U.S. Victory Does Wonders For The Cause

If one basketball game can’t make the horror of a deadly bombing disappear, if one basketball game can’t make Atlanta as charming as Barcelona or as sweet as Lillehammer, one basketball game can make us eager for the Olympics to come again.

The U.S. women’s basketball team beat Brazil 111-87 Sunday and did cartwheels. Let’s start the Olympics over again today.

When Lisa Leslie just couldn’t stop crying, no matter how hard she tried, and when Dawn Staley gathered two teammates and executed a triple cartwheel before she grabbed another teammate to dance with, and then another teammate to high-five, when 12 women have lived together for 15 months, traveled together, fought and hugged, griped and grinned, only so they could win an Olympic gold medal and maybe convince some doubters that this sport was worthy of something more than Olympic prominence, when they have accomplished what they set out to accomplish, when they did it with grace and good cheer, and ended this journey with such a sense of unabashed joy that you wanted to cartwheel right out of the stands and join them, then this pockmarked Olympics ended on just the right note.

It was good that the men’s Dream Team finished late on Saturday night with another bloodless win, so expected and therefore so humdrum. It wasn’t the fault of the NBAers, for part of the Olympics is about winning, and it is not wrong to want to see the best.

But part of the Olympics is about achieving something more, something unexpected maybe, or something so terribly difficult that it will stay with you forever. That was what made Kerri Strug’s incredible painful vault worth watching even 100 times. It is what made this last sporting event of the Centennial Olympics, played out in front of 32,997 fans who were in the mood to party, a wonderful conclusion.

This was no foregone conclusion, not like the men’s games. The U.S. women had suffered premature losses in the 1991 Pan Am Games, the 1992 Olympics and the 1994 world championships. The United States would keep trying to gather their best women players, who would have to leave the United States after college and scrounge around the world to play in pro leagues in Brazil or Italy or Japan. It was an unappreciated life where the money was pretty good, but the loneliness and rootlessness was unforgiving.

So this time, USA Basketball tried something new. It tried spending some money on the women. It funded a traveling team, paid the women a living wage ($50,000), which wasn’t extravagant or even close to what some of the stars, like Teresa Edwards and Sheryl Swoopes, Lisa Leslie or Dawn Staley, could earn overseas. But it was enough to make the women come home and make a commitment. A year of constant travel, a brutal schedule that had them living out of suitcases for nearly six months straight, sort of a barnstorming tour to sell themselves and to maybe make themselves worthy of something better in the future.

In exchange, the women hoped to get an Olympic gold medal and maybe a pro basketball league of their own. If they failed, if people came to their games and were bored, or if they bombed out in the Olympics, then certainly women’s basketball would disappear again, become just another archery or shooting or wrestling, something we pay attention to every four years and maybe during the NCAA tournament.

But anyone who watched these women - watched Leslie, the 6-foot, 5-inch center who wants to be a model, bring grace to the art of clearing out; watched Staley, who gives away nothing on the North Philadelphia playgrounds against the guys and nothing on the court at the Olympics, which you could tell when she dropped a behind-the-back pass to Katrina McClain that brought Sunday’s crowd off its feet; watched Edwards, who is the only U.S. basketball player, man or woman, to win medals in four Olympic games, dominate the early stages of Sunday’s gold medal game with Brazil with her swift passes and sure cuts to the basket - will want to come back.

It wasn’t just the Americans who wanted this, either. Hortencia Marcari Oliva, the legendary Brazilian guard, known only as Hortencia to real fans, who had retired after Brazil won the 1994 world championship, came back for the Olympics five months after undergoing a Caesarean section childbirth, when she is nearly 37 years old. She came to LaGrange, Ga., two weeks before the Olympics, lived in a dorm with her baby son, because she wanted to play in the Olympics and to win an Olympic medal. “It is not our team that lost but the United States that won,” she said, “and so I can be proud.”

Staley, the pint-size point guard who has smuggled peanut butter into Brazil and macaroni and cheese into Italy so she could quiet those homesick pangs, noticed something Sunday. “I think the fans enjoyed us more than the men,” Staley said. “They stayed for our (medal) ceremony. They didn’t stay for the Dream Team. I think they understand. We don’t know where we’re all heading after this, so for us, we just appreciated the moment.”

And Staley also confessed something else. She had thought the Georgia Dome would be too big for the women’s games. She was afraid no one would come. Instead, the Dome was maybe too small. For, as Staley said, “I think people fell in love with us.”

Yes, they did. It is what is best about the Olympics, this chance to fall in love with something new.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Diane Pucin Philadelphia Inquirer