Beware Greeks bearing basketballs

Ode on a Grecian basketball, or:
Another lost battle for hearts and minds

ROBERT LISS

Of recent years, the Olympics have alternated with the Federation of International Basketball Association World Championship games to provide fresh bi-annual insults to America's no-longer-to-be-assumed hegemony in a basketball world that has become as predictably unpredictable as the time and place of Al Qaeda’s next attack.

The bottom had been hit, it seemed, four years ago in the 2002 FIBA games, when the U.S. charges recorded an astonishing sixth-place finish, and the characteristically American quick fix of a dose of Instant Larry Brown had failed to right the world again. The U.S. team wound up settling for a third-place finish in an Olympiad which saw the gold go to an Argentine team composed of legitimate National Basketball Association star Manu Ginobili and a slew of lesser-known passionately slicing and back- door-cutting team-mates.

A code name for "white guys"

What went wrong? The 2004 U.S. Olympic basketball team, selected too much on the basis of athleticism and individual brilliance, had neglected to bring a sufficient complement of three-point shooters, who are prized commodities in international play, with its trapezoidal lane, its varied zone defenses, and its now-foreign emphasis on player movement without the ball. Three-point shooters were a code name for white guys, with the character card lurking in the near-background.

The United States always learns from its mistakes, right? Accordingly, at this year’s FIBA World Championships in Saitama City, Japan, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski’s U.S. hoopsters were sold as a morally resurgent group of upstanding Americans, poised and ready to restore order to a basketball world gone as awry as Bush & Co.’s Iraqi war.

The FIBA games seemed to promise a U.S.-Argentina rematch. The Americans’ semi-final opponent, Greece, figured to be only a preliminary skirmish, and with the U.S. leading by 33-21 with six and a half minutes remaining in the first half, it appeared that the awesome talents of LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony made the U.S. too strong for the valiant but seemingly overmatched Greeks.

Sophocles scores again

But when Greece scored the next basket to reduce the lead to ten points, into the game came the uncannily named and wickedly proportioned 21-year-old Greek back-up center, 315-pound Sofoklis Schortsanitis.

During the game’s next five minutes, this newly-minted version of the differently-spelled but identically pronounced Sophocles wrote a play of a different sort: tragic to sentimental American chauvinists but Aristophanes-like in its farcical provision of laughter for the wickedly amoral chorus of gods and deceased players looking down with scornful pity at what the rest of the world has made of the intricacies of the U.S. game— intricacies that the U.S. greats have largely abandoned in favor of selling their individual talents to the highest bidder.

With Sofoklis running the court like a stampeding pampas bull, on the next play U.S. guard Kirk Heinrich inexplicably failed to pull the trigger on an open three-point shot from the left corner. Instead, he put the ball on the floor after leaving the ground with two feet— an automatic traveling violation of the sort a player of his caliber might commit once in his lifetime, somewhere in his early-teens, before incorporating into his muscle memory the one-trial-and-you-know-it-forever piece of learning that forever eradicates the impulse to re-evaluate an open shot.

Fear of body contact

With this play serving as an omen, the game’s momentum shifted radically. Sofoklis’s menacing glare brought into high relief the irrigation-ditch like furrow in his enormous brow. He set high picks that U.S. players ducked behind, rather than risk colliding into a Greek SUV with souped-up acceleration.

As he realized how little body contact with him the Americans would tolerate, the emboldened Sofoklis strung together four consecutive baskets. The Hellenites’ 22-5 run turned a 12- point deficit unto a five-point halftime lead that Greece never relinquished, on its way to a stunning upset victory, 101-95.

All arms, legs, vowels and consonants

How and why? ESPN commentator Fran Fraschilla’s story line intertwined several strands (different rules, insufficient preparation time to jell as a team, and “high IQ” foreign players capable of spotting and exploiting their rivals’ flaws).

More simply, we were witnessing the degree to which European basketball— not just the European players we see in the NBA— has narrowed the gap between itself and the NBA. Who were these Greeks, this hairy-chested collection of swarthy men whose height averaged six-foot-eight in their starting line-up, even before inserting their 21- year old, 315-pound chunk of nuclear weaponry? These players were indeed known in Europe. Several of them had been offered NBA contracts, including the six-foot-five left-handed Dimitrious Diamantidis, the “Octopus Man”— all arms, legs, vowels and consonants, coming at you in equal measure, reminiscent of both Gail Goodrich and Lithuania’s Sarunas Marciulionis.

Like Krzyzewski, like Bush

The U.S. players walked off the court slowly, Dwight Howard blowing his bubble gum and James pausing to accommodate an autograph-seeker. The Americans displayed no more dejection than they displayed authentic emotion in the promotional ads that attempted to pretty up America's various international disgrace/fiascos.

How hard were these players willing to work for Mike Krzyzewski, whose Bush-like smirking face showed no more genuine emotion than strategic sense? Though he has begun to bask in the aura of saintliness and sanctimony that was once the sole province of UCLA’s John Wooden, Krzyzewski has served a narrow clientele in Durham. What was to be made of his inexplicably minimal use of his two big men, Dwight Howard and home-grown wide-body Elton Brand? Even harder to explain was Krzyzewski 's almost complete failure to find some way to combat basketball’s simplest (and, many complain, most neglected in superstar circles) play, Greece’s high pick-and-roll.

If the right coach were truly the issue, then who should be next? If you want character, check out the face of coach Theotis Anakis, the hero of Greek basketball. Both the U.S. players and the Duke coach had shown so little passion as to make us buy-in fans sell out and shift our allegiance to Greece, perhaps hoping to build a dynasty around Sofoklis, and freeing up enough salary-cap room to lure those veteran guards Euripides and Aeschylus out of retirement.

Basketball used to make sense. The late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas habitually read the sports section of his newspaper first, explaining that he preferred heroism to the infinite foibles of the news section. Today, were he alive, Justice Douglas could start anywhere.

Robert Liss is a psychologist and former basketball player who lives in San Francisco.