Photo courtesy of news.bbc.co.uk
Tomorrow is the 38th anniversary of the day when communists took everything away from Americans in terms of athletic dominance and superiority. That’s right, it’s the anniversary of the ill-fated 1972 USA-USSR Olympic basketball game, where the final seconds were controversially replayed and the outcome was in the Soviet Union’s favor. In my family, we call that a Get-Back Goal, and we stopped letting my cousin Trevor have them when he was five.
Anyway, Coach K, in his position as coach of the USA Basketball team, decided he wasn’t going to let Russia get away with this nonsense, and he rightly called out Russian coach David Blatt after Blatt tried to say that the USSR was the “rightful winner” of those Munich games.
“It’ll be a negative from the way the U.S. looks at it forever, and should be,” said Coach K in an ESPN article today. “And it’ll be in some ways a positive for those who believe in fairy tales.”
For anyone that has ever spoken to Coach K, you know he’s the king of one-liners, and seriously, this article is full of them. He basically goes on to say that most of his players are 21, and weren’t even alive when the Munich games happened, so-why-are-we-even-talking-about-it, and that it really has nothing to do with the fact that USA is going to tear Russia to shreds tomorrow: “His eyes are clearer now because there are no tears in them. So, it’s great. Whatever he thinks, he thinks. It really has absolutely no bearing on what we’re trying to do tomorrow. Absolutely none.”
But I think my favorite part of this article is when ESPN goes on to elaborate that Coach K didn’t even watch the Munich Olympics because he was basically protecting the entire world from communism and really didn’t have time:
“Krzyzewski did not watch the game when it happened, as he was in the U.S. Army manning a field artillery unit at Camp Pelham in South Korea, 2 miles south of the demilitarized zone that still separates North and South Korea.”
And that, Coach Blatt, is a diss.
NoMad Blogger 
Coach K’s comments were probably a little ignorant and offensive toward Blatt, but I doubt he meant any hostility or harm toward Blatt.
Here is a nice little article by one of my bloggers about this issue. Is this causing unnecessary conflict? Was the USA right to refuse its medals in ’72? What about now?
http://competitionnotconflict.blogspot.com/2010/09/soviets-deserved-gold-in-72.html