SUMMER GAMES SPOTLIGHT : BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 15 : IT WAS MORE THAN AN EXTENDED EGOS TRIP

There is no doubt the U.S. men’s basketball team was popular. In fact, the national newspaper El Pais on Saturday boasted--free--a full color poster of the team.

But can you imagine the egos involved in taking the 12 most regal players in the world and locking them together for seven weeks after they had played a hundred-game season? Chuck Daly, the U.S. coach, called it a tribute to the “professionalism” of NBA players. Undoubtedly that was some of it. They didn’t need to score a whole lot of points every night to demonstrate their individual worth. Then again, nobody at that level wants to be upstaged.

They probably had more fun than 12 professionals could have playing their game on vacation.

Daly distributed time, pushing when he had to and mostly letting them be. “Those 12 egos,” Magic Johnson called them. “He made us never lay down like we were on vacation.”

Larry Bird put it in perspective: “Chuck didn’t have any trouble with egos. His was a lot bigger than ours.”

* This a daily roundup of Olympic-related items from reporters in Barcelona from the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and Baltimore Sun, all Times-Mirror newspapers.