The Joy of Being Wrong

About nine years ago, I noticed a dearth of information on the 1972 Olympic basketball final, so I wrote about it and put it on the Web. A few years later I bought my own website and started putting some more writing up there. Having that kind of written record is fun to look back on, but a decade is a long time, and it's occasionally sobering to look back on something you now feel differently about. After the Beijing Olympics, I can proudly say I've changed my mind on USA Basketball.

My proclamation in 1999 that the US Olympic basketball team should no longer feature professionals was an idea that had an extremely short shelf life, if any. My contention, which I still stand by, was that the NBA players who lit up other countries for their first few Olympiads were not Olympians in the true sense of the world. In 2004, the American team gave the biggest test to the notion that NBA players belong in the Olympics with their bickering and their embarrassing behavior. They were, in many ways, the culmination of the attitude that had caused me to write that "in the coming decades, the Olympics should be less about getting the marketability and results we desire and more about developing the type of people we want to serve as instruments of 'friendship, solidarity and fair play.'"

http://www.sportshistory.us/dream.html

Interestingly, the guy I chose to quote as an exemplar of sportsmanship ended up coaching the 2008 team that proved me wrong. Mike Krzyzewski was one of two architects (along with Jerry Colangelo) of a team that restored USA Basketball's reputation. This year's Olympians defeated the toughest field ever while displaying the kind of camaraderie that had been sorely lacking. They hung out at the Olympic village, they rooted on their teammates, and they got along. Yeah, it doesn't sound like much, but it's something that the previous Dream Teams (or whatever you want to call them) managed to fail to do.

For good or ill, the age of unspoiled amateurs competing in the Olympics is over (and it's debatable whether it ever existed). Jerry Colangelo's key insight when he took on the challenge of rebuilding Team USA was that it would take more than an all-star team. He looked at character, starting at the top, and put together a team that could play the international game while holding true to an American style of play. In 1992, you got the feeling that the Americans were playing basketball about as well as it could be played. In 2004, they were still playing well, but they looked like they were up against a style of play that was superior. In 2008, they looked like they had the best of both worlds.

I have no idea whether the basketball rebirth we witnessed in Beijing is sustainable (like the slam dunk contest, it could be something an elite player does once and then passes on for the rest of his career), but it was fun to witness. Another thing that was fun to witness was all of those traveling calls! Maybe we could have the international refs sit in on an NBA game or two a year---the looks on our guys' faces when they get called for steps are just priceless.