Years ago, I saw this comedian on television. I can’t remember his name, or most of his routine, but there was one thing he said that’s stuck with me. Talking about the 1994 World Cup, which was hosted by the U.S., he wondered why it was that not a single incident of football hooliganism had occurred during the tournament. The answer he came up with was that since most of the games were taking place at stadiums in some of the roughest parts of some of the roughest cities in America, European soccer thugs had either decided to stay home or play nice. In other words, despite playing tough on that side of the pond, they were actually afraid of the thugs we’ve got on this side.
I heard this, and despite my distaste for violence, my loathing for the mob mentality, my total mystification with team partisanship, and my tepid sense of patriotism, I couldn’t help but well up with national pride: I come from a country with the meanest, most terrifying thugs in the world!
The feeling didn’t last long, burying itself somewhere deep in my subconscious to wait for the right moment to strike again. Which it did last week, when the United States men’s basketball team took the court in Beijing.
The Americans, still stinging from meager third-place finishes at the 2004 Athens games and the 2006 World Championships – their reputations as unbeatable basketball gods cast into the trash bin of sports history – showed up at these games with malice in their hearts and revenge on their minds, ready to run over anyone who got between them and the gold medal. There’s been all kinds of talk in the sports pages about how the members of this team, with their three-year commitments and their newfound devotion to team play, have been playing the game the “right way”: moving without the ball, finding the open man, executing on defense, sacrificing their bodies, sacrificing their stats. Which is all true. The “Redeem Team” has been playing the kind of beautiful, elegant, team-first basketball people are always bemoaning the lack of in today’s NBA.
But looking past that, it’s easy to see in the way LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and company have dispatched with their first four opponents (including reigning world champs Spain and American bugbear Greece) that they’ve brought good old American street ball to China, with every intent of not just beating their opponents but crushing their spirits and dashing their hopes.
Check out replays of those games on the Olympics Web site (www.nbcolympics.com), and you’ll see what I’m talking about. These guys are intimidating their opponents, scaring them, hurting them. Their crowding, physical defense; ruthless double-teaming; and full-court presses are leading to repeated steals and fast-break points, usually capped off by some ridiculous, muscular, gravity-defying alley-oop dunk. Against Angola, LeBron James swatted away a shot with such a thwack, you could hear it in Angola. And then, for good measure, and in open defiance of the Beijing Olympics’ “One World, One Dream” motto, James stood over that lowly Angolan and glared down at him with all the indignation of Zeus. It was a beautiful and terrible moment.
And it made me proud to be an American.
Side Note: Dirk Nowitzki has made it clear over the last three years that he is a great talent with little or no heart. After his Dallas Mavericks lost in the 2006 finals to the Miami Heat despite being up by two and three-quarter games, after they got humiliated by the eighth-seeded Golden State Warriors in 2007, after they lied down like whipped dogs this year against the New Orleans Hornets, word was out that Nowitzki is soft.
But the idea was always that he was soft by NBA standards, that when it came to the international game, his idiosyncratic style – a big man shooting like a guard from the perimeter – would be enough to get him through and that he’d prove himself, if not a champion, at least a baller.
Well, in Germany’s game against the Chinese on Saturday, a game both teams needed to win in order to advance to the quarterfinals and keep their medal hopes alive, the recent NBA MVP, with the ball in his hands and his team down by two with less than two minutes to play, managed to do this:
1) Get called for traveling;
2) Get called for charging;
3) Let NBA sophomore Yi JianLian hit a long two right in his face;
4) Miss a three-pointer that would have tied the game; and
5) Get the ball stolen out of his hands by a Chinese guard no one’s ever heard of.
And China won the game.
Looks like there’ll be no joy in Dallas again this year.
This article appears in August 15 • 2008.