Controlled chaos

Last-place game can generate its share of stories

INDIANAPOLIS -- There's a good reason two of my colleagues -- Bob Ryan of The Boston Globe and Jim O'Connell of The Associated Press -- are legends in the biz. At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, they -- along with precisely 56 noncredentialed spectators -- were at their stations in the RCA Dome to watch Algeria and Lebanon hook up in the 15th- vs. 16th-place classification game of the World Basketball Championship.

Bob and Ock never pass up the match for the planet's booby prize, because each knows that news is as likely to bubble up from the bottom as descend from the top. In 1994, in Hamilton, Ontario, they took front-row seats for the meeting between those old Cold War allies, Cuba and Angola. Two Cubans wound up defecting that day, and both scribes found themselves sitting on a story. Until some rent-a-cops intervened, Ryan even struck up a mid-game conversation, in hoops Spanglish, with several of the Cuban players as they sat on the bench.

On Tuesday morning, Ock pronounced what we were about to see the "Mideast Regional." Then we watched Algeria, after trailing by a point at the half, race off to a 100-70 victory that sent Lebanon home winless in five starts.

By the time the buzzer sounded, the RCA Dome crowd had more than doubled, to 117.

"If you play the 15/16 game in the world championships, you have a chance of coming home with at least one win," Algeria's Mourad (Big Mo) Boughedir said afterward. Algeria will have those bragging rights. Its accomplishment is even more impressive considering that the team lost two top guards, including Ali Bouziane, who had led the club to the second-place finish in the African championships that punched its ticket to Indy. Rules on international eligibility can be pretty flexible, but FIBA frowns on suiting up for more than one country and had ruled both ineligible for having already played for the French junior national team.

For a Stateside equivalent of the 15/16 game, think of the old third-place game at the NCAA Final Four. Teams play for no reason other than to go off into the sunset with a bounce in their step. From St. Joseph's defeat of Utah, 127-120 in four overtimes, in 1961; to Bill Bradley's 58-point cadenza in leading Princeton past Wichita State in 1965; to Virginia's 78-74 defeat of LSU in the final third-place game in 1981, those prelims to the title game had a let-it-all-hang-out quality.

So, too, with the Worlds' 15/16 game, which makes it worth leaving that wakeup call. I wasn't there in Argentina in 1990, when Korea beat Egypt 117-115, but the score vouches for its entertainment value. Eight years ago Cuba may not have walked away with Borrell, but the islanders did leave with a 78-67 victory. And in Athens in 1998, Senegal struck a blow for sub-Saharan Africa, edging Korea 75-72.

Algeria and Lebanon have a few things in common: They're Arab countries and Francophile cultures, and each has struggled with recent civil wars. But one would seem to have a basketball advantage over the other. Algeria plays in FIBA's least-developed zone, Africa, whereas Lebanon, like Lithuania and the Philippines, is a place where even soccer bows down to hoops.

Yet it's Lebanon that will look back on these Worlds as the disaster. Johnny Neumann, the former NCAA scoring champ at Ole Miss, coached the Lebanese nationals to Indy. But to hear Neumann tell it -- and, impolitically, he told it from the interview-room dais after Saturday's 107-80 loss to Turkey -- nobody in the country cared about the team until it qualified, beating out Korea in the Asian championships with players Neumann had handpicked. Then the Lebanese Basketball Federation began meddling. The team in Indy wasn't the one Neumann wanted.

Neumann's itchy trigger finger was pointed so obviously at the muckety-mucks in the federation that they had no choice but to fire him mid-tournament. They did so with gusto, even misspelling his name in the press release. "He should not have talked this way," said team manager John Mamo. "He should not have gotten on national TV to insult the government in front of the players."

At least, true to form, Neumann went down shooting. By the time the 15/16 game tipped off, Johnny Reb had long since checked out of his room in the Embassy Suites and headed home to Greece, leaving assistant coach Saskis Koriyan to pick up his clipboard.

How chaotic had it been in the few days following Neumann's firing? Lebanon center Joe Vogel, a native of North Platte, Neb., and former player at Colorado State who was naturalized for this campaign, never lost the glum glaze on his face as he answered the question. "About as chaotic as it was before," he said.

Neither Ryan, Ock nor I caught the entirety of the postgame press conference with Algeria coach Billal Faid and guard Milcud Doubal, who had rung up 30 points, nine assists, six rebounds and three steals. We were too busy chasing down other players in the catacombs of the Dome, which actually echoed less loudly than the main hall had.

Only Didier Le Corre, editor of the French weekly Basket News, came to the interview room. When it was over, Faid nodded at Le Corre and said, "Thank you for your participation."

To which we might reply: "No, thank you for yours."

Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure, available online and in bookstores everywhere. He can be reached at http://www.biggamesmallworld.com.

 

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