Ramblings' Journal

Amen to that.

How terribly disappointing.

Stay with the pros because it would be worst with college players, this is just a bump in the road and i did not know it was required to stay in the village to play basketball.

Good sportsmanship isn't necessarily required to play basketball, either. What's your point? Mike's point was that the US team consists of a bunch of over-paid idiots who are so spoiled and egocentric that the Olympic Village was beneath them.

my point is that i did not know it was a crime to be rich nor licking someone butt was in order to play the game, and on top of that iam quite sure other pros lived somewhere else. it bugs the hell out of me when all of these other standards apply to pros ie you know how much they make and ect to me this is class warfare at the cheapest.

The comments directed towards the U.S. team are troubling.

The comments concerning the composition of the team are accurate. The comments about their boorish behavior is accurate.

But people in the U.S. rooting against the U.S. team seems to be a bit much.

DS, I have that same reaction when I hear people rooting against America in fields of much more important endeavor -- like Michael Moore claiming the Iraqi "resistance" are true revolutionaries who should and will defeat us.

Personally, I think rooting against your own team in sports is far more benign.

I agree, the composition of the team wasn't sufficient. You really only had one big man (Tim) and you had a bunch of slashers, as opposed to pure point guards and spot up shooters. Add that to the fact that many of the guys are younger, and you only have about three weeks of practice and that is the recipe for success.

Do you really think if Shaq, Kobe, Garnette, Tracy McGrady, & Jason Kid were playing that the games would have been even close?

Do you really think that if they had a solid three months of practice to learn and understand the international game, that even this team would have had a problem winning the Gold?

I think the context of the loss must be looked at and evaluated, with decisions made on how to achieve a more unified time through longer practice periods.

Thank you hirez for a fact based response based on the realities of the game.

However i do believe that the subtle politics of race in america are, unfortunately, also at play.

The unnecessary impuning of the character of the bball players was echoed in a number of similar situations…

…in commentators criticism of Crawford and Gatlins’s mini celebration after winning their prelim race... ...in characterization of the australian women’s conduct after losing to the us women as a demonstration of their "good sportsmanship" rather than disrespectful upstaging in line with the spirit of "trash talking" engaged in leading up to the game... ...in Bob Costa's sharing that the signature moment for track and field competition was in El Guerrouj’s not again beaten by superior performers, ignoring US athletes delivering a performance that represented the greatest dominance by any track&field team in the history of the competition...

At some point i hope we not only take the time to dialog with each other, but that we also take the time to direct no knee jerk collective responses to NBC. Perhaps in doing so we can shed light on a history of subtle character assassination that not so subtlety keeps us divided along lines of race.

You can be "quite sure that other pros lived somewhere else" all you wish, but I've heard no evidence to support that. OTOH, my point was that their behavior is analogous to visiting good friends or family, receiving an invitation to stay with them at their house, and snidely refusing to do so. [IMO, their insistence on staying aboard the QE amounts to an extra-large "FU, your digs aren't up to snuff for us high-rollers!"] Sportsmanship embraces more than just a players on-court actions. American basketball players are aberrant in a crimal sense when compared to all other American sporting endeavors. That evidence shouldn't be difficult to find, and I'll look for it this afternoon. I don't possess an eidetic memory, but I have seen the damning statistics on this sub-culture.