They haven’t all been together in the same place since they got off the plane home from Munich in 1972. Then they were 12 exhausted and dispirited young men who had made a decision as controversial as it was historic. Today, near retirement age, with the advantage of hindsight, they remain frustrated by the events that transpired to rob them of their Olympic victory.
The 1972 U.S. Olympic basketball team — denied the gold medal by politics and unaccepting of the silver by conscience — is having its first reunion in Lexington and Georgetown, Ky., simply because its captain, Kenny Davis, lives in Paint Lick, his home base for the 40 years he has traveled the world as a sales executive for the Converse shoe company.
When Davis approached his employer with the idea of sponsoring a reunion, the maker of the iconic Chuck Taylor All-Star sneakers provided the seed money necessary to get the project rolling. Then Davis enlisted the support of his alma mater, Georgetown College, where he’s still the all-time leading scorer, to provide facilities and serve as the designated beneficiary.
The result is a three-day event that will begin with a golf scramble on Thursday, Aug. 23, for the benefit of the PGA First Tee Scholars program and culminate on Saturday night, Aug. 25, with a banquet. Both the golf outing and the banquet will be held at the Marriott Griffin Gate.
On Friday, Aug. 24, four educational seminars — free and open to the public —will be held at Georgetown College’s conference center. The seminars will deal with all the historical, political and sociological ramifications of the 1972 Olympics, including the shocking kidnapping of 11 Israeli athletes from the Olympic Village and their eventual execution at the Munich airport, all before the eyes of a worldwide television audience.
“We’ve never asked anybody to feel sorry for us,” Davis said. “We came home without a gold medal we deserved, but at least we came home. Those Israeli kids, who lived and ate with us in the Village, went home in caskets.”
The banquet speaker will be Doug Collins, coach of the Philadelphia 76ers and NBC’s basketball analyst for the Olympic Games in London. In 1972, Collins was a star player from Illinois State who made the team mainly because of his shooting ability.
With 0:03 remaining in the gold-medal game against the Soviet Union, Collins was fouled hard and made two free throws to give the U.S. a 50-49 lead and apparent victory when the Soviets missed a long desperation shot at the buzzer.
But while the Americans were celebrating the victory on the court, a bizarre scene was transpiring at the scorer’s table. The participants were the Soviet coaches, the game officials, the official scorers, and the head of the sanction organization of international basketball (FIBA). Although that official — William Jones of Great Britain — had absolutely no authority over the game, he convinced the officials to put time back on the clock to give the Soviets another chance.
The comedy — tragedy, actually — of errors continued until, on their third in-bounds attempt, the Soviets got the ball to star Alexander Belov, who knocked down two Americans as he caught the ball and spun for the basket that gave the Soviets a 51-50 victory.
So stunned that he didn’t noticed when somebody stole his wallet, U.S. Coach Henry Iba gathered his wits in time to lodge a protest on his team’s behalf. After a 14-hour debate, the five-person governing committee — which included three members from Soviet-bloc nations — voted 3-2 to deny the American petition. When the medals were awarded, the spot on the podium reserved for the silver medalists was vacant because the Americans had voted unanimously to not accept second place. The Soviet propaganda machine, which frequently used sports as a platform to win converts for Communism, immediately derided them as poor sports and sore losers.
“That wasn’t the case at all,” Davis said. “It was just that, under the international rules in effect at that time, we won the game. Simple as that. Why should we accept the silver when we had earned the gold?”
The robbery — and there’s no other way an impartial observer could view it — forced a lot of changes in international rules and policies. That will be the topic of one of the seminars on Aug. 24. Another topic will be the pros and cons of the American decision to not accept the silver medals, which today are apparently locked away in a vault in Switzerland.
Besides Davis and Collins, the members of the 1972 team are Tom McMillen of Maryland; Bobby Jones of North Carolina; Kevin Joyce of South Carolina; Ed Ratleff of Long Beach State; Mike Bantom of St. Joseph’s; Dwight Jones of Houston; Tom Henderson of Hawaii; Jim Forbes of Texas-El Paso; Jim Brewer of Minnesota; and Tom Burleson of N.C. State.
“All the guys are excited about getting together again,” Davis said. “We are linked in history. I’m sure it will be emotional for all of us.”
