Here’s my Flynn Rider moment: The U.S. basketball team wasn’t the rightful gold medalist at the 1972 Olympics.
The story you’ve heard, about how the refs kept giving the Soviets chances to win until they finally did, has always been inaccurate. Watch the final minutes and see for yourself:
Doug Collins hits the second of two free throws to give the U.S. a 50-49 lead with 3 seconds remaining, despite the interruption of the horn* at the scorer’s table as he shoots. During the foul shot, one of the referees puts his hand in the air and points to the table, acknowledging the horn, but he allows the shot to stand.
The Soviets immediately inbound the ball, but the ref stops the play at midcourt to deal with the horn situation. Two seconds tick off the arena clock, but the game hasn’t actually resumed.
On the ABC broadcast, Frank Gifford notes that the PA announcer has said that 3 seconds will be put back on the clock. However, the clock reads 0:50 at the moment the ref hands the Soviets the ball on their own baseline. They inbound the ball, but before the short pass is even completed, the horn goes off again – obviously to alert the refs that the clock is wrong. But the U.S. players celebrate as if they’ve won, and Gifford exclaims, “It’s all over!”
On neither of these two inbounds plays could you credibly argue that the Soviets lost the game and the Americans won it. The referee quickly stops the action on the first play, and the official clock is totally wrong on the second one. “They gave the Russians three chances!” is a flatly inaccurate summary.
What follows is, of course, the most infamous layup in basketball history. With the clock restored to 0:03, the Soviets execute a long pass to Sasha Belov, who scores the winning basket to deal the U.S. its first Olympic defeat in the tournament’s 36-year history. The U.S. players have long said they’d go to their grave believing they deserved the gold.
They didn’t deserve the gold. But I don’t think the Soviets deserved it either.
The plot twist I’ve yet to mention is this: After the first Soviet inbounds play is cut short by the ref, an older man comes out of the stands to intervene. He’s William Jones, the British head of FIBA, the governing body of international basketball. Jones orders the timekeeper to put 3 seconds back on the clock, even though he has no such authority.
For me, at least, Jones’ involvement is the moment that torches the game’s credibility. Roger Goodell can’t call down from his suite to tell the refs to call pass interference on the Rams, even if it’s the correct call. Gary Bettman can’t disallow Brett Hull’s Cup-winning goal, regardless of his opinion about what constitutes puck possession in the crease. They’re not game officials, they have no role in that chain of command, and any attempt to influence the outcome delegitimizes the whole thing. Once Jones puts his thumb on the scale, the whole thing is tainted.
Given the chaos and incompetence of those final seconds – the debate over whether the timeout system malfunctioned, the horn interrupting Collins’ shot, the two premature restarts, the inability of the refs to coordinate with the timekeeper, and the outrageous intervention of Jones – neither team would have accepted a loss. The only appropriate solution would have been to replay the game. It didn’t happen.
***
Fifty-four years later, different thumbs are on a different scale. Donald Trump, never one to hide his attempts to cheat, admits that he called his buddy (and tenant) Gianni Infantino to try to make Folarin Balogun’s red card suspension go away. Infantino is the president of FIFA, and FIFA did Trump’s bidding Sunday, striking down Balogun’s one-game ban – the first such reversal at a World Cup since 1962 – and making the U.S. star eligible to play tonight against Belgium in the round of 16.
The Belgians are pissed off. Other nations are pissed off. UEFA, the governing body of European soccer (and Infantino’s former employer), is really pissed off.
“When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined,” UEFA said in a statement. “We express our disbelief at such an unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable decision.”
Perhaps the greatest fear many of us had about this World Cup was that two institutions as nakedly corrupt as Trump World and FIFA would conspire to rig the tournament in the Americans’ favor. The stench of Argentina 1978 lingers in the minds of longtime observers of the sport, and conditions seemed ripe for something similarly sketchy. Banning a Somali referee from entering the country and forcing the Iranian team to commute from Tijuana were outrageous gestures from a host nation, but most of the world might have forgotten them if the tournament continued to deliver the thrills (as it has).
However, direct, governmental intervention on behalf of the home team – and FIFA’s willingness to cave to that intervention – is impossible to overlook, accept, or forget. Neither Trump, Rudy Giuliani's obnoxious kid, nor the freakin’ treasury secretary has any business getting involved. Infantino, like William Jones before him, has no business getting involved. Whether Balogun deserved a red card is irrelevant. The process is corrupted. The match is tainted.
What’s the appropriate solution today? The Belgians appealed (though they clearly saw the process as a sham) and were quickly shot down, but they’re still going to show up and play. I’ve seen a couple of people suggest that U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino should do the right thing by keeping Balogun on the bench all night. But we’re not living in a Foundation for a Better Life commercial, and Pochettino has been clear from the start that he didn’t think Balogun deserved the red in the first place. He’s surely not going to take a stand.
The more cynical response is that FIFA (and UEFA, and CONCACAF, and CAF …) has been shady and downright corrupt for generations, and that the knockout round of the World Cup is no place to develop a conscience. Surely, many of the same folks who will root on the Americans tonight were livid when Qatar beat the U.S. for the right to host the 2022 World Cup, a bidding process soaked in controversy. To paraphrase a guy who used to work at “Boston Stadium,” perhaps the U.S. team’s only imperative is “to do business as business is being done.”
Ultimately, though, Trump’s involvement in the Balogun affair does feel like, as UEFA’s statement noted, the crossing of a red line. If a head of state calls up the FIFA president, asks for a favor, gets the favor, freely admits to doing it, and the game goes on as normal without any consequence, there’s really no going back – just as there’s no going back from what happened after the 2020 election and on Jan. 6, 2021. If you don’t stand up to the brazen corruption and illegality in real time, you normalize it and you set the stage for others to do the same.
***
The 1972 U.S. basketball team did not accept the silver medal. The players skipped the victory ceremony, the medals were stashed away under curious circumstances, and two team members actually noted in their wills “that family members could not accept the medals after they die.”
For more than a half-century, critics have derided the Americans’ stance as sour grapes, an inability to come to terms with a historic failure, and what might today be seen as a Trumpian impulse to whine about a rigged system.
But even though I don’t think the Americans “won the gold” in Munich, I’ve come to respect their decision. The closing moments of that game were a cavalcade of incompetence, impropriety, and chaos, capped by Jones’ inexplicable decision to insert himself into the mess. Had their prayer of a deep pass not been answered by Belov, the Soviets would surely have protested the defeat and, who knows, might have had their own discussions on whether to accept the silver. Someone was going to go home feeling cheated, because the whole thing was corrupted.
So the silver medals remain unclaimed, left by a group of men who took a principled stand, accepted the inevitable criticism, and stuck with their decision. I don’t have to agree with them on the details to appreciate, or envy, their conviction.
*--There’s a whole other story here about rules regarding timeouts and substitutions in international basketball, and the ridiculous “Jeopardy!”-style buttons teams used to call timeouts back then. The Soviets were adamant that they wanted to call time between Collins’ two free throws, but claimed the electronic system was on the fritz, and the horn during Collins’ second shot was apparently an attempt by the scorer’s table to alert the refs to the timeout request. That adamance was represented by a Soviet coach standing right in front of the scorer’s table (and practically on the court) in a frantic attempt to get the ref’s attention about the timeout. The U.S. delegation believed, with some justification, that a technical foul should have been called.