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good I felt. I even actually worked out a little bit. I couldn’t go out and practice for two or three hours, but I could go out there for forty-five minutes and do some things. We played our first game, and I felt great. I was talking to the press about how exciting it all was, and then I felt it. It was that awful burning pain again, shooting right down my leg. I was devastated. Right away, I went to Dave and said, “Look, you might as well replace me. I can’t do this.”
    He said, “Look, Larry, I know you’re hurting. You don’t have to practice to be on this team. You’ve come this far. Try to hang in there. Think of all you’ve been through to get here.”
    That much was true. I was really in bad shape finishing up the season with the Celtics. I needed a lot of treatment, and a lot of anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers to make it through. One of the things we had to be really careful about was monitoring the medication they were giving me. The Olympic committee had very strict rules about what kind of drugs were allowed in an athlete’s system. One of the drugs that was banned was steroids. When my back got really unstable and my nerves got extremely inflamed, one of the treatments we resorted to was a steroid injection in my back. Once I decided to play in the Olympics, we had to be careful about using that as a method of treatment, because we were concerned residues of it could show up in a drug test. Everyone kept telling me it would probably be fine, but the truth was we couldn’t be 100 percent sure, so a lot of times I didn’t take the shot, even though I really could have used it.
    By the time we went to Portland for what they called the Tournament of the Americas, I was in agony. I didn’t think I could keep it together much longer. I flew home to Boston from that tournament in my back brace. As soon as I got home, I got in my car and drove to Massachusetts General Hospital to see Dan Dyrek. When he saw me walking down the hall toward him, I know he was shocked, because I never, ever saw him without an appointment. I barely said hello. I told him, “I need to talk to you.” We went into his office, and I said, “Dan, I’m not going to the Olympics. I tried to fight through this, and I can’t.” He knew I wasn’t exaggerating. If I couldn’t even get out of bed, it was a waste of time for me and the Olympic committee to go all the way over there. Dan was quiet, because he knew how important it was for me to be part of that Dream Team. I finally said, “There’s only one way I can do it. You have to come with me.” It was a really big thing for me to ask him, I knew that. We were leaving for Monte Carlo in a few days for our last leg of training, and Dan was a busy guy. Aside from his patients, he was teaching a graduate school course. But I wasn’t going to the Olympics unless Dan Dyrek came with me. Simple as that.
    Dan really didn’t know what to say. I could tell his mind was going a mile a minute, trying to figure out how he could make this happen. He finally said, “Okay, listen. I’m going to have to change a few things around. Let me see what I can do.” He smiled, and then he said, laughing, “You better send my secretary about two hundred red roses, for all the work she’s going to have to do in the next twenty-four hours.”
    The next day, when Dan Dyrek’s secretary showed up for work there were two hundred red roses waiting for her in the office. Dan called me up and said, “Hey Larry, about the roses. I was only kidding.” I told him, “I know that, Dan, but I also know how much work it took to get this done.”
    Dan ended up coming with me to Barcelona, and I think it must have been a great experience for him. Of course, once the guys all got to know him, he was helping them out with their little problems too. In the meantime we were falling like flies. I had back problems, Patrick dislocated his thumb, then John Stockton broke his leg. I guess at one point