Reports last week that the Basketball Hall of Fame would be moving up the 2010 induction ceremony, so as to avoid conflict with the FIBA World Championship tournament and thus focus the hoops universe’s full attention on the 1992 USA Olympic team enshrinement, got me to reminiscing about that seminal game in basketball history: The gold-medal match between the Dream Team and Team Croatia at the Barcelona Olympiad.
While few observers at that time thought the game would even be close after The Greatest Team Ever Assembled (still) had demolished the competition in Barcelona, everyone was well aware that regardless of the final game’s result, the match would literally be one for the books, internationally.
And history has borne out that feeling, ultimately culminating in the unstoppable twelve entering the hallowed halls of Springfield later this year. The Dream Team’s influence was profound and immediate with the jump of basketball to near-preeminence among the world’s most beloved sports, the final burgeoning of the NBA to global sports juggernaut status, and a new emphasis among national sports committees worldwide on basketball. Some credit Spain’s masterful dominance of The Continent today on the Barcelona Games, as though the shine and glamour of Team USA had permeated the country to produce Gasols and Navarros and Rubios.
Twenty years later – and who’d’ve imagined this back then? – that game remains at your fingertips, available for viewing on YouTube in eight parts – Awesome.
Back in 1992, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and some others on the Dream Team covered up the verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry expensive Reebok logos on the red, white and blue jumpsuits the team wore while accepting their gold medals. Those of us old enough to recall even remember some hand-wringing when Mister Nike Air himself implied that he might not attend the gold-medal ceremony with the offending logo on his gear.