Michael Jordan led USA Basketball over Yogoslavia in 1982

Michael Jordan’s iconic shot against Georgetown 40 years ago, which gave North Carolina coach Dean Smith his first NCAA title, wasn’t the only championship performance he did that year.

Lesser known, but just as important at the time, Jordan helped the United States regain its claim as the world’s best basketball nation in the summer of 1982.

On the surface, the United States Amateur Basketball Association, now simply known as USA Basketball, was trying to bring together a team of amateurs to participate in the 50th anniversary of the International Basketball Federation, also known as FIBA. The US team will play the European All-Star collection in upcoming games in Switzerland and Hungary.

Those games weren’t important. ABAUSA also planned three matches against the Yugoslav national team in three different cities in the former Eastern Bloc.

Yugoslavia won the gold medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which was boycotted by the United States. And while nothing was at stake during the exhibition match, for the 12 amateur US team, everything felt like it was on the table.

Michael Payne, a center who just finished his freshman season in Iowa in 1982, said: I wanted to win. “

Form a team

The team was one of three that ABAUSA put together for the international tournament in the summer of 1982. Many of the players on these three teams, including Jordan, thought they were still amateurs when the 1984 Summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles, so the international tournament was an early stage where they could play on the Olympic stage. It was also an audition.

Teams that played in the other two sets of exhibition game locations, Colombia and South Korea, made a tryout. However, the FIBA ​​Anniversary Team was carefully selected due to the tight schedule that required a commitment from June 9th to 28th. ABAUSA sent a questionnaire to all elite college basketball players to measure their interests.

In the 1982 situation, players could decline participation for almost any reason, including having to stay in summer school or having a summer job. As such, the US Select team was not the absolute best talent that ABAUSA could get together to represent. Country.

Ralph Sampson of the Virginia Center, who won the 1982 Wooden Award as the National Player of the Year, did not participate. Other freshman sensations Jordan and Tar Heels didn’t just beat the title game Patrick Ewing in Georgetown.

The ABAUSA Commission, in consultation with the US Olympic Commission, held a conference call with university coaches. Jordan was invited to the team and, at Smith’s recommendation, was scheduled to be coached by CM Newton with Lee Rose as an assistant coach.

Oregon State University forward Charlie Sitton will team up with Jordan in the 1983 Pan American Games gold medal, and in the summer of 1982, Jordan “wasn’t very noticeable at the time.” Told.

“I always didn’t really know how good he was at that point,” Sitton said. “If he wanted to take over, he could.”

Jordan was not initially considered one of the top players on the team. Some have already achieved more. Notre Dame Guard John Paxson later teamed up with Jordan at the Chicago Bulls and was an All-American consensus second team in 1982. St. John’s forward David Russell, LSU forward Howard Carter, Stanford forward John Leveri and Sitton have each been selected by the Associated Press as a national prestigious reference. Center Earl Jones had just led the NCAA Division II title as a sophomore at the District of Columbia University, with the 7-foot player being the first team, the D-II All-American.

The roster ended with Payne, Philcox of Vanderbiltguard, Jim Grandholm of the South Florida Center, Jim Thomas of Indianaguard, and Jeff Turner of Vanderbilt Forward.

Newton was the head coach of Vanderbilt at the time, so the five days of practice before the team headed to Europe was in Nashville.

“You all acknowledge greatness.”

They played one exhibition game before playing against Marathon Oil, a team of former college students based in Lexington, Kentucky. The game didn’t really prepare for the physical styles faced in Europe, but it was clear who was the best player. I was on the team. Jordan scored the team’s highest 26 points to lead a 146-119 victory in front of 1,000 fans at the Memorial Gymnasium.

“Coaches, like athletes, know when you’re in the gym and everyone recognizes how great it is,” Turner said.

Jordan, along with Cox, was the youngest two players on the team at the age of 19. And he challenged the select team by playing one-on-one with an older man, just as he did when he joined UNC. Pain, a roommate during the trip, joked, “I don’t know how many horses we will play.”

A 6-foot-4 guard, Thomas played for the Hoosiers team, which defeated Carolina in the 1981 title. He was one of the first players Jordan played after practice.

“He was very good-Tar Heel, North Carolina, all the time,” said Thomas. “That was all, and he would say,” I wish I could play the game, but we would have beaten everything (1981). ” He said he had the same result. “

Thomas noticed that Jordan had competed everything when the plane landed in Europe, and said the cargo was betting on others who first got off the conveyor belt.

Almost anonymous in Europe

The two games with the European All-Stars were not very competitive. College students simply didn’t match. In Switzerland, the United States lost 111-92 and Jordan scored the team’s highest 20 points. In Hungary, they were sent to 103-88 as he led the team again and scored 19 points. Exacerbating their losses was a major miscalculation from Edwards Tights, president of ABAUSA, who took part in the trip as mission chief.

He thought the players would be happy to see the countryside and took the bus a scenic route from Budapest, Hungary to Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia). The ride was supposed to be five hours, but it took twice as long, and in the first match I had to fly a 45-minute flight to Zadar, Yugoslavia.

“They wanted us to see the countryside. Everyone on the team was like,’Man, this is ridiculous,'” Grandholm said. “But we went over there, now it’s serious. This is because of pride, this is important. And you know what, no one is going to know about it.”

There was little coverage of the game in the United States. USA Basketball doesn’t even have one of the box scores in the archive. And in Yugoslavia, a much more pressing issue was the 1982 World Cup of Soccer. The game has been switched so that it does not get in the way of football fans watching Yugoslavia in group play.

Marquee matchup

They had defeated a coach before they played the Yugoslavs. Rose is the head coach of South Florida and previously had both Charlotte (1977) and Purdue (1980) in the Final Four. But he got sick during his trip and it seemed to get worse.

His wife, Eleanor Rose, told News & Observer that Jordan was reluctantly approaching her about her husband’s health.

“I think he needs to go home,” she recalled Jordan. “I don’t know if I can hear a cough, just like I have a cough in the gym.”

Rose had pneumonia, so he left the team and went home.

The Yugoslav team wasn’t as deep as the All-Stars that the United States had just undertaken in two games, but they were old and experienced. Some of the US players were already facing them with their college team.

The Yugoslav team played UNC in an exhibition game in December 1981. Drazen Dalipagic, a 6-foot-6 guard, dropped 41 points, but Heal won the extra time. Dalipagic was Europe’s player of the year for three seasons from 1976 to 1980. He played for their Olympic team in 1976 and 1980 and was 30 years old in the summer of 1982.

They also had a 23-year-old Yugoslav point guard named Alexander (Ako) Petrovich, brother of New Jersey Nets star Dražen Petrovich, who died tragically in a car accident in 1993. Off the coast of Jordan. Yugoslavia had only a few spots open on the roster of the FIBA ​​World Championships in Colombia in the second half of the summer. Ako Petrovic believed that his best shot to do so was to protect and impress the flashy top scorers of the Americans.

“I was looking for blood,” Ako Petrovic said in an Ink Butter podcast on January 19, 2021.

Or at least he tried. There was no box score from the first game they played, only the result. The United States won 92-90 in Zadar. Jordan then scored 18 points at the next meeting in a 93-92 defeat in Zagreb. You have now set up a third and final game to determine the winner of the series.

The Yugoslav football team has been removed from the World Cup. At the World Cup, in the heat of 90 degrees, hundreds of fans were sent to a single ticket window at Peony Stadium in Belgrade in an attempt to secure a seat in the final round. 5,000 spectators saw the United States jump into a 16-point lead on its way to a 88-83 victory. Jordan led with 21 points and the United States felt it was proven.

In another decade, Jordan and the Dream Team have once again reset the balance of US basketball power after winning a bronze medal in the last amateur team to compete in the Olympic Games in 1988.

But in 1982, after the United States missed the opportunity to compete in 1980, it was arguably more satisfying to win two of the three against what was considered the best team in the world. ..

“Playing Yugoslavia was incredible,” Grandholm said. “And defeat them? Frankly, I feel like I’ve won a gold medal.”

This story was originally published July 3, 2022 6:40 am.