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Power GrabThe Americans wrapped up their 60-0 gold medal run by routing their old nemeses, the Braziliansby Alexander Wolff
Two scenarios floated around Atlanta on the eve of Sunday's gold medal women's basketball game. One came from Tara VanDerveer, the coach who had guided the U.S. team over the preceding 14 months. "I can't believe we would come this far and not play our best game," she said.
Ruthie Bolton (6) wouldn't give up in a loose-ball tussle with Hortência (left) and Alessandra.
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The other take on how the final would play out came from Brazil's Marta de Souza Sobral, who, like Atlanta's public transportation system, is known simply as Marta. "We're going to steal the gold medal right in their home," said the 6'2" center for the world champions.
If there's one axiom that emerged from these Games, it's that Marta is unreliable. The U.S. Olympic team didn't merely play its finest game in schooling Brazil 111-87 to run its record to 60-0 and win the gold; on Sunday night all the American players scored. Together they shot 66% from the field, five delicious percentage points better than Brazil had shot in a 110-107 defeat of the U.S. in Sydney in the semifinals of the 1994 world championships. After that game the winners staged a raucous celebration during the bus ride back to the players' hotel that VanDerveer and two thirds of the members of this American Olympic team happened to share. In Sunday's final the American women parceled out 30 assists and mounted the medal stand holding hands, a gesture of togetherness that evidently hadn't crossed the minds of their male counterparts the night before. Gilt, you could say, by association.
In the end VanDerveer did not have to alter her belief. "This," she said afterward, "was our best whole game."
McGhee rose to the occasion in the title game, as did her teammates, each of whom scored.
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The first inkling of what her players had in store for her came to VanDerveer a year ago through the mail: She had prescribed individual workouts for team members during a break in formal training last summer, and signed worksheets sent weekly to VanDerveer testified to how closely each player was abiding by her regimen. From her home in Menlo Park, Calif., where she monitored the times run and the poundage lifted, VanDerveer could see that seven players weren't meeting their targets and would thus be conscripted into a remedial "breakfast club" when the team mustered for camp that fall. But VanDerveer's two finest performers, guard Teresa Edwards and power forward Katrina McClain—known as T and Tree, respectively—were meeting every bench-press benchmark, every mile-run milestone, every last goal VanDerveer had set.
VanDerveer had had her doubts about both. She had wondered if Edwards and McClain would buy into a program that demanded weight work three days a week, video sessions at least thrice weekly and a numbing 102,245 miles of travel before the journey was over. In their 30s now, with seven Olympic appearances between them, both players had been party to dispiriting third-place finishes at the 1991 Pan American Games and the '92 Olympics, as well as that loss to Brazil in the '94 worlds. Years of the have-jump-shot-will-travel life overseas, where club teams expect their American mercenaries to play no defense lest foul trouble keep them from gathering their requisite 40 points a game, had left bad habits ingrained in both.
Leslie took heat early from VanDerveer but was hot later as she scored a game-high 29 points.
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In fact, Edwards and McClain, each a former All-America at Georgia, were very nearly not members of the Olympic team. On the eve of the trials in May 1995, McClain had decided to accept a $300,000 offer from a club team in Hungary. The U.S. federation was offering $50,000, take it or leave it, with no guarantee that an Olympic roster spot would be held open if she lit out for Budapest. A shoe deal with Nike would have made up some of that gap, but, at 30, McClain had to consider her financial security. "I knew it was going to be all or nothing," she says now. "And I didn't think I was up for the whole year, for that kind of intensity."
Two hours before USA Basketball's deadline for returning a signed player contract, McClain called her brother, Troy. "She had supposedly already made her decision, and here she was calling me at that late hour, asking advice, second-guessing herself," he says. "I knew then what she really wanted to do." The Hungarians would have to find themselves another power forward.
Edwards's problem was different. In that loss to Brazil at the worlds she shot the U.S. out of the game, going 5 for 18 from the field, and over the seven games she played in the competition she dished out a miserly 21 assists. Would VanDerveer even want her? "[Edwards] got into a Teresa-versus-[Brazil's star guard] Hortência thing," says Lynn Barry, who supervises the women's program for USA Basketball. "T wants to win so badly, she felt she needed to take it all on her shoulders." When the selection committee included her on the team—thus making it possible for her to become the only basketball player of either sex to win three Olympic golds—Edwards broke down in tears of relief.
"I may have been a little skeptical at first," says VanDerveer. "I didn't want to get into a yearlong fight with a player who was bucking the system. And this system wasn't for everybody. But T and Tree bought into it. And if they were going to buy into it, it was going to work.
"I have a theory with my teams. Your best players have to be your leaders. And they both decided very early that they were going to be our leaders."
Before being named coach, VanDerveer had asked herself every morning what she could do to make herself a better candidate, and after she got the job and took a year's leave of absence from coaching Stanford, she visualized the medal ceremony at least once a day. An example of her visualization techniques occurred last November when the team came through Atlanta en route to playing Georgia in Athens. VanDerveer bused the players to the Georgia Dome and, though the building was set up for football, led the players out to the middle of the field. VanDerveer had asked Edwards to bring one of her gold medals from the 1984 or '88 Games, and, as an inspirational Olympic video played on the big screen, each player tried it on.
When someone hung Edwards's medal around McClain's neck, McClain instinctively raised her arms in triumph.
"How'd she know to do that?" someone asked.
Came the answer: She'd done it before, as a member of the 1988 U.S. Olympic team.
The case can be made—and to those who mistakenly think women's basketball was invented by Sheryl Swoopes in 1993 and perfected by Rebecca Lobo two years later, it should be made—that the growth of the game over the past dozen years is best reflected in the careers of Edwards, who at the opening ceremonies took the Olympic oath on behalf of all the athletes, and McClain, who helped carry the Olympic flag. "These Games probably meant more to them than anybody," says Andy Landers, who coached both at Georgia. "It goes beyond the Olympics' being in Atlanta. It's that they went into it as underdogs even to make the team. And on a day-to-day basis they had to meet expectations that they hadn't had to meet in years." Center Lisa Leslie, the Americans' leading scorer during the Olympic tournament, has a budding modeling career. Swoopes has a shoe named after her, and Lobo has the largest fan following. But Edwards led all women in the Olympics in assists, with a 7.7 average and a team-high 10 in the final, while McClain was America's second-leading scorer and leading rebounder.
Edwards and McClain first met 13 years ago at the National Sports Festival in Colorado Springs. Edwards was a backcourt prodigy just off her freshman season in college, McClain a ballyhooed high school senior. McClain would be enrolling at Georgia that fall, and Edwards expected to be peppered with questions each evening when they repaired to the room they shared. But none came. "I thought she was boring," says Edwards. "She wouldn't say a word. She'd just sit on her bed, reading her Bible."
In fact, Edwards's carriage and confidence had scared McClain. And when McClain showed up in Athens a few months later, she was in for another fright. She discovered from an array of Edwards family pictures gracing a desktop in her assigned dorm room that Edwards was to be her roommate. The ice between the two began to melt only
as preseason practice wore on and All-America Janet Harris bullied the freshman with impunity.
Eventually McClain took her roommate for an ally and faced Harris down, and soon T and Tree were doing movies on weeknights and church on Sunday. Years later, when the two teamed up to play club ball in Valencia, Spain, McClain would be able to return the favor; it was her companionship and knowledge of Spanish that helped pull Edwards through a challenging year with a difficult coach. Says Edwards, "[McClain] is good at reminding me that I can help other people if I'm strong enough to help myself."
Landers had to prod Edwards to try out for the '84 Olympics, and others on the team have similar stories of evolution. There is the Gump-like tale of stalwart backup center Venus Lacy, who grew up wearing braces on both legs and whose mother or brother had to carry her to elementary school. Reserve forward Carla McGhee was nearly killed in a horrific car accident nine years ago. And the gold-medal-game play of Leslie, who let Marta chug to the basket at will during the opening minutes and was sat down for doing so, turned magnificently around: She came back to pour in 29 points.
Two other U.S. players, reserve guards Dawn Staley and Jennifer Azzi, are every bit as chatty as Edwards and McClain are taciturn. As the Games wound down, Staley likened the Americans' sense of purpose and the resources at their disposal to the space program—so much marshaled to achieve a singular goal.
"I've been in Atlanta for two weeks now," Azzi added. "I can't remember the last time I could say that about one place. This must be home."
Stitch together those two thoughts and there is only one caption for the last event of the Centennial Games. It's a message not appropriate to Dream Teams, only to teams that dream. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.
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