In preparing his team for the game, Newell played up Spandarian’s boast. They think they’re going to beat us, he told his players. They say we invented the game, one of the few things they’ll acknowledge we invented. Guys, this is more than a game. We’re talking about a way of life.
Only basketball, yet the symbolism was unavoidably greater. Newell showed no reluctance to emphasize the cold war stakes. Before the game, he invited an American official into the locker room to talk to the team about the Soviets, their political system, their propaganda machine, and the importance of beating them. Jerry West—West, the perfect name for the situation—absorbed the larger meaning of the confrontation. The consequences of East-West tensions had come home to his family years earlier, on a June morning in 1951 when word reached Cheylan, West Virginia, that David West, his revered older brother, had been killed by an artillery shell in Korea. Since then, Jerry had been haunted by war and “the incredible pain and devastation it brings not only people but countries.” All the talk of nuclear holocaust scared him. He would do anything to serve his country, but he didn’t want to go into the military and get killed like David. This was his contribution, on the basketball court. “This was not about the USA beating the world, it was about beating Russia,” he said later. “The differences in our countries were so enormous, it was like two boxers that had hate for each other. Everyone was afraid of each other. We heard about all the big guys they had and how physical they were. It was almost like you were driven by fear.”
Meaning comes from life experience. The cold war talk meant less to Oscar Robertson. Growing up in the inner city of Indianapolis, he worried about poverty, about being beaten up, about his grades. There were a lot of things more important than worrying about the Russians.
After West scored the first basket of the game with his efficient, perfectly squared-up jumper, the only thing the Americans had to worry about were the referees, Bozhidar Takez of Bulgaria and Roger Weber of Switzerland. The Soviets could not keep up with the U.S. fast break, but the refs kept calling what Newell called “ticky tacky” fouls and violations. Newell thought one ref was blowing his whistle at every opportunity because he was overly sensitive to the cold war tension and wanted to control the game like a political mediator. “This one official was from Switzerland, and the only thing he would ever see is the three-second violation. He caught Oscar one time dribbling through the three-second area and called a three-second violation!” After several calls, Newell pointed at his watch and tried to say “one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three” in Italian. “The ref looked at me and said, ‘Oh, that’s a very nice watch’—as though I was trying to sell it to him,” Newell joked later.
Although Spandarian had spoken dismissively of Robertson beforehand, the Soviet game plan seemed to focus on him. They double-teamed him with the small guard Valdis Muiznieks and six-six Yuri Korneyev, and at times surrounded him with three players. Displaying the extraordinary all-around skills he would take to the National Basketball Association later that year, Robertson merely turned from being a scoring big man to a stunningly effective point guard, constantly feeding West with precise passes for open shots. “The floor play of the Big O was something to pop eyeballs,” noted Braven Dyer. Newell pulled him from the game twice in the first half—once after a technical foul—and with Robertson, West, and Jerry Lucas all on the bench late in the half, the Soviets made a run, narrowing what had been a seventeen-point deficit down to 35–28 at the break.
In the locker room at halftime, Newell told his team that they could not trust the officiating. “We’re going to have to just go out in the first five minutes and put them away,” he said. The players responded with what he later called “the greatest press defense I ever saw.” Robertson and West—a combination for the ages—pressured the Soviets from baseline to baseline, stealing the ball time after time before it reached midcourt. After a spurt that widened the lead to thirty points, Newell backed off, took out his starters and began substituting so that all twelve players got in the game, everyone except the two shot-putters down at the end, who had warm-up suits but no trunks. West sat down as the leading scorer with nineteen points. Robertson, held to only two points in the first half, finished with sixteen but wished that he could have stayed in longer and pounded the Soviets even more. “They didn’t know who we were,” Robertson said of the Soviets. “They miscalculated our ability level.” One imagines the Big O never had to utter those words again in his career.
When questioned after the game about his officiating, the Bulgarian referee said the Soviets played a cleaner style and that he didn’t like the way the Americans threw their elbows. Jerry Lucas, who finished with twelve points, disagreed, saying the Russians were “getting away with murder under the boards.” Perhaps the Americans were treated unfairly by the refs, but the foul totals contradict that perception. The Soviets were called for thirty fouls; the U.S., twenty-eight. Robertson, Lucas, and Les Lane had four fouls each, and only Terry Dischinger fouled out. On the Soviet side, two starters had four fouls, and two fouled out, including Viktor Zubkov, their leading scorer, who had been in the violent rebound battle with Lucas and Walter Bellamy all night. No matter, the final score was the hardest elbow of all in the cold war struggle: US 81, USSR 57. No one could come close to the Americans, not yet, though reserve center Darrall Imhoff astutely predicted that the world would catch up someday soon.
More than three decades later, after the IOC had dropped its last pretensions of amateurism, and after American prestige in the international game had indeed slipped, the U.S. sent to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics a group of NBA superstars who came to be known as the “Dream Team.” Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, John Stockton, Scottie Pippen, Patrick Ewing, David Robinson, Clyde Drexler, Chris Mullin—wave after wave of basketball wonder. But that squad of multimillionaires essentially represented an attempt at restoration, a mercenary effort to return to the greatness that once was, to repeat the untarnished brilliance of the original dream team in Rome led by the college stars Oscar Robertson and Jerry West and Jerry Lucas and Walt Bellamy, all of whom would later join Coach Newell in basketball’s Hall of Fame.
As they left the Palazzetto dello Sport, the American players knew that two games remained, against Italy and Brazil, before gold was theirs, but beating the Russians was what mattered. Pete Newell made that clear when he gave them three days off and encouraged them to visit Venice or Paris. He didn’t need the jukebox now for motivation. Arrivederci, Roma.
ANOTHER AMERICAN sports dynasty was challenged that Saturday evening, with far different results. This happened on Lake Albano, twenty miles southeast of Rome, where the heavyweight crew final was held. The setting seemed almost too achingly beautiful to disturb, even with the clean glide of sculls and graceful sweep of oars. The smooth blue-black waters of Lake Albano reached depths of nearly six hundred feet, filling the five-mile oval bowl of a primordial crater embraced by rich green slopes on the south, sunburned brown hills on the east and north, and a vast landscaped terrace on the west leading up to Castel Gandolfo, summer palace of the Pope. A correspondent for the Times of London described his surprise while approaching the lake: “Those who row are so used to going down to rivers that it comes as a curious sensation to climb steeply up a mountainside and find oneself nine hundred feet above the neighboring airport and rowing at a height at which one is usually asked to fasten one’s belt ready for landing. A tunnel cut through rock suddenly brings one out on the inner edge of an extinct volcano.”
The eight-man crews came out late Saturday for the heavyweight showdown after four days of racing on the rowing course, which cut on a diagonal 2,000 meters across the currentless lake. It was an event long dominated by the United States, which had won every gold medal since 1920. In that era, the U.S. team was the winner of an Olympic Trials regatta contested by the best college and club crews, not an all-star team of rowers plucked from various crews, a pol
icy adopted in later decades. From 1920 through 1956, the University of California had represented the U.S. team three times; Yale and Navy, twice; and the University of Washington, once. To the surprise of many experts, the Naval Academy prevailed again in 1960 and made it to Rome.
It had been a trying year for the Midshipmen. When their longtime varsity coach, Rusty Callow, retired before the season because of deteriorating health, it was widely assumed that he would be replaced by Paul Quinn, the plebe coach, who had led the Navy freshmen to four national championships, was beloved by his oarsmen, and was well regarded within the Eastern rowing establishment. Other programs in the East had such esteem for Quinn that no other coaches applied when the job came open, assuming he deserved it. But the Navy athletic director thought Quinn was too closely aligned with Coach Callow, wanted a break from the past, and brought in Lou Lindsey, a former Cal coxswain who was the club coach at Stanford. It was a challenging situation for Lindsey. The crew that awaited him was talented and experienced, losing only the number seven man from the year before, but the rowers were also disappointed about Quinn’s being passed over and reluctant to embrace the new coach. Appearances did not help: Lindsey was short and unprepossessing, in stark contrast to the commanding, six-four Quinn.
“Human nature is such that you slowly get used to anything,” Peter Bos, the senior captain of the Navy crew, said later—and he and his teammates slowly adjusted to Lindsey. “We never said, ‘God, this guy is the greatest,’ but we took direction. And we started out rowing well.” Early in the spring, they scored an important win, defeating Syracuse University and Cornell for the championship of the Goes Cup regatta over a wind-shortened course at Onondaga Lake near Syracuse. Midway through the season, they hit a rough patch, finishing last behind the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, then losing to California but defeating Wisconsin in a three-way race in Madison over a 13/4-mile course on Lake Monona (moved from the usual Lake Mendota because of choppy waters). Cal was considered the top team in the country then, and Navy kept pace, finishing only a seat-length behind. When they returned to Onondaga Lake for the traditional season-ending Intercollegiate Rowing Association Regatta, the Middies again lost to Cal in a close finish.
While training for the Olympic Trials, they ended a long workout by fooling around inside the boathouse at Annapolis, tossing guys in the air, and the stroke man, Joe Baldwin, hurt his wrist in the horseplay. The mishap sidelined Baldwin for several days, but what seemed like misfortune gave the team a needed spark. The stroke man sits first in line, facing the coxswain, and sets the rhythm and pacing of the crew. It is a crucial assignment, requiring ease and precision. With Baldwin out temporarily, Coach Lindsey put another member of the crew, Lyman Perry, in the stroke man’s seat, and the team responded positively. Suddenly, they said, they felt like they were flying. When Baldwin recovered, he was placed in another seat and Perry kept on as stroke man.
Even with that, at the Olympic Trials they barely made it out of the semifinals. An official started the race prematurely, oblivious to the fact that the Navy coxswain had raised his hand to indicate he was not ready. The shell was not lined up properly, facing at an angle toward another boat instead of straight ahead. In the frenzy to straighten out and catch up, one of the Navy rowers “caught a crab,” meaning he could not lift his oar from the water at the end of a stroke. He dropped his oar handle temporarily, losing a stroke or two, and Navy had to put on a furious sprint through rough waters the rest of the way to finish second, collapsing in exhaustion at the end.
It was a brutal way to qualify, but they got what they wanted: a third chance at California. The final turned out to be Lou Lindsey’s finest moment. Using his familiarity with the opposition as a former Cal man himself, he gathered his squad the night before the race and set the strategy: at a thousand meters, Cal would try to break away, using what was called a Power 20—meaning twenty strokes with extra exertion, a vigorous sprint within the middle of the long race. Rowing is as much psychological as physical, and Cal would use its Power 20 at a point where they thought they could break the will of the opposition. Lindsey told his men to listen carefully to the Cal coxswain, and as soon as he went into the Power 20, Navy was to follow suit.
“The idea was that if you hold them for their Power 20, you’re going to gain the upper hand. If they don’t gain a thing, it is inherently demotivating for them,” Peter Bos recalled. “And that’s exactly what happened the next day. At a thousand meters we were even with Cal, and when Cal took the Power 20, we took ours. At the end of the twenty we were still even with them. And five strokes later we were four seats out front. Why does that happen? Both crews did the same thing. But in their minds they lost, and in our minds we won. And the adrenaline you get from winning, and realizing what you had done, makes a helluva difference in your performance. We spurted to that four-seat lead and ended up winning by a full boat length.”
Other than the Navy crew itself, few were thrilled about the outcome. Most experts at the Trials shared the feelings of the Syracuse coach, Loren Schoel, who complained afterward: “I’m not convinced that Navy is the best U.S. crew or that it will win in Rome.” Clifford (Tip) Goes, the chairman of the U.S. Olympic Rowing Committee, a Syracuse man himself, was so lukewarm about Lindsey that he orchestrated a move to keep Lindsey from being named coach of the entire Olympic rowing team, an honor that traditionally went to the heavyweight coach. Instead, rowing officials split the coaching, placing Lindsey in charge of only his own crew.
Once the rowers reached Italy, the prospects grew no brighter. Several members of the Navy crew joined the ranks of U.S. athletes weakened by dysentery. During training on Lake Albano, they had lost badly to a makeshift eight made up of American teammates from the two four-man shells. Then they barely survived the preliminary rounds of Olympic competition and went into the final with few experts thinking they could retain the championship. But the U.S. tradition was strong, and its crews had fired back from underdog situations before. At Amsterdam in 1928, the then-not-so-old soldier Douglas Mac Arthur, a sports addict who headed the American Olympic Committee, exhorted the Cal crew to an upset victory from the backseat of his limousine as his driver eased down a riverside roadway closely paralleling the rowing course.
Inspiration in heavyweight rowing now seemed the domain of the Germans. Their coach, Karl Adam, had become the talk of the sport for his innovative designs, astute race tactics, and rigorous training methods, including weight lifting to build shoulder muscles, which the Italian press, wary of German power and efficiency, dismissed as “Teutonic eagerness.” The brawny physics teacher from Ratzeburg came to Lake Albano with a veteran crew combining rowers mostly from Ratzeburg and Kiel who were skilled in the use of an unorthodox oar variously described as a tulip, a coal shovel, or a spoon. All three images accurately evoked a scooped-out rather than flat blade that was difficult to master but provided advantages if handled with proficiency, which demanded strong wrists because of greater water resistance. When working their tulip blades perfectly, the heavyweight eight—Klaus Bittner, Karl Hopp, Hans Lenk (who went on to become a world-renowned philosopher), Manfred Rulffs, Frank Schepke, Kraft Schepke, Walter Schroers, and Karl von Groddeck—presented an odd but hypnotizing sight. In another Adam innovation, the number four and five oarsmen pulled from the same starboard side to prevent veering, while all eight sat up straighter and stroked faster than other crews as little coxswain Willi Padge urged them onward.
Since arriving from Germany, the Ratzeburg-Kiel men had found a daily routine as comfortable as their stroke, leaving the Olympic Village at dawn, driving to Lake Albano, training until noon, pausing for lunch at a nearby abbey, resting in the shade for a few hours, training again until sundown, and returning to Rome late at night. When a correspondent for Die Welt asked Lou Lindsey what he thought of the Germans, he said they would have to prove it on the water. But when the subject of their oars came up, the “slim,
energetic” U.S. coach said he had tried to introduce the “coal shovels” in American rowing but faced much skepticism. If the Germans had success on Lake Albano, it would become easier for him to make his case, Lindsey added with a smile, “though they don’t really have to win the gold medal.”
For his part, after a week on the lake, German coach Adam concluded that the stiffest test of his crew would come not from the U.S. but Canada. He had watched the Canadians carefully in two earlier races and determined that they rowed each time precisely the same way, speeding up at 1,000 and 1,750 meters. On the eve of the final, he presented a race plan to his men that was a variation of the strategy Navy had used at the U.S. Trials. Germany would allow the Canadians to come as close as a half-length of the lead after one of their power pushes, enticing them into believing that they could succeed, Adam said. Then, just as the Canadians thought they could grab the lead, the Germans would speed up to forty-five beats a minute with a counterattack. The result would be psychologically devastating, he predicted, sending the Canadians into a shock that would amount to a half-boat push for the German side.
The race went exactly as Adam planned. With calm waters and a slight tailwind, Germany seized a quick lead, with Canada second and the U.S. near the back of the six-boat field. At the halfway point, the Germans were ahead by one and a half lengths, followed by Canada, France, and Czechoslovakia. In the U.S. boat, the oarsmen came to the realization then that they had no chance at gold. “Gold was the only thing we had in mind, not bronze or silver,” Bos recalled. “But halfway through, we just knew that practically we could not win gold. It just affects your performance when you see what is not possible. Like with the Power 20, when you expect to do something and don’t do it on the water, it quickly affects your strength and performance. The chemistry changes. The second half of the race we rowed hard, knowing the best we could do is maybe take third, and it affected our rowing.” Up at the front, at the 1,750-meter mark, the Canadians put on a power rush, just as the German coach had predicted, almost snatching the lead until the Germans, waiting patiently for that moment, went into a ferocious forty-five-beat counterattack and powered across the finish line nearly a boat length ahead, shattering the Olympic record by 5.2 seconds.
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