World Basketball Championships Diary
Posted: Tues August 4,
1998
Alex Wolff will be in Athens covering the World Championships from Aug. 2-9.
DAY THREE: TUESDAY, AUG.
4
ATHENS—When
Shaquille
O'Neal got back from a trip here several years ago, someone asked
him if he had been to the Parthenon. His reply will stand
for the ages, longer even than that building itself:
"Aw, I can't remember the names of all the clubs we
went
to."
Styling ourselves more curious citizens of the world than
Shaq, Vanessa and I slogged to the top of the Acropolis
this afternoon in fluid-sapping heat and lung-singeing air.
For several weeks now wildfires have burned out of control
in Attica, just
north of here, and smoke has exacerbated the quality of the
city's normal, only marginally breathable air. The Canadian
government has helped out by lending Greece several
aircraft that can scoop water out of the Aegean and dump it
on the blaze. (This is
rather more dynamism than the Canadian team has shown at the
Worlds, where the can't-shoots of the north, with a 81-72
loss to Russia today, bowed out of the medal chase after
winning only one game. Memo to you Dookies: Even with hair,
Greg
Newton's game is
ugly.)
Trying not to be a slavish jingoist, and with the U.S.
safely through to the quarterfinals, I passed up the U.S.
team's 96-78 rout of Australia this evening, opting instead
to attend Greece vs. Yugoslavia in the Big House, the
20,000-seat Indoor Hall of
the Athens Olympic Sports Complex. The Greeks and Yugos had
already clinched spots in the quarters, too, but the two
countries have a bit of a thang going that figured to stoke
the crowd, and if there's one thing I've been in desperate
search of here
it's a stoked crowd. Yesterday the Yugoslav coach,
Zeljko
Obradovic, accused various unnamed international basketball
factotums of "being afraid of us" for not
permitting
Dragan
Tarlac and
Milan
Gurovic, naturalized Greeks born in Yugoslavia, to play for the
country of their birth. With Tarlac and Gurovic in tow,
Obradovic said, "The gold medal would already hang on
our chests." So apparently not everyone is trying to
avoid being slavishly
jingoistic.
But from the way the Yugos play tonight, Obradovic is
probably just being realistic. The atmosphere is here. A
smoky haze, the result of much of the capacity crowd
ignoring the NO SMOKING signs, overhangs the floor. The
Greek fans whistle at anything
Yugoslavia tries to do (though they throw no hot coins).
Still, the Yugoslavs seize early command, let the Greeks
whittle the margin to six at the half, then race out to a
19-point lead before winning 70-56. With nothing better to
do given the lockout
currently in place, every NBA G.M. ought to be here watching two
of Yugoslavia's players. After the Seattle SuperSonics
drafted 6' 11" center
Zeljko
Rebraca in 1994, they traded his rights to the Minnesota
Timberwolves. Rebraca opted instead to ply European
hardwood, most recently for Italy's Benetton Treviso. He
has a soft array of shots and superb court awareness, even
though he scores but nine points
against Greece. But on display more than anything is his
native gift for the blocked shot. Seven times he sends
Grecian field-goal attempts back whence they came, and at
least as many times shots get altered beyond recognition as
a result of his presence.
The other potential NBA star is
Dejan
Bodiroga, the 6' 8" multi-position player chosen in 1995 by
the Sacramento Kings, who makes a blind back-pass on the
break for a bucket that puts the game away. Bodiroga will
be with Panathinaikos Athens next season, after stopovers
with Stefanel Milan and Real
Madrid. You'd think Kings assistant
Pete
Carril would be leading the effort to sign this superb
passer—although Milan, Madrid, Athens ... Sacramento
has the ring of anticlimax to
it.
You've seen plenty through my eyes over the past few days,
so I thought I'd share the perspectives of others I've
encountered around the tournament. One is that of
Tim
Shea, the New York Knicks' new international scout, who's on
hand looking for the next
Dirk
Nowitzki. Watching the U.S. team, he expresses wonder at the
sweetness of
Jimmy
Oliver's shot,
David
Wood's resemblance to "the guy who played the Scarecrow in
The Wizard of
Oz," and
Brad
Miller's going undrafted. "There's too much dribbling going
on," Shea adds, as the U.S. struggles to beat Spain on
Monday night with a lot of screens on the ball. "You
watch the Russians, the Lithuanians, and the ball is always
in
motion."
Bob
Ryan of
The Boston
Globe keeps muttering about how every non-American team in the
tournament relishes a chance to run and take the ball to
the rack—even the South Koreans, who have the size of
a high-school jayvee squad. "Basketball in the States
is so slow-down oriented now
at both the pro and the college levels that this is very
refreshing," he says. Spain sneaks past an oblivious
U.S. defense for a quick basket in transition, which gets
Ryan going anew. "We're so unaccustomed to seeing an
up-tempo style that our opponents
get quick-break opportunities." Remember when
non-American clubs were supposed to be
"mechanical"?
Jean-Luc
Thomas is the lead basketball writer for
L'Equipe, the esteemed French sports daily. Like many hoops scribes
in that country, he takes an intellectual approach to
basketball that reminds me of the French jazz aficionados
lampooned on that old
Saturday Night
Live skit, the one featuring
Quincy
Jones and a mock French TV interview program called
Jazz
Perspectifs. I asked Jean-Luc whether he was working on another book
(the classic
Planète
Basket already being part of his oeuvre), and he astonishes me
with his answer: "I'm working on a book about the
tango."
I sense an opening here. "Are there any parallels
between the tango and
basketball?"
"No. The tango involves very precise gestures. The
music is
très
ecrite. There is no improvisation, the way there is in jazz and
in
basketball."
"Well, do you see any elements of the tango in the
play of the Argentine team here? Are they more mechanical
than other teams?" I was clearly groping
here.
"Ah,
non."
Jean-Luc smiles nonetheless. He knows the overreaching we
journalists sometimes allow ourselves to do, and he doesn't
begrudge me
mine.
Finally, I espy Indiana Pacers G.M.
Donnie
Walsh taking a ciggy-butt break just prior to the U.S. team's
game with Spain. Walsh is one of a number of
Indianapolitans on hand to take notes, as that Hoosier city
prepares to host the next Worlds, in 2002. This is his
first trip to Greece, and he's
staying at USA Basketball's headquarters, the magnificent Astir
Palace resort on the sea just south of Athens. "I went
to Fordham Prep in the Bronx back in the '50s, where the
Jesuits put you on one of three classical tracks," he
tells me. "In mine, you had
to study Greek. I actually read
The
Illiad and
The
Odyssey in high school. So seeing the Aegean, for me, is really
big."
Bigger, anyway, than it must have been for Shaquille
O'Neal.
Copyright 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
|
