Before the trade to the Lakers, I received one of the biggest honors in my career as I was named to the 2004 US Men’s Olympic basketball team. As a kid I was transfixed by the original Dream Team and had always fantasized about being an Olympian and representing the United States.
I would join a team that included veterans Tim Duncan, Allen Iverson, and Amar’e Stoudemire. It would also be an international coming-out party for LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, and my Heat teammate Dwyane Wade, who were coming off brilliant rookie seasons.
But the joy of being named to the twelve-man roster quickly turned to anxiety when Olympic officials informed me that I would have to pass a drug test before officially joining the team. It hadn’t even occurred to me. Obviously, doping was a big thing, but performance-enhancing drugs are basically a nonissue in the NBA. That stuff’s for track-and-field and cyclists. Didn’t matter. Everyone has to be tested and it’s serious business.
We all had relocated back to LA when I got the call from USA Basketball that a drug tester would be coming to my house in a few days to administer the screening. There was absolutely no way I was going to pass. I’d been smoking weed every day that summer. Panic set in. What if I fail? That would be my third failed drug test in four years. Would people’s patience finally run out? Would it even count as a strike against me as far as the NBA was concerned?
We weren’t going to find out. We started googling “fake penises” and studied different ways to beat a drug test. After an exhaustive search we ordered a giant rubber black cock to arrive the next day. When I filled the sample cup and handed it back to the tester, the urine had to be warm to prove it just came out of my body. People tried to evade detection by having a cup of clean urine waiting in a cupboard in their bathroom, but that didn’t work with the USOC. That pee had better be body temperature.
Robert Montgomery of NBA security, who administered the test, pulled into the driveway and knocked on the door. That was the signal for my trainer, Robbie Davis, to urinate into the reservoir of the phallus, which was hidden in the balls. He’d never done drugs a day in his life, so his piss was guaranteed clean. He handed me the rubber penis and left the bathroom as I strapped it on.
Montgomery entered the bathroom and handed me the cup. He was standing about two feet behind me as I turned around toward the toilet. The reality of what I was doing started to set in and I got a little nervous. This was absolutely crazy, but crazy was my only option at the time. I unzipped my pants and carefully slid the fake penis through the zipper hole. To get the pee to come out of the tip, I had to squeeze the shaft repeatedly.
I had to be careful to disguise my motions because it’s an unnatural way to relieve oneself. Even though we put this thing through several trial runs, I was paranoid it wouldn’t work. Plus, the dude was standing right behind me. I was extremely careful not to drop the sample cup after I filled it, because with the tester at my house, it’s not like we could come up with another fresh batch.
I filled the cup and then finished off in the toilet to give the perception that I was actually using the bathroom. Then I handed Montgomery a hot cup of piss. He stuck a thermometer in the cup to gauge the temperature. Montgomery, satisfied that the pee was mine, said, “Welcome to Team USA.” Just like that he was gone. When he pulled out of the driveway, we all breathed a sigh of relief. That was a serious risk. I was cool under fire, but my nerves were rattled.
I went out back to smoke.
Several days later we were off to Jacksonville to begin eighteen days of training that would lead up to the games in Athens, Greece. From there it was off to Germany, Serbia, and Montenegro, and finally Istanbul. Despite the mix of veterans and rookies, most who had never played together before, the team’s personalities jelled fairly quickly. Perhaps more than any other Olympic team in recent memory, this squad liked to party. Much to the chagrin of NBA security, we craved the night and whatever adventure came with it.
Our security detail was like no other in USA Basketball history. This was the first post-9/11 Olympic games, and both the NBA and the USOC weren’t taking any chances. In Turkey we were in the most extravagant five-star hotel, and a bomb exploded less than a mile away. Security immediately rounded up players and coaches and took us to a bunker below, where we had to wait until there was no threat.
It was out of the question for us to leave the hotel without security. They had to know where we were at all times. Not even players’ friends or family could leave the hotel unattended. It was a drag to say the least, and sometimes it wasn’t worth the hassle to go out, so we spent a lot of time in our rooms. Guys were starting to get tired of that before we even got to Greece.
One day, Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury came up with a plan to shake security and organized a players-only night out. Iverson was our leader and the oldest player on the team. We all looked up to him, and when he spoke, we listened. He was a hero to many of us. Guys were in awe of him, and we tried to soak up every minute with Iverson. He was our OG.
Nearly the whole team organized in the lobby for our secret night out. LeBron, Carmelo, and A.I. had on 3XL white T-shirts, so we kind of stood out. It wasn’t exactly the most clandestine operation, but somehow eleven professional basketball players—everyone except for Tim Duncan—managed to duck out a side door and jump in a line of cabs. Back then, Utah forward and Turkey native Mehmet Okur owned one of the dopest nightclubs in Turkey. It had a glitzy outdoor area and a massive interior with five floors, which was accessible by boat.
There were insane two-hundred-foot yachts parked on the docks out back. Iverson was leading the charge as we headed inside. I’d never seen so many beautiful women in one spot at the same time. There were women of nearly every ethnicity with every skin tone and hair texture imaginable. Liquor was flowing. Music was pulsating. Guys were hooking up all over the place. It felt like a scene out of a movie.
About three in the morning, Iverson had seen enough and wanted to organize the transportation so we didn’t have to wait and risk getting mobbed. The moment we stepped outside, though, we were swarmed by a dozen paparazzi. Flashbulbs were going off like crazy. Somebody tipped off our handlers to the fact that we were there, and in an instant, three giant NBA security vans pulled up and came to a screeching halt outside the club. Security personnel jumped out and they were not pleased.
The jig was up.
We arrived in Greece on August 13, 2004, the day after our epic night out, and there would be no more evading security. We were under many watchful eyes from the moment we arrived until the moment we left. After much deliberation it was decided that the team would stay on the $800 million RMS Queen Mary 2, a gigantic, luxurious ocean liner that was docked in a special Olympic zone, which was protected by commandos, motion detectors, gunboats, helicopters, and sensors that could detect swimmers in the water under the boat. It was a brand-new boat and the longest passenger ship ever built, stretching 1,132 feet . . . nearly a quarter of a mile.
The decision to stay on the Queen Mary and not in Olympic Village with the other athletes ruffled some feathers and was derided in the press. But the NBA considered the security risk to be too great. It was an enormous security undertaking just to get the team on and off the boat every day. You had to go through several different security checks whether you were boarding or leaving the boat. We had fun the couple times we visited the Olympic Village, but we mostly stayed on the boat. Once we managed to hit a strip club in Greece that was packed with beautiful Russian women, but that was it.
The ship had dozens of restaurants, a cinema, a shopping mall, a theater for plays, a library, a wine bar, countless works of art, and even a planetarium. But apart from some British dignitaries and Saudi princes, we were the only ones on the ship, so it felt like a ghost town.
We spent most of our time at the ship’s club called G32, named after the ocean liner’s hull number, on the second deck, where there was a huge dance floor and several bars where we’d go drink every night.
One night, A.I. stumbled into a cigar room and proceeded to organize meet-ups at 8 PM every night, where a bunch of guys would go to smoke cigars and trade stories. Iverson dubbed the group the Cigar Club. He held court and told wild stories about his life and career. Nobody wanted to miss them because you never knew what you were going to hear.
The Cigar Club was an education on the lives of the world’s best basketball players. No subject was off-limits. Near the end of the almost three-week run of the Cigar Club, Chuck (only A.I.’s close friends and family got to call him “Bubbachuck,” or “Chuck” for short) told one of his best stories. Several years prior, during the epic Jay-Z versus Nas hip-hop beef, Nas dropped his infamous diss track “Ether.” Jay-Z quickly responded with a track of his own called “Supa Ugly.”
In the first lines of the third verse, Jay referenced how both he and Iverson had flings with Carmen Bryan, Nas’s girlfriend and the mother of one of his children. In the lyrics Jay raps: “Me and the boy A.I. got more in common / Than just ballin’ and rhymin’ / Get it? / More in Carmen.”
Iverson said the day the song, came out he was driving with his wife. “I’m listening to the song, thinking this joint is hot,” said Iverson. “I mess around and turn it up. Then that line comes and I’m like what?! My wife looks dead at me and slaps me across the face! Slaps the shit out of me.”
Everyone was in tears. Cracking up. But nobody wanted to interrupt. Everybody wanted him to keep going. Chuck just puffed his cigar. “So I’m pissed, right. Just pissed. So, you know what I did?” asked Iverson. “I called Jay-Z up. I said why the fuck you put my name in that song? Why you drag me into your bullshit?”
There was a pause on the phone.
“Yo, it was just wordplay,” said Jay-Z. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s no big deal.”
“But I’m married with kids, man,” replied A.I. “You can’t put me out there like that.”
“Yo, don’t take it that serious,” Jay-Z said calmly. “Mike Jordan is back.”
Then Jay-Z hung up the phone.
Everyone just started clapping at the story. The young guns like LeBron and Melo were in awe, soaking up every moment. When LeBron was a kid, his idol wasn’t Jordan; it was Allen Iverson. He wanted to be like Chuck from the headband to the shooting sleeve to the impact he had on the game. You could see how valuable these nightly get-togethers were for him. And me, too. Being with the guys on that trip was one of the best experiences of my life.
However, it was another story entirely on the court, as that 2004 team was one of the most disappointing US Olympic basketball teams ever. We were disjointed and never really clicked. It’s the only team since 1992, when the US started sending pros, that failed to win the gold medal. The three losses we suffered were the most ever in Olympic competition, and the nineteen-point drubbing at the hands of Puerto Rico was the biggest loss by Team USA ever.
From the start, no one got along with coach Larry Brown’s style or substitution patterns. He was an old-school disciplinarian who took the fun out of the experience for a lot of guys. Playing basketball in the summer is supposed to be fun. Brown overlooked more talented upstarts like LeBron and Melo in favor of veterans like Shawn Marion and Richard Jefferson. LeBron, Melo, and D-Wade were so upset, they gathered in the ship’s computer room at midnight one night and feverishly looked up next season’s NBA schedule to see when they would be playing against Marion and Jefferson.
We came home with a bronze medal that no one even wanted. It was hard not to be upset with the result, and it lingered with many of us. One positive was that I played really well and ended up being one of our most consistent players. I averaged 9.3 points and 5.8 rebounds on 57 percent shooting while starting all eight games. Even though it wasn’t gold, I was still happy to get my medal. In many ways it represented how far I’d come. When I got home, I gave it to my son, LJ, and he put it on his dresser, where it remains to this day.