Someone Else Win Gold? Is He Dreaming?
What we’ll see in the television promos for the Sydney Olympics are scads of pixie gymnasts a-vaulting and a-beaming, Marion Jones trying to out-Carl Carl Lewis, Tommy Lasorda hugging a giant kookaburra and, inevitably, Anna Kournikova showing off her Olympic rings - one from each Russian hockey player she happens to be dating.
None of which capture the spirit of the Games quite like … why, Angola vs. the Dream Team, of course!
Yes, we’re sneaking up on that time once again when the NBA makes a mockery of its international imitators, if not the Olympic ideal itself - though we may also be sneaking up on a time when it’s no longer such a mockery.
Todd MacCulloch would like to think so, anyway.
A year removed from the University of Washington, the Canadian giant is a member of his country’s Dream Team, if you allow for the fact that there isn’t a lot of hoop dreaming going on up north. Having done three years on the national team and one in the NBA with the Philadelphia 76ers, MacCulloch thinks he can see the chasm closing.
Slowly.
“Teams are catching up little by little,” insisted MacCulloch, who stopped in Cheney on Tuesday and spoke at Eastern Washington’s basketball team camp. “I think we have some good talent in Canada and Europe has some amazing teams that have the benefit of playing together at different points of the season.
“And there are some great shooters in different parts of the world. Anytime you’ve got great shooters, those 3s add up pretty quickly.”
Guess that must have been John Thompson’s problem in picking the 1988 U.S. team: he couldn’t add.
“There are a lot of great players in the world,” MacCulloch went on. “Sometimes you assume all the best players must be in the NBA, but a lot of guys with great talent don’t. Maybe they make more money in Europe or maybe like they like being a big star where they are.”
Then again, are we not still waiting for a big-time foreign talent to come along and even so much as steal a scene from the stars of the NBA? Yes, yes, Hakeem Olajuwon, I know. But the fact is, his greatness was brought to blossom in our league, not playing for Real Madrid or any of Europe’s weekend-warrior clubs.
If they’re truly great, they must prove it on this stage.
MacCulloch himself knew that a year ago when he was sweating out commissioner David Stern’s role call during the NBA draft. With each pick that became somebody else, MacCulloch could see himself with a stack of language tapes and a visa, an exile from Main Street.
And then the Sixers saved him with the 47th selection and a two-year contract, and MacCulloch was back in a role in which he’d grown more than comfortable.
Project.
It was this message MacCulloch pitched to the campers at EWU, where he was appearing as a favor to the new head coach, Ray Giacoletti - once the assistant at UW in charge of tutoring the big men, which in MacCulloch’s case was a full-time job.
There is an inherent illogic in offering up a 7-footer as an inspirational tool to teenage hoopsters: No one in the audience Tuesday is going to grow up to be 7-feet tall.
On the other hand, the majority of those campers can probably bench press more already than MacCulloch could on his first trip to the UW weight room after wandering in from Winnipeg as a freshman.
“I remember the day,” Giacoletti said. “He did 95 pounds the first time. The football guys were laughing at him, and some of our guys wondered what it was we’d brought in.”
This after MacCulloch had allowed himself to balloon to 315 pounds for his senior year of high school. Giacoletti also recalls going to Winnipeg to watch a game shortly after Christmas that year and noticing the school couldn’t find a pair of trunks to fit UW’s prize recruit - he was wearing a pair of Notre Dame shorts he’d picked up on a recruiting visit that fall.
For MacCulloch, the hardest work was just getting himself into condition to where someone could make him into a player.
Then he had to “change my attitude from being someone who was just happy to score a few points to someone who could help control a game,” he said.
Washington State fans will remember both faces of MacCulloch from his senior year - the two-point flop in the Spokane Arena, and the 32-point, 15-rebound monster that emerged a couple of months later.
His growth figures to be similarly fitful in the NBA, but the spikes are certainly encouraging. There was the 22-point, 16-rebound effort against the Dream Team - coached at the time by the Sixers’ Larry Brown - last summer in an Olympic qualifying tournament, and a couple of double-doubles he had as a fill-in starter when injuries wracked the Sixers early last season.
“He played a vital role in them getting off to such a good start,” Giacoletti said. “People forget - he made the rookie game at the All-Star weekend. That’s pretty good for the 47th pick.”
The pickers, MacCulloch said, had something to do with that, too.
“I got a lot better because I went to a coach who likes to teach,” he said of Brown. “You’d better hope you’re a guy who likes to learn. But to get a coach like that, an energetic owner who is willing to do whatever it takes and some good young players for teammates, I couldn’t have dreamed for more.”
Dream teams, it seems, are in the eye of the beholder.