THE 1987 PAN AMERICAN GAMES : Brazil Gets Upset Win Over U.S. in Volleyball

They have had other classic athletic events in creaky old Hinkle Fieldhouse here, including one that they made a movie out of.

But Brazil’s five-game victory over the United States in the opening match of the Pan American Games men’s volleyball tournament Wednesday night would have even made them stand up and take notice in Milan, Ind.

It was a team from tiny Milan that inspired the hit movie, “Hoosiers,” and it was Hinkle Fieldhouse, on the campus of Butler University, that played host to both the state title game that Milan won over Muncie Central back in the early 1950s, and to the shooting of the movie.

And it was Hinkle, built in 1928 and still shining proudly in lots of spots, that played host to Wednesday night’s rematch of the 1984 Olympic gold medal game between Brazil and the United States.

Rematches in sports tend to lack the luster of the first time. All too often, the second time around in sports, all sports, tends to be more for the hype and the hoopla than for real drama.

But when Brazil beat the United States, 12-15, 17-15, 15-9, 3-15, 15-8, Wednesday night, it was the real thing. Volleyball war, if you will.

The match ran just shy of 3 hours 20 minutes. The second game alone took 58 minutes.

Brazilians in the crowd, and there were more than just a handful, stood throughout the match, singing songs and waving a large green, yellow and blue Brazilian flag. That prompted the familiar return chant of “USA, USA.”

And when it finally ended, with the heat and humidity leaving both players and spectators drenched, the happy Brazilians surrounded their team in the corner of the court and danced around them, singing and swinging their flag.

The United States had beaten Brazil in the ’84 gold medal match in three straight games at Los Angeles. After that, roughly the same group of U.S. players had done something only one other team, the Soviet Union, had ever done before. It completed volleyball’s triple crown, adding victories in the World Cup and World Games to its Olympic title.

So when the Brazilians drew the United States in the first round of pool play here, there was clearly great motivation, especially since all but one of the players competing here Wednesday night were members of the Brazilian Olympic team.

Leonidio DePra Filho, a Brazilian spiker, spoke afterward of that motivation.

“We knew coming here about the U.S., and about how they are and how they should win,” he said. “But when we got to the court, we decided just to relax and to play. And that helped us.”

It also helped Brazil that Karch Kiraly, the U.S. star, was unable to contribute a great deal to his team. He has a fracture in his left hand, and while he played in short spurts in the second, fourth and fifth games, Coach Marv Dunphy said that he may be ineffective, for all intents and purposes, for the entire tournament.

“Karch is in the hands of a radiologist,” Dunphy said. “The doctor will make the decision. He can’t play at all in the front row right now, and he may not be able to play up there at all in the Pan Am Games.”

Even though Dunphy refused to point to the missing Kiraly as a reason for the defeat, saying, “We’ve won lots of matches as a team and we lost this one as a team,” Antonio Gouvia, a Brazilian middle blocker, saw it differently.

“Karch is a very good player, the best player in the world,” he said. “They miss him a lot. You could see it tonight. When he isn’t in there, it forces them to change their tactics.”

The tactics that kept the United States in the match, against a smoother-passing and more organized Brazilian team, were a series of low sets for powerful Craig Buck and high-angle sets for equally powerful Steve Timmons.

But in the final game, after the lead had swayed back and forth a point at a time almost throughout, the Timmons-Buck power went awry, and the United States never recovered. Buck hit long for 9-8; Timmons hit long for 10-8; Elberto Furtado blocked Buck for 11-8; Timmons hit long again for 12-8, and Gouvia blocked Timmons for 13-8.

“I didn’t feel that we really had control of things,” Dunphy said. “I didn’t feel we were in control in the match, or much at all in the fifth game.

“They swung and hit a lot, and we swung and missed.”

The defeat did not, by any means, put the United States out of the running for a gold medal. Seedings for later playoff competition are determined by records in the pool, and there are four games to go before the semifinals Aug. 20.

But Wednesday night’s result did not make things any easier, especially since the United States must play its last pool game Aug. 19 against Cuba, the team that recently beat them in zone competition in five games in Cuba in June.

Nobody on the U.S. team is taking this lightly, however, even though the United States already has qualified a number of times for the ’88 Olympics at Seoul, South Korea.

“Other than the Olympic Games,” Dunphy said, “this is the most important event for us.” Added Kiraly: “International volleyball has changed. Four of the top six teams in the world are now in the Western Hemisphere.”

He didn’t name the four, but there was little doubt after Wednesday night in old Hinkle Fieldhouse that Brazil is one of them.