The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [101]
I do not equate the death of the Israelis with the disappointments of Americans who failed to win a gold medal due to a mix-up in the starting times, or equate it to the judges of Communist-bloc nations voting to deny American athletes a hard-fought victory. But this book is about sports conspiracy theories. And the story of a basketball team who would ultimately win, and then win again, and then finally lose the same game—that belongs in a book about sports conspiracies.
Although there were a lot of great college basketball coaches to choose from in 1972, the United States Olympic coach was Hank Iba. It seems strange today that the U.S. would have bypassed Dean Smith, John Wooden, and all the great coaches in the prime of their careers for the then sixty-nine-year-old Iba. However, the old coach was a strict disciplinarian who had won college championships in the mid-1940s. He had been the United States national coach in 1964 and 1968, and had led his country to a pair of Olympic gold medals.
Many of the top United States players in the 1971-1972 season elected not to try out for the team—including UCLA center Bill Walton, the best player in the country. Walton was evasive in his reasons over the years. At one time, he said it was because he didn’t want to be exposed to negative coaching. Another theory was that he was making a political statement, due to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Regardless, Walton’s absence didn’t cost the United States a gold medal. Hey, four years earlier Iba had won a gold medal without the services of UCLA center Kareem Abdul Jabbar. The fact of the matter was that it usually didn’t matter which twelve college players were selected. Since basketball became an Olympic sport in 1936, the United States had never lost a game. They had never even came close to losing one.
Iba’s team had won the gold medal game against the Soviet Union in 1964 by a score of 73-59. In Mexico City four years later, the United States defeated Yugoslavia for the gold medal game by a score of 65-50.
The team that Iba assembled in 1972 was far from the “Dream Team” that the 1960 team had been. Instead, the United States had a young team which hadn’t ever played together, unlike the Soviets, who had many of their players back from the 1968 bronzemedal squad. The Soviets were much older than their American counterparts, more than five years older per man.
Even before the gold medal game, the United States had their problems. Brazil, rated number two in the 1972 Olympic tournament, gave the United States all they could handle. The United States led by a point with 6:50 remaining, and then Doug Collins from Illinois State scored seven points in about ninety seconds to give the U.S. some breathing room. The U.S. team eventually won by a score of 61-54. At that point, writers were writing that the other teams—particularly Russia and Brazil—had players that could play with the Americans, but not the depth.
The U.S. amateurs had the players who would turn out to be the top two picks from the 1973 NBA draft—Collins and six-foot-eight Jim Brewer (from the University of Minnesota). The United States didn’t just have one talented center, they had two. Tom Burleson was the third overall pick in the 1974 NBA draft, and the seven-foot-four center played in the NBA for seven years. Tom McMillen was a six-foot-eleven center that would go on to be the ninth pick in the 1974 draft, and play eleven seasons in the NBA before becoming a congressman.
Because of McMillen and Burleson, one can understand why Iba elected not to run teams off the court. His teams walked it up more than the players liked. In the semifinals,