Overseas

46
filipino globe palakasan
November 2006
IT’S A CRYING SHAME
We had everything going for us. The novelty of it, the initial
excitement, the drive. Too bad, it’s all gone now. Michael Jordan, Dream Team I
Team USA:
The dream and
the nightmare
Shaquille O’Neil helped lead
two Dream Teams to victory.
It has been downhill for the
Americans from there.
RAUL AGOT in Los Angeles
Basketball is in business again in
the US. Weeks into the new NBA
season, it’s a rip-roaring time for
some of America’s biggest stars.
For a while, they were also the
world’s best outfit. Remember the
Dream Team?
“Forget it,” writes US basketball
analyst Roger Hoffman. “There
won’t be another one.”
The NBA-laced dream ended
in Athens during the 1998 world
championship, where Team USA
got hammered into third place.
Although it swept into the gold
medal in Sydney two years later,
it sank back into ignominy in the
2002 worlds in Indianapolis and
the 2004 Olympics in Athens. The
nightmare continued in Japan this
year with the US ending up with
nothing better than third place to
show for all the hype and ripple it
stirred across the ocean.
So what’s wrong with Team
USA?
Everything. Unlike Dream Team
I, II and III, which trotted out the
likes of Michael Jordan, Magic
Johnson, Larry Bird, Shaquille
O’Neil, Grant Hill and Reggie
Miller, subsequent teams had a
hard time summoning the kind of
patriotic fervor that drove their
predecessors.
Add to that the constraints of
professional basketball, where
commercial and legal interests
play bigger than the game itself.
The 1998 team, for instance, went
to the world championship already
a loser. It failed to get NBA players
because of a lockout over pay
dispute. Instead, the US sent the
“Dirty Dozen”, a team of hardworking
present-and-future stars
of the minor leagues. Deprived
of Dream Team status, they wore
their new name like a badge of humiliation.
Outside the US basketball establishment,
there’s the inevitable: the
march of once faceless, nameless
players who came to the NBA,
prospered and shone and went
to play for their national teams.
Around them, a small army is built
and under their spell, the army
responds to the challenge —to a
man.
“You can’t keep the coming of
night, just as you can’t keep other
teams from catching up with us,”
blogs Rupert from Indianapolis,
one of thousands of anonymous
commentators of the game that
earlier disparaged for their opinions
but are now making a lot of
sense.
Since Dream Team I, the US had
not lost a game until it fell to Russia
in 1998. It lost to Argentina and
Spain in 2002, to Puerto Rico, Lithunia
and Argentina in 2004 and to
Greece in Japan this year.
The only way the US can ever
regain basketball supremacy is to
forget the dream and wake up.
OBITUARY
In his time, Auerbach smoked out the enemy
For the best part of the 1950s and
‘60s, the legendary Red Auerbach
stood head and shoulders above
the NBA, with his trademark cigar
bringing a certain brashness to his
figure.
He had every right to behave
like a giant. In that decade, he
led the Boston Celtics – to a
man a legend – to nine NBA
championships.
When he died early this month
at 89, he had secured his sporting
legacy: 938 wins, making him
the most successful coach in
NBA history until Lanny Wilkens
passed him in the mid-1990s.
Until his death, the straighttalking
Auerbach served as team
president. Fittingly, the team has
dedicated the fledgling season to
his memory.
“Red was a guy who always
introduced new things,” Steve
Pagliuca, a Celtics managing partner,
said. “He had some of the
first black players in the league
and some people didn’t like that,
but you’ve got to do what’s right
for the fans,” he said.
“So I think we tried to do things
thoughtfully.”
Auerbach was born in Brooklyn,
on September 20, 1917. He was
inducted into the basketball Hall
of Fame in 1968.