Recalling a Distant Dream Team : Lubin Played on ’36 U.S. Olympic Basketball Squad That Swept to the Gold in an Era of Far Less Glitter

Now that the Dream Team has completed its mission--which included selling a few billion cheeseburgers and cultivating friendships with Third World countries--Frank Lubin can rest easy. America has restored law and order in Olympic basketball, re-establishing a tradition of dominance that Lubin helped originate XIV Olympiads ago.

“Nobody could have beaten us back then,” says the 82-year-old Lubin, the captain of the 1936 U.S. team that won the first Olympic gold medal in basketball.

Like the Dream Team, the ’36 U.S. Olympians crushed their opponents--outscoring them by more than a 2-to-1 margin--but the similarity ends there. Although basketball was well established on the amateur level in this country, pro leagues didn’t exist, and the sport was in its infancy elsewhere in the world. Far from being a centerpiece of the ’36 Games, basketball was more of a sideshow, played outdoors on a clay court that turned to mud during a downpour in the championship game.

The players were anything but icons. Lubin and his teammates stayed in the Olympic village like everybody else and didn’t need the William Morris Agency to handle their endorsements after the Games ended. Lubin did receive a telegram offering him $35 a week to play for the Denver-based Piggly Wiggly team, but he was making more as a grip in the movie business and turned the job down.

Despite being a star of his era, the 6-foot-7 Lubin “never made any money off basketball,” he says, but he has become the eminence grise for U.S. Olympic basketball. Before the 1984 Games, Bobby Knight introduced Lubin to the young U.S. Olympic team.

“He said that I had something they didn’t have--a gold medal,” Lubin says. “I think it hit the players right where it hurt.”

Since he was rediscovered by the media in ‘84, Lubin has been called on every four years to recount the old days. For the Barcelona Games, he did an interview with Quinn Buckner on NBC and is involved in a documentary produced by Bud Greenspan. More famous now than he was in his heyday, he recognizes the irony.

“For practically 50 years I sat here in my rocking chair wasting away,” Lubin says with a wink, “and now I’m getting all this attention.”

While fame eluded him in this country, it managed to find him in--strangely enough--Lithuania, where he is known as Pranas Lubinas, the “Godfather of Basketball.” According to a recent story on him in L.A. Weekly, “When a (Lithuanian) player is complimented for a quick-footed pivot move, he is told, ‘You play like Pranas Lubinas.’ ”

How did Frank Lubin become Pranas Lubinas, hoop godfather of a former Soviet satellite state? Sitting in his favorite rocker at his comfortable Glendale home, Lubin carefully unwrapped a packet of press clippings, history unfolding in his hands. Mary Agnes, his wife of 57 years and a former international basketball player, came over with a bowl of nuts.

“Don’t forget to mention the U-boat incident,” she says.

Oh, yes. The U-boat. While the athletes were innocents abroad in 1936, the Games themselves, held in Berlin, were a prelude to war, political propaganda for Hitler’s Third Reich. The Olympic village was later turned into an army barracks, but World War II was still three years away and Lubin remembers his Olympic experience as “a wonderful time.”

After the Games, Lubin accepted an invitation to visit Lithuania, where his parents had been born. A short vacation turned into a three-year stay for him and Mary Agnes. Renamed Lubanis (his father’s original name) and called Pranas (which means Frank), Lubin became coach and player for Lithuania’s national team. He wasn’t the originator of the sport in Lithuania, he says, but he was the man who established American-style basketball in that country and set in motion a legacy of excellence that continues to this day.

In 1988, before Lithuania gained its freedom from the Soviet Union, Lithuanian players, including Arvidas Sabonis and Sharunas Marciulionis, formed the nucleus of the Soviet team that beat the United States for the Olympic gold medal. Lubin refers to those players as “students of my students.”

Lubin’s most memorable contribution to basketball in Lithuania--and the singular deed that made him a Lithuanian legend--was his performance at the 1939 European Championship in Kaunas, Lithuania. Never a basketball power before then, the Lithuanians upset archrival Latvia in the title game, 36-35, with Lubin scoring the winning basket in the final seconds. He was carried off the court by a sea of fans.

Even today, he says, “If you go over to Lithuania and mention Pranas Lubinas, they’ll set you up with anything you want.” Two years ago, the president of Lithuania visited Los Angeles and Lubin went over and introduced himself. “ ‘I’m Pranas Lubinas,’ I said. He looked up at me and went, ‘Aha, baskeetbool, ‘ “ Lubin recalls.

Lubin and his wife might have stayed in Lithuania longer but World War II interrupted their visit. That’s where the U-boat comes in. Nearly stranded in Italy late in ’39 after a tournament, Lubin made his way back to Lithuania but took the advice of the American consul and left Europe. After a tense incident with Latvian border officials regarding the validity of his American passport, the Lubins arrived in Finland and booked passage on a steamer. Somewhere in the Baltic Sea, their ship was stopped by a U-boat and boarded by German sailors.

“I guess they found everything in order because we were allowed to continue,” Lubin says.

Back in Los Angeles, Lubin worked behind the cameras for Twentieth Century-Fox, but he was the center of attention on the basketball court, leading the studio team to more than 20 Southern California Amateur Athletic Union titles as player-coach. Pro basketball, which didn’t coalesce until the ‘50s, arrived a little too late for Lubin, although he says the Minneapolis Lakers once offered him a $7,000 contract, $2,000 less than he was making at the studio.

Lubin had more than a casual interest in this year’s Olympics. With Lithuania competing as an independent country for the first time, he was filled with pride, expecting big results. Of course, “I am also an American,” he says, and was rooting for the Dream Team. When the teams met last Thursday, he had “extremely mixed emotions.”

His heart gave the Lithuanians a chance of upsetting the American juggernaut--Lubin even thought out loud that “Lithuania could beat them.” But the Lithuanians were mortal, like the rest of the world, and the Americans routed them, 127-76. Lubin took it well.

“Our Lithuanian boys were a little tense,” Lubin says, adding with a twinkle: “Nobody could have beaten that Dream Team. Not even with Pranas Lubanis.”