Good Story On USA Basketball

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Good story on USA Basketball

Summer of '72 a reminder there's no silver lining

By Gene Wojciechowski

ESPN.com

LAS VEGAS -- Thirty-four long years later, Mike Bantom still wonders what it would have felt like to bow his head and have someone drape a gold medal around his neck. This is what a single unfulfilled moment can do to you. It can frustrate. It can infuriate. It can leave a hole in your heart the size of a wristband.

On Wednesday at the Cox Pavilion, Bantom sat on a metal folding chair near courtside of the first-ever practice session of the newly organized USA Senior National Team. If U.S. coach Mike Krzyzewski and his staff were smart -- and they are -- they would invite the now-55-year-old Bantom to a team dinner at their swank Vegas digs, the Wynn Hotel, and ask the former St. Joseph's forward to describe the day this country's choke hold on basketball and gold medals came to an end.

And if LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Elton Brand, Gilbert Arenas and the rest of the U.S. players are smart -- and they are -- they'll listen and perhaps understand they're not just playing for themselves, but for you, and me, and Bantom. Or as the program's managing director Jerry Colangelo puts it, for "redemption."

In 1972 Bantom earned a place on the U.S. Olympic basketball roster. Sixty-four players were invited to the tryouts at the Air Force Academy. Twelve players were selected to the team coached by the legendary Henry Iba. There was no confusion about what was expected. No USA men's hoops team had ever lost a game in Olympic competition. Anything less than perfection and a gold medal was unthinkable.

"After the team was picked we had a three-week training camp at Pearl Harbor Naval Base," says Bantom, now an NBA senior vice president of player development. "And I guess it was in Hawaii, but we didn't see much of Hawaii. We saw the naval base."

Krzyzewski, a former Army captain, houses his team in the Wynn, home of bed linens with 320-thread counts, of restaurants whose menus include $170 caviar tastings, of nightclubs with sultry, provocative names such as Lure and Tryst, of shops that feature Cartier, Dior and Blahnik. They practice twice a day.

Iba's team lived in barracks and practiced in the morning, afternoon and after dinner. "We lived as soldiers in the barracks," Bantom says. "We ate at the mess hall. We got up in the morning when [the soldiers] got up. Lights out when their lights were out."

Krzyzewski's team has no curfew. The players can return to the luxury of the hotel, sit poolside if they choose, play video games in their rooms or become close, personal friends with every club on The Strip. After all, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

Iba's players could return to their one-room barracks with no air conditioning and then try to sleep in their much-too-short, government-issued single beds with mosquito netting. Of the three weeks they were there, Iba gave them one night off -- and took them to a Don Ho Hawaiian Revue.

And then Iba's team traveled to Munich for the 1972 Summer Games, where it faced the USSR in the gold medal game. With three seconds remaining, the USA led 50-49. The Americans owned the one-point lead thanks to a pair of free throws by USA guard Doug Collins, whose son Chris is now assisting Krzyzewski here at the U.S. national team practices.

But then the U.S. team was undone by a referee's whistle, by a timekeeper's slow finger, by a FIBA official's mind-boggling ruling, by a three-quarter-court-length pass (think Grant Hill's pass to Christian Laettner in the 1992 NCAA Tournament) by the Russians, by a game-winning layup as time (or, at least, FIBA's version of it) expired, by a failed U.S. appeal.

Bantom remembers. Why bother even trying to forget? It isn't possible.

The USSR team "won" the gold. The USA team chose not to accept silver. Bantom never bowed his head.

"I think the major emotion is just frustration," he says. "After all these years the one thing I really realize is how rare it is -- and what an honor it is -- to win a gold medal. I really thought we had done that. And I wish I had that medal to show for it."

There are no more givens in international basketball. Sure, the U.S. hoops team has won gold in 12 of the last 14 Olympics, but it could manage only a bronze in 2004. And it has won just three of 14 World Championships, the last one coming in 1994.

Granted, the U.S. hasn't always sent its A-teams to those championships (Athletes In Action represented the U.S. in 1978 -- and finished fifth). But in 2002, on U.S. soil, the George Karl-coached World Championship roster was stacked with NBA stars ... and finished an embarrassing sixth.

Colangelo is tired of embarrassments (though Kobe Bryant's recent decision to undergo knee surgery, relayed to USA Basketball officials by Bryant's agent, came as a total surprise to Colangelo and Krzyzewski). Colangelo's coaching and player roster is handpicked. His management team was chosen with equal care.

This isn't the 1992 Olympic Dream Team. That team was built to annihilate once. Colangelo's program is built, so says his blueprint, to dominate over a long period of time.

Wednesday's practices were a nice start, but only a start. Now comes the hard part: winning.

Maybe Bantom can help with that. All anyone has to do is ask.