Hoop dreams: the US basketball team that may have been the greatest of all time

“I don’t know anything about Angola. But Angola’s in trouble.” The words of Charles Barkley at the Palau Municipal d’Esports the day before the US basketball team kicked off its run at the 1992 Olympic Games turned out to be true on several levels, some more uplifting than others.

Barkley himself would go on to score 24 points against Angola in an overwhelming victory, in the process elbowing an opponent in the neck to “show him what the NBA is like”. He would also end up leading scorer in that Dream Team, a man having the time of his life, carousing with the locals, playing cards all night with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, providing the razor edge in a team playing with a kind of light around it. And in the process becoming a part of another kind of history.

It is exactly 30 years this week since the Dream Team took gold in Barcelona. Sporting anniversaries are often pointless things. An event took place. Time passed. The end. This, though, is one of the good ones. Perhaps even one of the best, if only because the Dream Team is that kind of entity, a matter always of ultimacy and greatness.

Not just because the team itself was extraordinarily good, arguably the greatest collection of sporting talent ever assembled. Not just because they actually performed like a team, winning their games by an average of 44 points. Not even because there was a rare kind of joy in the way they did it. Look back and what stands out is the look of shared wonder in the crowd as Jordan leaps not just up but somehow forward too, maintaining altitude like a glider; or Magic Johnson flips out passes so flat and crisp they draw a kind of collective gasp, men moving though a different kind of gravity, lighter air.

This was also one of those