U.S. Team Is Tinged With Red

John Thompson is a basketball coach. Period. To my knowledge, no one appointed him secretary of state or put him in charge of the country’s press relations or even made him general manager of the Olympics.

They hired him to teach the kids the fine points of basketball, when to go to the fast break, how to use the high post, what to do with the full-court press. They hired him to set picks, not policy. To run a game, not the world.

John Thompson has had some success as a basketball coach. And that’s fine. That would be at Georgetown University, which is a private institution (if any institution can be said to be wholly private in this day of federal involvement in education) and Coach Thompson pretty much ran the operation his way there--which is to say about the way Stalin ran Russia.

But now, John Thompson has been named coach of the U.S. Olympic basketball team, which is up here on the final leg of its training tour preparatory to going to the Games in Seoul.

Now, that’s U.S. as in us. That’s our basketball team out there, not Coach Thompson’s. We pay the bills. Chances are, we subsidized these athletes if they went to a state college--as most of them did.

But that’s beside the point. The real point is, that’s America’s team. And you know how we are. We’re a kind of laid-back, free-wheeling people. We go with the flow. We’re not a suppressed people. We like having a free press, free right of assembly, freedom to see whom we want to see, talk with whom we want to talk. We fought for those things. It’s what Americans are all about. We’re not conspirators. We’re an open society. We’re not paranoid. We like people.

Some people never really understand this. They see things differently in other parts of the world, like, say, the Soviet Union, to pull a country out of the hat. There, the team--like everything else--belongs to the state. The state calls the shots, so to speak (sometimes, literally). The state runs the newspapers. If someone wants to talk to a basketball player, he clears it with the KGB or the Politburo or some other handy despot.

Here, we do things differently. If we want to talk to, oh, say, Carl Lewis, we clear it with Carl Lewis. If he doesn’t want to talk, fine. But, it’s his call, not some bureaucrat’s.

A lot of people here this weekend would like to talk to the Olympic basketball players. Their readers or their viewers--the people who pay the freight--are interested. You figure you go up to the player and make your pitch. That’s the way the system works. Good old American gamesmanship. Fun and games. God bless America. I mean you can talk to Magic Johnson. What’s the big deal with David Robinson?

Only, you can’t. Why? Because John Thompson says you can’t. Who?! That’s John (“I-make-the-rules-around-here”) Thompson, as in commissar. They thought they hired him to coach the team, not sequester it. They thought they wanted him to run their game plan, not their lives.

You want to talk to a basketball player on the U.S. team? You go through Big Brother. John Thompson. He screens the calls. No calls go through to the players.

Thompson’s team--pardon me, our team--plays a hand-picked team of professional All-Stars from the National Basketball Assn. The pros are donating their services. You can talk to them all you want.

Here, unembellished is what the press releases have to say:

“NBA Player Accessibility: Fri. Aug.26--Practice 6-8 p.m. NBA players available before or after practice. Sat. Aug. 27--12:30-1 p.m. shootaround at Thomas & Mack Arena. Available after practice. Sat. Aug. 27--NBA locker room open until 50 minutes prior to the game.”

As an addendum to this is the following: “As you are well aware, there is no access to the Olympic players. Coach Thompson will not allow them to speak with the media and all practices are closed.” On another page, the publicist reiterates the warning: “As a final note, I’m sure you are already well aware of the virtual non-existent access to the Olympic players. They will not be available for interviews and their practices are closed. On the other hand, the NBA players are available as detailed on the enclosed alert.”

Well, how about a press conference? Yeah. After the game. Well, after the game can be 2 o’clock in the morning in the Eastern press and even well after the papers have gone to bed on the West Coast. And the alert notes: “The post-game press conference will follow a 10--minute cooling off period and last 15 minutes.”

For this, Las Vegas Events pays them a guaranteed $125,000 for their appearance--or, as the case may be, non-appearance.

Why all the secrecy? What is this, a hostage mission? Or an exhibition game? Even an Olympics Games is hardly the Persian Gulf.

Are the stakes that high that the squad has to be spirited from place to place and hidden from public view?

Well, the U.S. has lost exactly one basketball game in the long history of the Olympic Games--and that was on a questionable call. Their chances of losing another one this year are about on a par with Edwin Moses losing a heat in the hurdles. Not the way to bet.

Coach Thompson and his cast of anonymous athletes came into Vegas this week with all the fanfare of a band of pickpockets. It was a covert action which would do credit to a spy ring. The last thing this invisible in this town was Howard Hughes. Thompson must have thought they put him in charge of a monastery, not a ball team.

But, yes, Virginia, there is a U.S. Olympic basketball team. They took the floor against a handpicked group of pros that included Mark Eaton, Danny Schayes and a half-dozen other top NBAers. They appeared to be able to talk, think and do all the other things normal citizens do. They certainly run and jump and shoot. At the half, they were ahead, 46-41, but even though they lost, 90-85, they didn’t look as if they had a great deal to fear from the Soviets. Or even the Boston Celtics. It might not even hurt them if they had to talk out loud. But, presumably, after the game and the press’ 15 minutes were up, they put on their false noses and whiskers and went back into seclusion. You’d think they were wanted by the FBI. Bonnie and Clyde got more public exposure.