A Matter of Perspective : The ’72 U.S. Team Made Do Without Some Top Players, but Dynasty Ended

As good old days go, there have been better than July of 1972, when 12 young U.S. basketball players gathered in the heavy air of Pearl Harbor to prepare to defend the national honor.

This was before Reagan and Gorbachev.

There were two superpowers and neither was Japan.

There was a Cold War, and an undeclared hot war in Vietnam, which President Richard Nixon said must be pursued to an honorable conclusion, lest the world regard the United States as “a pitiful, helpless giant.”

Two Washington Post reporters had recently begun investigating implications of a burglary of Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex.

Against a real backdrop, the fortunes of the U.S. Olympic basketball players barely register. But basketball was the one U.S. spectator sport with international “competition.” U.S. domination was considered a given, so American players, too, were hostages of the Cold War.

They were treated almost as military auxiliaries. They practiced three times a day, for up to three hours a session, under crusty Hank Iba on the Naval base at Pearl Harbor, still a staging area for war-time operations. They slept in barracks, all 12 in a single bay. Doug Collins recalls that when they finally got a night off, they joked about going over the hill.

Their loss to the Soviet Union in the Olympic final was a blow to the national pride, no matter how unjust the circumstances. Twelve young men 23 and under came home feeling as if they had helped launch Sputnik I.

Sixteen years later, when the Soviets beat the United States fair and square in Seoul, the popular reaction was: Dammit, next time we send in the pros.

THE SETTING

A few days before the game, Palestinian terrorists massacred Israeli Olympians.

Within two years, the war would end in Vietnam, and Nixon would resign.

Somehow, this game carved out its niche and kept it.

Here are the facts everyone agrees upon:

--The United States goes ahead, 50-49, on two free throws by Collins with three seconds to play.

--The Soviets in-bound the ball while their reserves try to call time out. In international basketball, the coach then had to press a button, turning on a red light. Soviet Coach Vladimir Kondrashin doesn’t.

--With one second to play, referee Artenik Arabadjan of Bulgaria stops the clock because there are fans on the court.

--The Soviets aren’t allowed a timeout. Their in-bounds pass is deflected. Time expires.

--The Soviets protest. Williams Jones of Great Britain, secretary general of the International Amateur Basketball Assn., comes out of the stands, puts three seconds back on the clock and grants the Soviets a timeout, despite having no statutory authority during a game.

--Ivan Edesheko throws a length-of-the-court pass to star forward Alexander Belov, who grabs it between Texas El Paso forward Jim Forbes and South Carolina guard Kevin Joyce. The American players fall. Belov makes the winning layup.

Opinion about this depends on perspective.

American players refused to accept silver medals and persist to this day, despite quadrennial entreaties by USA Basketball to change their minds--in the words of executive director Bill Wall, to “put it all behind us.”

The Soviets believe it was a well-officiated game.

“Our boys come back after Olympic Games, 1972, this is big story,” says Alexander Gomelski, coach of the ’80 and ’88 Soviet teams.

“All people give them heroes. . . . Every day Russian people and Russian newspapers, journalists on TV, talk of three seconds in Munich. And every basketball person knows Alexander Belov is great player.

“This is great story. I like it same.”

The rest of the world, though, seems to be with the United States on this one.

“The game was stolen, I would say,” says Crystophe DeRollez, a member of the French national team from 1978-83, now a correspondent for Mondial Basket magazine.

“People in France say the U.S. has always won in Olympic basketball. If someone says, ‘What about ‘72?’ we say, ‘Remember how it was.’ ”

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER

By DOUG COLLINS

“Pearl Harbor, that was fun.

“I’d never been to Hawaii before, coming out of Benton, Ill. I was looking forward to it. Well, my thoughts of Hawaii then and when I go to Maui now are not really the same, trust me.

“It was not Monte Carlo and the French Riviera (where the 1992 team will train). We should have been where there was no sunshine because we were in the gym probably about nine hours a day--practiced three times a day.

“I really don’t know how we got through that. It seemed like it would never end. Hot. Mosquitoes. Practices were brutal. I mean, they were brutal! Guys just absolutely knocking the crap out of each other. All 12 of us slept in the same room in the barracks. The food was horrible.

“In the evenings, the Naval base had a movie for the sailors. We’d watch the movie, then we’d go over to the bowling alley, get something to eat. Then we’d go to bed.

“The big night out was on my 21st birthday. (Assistant coach) Johnny Bach talked Coach Iba into giving us the afternoon off and dropped us off at the Polynesian Cultural Center, with matching Hawaiian shirts on and white shoes Sears gave us. It was like, ‘Here guys, I’m picking you up at midnight, enjoy yourselves.’ There was concern maybe some of us wouldn’t come back.

“It’s hard to believe it’s 20 years ago. Everything’s so vivid in my mind. . . . I remember marching into the Olympic stadium. We were all in our red, white and blue. I remember people chanting, ‘USA! USA!’ The goosebumps, the hair standing up on your arms--it’s a feeling you can’t really describe.

“All we heard was, ‘You’ve got to beat the Russians. You’ve got to beat the Russians.’ From the day we made the team, we knew the confrontation was going to be with us and the Soviet Union.

“The day was forever. The game started at 11:45 p.m. (for U.S. television). Here you are, 21 years old, waiting to play for a gold medal and you think the game is never going to get started. They had these places where you could sit in a booth and listen to music. I was real big into Motown. I remember the last song I heard that day: ‘What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?’

“I was crushed at the time. It really didn’t set in for a while. And then you started reading about being the first Olympic team that had ever lost in basketball, and then the circumstances--you get angry.

“Every Olympic year, I see it on TV. From a selfish standpoint, you think about your place in Olympic history that has been washed away. I’ve become very patriotic, and every Olympics you become so aware of what a great country this is and all the opportunities.

“To see those athletes, with the national anthem playing and the tears of joy and all the years of hard work, and you stand there and watch the flag raised--I missed that. I felt that was taken away from me, and that bothers me as much as anything.”

EPILOGUE

In retrospect, it was an accident waiting to happen.

U.S. Olympic basketball was a throwback, descended from the days when the Amateur Athletic Union and the NCAA dominated the game. The first team was built around Universal Studios’ AAU champions.

The founding fathers of Olympic basketball were venerated conservatives in a fast-changing culture. Iba, the pattern-ball purist from Oklahoma State, coached three teams from 1964-72 while the cream of the collegiate crop turned a progressively colder shoulder.

UCLA’s Bruins, the lords of the game, almost gave it a pass altogether. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skipped it in 1968, Bill Walton and Jamaal Wilkes in 1972.

The 1972 team also could have had North Carolina State’s David Thompson, but he was only a freshman.

Instead, the committee worked with whatever players were readily at hand.

In 1968, an unknown from Trinidad, Colo., Junior College, Spencer Haywood, bailed out an underwhelming U.S. team.

In 1972, as the world edged up, all but unnoticed, the United States went with a front line of Tom McMillen, Jim Brewer and Dwight Jones.

The team had to rally from six points behind in the final minutes to get to the controversial three seconds.

“Everybody talks about how we were robbed,” says former Marquette coach Al McGuire. “What the hell! How about the other 39 minutes?”

Says Collins: “Let’s face it, we would never ever be having this discussion if Bill Walton had played. End of discussion. Forget it. Doesn’t matter.”

Of the 12 Olympians, 10 played in the NBA.

Kenny Davis, the NAIA representative on the team--that’s how it was done then, one from Column A, one from Column B--became a sports-shoe representative and lives in Paint Lick, Ky.

“Every time I get to feeling sorry for myself,” he recently told Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith, “I think of the Israeli kids who were killed at those Games. . . . Think of being in a helicopter with your hands tied behind your back and a hand grenade rolling toward you . . . and compare that to not getting a gold medal. If that final game is the worst injustice that ever happens to the guys on that team, we’ll all come out of this life pretty good.”

Forbes, who fell trying to stop Belov, told Mike Bantom six months later that he couldn’t get over it. As a senior at Texas El Paso, he suffered a knee injury and never played professionally.

“I just saw him at our 20-year reunion,” Collins says. “He’s teaching school in El Paso. He’s doing great. Fact, he’s going to work at my basketball camp.”

All’s well that ends, more or less.