Top 100 momentsNo. 8
The Dream Team
NBA stars play the Barcelona Olympics and turn basketball into a global export. Kids from every continent start dreaming in a different silhouette.
Until 1992, the U.S. sent college kids to the Olympics and still usually won. Then the world caught up. So the NBA sent Jordan, Magic, Bird, Barkley, Robinson, and the rest. They practiced in Monaco, signed autographs for the other teams, and won by 44 a night.
Barcelona is not close. It is a commercial. The world sees the best basketball ever assembled, in USA kits, and decides the sport belongs to more than Springfield. European clubs, African kids, Chinese gyms — the pipeline starts looking like the Dream Team’s warm-up line.
The Olympics never get that amateur fig leaf back. Basketball never gets smaller. The Dream Team is the moment the NBA becomes a planetary league with one city as its capital.