Team USA Held to a Higher Standard?
Welcome to the Olympic basketball tournament, where once again the dysfunctional world community doesn’t include the United States. From Beijing to London, the Americans have been model Olympic citizens on the court and off it. They’ve truly been ambassadors of the NBA and America, a team that has gone a long way to transform the league’s image home and abroad. They’ve found ways to become a team, a program, and it resonates with everything they do and everywhere they go here.
There’s a higher standard for the Americans – and, make no mistake, sometimes a double-standard – but they’ve come to understand, even embrace it. Four years ago, it was the Spanish team that posed for a team picture making slanted-eyed gestures in Beijing.
Had the Americans posed that way, the USA’s Jason Kidd told me then, “We would’ve already been thrown out of the Olympics. At the least, we wouldn’t have been able to come back to the U.S. There would be suspensions.”
It wasn’t the United States inspiring problems in ’08, and it isn’t them in ’12. As it turns out, groin shots have become business as usual in FIBA, where two stars – (Juan Carlos) Navarro and the United States’ Carmelo Anthony – were deliberately punched. Argentina’s Facundo Campazzo delivered the blow to ‘Melo, confessing it as retaliation for Chris Paul hitting him. Campazzo didn’t get ejected.
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