When Michael Jordan was drafted, he was not decked out in a bespoke suit on a stage in Manhattan, shaking hands with commissioner David Stern and smiling for the cameras.

The draft was not even at night in those days — it was held on a Tuesday afternoon. Jordan was in the heart of Indiana, between two-a-day practices with Bob Knight, the coach charged with picking and guiding 12 amateur players for the Team USA roster that would be entered in that year’s Olympics.

One of Knight’s assistants was George Raveling, then the coach of Iowa, who had become fast friends with Jordan. Because the players were not allowed to leave training camp to go to the draft, Raveling drove Jordan and a couple of other draftees to a television studio in Bloomington, where the draft could be seen by remote feed. Jordan went No. 3 to Chicago.

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When it was over, the group had only a little more than an hour to get back to Indiana’s campus for the second practice. Raveling asked what they’d like to have for lunch before going back. Jordan piped up: McDonald’s.

Raveling was incredulous. He reminded Jordan that he was a professional now, that he would be a millionaire, that he should be eating steak.

“Coach,” Jordan told him, “I don’t care how much money I make, I am a McDonald’s guy.”

Thus, the first thing Jordan did after being drafted into the NBA in 1984 was visit a McDonald’s in Bloomington, Ind.

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Times have changed. Today’s version of Team USA gathers in Las Vegas this weekend to prepare for this year’s World Cup in Spain, offering a reminder of what was the greatest collection of amateur basketball talent ever gathered in one place — the 1984 Olympic trials, held on the campus of Indiana University under the watchful eye of Knight.

After that team was selected, it went out on the road for a coast-to-coast tour of nine scrimmages (the final scrimmage came 30 years ago on Friday) against NBA players, winning all nine games before sweeping to the gold medal in Los Angeles.

But the first challenge was the roster, an unenviable task for Knight. One of the players on hand was Villanova star Ed Pinckney, who thought he had a good a chance to make the team because he had played for Team USA in the Pan-Am games in 1983.

“I actually have a picture we took of all the guys who were involved in that camp, we were seated and posing for the picture,” Pinckney said. “When I look at that picture now, almost everyone in that group wound up being a really good player on their team. There were a lot of guys who had really good, long NBA careers, there were a couple of Hall of Famers in the picture, and there were unbelievable coaches. It was just an amazing group of players and coaches.”

Originally, there were 74 players in the pool, and seven of those players went on to the Hall of Fame — Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Joe Dumars, Karl Malone, Chris Mullin and John Stockton. But a couple dozen more went on to long and very successful careers in the league, including Pinckney, Michael Cage, Antoine Carr, Dell Curry, Ty Corbin, Sam Perkins, Chuck Person, Terry Porter, Alvin Robertson, Wayman Tisdale and A.C. Green.

And there were fascinating stories, like that of Leon Wood, who wound up being an NBA bust but came back to the league as a referee, or the eminently talented Roy Tarpley, whose career was sunk by substance abuse problems. There was also Pearl Washington, the Brooklyn streetball legend who flamed out in the NBA, and dunk-contest heroes Kenny Walker and Terence Stansbury.

“There was a sense that, even at the time, that this was going to be one of the greatest collections of young talent ever assembled,” scout and journalist Frank Burlison said. “From late April to early May, you had just dozens of these great young players all together in Bloomington.

"And the coaches, there were some of the greatest coaches in the game — Bobby Knight would be there, with Pete Newell and George Raveling and Don Donoher, John Thompson. They trotted out Hank Iba, even, the old Oklahoma State coach. It was just incredible. You are sitting courtside, and there are all these legendary coaches and these young players who, a lot of them wind up being really great players.”

With that level of talent on hand, picking his final roster was agonizing for Knight. Throughout the course of the trials and scrimmages, Knight showed his well-known temper and intransigence, and reporters who were following the team repeatedly focused their attention on him. That, of course, was how Knight wanted things — it took pressure off his players. During one scrimmage in Milwaukee, Knight excoriated the referees, punching the ball away from one of them and earning his third technical foul in seven games.

In a tense exchange with reporters following the game, Knight said, “What do you want me to do, sit on my butt and let some kid get hurt that has a million dollar contract a month from now, knocked out of a basketball career because of some idiot with a whistle that doesn’t know how to blow it? Don’t be ridiculous.” And when asked about Knight, Jordan compared him to Dean Smith but said, “The only different thing is the vocabulary.”

But while Knight was publicly blustering, he was much more sensitive behind the scenes. Knowing there would be some heartbreak when the first round of cuts were made — more than 50 young players were to be sent home in the first wave, after all — Knight brought in former star player Dave Cowens to speak to the group. Cowens had been cut from the 1968 Olympic roster, but then had a Hall of Fame career with the Celtics.

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“He came in and talked to us about potentially not making the team and it was great that they brought him in,” Pinckney said. “I remember listening to him and thinking, ‘I hope I am not one of those guys who goes home on the first bus.’ But he gave a great talk, he talked about persevering and working hard — he was also a guy who did not make it. So we all took that to heart, all the guys who went home.”

There was a considerable bit of controversy over which guys went home. During the trials, there was no question that Barkley had established himself as one of the best two or three players at the camp, putting on displays of scoring, ballhandling and passing that should not have come from a power forward. But Knight was concerned about Barkley’s height and, ultimately, he wanted Jordan to be the featured scorer. Keeping Barkley might have created a chemistry problem — so Knight cut him.

Stockton, too, was a surprise cut. He had arrived in Bloomington a relative unknown out of Gonzaga, but quickly established himself as one of the best point guards in the group. It was size, too, though, that cost Stockton, as Knight opted to go with Leon Wood, who was 6-3, as one of his point guards, cutting Stockton.

Even as he was making those cuts, though, Knight was taking the time to approach the gathered NBA personnel executives and put in a good word for those he was letting go.

“He did something that probably not a lot of people know about, that hasn’t been talked about enough,” Raveling said. “He gave all those guys the chance to be seen by the pro scouts. We had all the pro scouts in our practices and he would talk to them about each player. By the time Charles got cut, there was no doubt that he was going to be in the NBA. With John Stockton, coach had a talk with John, he told him, ‘You probably should have made this team, you’re good enough. But I am going to do everything I can to promote you so that the NBA and all the scouts and teams know what kind of player you are.’

“All those guys, even the ones he cut, they probably did not even know, he was promoting the hell out of them. When he had to cut someone, he would go talk to scouts and say, ‘We’re letting this player go, but here’s the reason why, it is not because he can’t play or talent or attitude, it is because of the type of team we are trying to compose.’”

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The final 1984 Olympic roster looked like this:

Centers: Patrick Ewing, Jon Koncak

Forwards: Wayman Tisdale, Sam Perkins, Joe Kleine, Jeff Turner

Guards: Michael Jordan, Chris Mullin, Steve Alford, Alvin Robertson, Vern Fleming, Leon Wood

While four players averaged double figures in the Olympics, there is no question that the month of July and August belonged to one guy in particular: Jordan.

By that time, Jordan had achieved stardom in his three seasons at North Carolina, but that year’s Tar Heels had a stacked team, including Perkins, Kenny Smith and Brad Daugherty. And Jordan had been famously reined in twice in the Tar Heels’ final four games, first by David Henderson of Duke in the ACC tournament, and then by Indiana’s Dan Dakich in the NCAA tournament. Individually, it was still uncertain just how good Jordan would be against NBA players.

It was in the scrimmages against NBA players that Jordan gave a preview of what was to come in his pro career. While Jordan had some struggles in the early going of Team USA’s practice slate — which took the team from Providence, R.I., through the Midwest (including a game at Indiana’s Hoosier Dome that hosted a record 67,596 fans) and finally on to the West Coast — he scored 25 points in a homecoming in Greensboro, N.C., on July 12. After that game, Portland forward Kenny Carr said, “Michael Jordan makes the team a great team. I would hate to see the outcome if they didn’t have him.”

Larry Drew, then a guard for Kansas City, also squared off against Jordan in the scrimmages. Jordan had only 16 points in that game, but during a 19-2 run in which Team USA blew open the game in the second half, he made a 17-foot jumper, a big dunk and four free throws.

“To be perfectly honest, I had not really heard of Michael Jordan much,” Drew recalled. “We played them and I just remember, I called my brother after that exhibition game and I said, ‘There is a kid playing on this USA team, I just played against him, and we’re going to hear a lot about him in the league.’”

Indeed, we did hear a lot from Jordan. Drew, in fact, had a chance to win a ring with the Lakers in the 1991 Finals, but L.A. was thwarted by Jordan and the Bulls, who won their first of six championships that season. Forward Phil Hubbard, too, played against Jordan and Team USA in those scrimmages, and his best chance at a championship — when he was with the 57-win Cavaliers in 1989 — was done in when Jordan shocked Cleveland by making The Shot in the first round of those playoffs. That was Hubbard’s final NBA game.

“Playing against him with Team USA, you got the first real sense that he would be a great player,” Hubbard said. “But I don’t think anyone was able to tell just how great. It was obvious he had a game that was better suited for the NBA, and he was able to make some incredible plays. He definitely showed some things out there.”

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After 1984, the landscape of USA Basketball shifted dramatically. The team lost to the Soviet Union, which featured Sarunas Marciulionis and Arvydas Sabonis, in the semifinals in the 1988 Olympics, and in 1992, began including NBA players.

Today’s USA Basketball program has been rebuilt under the guidance of director Jerry Colangelo and coach Mike Krzyzewski, and one of the hallmarks of the new regime is that they’ve re-instituted competition as part of being granted spots on the national team — for 12 years going back to the original Dream Team, players were simply selected without having to earn their spot.

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This weekend will mark the start of the final leg of the roster process for the upcoming World Cup. It is a process that has helped to reinvigorate the national team, one that has made the players individually and the team as a whole better — Krzyzewski and Colangelo will pick players according to which ones have skills that fit together best, not according to their NBA scoring averages or the size of those players’ contracts.

That’s reminiscent of how Knight constructed his team 30 years ago.

“When I look back on it, it was probably a more mammoth undertaking for Coach Knight than the rest of us really understood at the time,” Raveling said. “You look at the sheer number of guys we invited, we had to use all the facilities at the University of Indiana, we had a staff of about 30 people and it was really, really well-organized by Coach Knight.

"But, as you know, there were some Hall of Famers who did not make the team. I think coach had a vision of the kind of team we would need to win. We were not picking an All-Star team. We were picking a team that we felt could win the gold medal. The whole thing came down to team composition, having the necessary parts to win a gold medal. At the end of the day, that was our mission.”

As much as the 1984 Olympic group might be remembered for the fact that Barkley and Stockton were cut, or for Jordan’s brilliance, or for Knight’s prickliness, the mission was the gold medal. And that was accomplished.