![]() Iba had coached 40 years of college basketball, 36 of them at what was then known as Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State). ![]() It was funny because he comes back to me with almost tears in his eyes, going, ‘Didn’t they tell me to shoot the ball?’” “So Doug gets in the game, the ball comes to him after one pass, he pulls up and shoots the jump shot, and no sooner had the ball left his hand than Iba’s saying, ‘Get him out of there.’ Doug comes back – we laugh about it still. So they told Doug to get into the game and shoot the ball, saying, ‘We need some shooters in there.’ “They had a zone against us and the guys wouldn’t shoot the ball. “(Future NBA player and coach) Doug Collins was my roommate at the Olympics, and he and I are sitting together on the bench,” Ratleff related. Ten passes per possession was, seemingly, the ironclad rule. Olympic team, the roster was filled with athletes eager to play a fast-paced game … but it was coached by a veteran college coach, Henry Iba, who insisted on a slow-it-down style. Even as some of the more heralded college players of the day (including UCLA’s Bill Walton) opted not to try out for the U.S. communism during some of the darkest moments of the Cold War.īeyond that, there was an internal clash. It was a clash of systems: the amateur college athletes representing the USA against the older, state-subsidized “soldiers” and “students” of the USSR, the matchup framed as capitalism vs. For a time, Ratleff recalled, there was uncertainty whether the basketball final would be played until Brundage made his proclamation. The men’s basketball final – the women’s game wouldn’t join the Olympics until 1976 in Montreal – was to be the final medal to be decided in those Games. It could have happened to us just as easy.” After that happened, it really threw us back. Some of them you don’t talk to because of the language barrier, but you kind of know them, and you wave to them and stuff. ” … You’d see some of the athletes at the Olympics walking by. “I thought it was firecrackers and people having fun at the disco, which wasn’t too far from our dorm. “We heard all the action that night but we didn’t know what it was until we came in the next morning on the way to practice, when they told us,” Ratleff said in a phone conversation. After a 34-hour stoppage, including a memorial service in the main stadium, then-IOC president Avery Brundage brusquely – and, to many, insensitively – insisted, “The Games must go on.” But for the time being any reflection was brief. Ultimately, that terrorist act would change the Olympic movement and particularly the International Olympic Committee’s emphasis on security. 5 when eight Palestinian terrorists entered the Olympic village, killed two Israeli athletes and took nine others hostage, eventually killing the rest when a rescue attempt went awry. It was a bizarre finish to a bizarre game in a bizarre Munich Olympics, which turned tragic on Sept. ![]() team was supposed to appear but refused their silver medals. To their left is a vacant place where the U.S. The Soviet Union basketball team, flanked by the bronze-winning Cubans, right, stands on the podium after receiving their Olympic gold medals Sept. That silver medal did not belong to me, so I can’t take it.” ![]() “I tell people, my mother taught me at a young age that you don’t take anything that doesn’t belong to you. Kenny Davis (the team captain) has put it in his will that nobody in his family can accept it. ![]() “And I know there’s no way I’m gonna accept it. “They (Olympic officials) said in order to get the medals, everybody has to accept it,” said Ed Ratleff, a two-time first-team All-American at Long Beach State and later first-round pick of the Houston Rockets who was part of that team. They’re still in a vault somewhere, and I think we can assume hell will freeze over before that changes. The United States players, to this day, have refused to accept the silver medals from that tournament. Saturday marks exactly 50 years since the Olympic basketball debacle in Munich, a gold-medal game in which the United States appeared to have beaten the Soviet Union – and maintained what was to that point a perfect 63-0 record in Olympic hoops – only to have it reversed after referees (and administrators) gave the Soviets three tries to get it right. ![]()
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