Europe Views U.S. Supremacy With Wonder

The box scores start burbling through the fax machine here at the Don Yo Hotel each day around dawn, but the news is never good.

A 79-point victory over Cuba. A 42-point rout of Panama. A 61-point romp over Argentina, and so on.

Peter Skansi, Croatia’s basketball coach, gets the results of the U.S. Olympic team’s games almost the minute the final buzzer sounds 6,000 miles away, but all he can do is read them, shake his head and laugh.

“I’ve always said the same thing: the gold medal is already gone for these Olympics,” Skansi said. “Everybody else will play for two medals--the silver and the bronze. I told my players this before our first game, and they understand. Because it is true. Nobody is going to beat the United States.”

That realization settled over the European Olympic qualifying tournament almost two weeks ago, especially once the scores from Portland started rolling in. Lithuania, Germany, Croatia and Slovenia may be the class of the new Europe, but teams that have somehow survived 50 years of political and social repression readily acknowledge that they have no chance against the United States.

“Who’s going to stop them?” German forward Hansi Gnad asked. “Who? Lithuania? That’s the best team here, because they’ve got a guy like Sarunas Marciulionis. But you’ve got to realize that the United States has got 10 or 12 Marciulionises. It’s like playing an NBA all-star team, except that these guys want to play defense, too.

“All you can do is hope to play a close game with the U.S., and count it as a moral victory. But everybody knows that moral victories don’t matter in the Olympics.”

Croatian forward Dino Radja agreed.

“It’s funny,” he said. “It’s funny, because if you don’t laugh, what else can you do? The NBA players shouldn’t be playing. They should just give them the gold medal right now and get it over with. Nobody in the NBA can stop Michael Jordan one on one, so why should we be able to? Patrick Ewing scores 25 points a game in the NBA, think what he’ll do here. It’s the same for Karl Malone and Charles Barkley . . . and on and on and on.”

So there’s no hope at all for Europe?

“Our only chance,” Radja said, “is if the United States team has a plane accident.”

But if the Olympic outcome is a fait accompli , a morbid curiosity still surrounds each U.S. result here. Those coaches without connections or fax machines on the other side of the Atlantic rely on day-old newspapers and word of mouth, while others hit up the dozen or so NBA scouts in attendance for the latest gossip. Daily shoot-arounds are given over to discussing the U.S. victories, and players took the Canada outcome--a team they knew had some NBA players on it--as a very bad sign.

Hopes here soared briefly when word of injuries to Ewing and point guard John Stockton got around, but the realization that Isiah Thomas or Kevin Johnson or some other all-star could step in if needed sobered everybody up.

Some coaches and players even stay up until the wee hours to watch the U.S. highlights on British cable TV, but others found the footage too scary.

“I saw a couple of minutes on TV the other night, but I won’t watch any more,” Croatian guard Toni Kukoc said. “Why should I? I know what’s going to happen. The United States is going to win every game in the Olympics by 25 or 30 points, and if it’s a bad day, maybe they’ll only win by 15.”

But German forward Detlef Schrempf, who stars for the Indiana Pacers, actually wants to play the United States.

“In the gold medal game, though,” he said quickly. “The later the better.”

Ironically, European basketball has never been stronger. There are eight past or present NBA players here at the qualifying tournament, another 12 who were NBA draft picks, and Latvian guard Gundaris Vetra signed a two-year contract with the Minnesota Timberwolves last week.

But as Atlanta Hawk forward Alexander Volkov can attest, being in the NBA and being a star are different. Volkov single-handedly kept the Commonwealth of Independent States in contention for an Olympic berth here--often playing all 40 minutes in the process--but he barely rates much more than garbage time in the NBA.

“My teammates are always asking me about the NBA,” Volkov said. “So I tell them the truth. It’s harder than it looks. Even the worst player on an NBA team could kill you in Europe, so imagine what this (U.S.) Olympic team will do to the other teams in the tournament.”

As if the teams qualifying for the Olympics don’t have it tough enough, Spain, the only team to earn an automatic berth as the host nation, might not even be there. The Spanish national team will begin a seven-day strike on July 8--its second in the last two weeks--in protest of the Spanish League’s intention to allow three foreigners per team this season, and the players have no intention of backing down.

As a result, Spanish Coach Diaz Miguel said he doubts the team will even show up in Barcelona.

“What can I do?” Miguel said. “We’d like a chance to show what we can do in the Olympics, but this is a labor issue that will affect Spanish basketball for years to come. I must respect my players’ wishes.”