Stolen Glory

This book is, ostensibly, about a single basketball game. Officially, the Soviet Union beat the United States, 51-50, in the gold medal game at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich on a desperate basket at the final buzzer. In many ways, the game was for the Soviets a mirror image of what the U.S. Olympic hockey team would experience eight years later at the Winter Games in Lake Placid: an improbable, almost unthinkable, victory over the sport's long-time Olympic standard-bearers and a Cold War shot in the arm for a politically struggling government. But that is where the similarities end. Because there's one Olympian-sized difference between what is, arguably, each country's greatest Olympic achievement: the Soviets didn't actually win the gold medal in basketball in 1972. Or, more specifically, they have never been recognized as having won by their American opponents. To this day, 40 years after that final buzzer sounded, 12 silver medals lay unclaimed in a storage room maintained for the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. History says those silver medals belong to the Americans. Doug Collins and his teammates say that "history" is mistaken.

Why has Collins, the sparkplug of the '72 team and now the head coach of the Philadelphia 76ers, and his former teammates--all of whom are still alive--continue to insist the gold medals were wrongly awarded to the Soviet Union? The Game that never ended! To understand, it helps to go back to Benton, Illinois just for a moment, where Collins would imagine countless times what it would be like to sink a historic winning basket. In his mind, he was playing in the state championship for the Benton High Rangers or in the NCAA title game for Illinois State (the alma mater of his high school coach and the school Collins would attend, too). Or, just maybe, he would hit those shots someday in the NBA finals. The whip-thin, 130-pound high school sophomore would always use the same routine as he practiced shooting that pair of free throws that would make history: Bounce the ball three times. Spin it in his hands. Shoot. But Collins never could have imagined what would transpire in the wee hours of September 10, 1972, in Munich, West Germany, just days after the kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists, an atrocity that led Olympic officials to consider cancelling the rest of the Games. With three seconds remaining on the clock, Collins stood at the free throw line for the United States of America, with his team, after mounting a heroic comeback, down by one point to the Soviet Union in the Olympic gold medal game. Collins, as it happened, couldn't even see straight. Moments earlier, after making a spectacular open-court steal from one of the best Soviet players, he had been knocked out cold as he drove the lane for a potential game-winning layup. Even though their loyalties had seemed divided throughout the game, the 6,500 spectators crammed into Munich's basketballhalle cheered wildly as Collins made both free throws to put the U.S. ahead, 50-49. Olympic gold seemingly belonged to the Americans. But after the Soviets' first unsuccessful attempt at scoring during the last three ticks of the clock, they were given another chance to inbound, because of reasons still disputed to this day. When the Soviets failed on their second attempt, the ball harmlessly clanging off the backboard, the U.S. players erupted at midcourt, jumping up and down with their arms raised in triumph. This was the era, long before the strict stadium security of today, when fans would storm the court or playing field after a championship game, and sure enough they swarmed the American team. One fan tried to pull off Tom Henderson's jersey; another stole Iba's wallet. ABC's Frank Gifford, calling the game for TV viewers back in the States, announced that the U.S. had capped an unlikely comeback. The game was over. Collins, the man, had fulfilled his boyhood dream, and on the biggest stage of all. He had sunk two foul shots that instantly made history.

Mike Brewster, a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism, has worked as a sportswriter, business writer, and corporate marketing professional. He is the author of the books Driving Change: The UPS Approach to Business, Unaccountable, and King of Capital: Sandy Weill and the Making of Citigroup. He lives in New York City and plays basketball in Riverside Park. Taps Gallagher, a native New Yorker, received his M.A. from St. John’s University in New York and his J.D. degree from Loyola University of Chicago. He has been involved with basketball his entire life as a player, coach, referee and historian. Stolen Glory is his first published work. He now resides in Clarendon Hills, Illinois and is still a New York Knicks fan.