Reviewed by Jay Price

“You can write,” a literary agent of some repute once suggested to the unknown author of an otherwise uplifting story about a cadre of similarly obscure athletes. “Why don’t you write a book about Derek Jeter?”

A look at any bestseller list should serve as a reminder that the commercial value of celebrity star power on the cover of a book — be it subject or author — can never be overrated.

Even more so, if that’s possible, when it comes to a book about sports.

So it comes as something of a surprise when the first character to whom we’re formally introduced in Dream Team, a volume peopled by some of the most lionized jocks ever to walk the earth, is … um, a Yugoslavian inspector of meat.

Boris Stankovic didn’t come up with the catchy name attached to the first out-of-the-closet professionals to represent the United State in the Olympics: the 1992 basketball team of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and their rock-star brethren, who famously cruised to gold in Barcelona. Jack McCallum can take partial credit for that. Or, rather his editors at “Sports Illustrated” can take credit for it, having used the tag line “Dream Team” to promote one of McCallum’s first cover stories on the subject.

Stankovic, an official of the Federation Internationale de Basketball, the organization that oversees international basketball, never met Johnson or Bird, and his only brush with Jordan came before MJ started having shoes named for him. But it was the former inspector of meat — not NBA commissioner David Stern or NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol — who saw that bringing the pros into the Olympic tent was the surest way to intensify interest in the Games; make lots of money for everybody; and, as the ambitious subtitle of McCallum’s book suggests, alter the basketball map by inspiring young Germans, Italians, Chinese and Brazilians who suddenly wanted to Be Like Mike.

Twenty years later, long after the novelty of the Dream Team concept lost its luster, Jordan, Magic, and Bird are still household names. And, so, in the midst of another Olympics, here is the book McCallum first contracted to write in 1992, before that publishing deal fell through.

Suspense doesn’t drive the narrative. McCallum is smart enough not to dwell on the play-by-play in a tournament where Magic, Michael and their teammates feast on the star-struck opposition — their opponents seem most concerned with getting the U.S. players’ autographs — by an average 40-point margin.

Rather, McCallum concentrates on the run-up to the Games: the angst over adding the serially impolitic Charles Barkley to the team, and keeping Isiah Thomas off; the “training camp” in Monte Carlo, where the Dream Team’s regimen consisted of all-night card games and lots of golf; and the interaction of all those alpha-male egos. Spoiler hint: Magic and Michael showed more deference to Bird than to each other.

Nobody’s more qualified to tell the story, or to put it in perspective. McCallum’s work at “Sports Illustrated” made him an insider in Barcelona. Happily for the rest of us, he’s way past mistaking that access, unimaginable today — the Dream Teamers pause on their way from the locker room to the opening tip of the gold-medal game to have their picture taken with McCallum and a colleague — for anything more than good fortune and better timing. And his conversational style makes his book, even the parts you’ve heard before, a congenial companion.

Basketball fans of the right age will remember the team’s first practice game, when a team of college kids — subtly aided and abetted, some suspect, by Dream Team coach Chuck Daly — handed the NBA stars a rude wake-up call. Even more compelling for McCallum was the intra-squad scrimmage where Johnson, the self-appointed team spokesman, and Jordan, his take-no-prisoners rival, talked trash and vied for the position of lead dog.

The savvy Daly knew when to give his uber-competitive stars their space. “Learn to … ignore,” he advised Mike Krzyzewski and P.J. Carlesimo, the college coaches serving as his assistants; betting that, when push came to shove, the players’ pride would trump any petty concerns over who got the most playing time or scored the most points. At the end of the day, that gamble made Daly the second most prescient basketball guy on the planet … right behind the humble inspector of meat who dreamed up the whole shebang.

Jay Price, an award-winning columnist for the Staten Island Advance and Sport magazine, is the author of Thanksgiving 1959. His website is www.thanksgiving1959.com.