ShareThisBy BERNIE LINCICOME
Scripps Howard News Service
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Whoopee. The US of A gets to go to the Olympics.
It has come to this. Our national basketball team had to play its way to Beijing. You know, just like Angola and Iran, like it was hockey, or even soccer, for crying out loud.
And crying out loud, or whimpering softly, is what we have been doing recently when it comes to The Game We Love taking on the world.
So, this becomes a big deal because it has been such a bad deal of late, our expectations jarred in the last Olympics, in the last two World Championships, in faded memories of the Dream Team, left to unworthy heirs.
We went from bullies to showoffs to punks to losers, and still never changed anybody's mind about where the best basketball is played and by whom. It was us. U.S.
Always has been.
This should be a great yawn, but it isn't. This should be like learning that Starbucks opened a new store. Or Kohl's is having a sale.
We are asked to be proud that the best basketball players on the planet, or enough of them to bother, did not find a way to lose in Las Vegas -- and how dicey things might have gotten had it been in Venezuela, where the tournament was originally supposed to be -- and will, along with Argentina, represent this hemisphere at the Olympic Games.
Never mind that Argentina did not bother to use four of its NBA players -- most notably Manu Ginobili -- off the team that won the gold in Athens.
That's what we used to do. Send in scrubs to dust off the early nuisances, saving the stars for later, not bothering them with grunt work.
But now the sneaker is on the other foot, arrogance has given away to anxiety, our desperation to make it right again is so great that we will use LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony to beat Uruguay.
How easily and mightily we rolled through the Virgin Islands, like a cruise ship with credit cards, and barely nodded at Canada and Puerto Rico and the rest as we sailed on.
This is as it should be and as it would be whenever we take the trouble to bother, because basketball is our own special invention, our national brand, as thoroughly American as Coke and Apple and the Galleria.
Our assurance has never wavered on that, our conviction as firm today as it was when we would send North Carolina's junior varsity to whip Yugoslavia.
This is the same sort of encouraging return that just last summer had us satisfied that our rightful place atop the basketball world had been achieved, right up until Greece -- yes, Greece -- whipped pretty much this same team and turned gold to bronze at the world games in Japan.
No such problem this time, with victory after victory by 40 points or so, with the addition of Kobe Bryant and Jason Kidd, building on the unselfishness and teamwork of James and Anthony, adapting to the international nuances of the game (such as hitting three-point shots) instead of going all school yard higgledy-piggledy -- not to re-blame Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury or anything.
This bunch is hardly the NBA All-Star team, save the aforementioned four, most notably Bryant, who seems to be the missing ingredient.
As the best player on the planet, Bryant need not boast of it, just as Michael Jordan did not need to on the original Dream Team. Egos must give away to camaraderie, the common purpose more vital than the individual strut.
James and Anthony have repeated their successes of last summer, with Anthony not only shooting threes but hitting them, a benefit that could certainly come in handy for his own Denver Nuggets.
All of this, I suppose, can be credited again to Mike Krzyzewski, apparently able to remind pros what it was like in college, even those who did not go to college, such as Bryant.
More astonishingly, he has convinced them to play defense, or something resembling defense enough for this side of the globe. He has emphasized the game's fundamentals, though one imagines he might have had to show them what a fundamental is.
Here's what it has come down to. In order to beat the world, we have had to turn back the evolutionary basketball clock, sublimating great individual skill for unfashionable cooperation.
It is almost as if Dr. J never soared or Dominique Wilkins never flew or ESPN never showed a highlight.
We're back to basketball with running boards, but we're in the Olympics.
Whoopee.
(Contact Bernie Lincicome at lincicomeb@RockyMountainNews.com.)
