Dirty Dozen

An American tourist in Rome was walking away from the Colosseum last Friday when he ran into the defending world champion USA basketball team. He was about to ask one of the players for an autograph when curiosity overtook him. "I'm sorry," the tourist said nervously. "I know I should know you. But I don't."

"No, no, it's O.K.," the player said, and this is how he introduced himself and his teammates: "We're not NBA." The tourist still didn't understand.

"We're outsiders," the player said, trying to explain himself a little better. After all, you can't just meet a stranger outside the Roman Colosseum and say, "Hi, I'm Jason Sasser. I'm a 24-year-old unemployed small forward from Dallas. Grant Hill, Gary Pay-ton and Tim Duncan were supposed to be on the Dream Team, but they didn't feel like playing, so my country asked a bunch of nobodies like me to play instead."

On Sunday in Rome, Sasser, whose NBA experience consists of 69 minutes spread over eight games, boarded a private jet with his teammates for a flight to Athens. There a chartered bus was waiting with a police escort to take the U.S. team to an elegant resort hotel. On Wednesday, when the world championship would open, he'd put on an oversized warmup top featuring white stars in a field of blue with red trim. This might take some getting used to, but Sasser is the starting small forward for the U.S.—not for the Dream Team, not for the NBA millionaires' team, but for the American team. The American team. Our team.

If Sasser and his teammates happen to win the world championship—as they very well might—you may decide that they were an improvement over the NBA stars. When was the last time the U.S. put together a Dream Team that wasn't hyping a sneaker company? A team that didn't act like it was doing you a favor by playing hard? A team of real dreamers.

The trouble began hundreds of millions of dollars ago when NBA owners started complaining that the best players in the world were making too much money. The players responded that the owners had plenty more to go around, and, anticipating the July 1 lockout, wondered publicly whether 12 NBA stars ought to represent the U.S.—and help promote the league—in the 1998 FIBA World Championship, the 16-nation tournament that is basketball's World Cup. The attorneys on one end of the speaker-phone and the agents on the other kept daring each other to make a move. USA Basketball, the sport's American federation, was caught in the middle, without a team. On June 16 the federation said it couldn't wait for an answer any longer from the NBA players. In effect, the Dream Team was put on waivers.

The federation, however, had no intention of withdrawing from the world championship. Jim Tooley, an assistant executive director for USA Basketball, instead put together a new list of candidates that included 1,500 Americans who play in the CBA and in professional leagues abroad. After calling a few folks at the top of his list, Tooley realized that any big-name player who'd ever had anything to do with the NBA wasn't going to participate. Former stars like Dominique Wilkins and Byron Scott, for example, who played in Europe last year, apparently didn't want to be seen as scabs, so Tooley had to cross more than 300 names off his list. "I believe some agents dissuaded players," Tooley says. "One agent as much as told me, 'You guys kicked [the NBA players] off the team, and now you're getting what you deserve.' "

That left Tooley with CBA players, amateurs and players who had gone to Europe and were quickly forgotten back home. "We got the list down to 200 guys we were interested in," he says. "Then I just started making phone calls. I called more than 150 guys."

From that group Tooley chose 30 invitees—including three collegians—and all but two of them arrived on July 8 in Chicago for tryouts, just three weeks before the U.S. would begin defense of the gold medal won by Dream Team II in 1994. That team, remembered for the trash talking of Derrick Coleman and Larry Johnson, had been recruited after months of negotiating, pampering and flattering. The players who came to Chicago, however, had been neither coaxed nor seduced nor promised anything more than a plane ticket and a chance.

One of them was 24-year-old Jimmy King. A shooting guard who was one of the most heavily recruited players in the country seven years ago, he had gone to Michigan as part of the Fab Five. Two visits to the Final Four were followed by a year spent mostly on the Toronto Raptors' bench. King was then traded to the Dallas Mavericks, who waived him before the 1996-97 season. "That was the first time I had ever been cut from anything," he says. King spent most of the past two years in the CBA, where he was MVP last season.