August 15, 2004
2004 Summer Olympiad Opens in Athens – U.S. Basketball Taken to the Woodshed
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I didn't need to see Puerto Rico rout the United States to know that the world is playing great basketball; didn't need to see the United States shoot 35 percent to know that the team we've sent to the Olympics has no outside shooter, and maybe only an outside shot at the gold medal.
As compelling as "the world is catching up" angle may be, yesterday's loss was as much about Puerto Rico wanting to get the United States off its back - on a number of levels - as it was about the world catching up.
This was about a veteran Puerto Rican team wanting to win a gold medal and beginning the journey by beating a team that had beaten it like a drum. The game was more about that than about a continental shift.
Puerto Rico's 40-year-old center, José Ortiz, all but cautioned the United States team that this had better be the last time the Americans play a team for chumps. No one was saying it quite that bluntly, but that's what happened. "I'm not saying that they did not take us seriously," Ortiz said. "But they should understand that this kind of tournament is very intense, and also the rules are different."
Which rules? He smiled. The biggest rule is respect. "Don't take other teams lightly," Ortiz said. "That's my advice."
United States basketball players still believe they own the franchise. The reality is that they own half the franchise - the pizazz half. The rest of the world plays good, solid basketball.
That is the difference between the National Basketball Association and the rest of the world - and the gap that the United States team will have to bridge in the next 48 hours.
The world may play higher-quality basketball than the United States - if you define quality by playing textbook basketball. The United States, embodied by the National Basketball Association, plays more spectacular basketball. That's what the N.B.A. sells: spectacle. That's what the world buys, and why it loves the N.B.A.
The greatest cheers for the United States yesterday came on breakaway dunks and flashy passes and steals that ended with dunks.
That won't win a medal.
Everyone thought a 95-78 loss to Italy last month humbled the United States.
The team was shocked, but not humbled. These elite players come out of a culture of stardom that only intensifies as they get older. Before the game yesterday, when it was time for team photos, a mass of photographers gathered in front of the United States team. Only one photographer turned to snap the Puerto Rican team, until the United States team walked off.
Whether they've earned it or not, the United States players are still the glamour attraction, and for all those who will use yesterday's game as some type of measuring stick, the world is not catching up.
The United States lost to Puerto Rico, a proud team that had never beaten the United States in Olympic competition and lost by 25 points to the United States on July 31.
If Kevin Garnett, Jason Kidd, Tracy McGrady, Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant were playing, this might not have been much of a game, probably not much of a tournament either. The reason there is so much of a buzz around these Olympics is that those players are not in Athens, meaning that the United States is vulnerable.
This is a young American team, the youngest since the United States started using professional players, in the 1992 Barcelona Games. Allen Iverson, at 29 the oldest player on the team, has been through that arrogant phase, the phase when you think you can walk on water and dunk over anyone. His toughest job as this team's captain will be convincing his teammates that they can lose, in embarrassing fashion, that the sun doesn't rise in their backyards.
They've inherited a mantle of greatness that they did not earn.
Iverson has been worried about the cockiness of his young teammates.
"You can come in and think you're invincible and that nobody can beat you, and all you got to do is step out on the basketball court," Iverson said last week. "You need a lesson like that, that you're not invincible."
Any team that has Allen Iverson as its voice of reason is a compelling team indeed.
After its loss to Italy, the United States responded by defeating Germany, routing Serbia and Montenegro and beating Turkey twice.
I'm curious to see how the players will respond to yesterday's loss, especially with a game tomorrow against a Greek team that beat Australia by 22 points yesterday and will be playing in front of a frenzied crowd. Going into this tournament, Larry Brown, the coach of the United States team, said he wasn't sure his players had learned the lesson of humility. They haven't.
After yesterday's game, a dejected Brown questioned his team's desire.
"I think they played so much harder than we did," he said of the players from Puerto Rico. "The first day we got together as a group, we talked about respecting our opponents, realizing that these guys have played together, realizing that the game has gotten better all over the world and try and understand how important it is for them to represent their country and play the right way.
"The only thing we can do is find out what we're made of.
"This is a great opportunity for a group of guys to get together and figure out what it means to truly be a team. I'm anxious to see if we'll be able to do that."
He'll have plenty of company.
Otherwise, Daniel Gross had an interesting piece on Slate.com last week about predicting medal counts based on past success and future economic factors affecting competitiveness of athletes:
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The countries of the former Soviet bloc, some of which have seen declines in living standards in the past 15 years, have continued to excel. The model projects impoverished Belarus, which won 17 medals in Sydney in 2000, to win 15 medals in Athens—the same number as prosperous Canada. The Soviet-era sports bureaucracies may have crumbled in Russia and its former republics, but the infrastructure that produced world-class wrestlers and gymnasts hasn't dissolved entirely.
The model foresees little change at the top. As they did in 2000, the United States (70), Russia (64), China (50), and Germany (45) are expected to take home the greatest number of medals. But look closely, and each Olympic titan is projected to take home substantially fewer medals than it did in 2000. And none is expected to fall further than the United States. What's more, the top 30 Olympic nations are projected to lose about 10 percent of their total. Meanwhile, the rest of the world—a large assemblage of Olympic also-rans—is expected to increase its medal take by 50 percent. As we were exerting our hegemony in the Middle East and Central Asia, were we (and our coalition partners) losing it in the high-jump pit and the swimming pool?
If so, there are two possible explanations. One is the pre-9/11 Thomas Friedman explanation. With the continuing flow of information, resources, and people all over the globe, those who excel at sports are increasingly able to train and compete against world-class competition. Kenyan distance runners receive scholarships to colleges in the United States, inner-city American fencers compete against aristocratic Europeans, Israel produces a world-class judoka, and Italy fields a competitive baseball team. The world today is a happy playground in which specialization and excellence are identified, developed, and rewarded.
The second is the Patrick Buchanan explanation: Lazy white FirstWorlders are about to be overwhelmed and outrun by hungrier, darker Third World residents. The model projects such big losses for established Olympic powers—and such big gains for nobodies—largely because of the influence of GDP growth. In the past four years, France and Germany have had comparatively little growth compared with, say, India and Mexico. So, France and Germany are projected to lose medals, while India's total is expected to rise from one to 10 (!) and our neighbor to the south could win 11 medals, up from six in 2000. We may think the rich are getting richer. But the poor are getting richer at a more rapid pace. "What's tended to happen is that the developing economies' share of the global economy is increasing over time, and perhaps these countries are becoming keener on participation in the Olympics," said Hawksworth.
Hawksworth produces another warning that echoes what one hears these days in economic circles: Look out for China. China may do better than expected in part because "with the Olympics coming up in Beijing in 2008, they seem to be setting a national priority," said Hawksworth. "They're kind of challenging the U.S. and Russia as the Olympic superpowers."
- Arik
Posted by Arik Johnson at August 15, 2004 01:48 PM | TrackBack
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