Moment of truth for basketball's Team USA
COMMENTARY
The U.S., which faces Argentina next, is eager to redeem itself after the disappointment of the 2004 Athens Olympics. It would serve the team well to remember its comeuppance lessons.
BEIJING -- In 1936, our basketball team kicked some serious Olympic butt.
A guy named Joe Fortenberry scored eight points in the gold-medal game. So did Canada.
Final score: USA 19, Canada 8.
After that, Canucks stuck pretty much to pucks.
We thought we were pretty hot stuff. But we got beat in 1972. (OK, so the German clock-keeper let the Russians rob us.) Then we lost again in 1988. (Danny Manning and David Robinson notwithstanding.)
So we sent for the big guns. Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Karl Malone, Charles Barkley . . . we rounded up every big-time basketball player we could think of except Meadowlark Lemon.
This strategy succeeded. We beat Cuba by 79 points. I think all five Cubans smoked cigars while they played.
We also beat Angola. I bet you can still remember where you were on that 1992 day when the news came that we beat Angola in a game of basketball. I mean, be still my heart.
We got pretty cocky again.
Comeuppance came in 2004. We were floored. We got Uncle Sam's hat handed to us.
Our basketball team went to Greece and hit the skids. Our defense had more holes than the Acropolis. I took one look at our offense and did exactly what Meryl Streep did years later when she got to Greece to make a movie. I shouted out: "Mamma mia!"
Our punks stunk.
I saw them take the court and said, wow, check out these names: Allen Iverson! Stephon Marbury! LeBron James! Tim Duncan!
About a week later, the only thing I wanted to check out was out of my hotel.
Jason Kidd of our 2008 team here in Beijing remembers the feeling pretty well.
"I stopped watching after we lost to Italy," he said.
Unfortunately, the feeling is about all Kidd remembers well. We didn't play Italy that year.
We did play Puerto Rico.
I always assumed we could beat Puerto Rico in basketball with any five guys of ours in shorts. I thought a Kansas Jayhawks junior-varsity could beat those guys. I felt we could win with Wesley Snipes, Woody Harrelson and the cast of "White Men Can't Jump."
Puerto Rico pounded us.
We lost by 19. We couldn't have made a shot that day if the Puerto Rican kids had left the gym and gone for a swim.
I'll never forget Julio Toro, the coach, saying how proud he was to have his Puerto Rico team beat "the big colossal from the North."
