They are bound to be the least popular athletes in Greece over the next few weeks, no matter how many urine-testing machines the Bulgarian weightlifters break. The U.S. basketball team has to understand what it’s in for. And it won’t be pretty.
Which is the best news a basketball fan at the Olympic Games could ask for.
The Dream Team will take on Serbia-Montenegro at Belgrade to face the defending world basketball champions tonight. This is not an especially good time for the Americans to play what will surely be one of the hardest road games ever played.
They just got stomped by Italy, which might have delighted certain precincts along Mulberry Street but astonished just about everyone everywhere else. They needed an Allen Iverson prayer at the buzzer the next day to survive Germany, which didn’t even qualify for the Olympics. Now they get Serbia, at Serbia, which sort of makes the prospect of playing Duke at Cameron Indoor seem like a neutral site.
They will probably get clobbered again.
And, again, that is delightful news, and not just for those who think the professionals have worn out their welcome at the Olympics. Instead, what these disastrous pre-Games tune-ups have done is ensure that the basketball round-robin, which has been little more than a glorified exhibition in just about every Olympics since 1992, will have some buzz attached to. Maybe the most buzz attached to it.
Better, you would think the Americans have to understand that they won’t be able to glide through any of these games like they were playing the Clippers in January. Not unless they want the inglorious burden of becoming the first batch of U.S. pros to be sent home without gold. I still believe that even this mostly Blist
assortment of NBAers should have more than enough to win.
But now the B-listers have to bring their A-games. Every night. Which is also wonderful news.
And the thing is, as tough as Belgrade will be tonight, Athens will be even more of a test. In Belgrade, there will be just one united country rooting against the Americans. In Greece, it will be one united basketball world.
Gone are the days when the Dream Team was looked upon as a grouping of pied pipers in tank tops. We saw traces of that four years ago, on the night the news began to spread around the track and field venue in Sydney that the Americans were in deep, deep trouble. Cell phones began buzzing all around the grandstands.
Disbelief reigned.
But it was true. Across the main Olympic mall, inside the Sydney SuperDome, there were 14,653 people trying to lend their voices to the cause, trying to help an upstart team from Lithuania knock off the Dream Team. A guard named Sarunas Jasikeviscius was drilling 3s from every corner of Australia. The Americans
looked slow, sluggish, slovenly with the ball.
And the place was positively electric with possibility.
Finally, there came a moment, three seconds left in the game, the Americans clinging to an 85-83 lead, when Jasikeviscius found a sliver of daylight, well beyond the 3-point arc. He’d already made five treys. A sixth would usher in the kind of celebration that would have kept 3.7 million Lithuanians up for a week. Or a lifetime.
Jason Kidd and Antonio McDyess ran out at Jasikeviscius, but the Lithuanian got the shot off clean. The ball was in the air when Kidd and McDyess turned to a higher authority to help the Americans retain their veneer of invincibility.
“Go left!” Kidd shouted. “Go short!” McDyess screamed. That, at last, is what happened.
It veered left. It fell short. A buzzer groaned, and a large crowd groaned, then rose to its feet and gave the Lithuanians a standing ovation as they stumbled dazed around the court.
They hissed at the U.S. players.
Larry Brown, then the head coach, chased a referee off the court, a nice exclamation point. There was no mistaking who the bad guys were that night. No mistaking who the bad guys are now. The world smells blood.
Man, this is going to be fun.