By: Ronnie Kurtz
Basketball is first and foremost a game.
So when Kobe Bryant gallantly declared that this year’s rendition of the U.S. Men’s Olympic Basketball Team could defeat its vaunted 1992 predecessor, he of course meant that triumph would come on the court, in a game.
But the fact of the matter is that, up until the Dream Team ran through the Barcelona Olympiad, Olympic Basketball involved much more than mere games. The ideological Cold War that enveloped the globe suddenly became very hot when the world’s best athletes came together.
The U.S. Men’s basketball team has been a juggernaut throughout its history, winning every single game played until the 1972 Olympics. From 1956 onward, the undisputed two best basketball nations in the world were also the two most powerful politically. The Soviets would continuously field a team of their best players, professionals who played together year round and were as cohesive of a team as any NBA unit. The Americans, undercut by an Olympic rule forbidding NBA players to participate, routinely fielded a hodgepodge of college all-stars that put the pieces together on the run. Seemingly every Olympiad led to an epic showdown between the two, the citizens of each nation waiting with baited breath as battle raged on the television screen.
In spite of the U.S.’s stranglehold on the competition in the early years, its Olympic runs and collision courses with the Soviets were not lacking in emotion and intensity. As political crisis unfolded, the U.S.-Soviet basketball games took on an unprecedented importance. Much like the wars in Vietnam and Korea or the space race, Olympic competition, especially in basketball, was a chance for each country to assert dominance and superiority over its counterpart. The punishment of a loss for Americans was the disappointment of a nation; for the Soviets, the repercussion was much worse. In A Sense of Where You Are, 1964 team member and future NBA Champion Bill Bradley described the Soviet center in the gold medal game as “tough to stop” as “after all, he was playing for his life.”
Sound far fetched? Take a look at the 1972 Olympics. With the U.S. holding a one point lead with three seconds to go in the gold medal game, the Soviets inbounded the ball and failed to score. Yet, due to several controversial decisions by the referees, the Soviets were allowed to run the inbounds play two more times; they finally scored on the last attempt at the buzzer, handing the U.S. their first ever Olympic Basketball defeat and landing the U.S.S.R. their first gold medal. The U.S. players, incensed that the referees handed the Soviets the gold, boycotted the medal ceremony and did not accept their medals. To this day no one on the team has accepted their medal, and many players have written into their wills that their family may not accept the medal after their death.
That’s how personal, how emotional, how meaningful Olympic basketball used to be. The Olympic series was put on hold during the 1980 and 1984 games; each country boycotted the games hosted by the other. In 1988, at the conclusion of the Cold War, the American team suffered their first undisputed loss to the Soviets, knocked out in the semifinals. They stood on the podium and accepted a bronze, distraught as they watched their rivals celebrate.
But in 1992, things changed. The Soviet Union had fallen three years earlier; with a rule change allowing NBA players to play in the Olympics, the US was left without a formidable rival, politically or in basketball. A team that had 11 Hall of Famers, including such legends as Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson, the Dream Team steamrolled everyone they played, outscoring opponents by an average of 43.8 points per game; in the gold medal game, Croatia came the closest, barely losing by 32 points. America had shed her biggest rival and was now free to dominate geopolitics; her basketball team had done the same. A post-Cold War beacon of American superiority and exceptionalism, the Dream Team captivated the nation in a way that no team after ever can.
So, while it is highly debatable that the 2012 version of the U.S. team could beat the Dream Team on the court, there is no debate that the team does not hold the hopes and dreams of Americans like the Dream Team and all of its predecessors did.
But they better win. After all, the biggest transition following the 1992 Olympics is that now, their life depends on it, too.
