The following is an article from Uncle John’s Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.
In the Olympics, silver means second-best. Here’s the story of the 1972 U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team adn how they refused to take second place.
THREE SECONDS TO GOLD!
Before 1972 no U.S. men’s basketball team had ever lost in Olympic play. Starting in 1936 (the year basketball became an Olympic sport), U.S. men’s teams won 63 consecutive games- and seven straight gold medals. But just after midnight on September 10, 1972, in Munich, Germany, that golden winning streak came to a screeching end, courtesy of the Soviet Union. The final three seconds of that game may be the most controversial Olympic finish of all time, because officials allowed those three historic seconds to be played not once, not twice, but three times.
TEAM OF DESTINY
Although the U.S. was favored to win, the Soviet team was not only good, it was seasoned, having played hundreds of games together. The American team, on the other hand, was basically a college all-star team; most of its members had played together only a few times before the Olympics. According to U.S. assistant coach John Bach, the team’s experience amounted to 12 exhibition games plus the Olympic trials. To top it off, the 1972 squad was the youngest ever to represent the United States in Olympic competition. They had two things going for them- they were tall (average height: 6’7″) and they were talented (an amazing 10 members of the team went on to become first-round NBA draft choices.) “These were the two strongest countries in the world fighting for supremacy, and basketball was ours,” said U.S. guard Doug Collins, now head coach of the Philadelphia 76ers.
Surprisingly -at least to those who believed the U.S. couldn’t lose at men’s basketball- the Soviets built a 10-point lead in the second half. They kept that lead for several minutes before U.S. guard Kevin Joyce led a furious comeback. Pressing and hustling, the Americans whittled the lead down to a single point at 49–48 with 38 seconds left. But the Soviets had the ball. Intent on running out the clock, they passed back and forth, keeping the ball away from the Americans.
With just 10 seconds left, Joyce deflected a pass from Aleksandr Belov, and teammate Doug Collins scooped it up. Collins drove toward the basket to make the winning shot. “As I picked up my dribble,” Collins recalled 40 years later, “I saw the guy from Russia. He was not going to be able to get an offensive foul- he couldn’t get there. So basically he was just going to cut my legs out from underneath me.” Soviet player Zurab Sakandelidze fouled Collins so hard that he fell against the basket stanchion, which he said “knocked him woozy.” An intentional foul was called against Sakandelidze. With three seconds on the clock, Collins gathered his wits and sank two free throws, giving the U.S. a one-point lead. The score: 50–49. It looked like another Olympic championship would be theirs.
LET THE DO-OVERS BEGIN
After the free throws, only one second remained on the clock. A single second wouldn’t give the Soviets enough time to in-bound the ball and drive to the hoop. Game over? No. A referee blew his whistle and stopped the game. He’d noticed a Soviet assistant coach gesturing frantically that they had signaled for a time-out between Collins’s two free throws and been ignored.
Lead referee Renato Righetto allowed the time-out. When play resumed, according to Righetto, the clock should have been reset to show one second remaining. It wasn’t. William Jones, secretary general of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA), came out of the stands and ordered the time keepers to turn the clock back three seconds- the time from the whistle of the foul against the Soviet Union to when the U.S. team scored two free throws would be played again. “Jones overruled the referee and the official scorer,” said U.S. team captain Kenny Davis. “He had no power at all to do…
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