U.S. Olympic Men’s Basketball Trials : Amateur Era Isn’t Making Graceful Exit

Behind windows covered over with adhesive tape, the world’s last great amateur basketball team takes shape. In 1992, the United States is expected to send grown-up National Basketball Assn. professionals to the Olympics, and an era will be over.

Remember young Bill Russell in Melbourne?

The “greatest team ever” with The Big O and Jerry West in Rome?

Spencer Haywood of Trinidad (Colo.) Junior College bailing out the United States in Mexico City when the big names stayed home?

The debacle in Munich?

The next “greatest team ever” with Bob Knight at Los Angeles?

Amateur Basketball Assn. USA penning up the press, hiding the coaches and hushing up the players?

Farewell to all that. This is the amateurs’ last hurrah but if this team looks impressive, what it really represents is the last American window of vulnerability in the foreseeable future. Beat us now or come back around 2020.

But there’s a world out there beating on America’s door. The gap is closing. Not only that, since the last Olympics, they have added a three-point shot from 20 feet 6 inches, only 9 inches farther than the college shot, and if there’s one thing top foreign teams can do, it’s shoot.

In the ’87 Pan-Am Games, the United States was stunned on American soil by a Brazilian bomber named Oscar Schmidt, who sank four straight three-point shots during one burst and scored 46 points in a 120-115 upset.

Is that what has these ABAUSA aparatchniki so up-tight?

After camp started, for instance, players were made unavailable to reporters for four days. Meanwhile, they were free to have dinner with NBA suitors. Practices were closed to the press but open to NBA scouts--and representatives from an athletic shoe company that kicks in $600,000 annually to ABAUSA.

After protests, practice was opened to a pool of eight reporters. But Tom McGrath, trials director, walked up to the man from Sports Illustrated, one of the gang of eight, and told him he isn’t supposed to be chatting with NBA scouts.

Members of the U.S. boxing team, working out in a room off the gym, were told to stop watching the basketball players through their window. Olympic boxing Coach Tom Colter replied that the basketball players should stop looking through the window at his boxers.

All cuts were announced after the players axed were taken to the airport, far from any reporters who might have published any complaints.

The cut from 90 players to 48 was made Sunday morning--at 5:30 Sunday morning. The players were put on buses to Denver, some for that night’s scrimmages, some bound for the airport.

The New York Times, Boston Globe and Philadelphia Daily News, among others, gave the whole thing a pass and stayed home. There were about 75 reporters here when camp started, about 25 three days later when ABAUSA finally gave up the no-room-in-the-gym defense and allowed everyone in for practice.

ABAUSA got ripped by the sports editor of the hometown Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, and was called “the Colorado Springs police state” by the Rocky Mountain News’ Jay Marriotti and “USA GDR” by the San Diego Union’s Chris Jenkins.

Aside from that, nobody got too upset.

What in the name of public relations disasters was going on?

Olympic Coach John Thompson, a hall of famer at closeting teams from the press, said it wasn’t his idea.

“I’m labor,” he said. “You have to talk to management.”

However, it may be impossible to just let Thompson slide on this one. If this wasn’t his idea, ABAUSA must have had his predilections in mind. Also, Mike Moran, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s director of public information and media relations, dated the press-barring movement at ABAUSA to 1981, when Thompson closed his practices at the National Sports Festival.

Thompson, however, rarely ducks a fight and he was Mr. Nice Guy around here. He handled hard questions smoothly and seemed to enjoy the give and take.

The problem is not so much one coach’s style anymore. It’s something that’s been institutionalized at ABAUSA.

Amazingly, it has been largely forgotten that similar restrictions were in force at Knight’s trials. Players were off limits until the third day. When they were made available, 53 were asked for interviews, and 23 demurred, including such big names as Pat Ewing, Michael Jordan, Wayman Tisdale and camp sensation Charles Barkley. The press was allowed into practice one day. There were no pool reporters at the other workouts.

Since this was Bloomington, Ind., and Knight’s turf, it was assumed that he had put in those restrictions. For whatever reason, there was little surprise or protest.

Voila, ABAUSA was allowed to conclude that it had a viable arrangement.

ABAUSA has been allowed more than one illusion.

Men’s basketball enjoys a special position, being the one Olympic sport with mass appeal in the United States. American players come to it as full-fledged celebrities. On top of that, anything Olympic has been red-hot since 1984, when there were to be American Games, and afterward, because of the attendant good feelings.

Thus, as ABAUSA executive director Bill Wall said, bluntly as ever, “We aren’t selling anything.”

Assuming a captive audience, he focuses on the down side: The coaches are busy. The task is huge. Players will be distracted. They’ll have their feelings hurt if the press just talks to the superstars. The press already knows all there is to know about these players.

He yearns to make, and the coaches talk constantly about making, the trials a positive experience for all the players who are offering to serve their country gratis.

This would indeed be nice, but it has nothing to do with real life. Pro scouts monitor every muscle twitch. They have to be there, otherwise no deal with the NBA, which would then sign its draftees before the games, leaving the U.S. team in Second-Rateville.

The scouts represent teams about to make multimillion-dollar investments. Whether it goes unobserved or unreported, the fact is that Rex Chapman may have cost himself a bundle by sleepwalking through a week that he began as a lottery pick. There are big winners and losers, whether ABAUSA likes it or not.

ABAUSA holds its ground. Reaping the benefit of everyone else’s promotion, it is happy to harvest what has been created by others.

In this, ABAUSA has become the nemesis of its ostensible parent organization, the USOC. In fact, ABAUSA is fairly independent. It is chartered by the Federation Internationale de Basketball Amateur and raises most of its own money.

But just how captive is that audience?

In 1984, Knight’s team played eight exhibitions around the country and drew 99% of capacity. The two scrimmages at Indiana’s Assembly Hall drew sellouts of 18,000.

Sunday night in Denver, two scrimmages drew 12,400 in a 17,000-seat arena. Officials of the sponsoring Denver Nuggets lamented the lack of “communication,” as one put it, with ABAUSA.

“That we got 12,000 people, I think we were pretty lucky,” Nugget publicist Bill Young said. “I think we pulled it off, but it was kind of frustrating.”

Not that ABAUSA is against the press on principle. When it feels it needs publicity, it becomes quite pragmatic. The women’s team is available to the press, resulting in better feeling but an inferior overall moral position.

Or as Wall said the other day, “There really isn’t a defensible answer.”

If you’re an American, you’d better hope that the team has a better year than the front office.

Oh yes, the team.

It has David Robinson, Danny Manning, Sean Elliott, etc. How can it go wrong?

Oh, it already has?

All those players were on that Pan-Am team that lost to Brazil?

How much more galling could a defeat be? ABAUSA was supposed to be the answer to those old days when the United States regarded the competition with contempt and played with whomever it could round up. These were the best American players, under one of its top coaches, Denny Crum.

Said Georgia’s Willie Anderson, a Pan-Am star: “One of the downfalls, we had too many guys pouting about not playing. It was an attitude within the team that the coaching staff couldn’t see.”

Said Robinson: “Coach Thompson will make sure the players he selects will be disciplined, or he’ll teach them that in a hurry.”

Thompson, an imposing figure at 6-10 and more weight than any of his players will pack, has no trouble getting messages across.

In this camp, however, he ambled amiably about, watching scrimmages, sitting in the stands with George Raveling, the USC coach who’s his top assistant, or Mary Fenlon, the academic coordinator at Georgetown whom he brought along as a secretary, or Patrick Ewing, who visited camp.

You never got too far from a Hoya here. Five Georgetown athletes were invited to try out, among them Alonzo Mourning, the high schooler who has signed to attend, and Gene Smith, who has been retired for four years and was a limited player at his peak, and John Turner, a forward who sat out last season.

There is a word for all this-- cronyism-- and there have been murmurs of it about.

“I’m partial to my own,” Thompson said. “I’m not one of those who goes around saying he isn’t.”

There have been murmurs out there about more than that.

On a cable TV show in early spring, CBS’ Brent Musburger passed along a viewer’s question about whether Thompson, the first black coach of a U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team, would select any white players.

“Is it a question that can be asked?” Musburger asked. “Certainly.

“Take a look at his team down at Georgetown. I think a lot of people wonder about that.”

It might be noted that there was little outcry before Knight chose his team. Or afterward, when he picked 5 white players among the 12, with 2 of the 5--Steve Alford and Jeff Turner--at least a little controversial. The point is not that Knight picked the players he did; it is that his picks were as readily accepted.

If this is controversy, Thompson sailed right through it, looking untroubled. He watched practice, he held short press conferences, he got off occasional jokes.

He looks forward to Seoul.

“We’re going to be in that Olympic Village,” he said, jovially. “This will be the first time I won’t have to be accused of isolating anybody. They have more security in that place than I’ve ever had . . .

“They’re throwing the rabbit in the brier patch. We’re not going to have anyone just hopping in on us. They’ve got to get through the guards and the barbed wire fence to get there.

“(Laughing) I may learn a lot from this.”

See?

If you look at it just the right way, every cloud really does have a silver lining, and the U.S. team is off to as good a start as could be expected.