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Tuesday, September 19
Memo to U.S. men: Enjoy the ride
By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com
SYDNEY, Australia -- Memo to the U.S. men's basketball team: Fly under it.
|  | | Gary Payton stretches as the American men practice for the first time in Sydney. |
The radar, that is. Fly under it. Come on, you can do it. Come here, win your gold medal, keep your flapping yaps under control and get out of Australia without leaving any of our national reputation behind.
Hey, start a trend. Be the first on your block of Dream Team alumni to have gotten out of an international competition in one piece, diplomatically speaking. Have a ball. Play some ball. Smile every 30th minute, just for the novelty of the thing.
You could have two of the most enjoyable weeks of your lives and still walk away with Olympic gold, so do it. What's not to like? You're in Australia, playing hoops, hanging out with your buddies, letting Vin Baker cook everybody dinner whenever he feels like it.
Makes you feel warm all over, doesn't it? And here's all you need to remember to keep that good vibe coming:
Easy does it.
The U.S. men have been low-keying it so far at the Games, "low-keying," of course, being the most relative of all relative terms. Oh, sure, Gary Payton already has begun rehearsing his globally famous routine of trash-talking players who don't even understand English, but surely by now the whole world knows that Gary Payton would trash-talk a hot-dog vendor for taking too long to get his Polish into a bun.
And sure, the Americans and the Aussies mixed it up during exhibition play the other day. And, yeah, now that you mention it, Payton, of all people, wound up as one of the tri-captains of the U.S. team, along with Alonzo "Silent Scowl" Mourning and Jason Kidd.
But you add it all up, it still doesn't even make one decent junior-sized controversy -- certainly not compared with Chuck Barkley and other members of Scream Teams past. And that's fine by us. This isn't about the hardware, it's about the software. The medal will come. What we're pulling for is some basic honor to go with it.
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Mourning's paternity leave |
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SYDNEY, Australia -- Alonzo Mourning of the Miami Heat, the
only true center on the U.S. men's basketball team, will leave the
Olympics for the birth of his daughter and miss two preliminary-round games.
Mourning will fly home to be with his wife, Tracy, for the
birth. Labor will be induced on Sept. 23 in Florida, so Mourning
will fly home on Friday. He will return by private jet on Sept. 26.
The games he'll miss will be against New Zealand and France,
neither considered any threat to the Americans.
"I'm going to miss two games, unfortunately," the 30-year-old
Mourning said. "But I do trust my teammates will be able to hold
down the fort until I get back."
-- Associated Press
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The whole basketball scene at the Games is a little weird these days. The addition of "professional" players to the mix a few Olympiads back just sent the sport hurtling into an entirely different -- and, alas, terminally boring -- stratosphere. The U.S. versus the world? What, how many points is the world being given?
Even here in 2000, where arguably the top handful of players in the NBA didn't even make the Olympic trip (Shaq, Kobe and Grant, just off the point of our head), no one has bothered to seriously suggest that the other countries are playing for anything but silver. For the Americans to lose this, they'd have to take a wrong turn at the Opera House and wind up in Canberra instead of the Olympic Dome.
It isn't the fault of U.S. coach Rudy Tomjanovich or his players that they comprise the most formidable team in the world, and they certainly shouldn't waste a moment feeling sorry for any of the other teams here. Hey, you want to get technical about it, Australia has more players with NBA championship rings on their fingers (Luc Longley and Shane Heal) than do the Americans nobody, last we checked). No point in being remorseful about any of this. It's sports.
But it'd be nice, even just for the sheer change of pace involved, to wake up every day for the next two weeks and read not a single ridiculous thing about the U.S. men's basketball team -- no nutty pronoucements, no me-firsting around the campus, no prima donna treatment (at least none that makes it into the papers), no taunting of the opponent in the midst of a 60-point blowout of some emerging nation with a name like the Revolving Republic of Serious Misgivings.
A little basketball, a little rest, a gold-medal wipeout and a nice trip home. It sounds perfectly innocuous, doesn't it? Indeed it does. It's just the ticket. You're in a lucky place, guys: You can find yourselves lionized for simply not acting like preposterous fools. Let's see how it goes.
Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, which has a Web site at http://www.sacbee.com/.
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