks:

“Some guys like Michael Jordan and Sam Perkins, he didn’t yell at as much because that was their personality. The guys like me and Tisdale and Steve Alford and Joe Kleine and Leon Wood--Leon ran the stadium stairs more than anybody. He’d dribble the ball up the floor and Coach Knight would look at him and say, ‘Leon, get the hell out of here.’ ”

Of course, there’s a story behind that, too. Knight was never keen on Wood, a pro-style guard who excelled in running a fast break but who had the ball too much for Knight’s taste in Knight’s passing-game offense. Knight is said to have allowed his mentor, Pete Newell, to talk him into keeping Leon.

Drilled within an inch of their lives, the Olympians went 8-0 in exhibitions against NBA stars. This looked glamorous but meant relatively little. The pros were out of shape and disorganized, if talented enough to put on a good show.

Then the U.S. team encamped in San Diego for final preparations and scrimmages against teams in the Summer Pro League.

“There was one time when we were playing some of the NBA rookies,” Koncak says. “They had a bunch of no-names and they were just drilling us. This is the day, I think, that he threw Wayman Tisdale out of the gym in front of Jerry West and all those guys (NBA scouts).

“We’re playing these guys who’ve gone like second, third, fourth, fifth in the draft for, like the San Antonio Spurs, and they’d been practicing a little bit. And they start to kick our butts, to be honest with you.

“So Knight stops practice and says, ‘I know some of you s.o.b.s haven’t heard of any of these guys but they’re kicking your butts! You’ve got to be tougher’--blah, blah, blah--’And Wayman, get outta here!’

“He used to get off on doing that stuff.”

THE GAMES

What games?

They were uniform routs. The United States won by an average of 32 points a game and went 5 games before they ever trailed, at 2-0.

The closest anyone got was West Germany in a 78-67 loss. The West Germans came from 22 behind during garbage time while Knight sat on the bench, yelling loudly enough to be heard by nearby photographers, “I can’t believe this team! I can’t believe this team! They just go out and play the kind of game they want to play!”

If there was no one worthy of being on the floor with them, the Americans were nonetheless brilliant, and the more so, because they rarely allowed their level of play to be dragged down.

With drama nonexistent, however, attention waned. Attendance in the Forum was only 13,500 a game, less than the Lakers averaged that season. When the United States started its semifinal game against Canada, which it had already beaten by 21 points, ABC cut away after five minutes with the United States ahead, 8-6. ABC’s basketball announcer, Keith Jackson, was reportedly complaining about lack of air time.

If only they could have miked up the maximum leader.

Nah, television isn’t ready for that much drama.

One night, there was a row on the bench between Knight and Raveling. The first report was that Raveling had been yelling at the referees and Knight had ordered him to knock it off and go sit at the other end of the bench.

A player says it wasn’t quite that way:

“The night before that game, John Thompson was in town. He and Raveling are really tight. So he, Thompson and Patrick just go out and eat dinner, go out at 7, come back at 8:30.

“So Patrick’s not playing worth a damn that next day. And earlier Coach Knight had turned Patrick over to Coach Raveling and said, ‘Get him to play.’

“So he looks at Raveling and says, ‘Man, you aren’t doing . . . with him.’

“And you know Coach Raveling, he’s a proud person. He says, ‘ . . . you.’

“They exchanged some words. Raveling got up and walked down to the end of the bench and he said, ‘Man, I don’t need this.’ ”

After the United States had won the gold with a final 31-point lambasting of just-happy-to-be-there Spain, and Knight had laid a final tongue-lashing upon the ears of Leon Wood on the way to the dressing room at halftime, people started asking about the Soviets.

Knight said what you’d expect Knight to say:

“You people have never seen the Russians play. . . . They wouldn’t have won here. . . . If you guys don’t know that, you’re not as smart as I think--and I don’t think you’re too smart anyway.”

Actually, this was poetic justice, Knight’s own alarm coming home to haunt him. Before the Soviets announced their boycott, Knight had been hyping them for all he was worth. When they withdrew, he stopped mentioning them and started building up the Italians, who turned out to be mediocre.

For comic relief after that final game, Spain Coach Antonio Diaz-Miguel, a friend of Knight’s, then testified that the Soviets could actually have given the United States a good game.

Probably, they wouldn’t have. Nothing is certain--that’s why they play the games after all--but the U.S. team was a lot better, a lot quicker, a lot better coached, and would have been playing in the United States.

Most likely, the Americans would have worked up some real fervor, and won by 20--or 50.

So where do they belong in history?

Newell, who coached the ’60 team, suggests we wait a while. The ’60 team had two Hall of Famers, Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, plus a third superstar then at the top of his game, Jerry Lucas, plus two other players who became NBA rookies of the year, Walt Bellamy and Terry Dischinger, plus an alternate selection named John Havlicek.

But Newell thinks the ’84 team was “better conditioned, better coached and better organized” than his.

In four years, there is every expectation that the United States will send a professional team to the Olympics, and people may stop wondering whether the ’60 or ’84 team was the best.

How important is it, anyway? This team was all it could have been. What should count more than that?

THE AFTERMATH

All 12 U.S. players were NBA No. 1 draft picks.

All but Jeff Turner, a soldier-type chosen by the Nets, are still playing.

Jordan, Alvin Robertson and Ewing have been NBA All-Stars, as have the axed Barkley, Malone, Chuck Person and John Stockton.

The metronome quality in Knight’s career continues, a year or two of triumphs, followed by a string of pratfalls:

1984-85-86--He throws a chair. His Indiana team fails to make the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament, gets back in the next year and is upset by Cleveland State.

1987--Indiana wins the NCAA title.

1987-88--Knight pulls his team off the floor in an exhibition against the Soviets. Indiana is upset in the NCAA tournament by Richmond. Knight demotes two-year starter Ricky Calloway, who leaves school. Knight makes his rape remark to Connie Chung, is reprimanded by the Indiana president, negotiates with New Mexico but decides to stay at Indiana after a meeting with the president.

Players from the ’84 team had hoped to get up an exhibition with this year’s Olympic team, but it won’t happen. Olympic officials were nervous about comparisons. Said one: “There’s only one Michael Jordan.

Everyone retains good memories.

“There aren’t many things that are a thrill to me,” Knight said in Esquire. “But that was.”

Almost everyone remains friends.

“We had a sense of togetherness,” Koncak says. “But after the Games were over, I didn’t pick up a phone and talk to Leon every week. But every time we played a team he was on--(laughing,) and it’s been 10 or 12--we’d sit down and talk. It’s like Wayman Tisdale. Indiana was in a couple of weeks ago and we sat down. He knows my wife, I know his wife. Every time I see Michael, it’s the same way, Patrick.

“It’s just something that we shared, that we have in common, that’s a bond we all have.

“I’ll never forget--that summer, even though we worked very hard and Coach Knight was very demanding--that was one of the best summers of my life.”