Team USA and the Basketball Hall of Fame...

Say what you will about the new Big Three in Miami,
it's going to be fun to watch!  

So now that the summer of LeBron has run its course and we know where he and other coveted free-agents will be playing in the NBA next season (the whole of New York City just hung their respective heads for a moment.  Yea, they're still not over it!)  (And while extending the mildest of apologies to baseball's "pennant races" (boo... the Mets are coming up short again)) it is finally time for us to turn our collective sports-attention to the 2010 FIBA Basketball World Championships.  Whew, bet you didn't see that coming!  Just as Football’s FIFA World Cup is played every four years, so is this International hoops tournament; although admittedly, on quite a bit smaller of a scale than their world dominating big brother footballers.  Most Americans think of the Olympic Games as the benchmark for world supremacy in sports, including basketball, but it is in the World Championships where the “official FIBA Champ” has been crowned since 1950.

When Spain won the FIFA World Cup this summer
hundreds of thousands flocked the streets in Madrid
to welcome them home.  Comparatively, international
basketball is an afterthought.  

I have often wondered why the Basketball World Championships seem to be so traditionally over-looked globally, but after long and deliberate consideration I have at last come to the realization that the simplest explanation must be the correct one.  Maybe it just appears that way because in comparison with the unfathomable mania that dominates the globe for a solid month during the World Cup, nothing could possibly measure up.  Right?  I mean, really.  Every four years the World's basketball faithful have to follow that???

Arvydas Sabonis is under consideration to
enter the Hall of Fame next year.  

Or maybe, because of the Olympics, most sports fans just don't really care at all.  For example, in 2002, the event was held in Indianapolis… considered by many to be a “basketball city.”  Almost nobody showed up.  The crowds were embarrassingly sparse… even for USA games.  And that year, infamously, a team from the United States of America… with all NBA players on the roster, finished SIXTH in the world; something unheard of!  Two years later in the Olympics, Bronze.  USA Basketball needed to change. National teams from Europe and South America in particular had started to display much more cohesiveness and chemistry than the American squads as most had been together under the same system for years.  And with each passing year the athleticism and ability of international players was also on the climb.  The US policy of throwing random players together for a couple of weeks with a different system and coaching staff each time was not going to cut it anymore.  The “World” had caught up.

So USA Basketball turned to revered basketball mind, Jerry Colangelo and Duke coach (and Hall of Famer) Mike Krzyzewski, to turn around Team USA’s shaky culture.  They started by getting solid 4-year commitments from the best American players.  (In the past many elite players would turn down invitations last minute, due to the grueling NBA schedule, injuries, or simply the lure of a summer social life.)  But now it was different.  The USA had something to prove.  30 guys were invited to camp, and only 12 guys would emerge.  Kobe, LeBron, Dwayne Wade, and Dwight Howard had to TRY OUT… probably for the first time since the 6^th grade.  Nobody was guaranteed a spot.  The US was indeed rejuvenated, but it still wasn’t enough in the 2006 World Championships in Japan, as a savvy Greece team upset the “redeem team” in the semi-final.  USA finished Bronze again.  And while that same team was back again two years later to indeed “redeem” while winning the Gold medal in the 2008 Olympics in Bejiing, Team USA has not finished better than Bronze in the FIBA World Championships,  since 1994.  Sixteen years ago was the last time Team USA won the coveted “Naismith Trophy” that accompanies the Gold Medal.  Think Dr. Naismith could have ever predicted That???   :) 

And speaking of the good doctor, while gigging up in Connecticut recently, I was able to swing up to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts.  Which is right down the street from where he came up with the idea for the game back in 1891, when the YMCA charged him with developing an indoor game to provide an “athletic distraction” for rowdy youths trapped indoors during the long cold New England winter months.  If you don’t know the story, check out the way Bill Cosby told it in San Francisco back in 1972.  (“You can’t play football… because your fingers have disappeared, man.”)  Seems like a fairly sensible request to create an indoor game, right?  And while the game the Doctor invented that day with a soccer ball and a peach basket, is very different from the high-flying super-sport that it has developed into in the past 120 years or so, most of the rules were established way back in that YMCA Barn, by Naismith and his restless kids. 

I had been to the Hall of Fame once before back in the year 2000, but this was my first time since the new building had been completed in 2003.  Now there is a huge building in the shape of a sphere (or a basketball shape, as they say around here) right off of I-91 where the history of basketball greatness is forever enshrined.  The exhibits they have on the early years of the game are fascinating, as well as the details on how the game evolved into one of the most popular in the world, and the ring of honor, where all of the best ever are immortalized, is a thrill for hoops junkies like me.  But the coolest thing about the place is that there is a NBA style basketball court right in the middle of the sphere where you can shoot hoops all day if you want.  Perfectly buoyant hardwood floors, soft break-away rims with silky smooth nets, and those ideal leather basketballs that practically dribble themselves.  So when I got in I eagerly grabbed a ball off of the rack but then an employee told me that the courts were closed at the moment for a special clinic that some UMass players were giving to a High School Girls team from Montreal.  More than slightly disappointed I shrugged it off and headed back to the elevator, but then he said, “But you can join in if you want to.”  That was all the prompting I needed.  

So for the next 45 minutes I got to run drills with UMass Players: Terrell Vinson, Freddy Riley, and Sean Carter along with D’arcy, Jennine, Amelie and the rest of the Canadian hoopsters with Pony-tails!  So much fun… you never get to run drills in real life.  I think I hit something like eight of my first nine threes.  It’s amazing how much easier it is to shoot without the wind gusting in unpredictably.  After ten years of gritting it out on the menacing concrete, unforgiving steel backboards, and archaic bare rims of the New York park street-courts, it was like dying and going to heaven.

Later on while perusing the museum I would occasionally peer over the side to look at all of the people shooting hoops throughout the day.  During normal playing hours there are lots of hoops available for people to try their jumper (including the original Peach-Basket) and one time when I was looking down I noticed, that on the basketball court every possible demographic that I could think of was represented.  From toddler to grand-mother, all different shapes and sizes, all differing nationalities and style preferences, all wearing unmistakable smiles.  How often do you come across a game so universally enjoyed?  So simple that its appeal spans so vastly across the human landscape?  I couldn’t think of another sport that lends itself so readily to the masses, where all you really need is a ball and a basket, and it hit me in that one moment how special this game is.  Doctor Naismith may have completed his assignment that day for his bosses at the Y, but the lasting result of his “athletic distraction” has proved nothing short of miraculous, eventually providing worldwide happiness beyond measure.

Inspired to get back on the court to shoot a few more, I raced back down the stairs, grabbed a ball off the rack, and started dribbling toward an empty hoop.  Quickly one of the employees caught my eye and said, “oh, you only have about ten minutes left to shoot okay, because the court is closing early today.”  “Okay, cool, thanks,” I said, slightly dismayed, looking around at all of the jubilant hoopsters having a blast on the hardwood, “Why is it closing early?” I asked.  “Because of a wedding,” he said.

Oh c’mon Mom.  Maybe she wanted it! :)

Anyway, last weekend the Hall of Fame welcomed in new members Karl Malone, Dennis Johnson, and Scottie Pippen (fittingly introduced by last years inductee, Michael Jordan) as well as the 1992 US Olympic basketball team.  Or you may remember the media dubbing them the Dream Team.  That squad with Mike, Sir Charles, Scottie, Larry, and Magic dominated the games that year, winning each contest by an average of 43.8 points.  The world was certainly overmatched in those days, but alas, the times they have-a-changed.  And we are about to find out who is the best in 2010.

Derrick Rose has the quickness to
compensate for the lack of size on
the US Squad.  Will it be enough?

So if you are sitting around this weekend with nothing to do.  If your baseball team is already out of the playoff picture (102 years and counting, North-Side-of Chicago!) or nationally televised Preseason football games that don’t mean anything can’t really grab your interest (Brett Favre only played four downs last night, Minneapolis!) why not dust off your patriotism and check out the Basketball World Championships from Turkey starting this Saturday.  Will Kevin Durant, Derrick Rose, Tyson Chandler, and this US team of young upstarts be able to live up to their Olympic-Gold older brothers (or fathers), and bring the Naismith trophy back to the states for the first time in sixteen years?  With teams from Spain, Brazil, and Argentina sporting the bigger and more experienced rosters this year, it is going to be far from easy, and the US may even be playing the role of an Underdog in this tournament.  And well...  you know we have a soft spot for guys like that around here! :)

Let's go Coach K and the young dogs!!!

USA!  USA!  USA!!!
Sorry, I 'm just dusting off that patriotism.  

Thanks for reading,

Underdogs OUT!

Next up: The Underdogs head through the middle of the country as the Underdog Trail leads ON... to Colorado!