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passed it over to Bill. After Walton signed, the people said to Eddie, “Can we have your autograph too?” Ed said to them, “No, you don’t want my autograph.” The people said, “Oh yes we do, John. Please?” They thought Ed was John Stockton. Eddie kept saying, “No, really, you don’t want my autograph,” but these people were persistent. Finally I said, “John, just sign it for these nice people.” So Ed signed Stockton’s name, and the people left. I turned to Eddie and said, “If you’re going to hang out with us, you’ve got to remember one rule: sign it and move on.”
    We really did have a lot of laughs. The best part about it was nobody tried to pull any star treatment. If you needed to be taped, it was first come, first served. No egos involved. I remember one day in San Diego, Charles Barkley was carrying coolers out to the truck for the medical staff. It was that kind of atmosphere. Michael Jordan was treated the same as all the rest of us, and he didn’t mind, either.
    It’s funny, because I’ve gotten to know Michael so well in the last few years, but I never did any of my commercials with him until after I retired, so I didn’t know him all that well in Barcelona. Michael played golf every day. We hardly ever had practice, so he’d be gone first thing in the morning to play eighteen or thirty-six holes. He’d play on game days too. He’d finish up like an hour and a half before it was time to get on the bus and go to the arena. I did play golf with him a couple of times. Me, Michael, and Magic got together one night too. They had a room downstairs from our hotel with everything in it, and the three of us went down there with Michael’s buddy Ahmad Rashad, drank a few beers, and talked. It was a nice change, to be all on the same side like that, something I’m sure none of us ever dreamed would be possible. We talked a lot about basketball, and the times we played against one another. As usual, Michael and I were cracking on Magic. At one point Ahmad asked us who we thought was the best basketball player ever. After a lot of discussion, we all came to the conclusion that Michael was the best—not every night, though.
    One of the things that was really disappointing to me was I wasn’t able to march in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. The problem was that the whole thing, from start to finish, was going to take around four hours, and my back wouldn’t have made it. I couldn’t stand for more than a half hour without stiffness and pain. Dave Gavitt tried to arrange it so I could slip in and out of the march, but they wouldn’t let us do that, for all sorts of security reasons. I wish I could have done it. Magic and Charles and David Robinson and some of the others marched, and they said it was a great experience. But I knew the fact that I was in Barcelona at all was stretching it, so I had to take what I could get.
    One night, the people of the city of Barcelona arranged to have a restaurant closed down, and the whole team went there for dinner. That was one of my favorite nights. Everybody showed up, and we had a lot of laughs, and nobody could get to us because they had police stationed all over the place, inside and outside the restaurant. It was always fun to be around that team, because the guys always had something going. I can remember Scottie and Clyde going at each other. One little joke could turn into one big hoot on somebody, and everybody would put in their two cents worth. It reminded me a little bit of our 1986 Celtics championship team. We had a lot of big personalities—Kevin McHale, Bill Walton—and it seemed like somebody was always getting it.
    For all the fun I had, the basketball was very, very tough. I really shouldn’t have been playing. I was hoping the rest I had since May, which is when the Celtics were eliminated from the playoffs that year, would help, and it did for a while. When we had that training camp in San Diego I was surprised at how