This is the Dream Team Tapes, a diversion podcast's original series in association with IHeart Radio.

This is the story of the United States Olympic basketball team that won gold in Barcelona in 1992, known worldwide as the Dream Team.

Well, we all know what that is, and spoiler alert,

the United States Dream Team won the gold medal in Barcelona.

But it wasn't as simple as marching to the podium, hearing the national anthem and waving to the crowd. They did all that, but there was a subplot in between.

And I'm going to tell you about that at the end of this, episode seven, of the Dream Team tapes,

which I'm calling Bevei Barcelona, because I, Jack McCallum,

had three years of high school Spanish. We've been to practices in San Diego, to the gaming

tables and the Immortal Scrimmage in Monte Carlo, and now the Dream Team at long last is in

Barcelona, where the world awaits the epic battle between the United States and

Angola. Actually, we do remember that battle, though epic it was not. For a reason, we'll get into

later, and which involves, of course, Sir Charles Barkley himself. There's much to cover in this

episode, the attention given to the dream team, which will be the

hardest thing to describe. The so-called family room in the Ambassador Hotel, where the alpha

male's Jordan Magic, Barkley, and Bird played cards all night and argued about championship rings,

and where Bird's young son, Connor, used to roll pool balls loudly down the stairs toward the lobby.

There is a frightening intensity with which Jordan and Scotty Pippen faced their meeting with

Croatia's Tony Kukoch, who drew their collective ire because Bull's general manager, Jerry Krause,

wanted to pay Kukoch a lot of money, which Pippen felt was being lifted from his pocket.

There is a dramatic struggle of the Lithuania team to win the bronze medal.

The Grateful Dead had helped fund their unlikely path to the Olympics,

and in the Dream Team book, I called Lithuania the tie-died darlings.

...