King Kaufman's Sports Daily

The U.S. basketball team gets smoked by Italy. Italy?! Good. At last the Dream Team era is over and Olympic hoops will be worth watching.

Aug. 4, 2004 | The U.S. basketball team had its clock cleaned 95-78 in a pre-Olympic exhibition Tuesday by that noted hoops power Italy, which boasts nary an NBA player, so it must be time for a nationwide chorus of that new summertime favorite, "The Let's Get Rid of the Overhyped, Pampered, Egomaniac Dream Team and Go Back to Having College Kids Play in the Olympics Mambo."

In which case the final score would have been more like 95-50, Italy.

Cha cha cha.

I grew up in the era before NBA players were allowed in the Olympics, which ended in 1988. Four years after that, the original Dream Team won the gold in Barcelona. Like most people who remember those times, I think, I look back fondly on the days of college all-stars representing the USA.

But they aren't coming back. And that's good.

It used to be fun to not know some of the players too well as the Games started, then get more familiar with them as the tournament progressed. Remember, this was before there were five college basketball games on TV every night, so even when the team was made up almost exclusively of big-time players from big-time programs, as it wasn't always but was in 1976, you might have only seen them play a few times in college games even if you were a pretty dedicated fan.

In that way, though to a lesser extent, basketball was fun the way most Olympic sports are. You find yourself living and dying with some athlete you'd never heard of two weeks before. And an added bonus: Some of these guys were going to go on and become NBA stars.

Sure, I knew Adrian Dantley and Quinn Buckner in '76, but even some of the North Carolina stars, like Phil Ford and Walter Davis, were hazy for me, a West Coast boy. And while I admit I was pretty young in 1972 -- I was 9 -- I don't remember seeing Doug Collins play a lot of games for Illinois State, do you?

All of this made up for the fact that Olympic basketball lacked much drama, that unless the Soviets had control of the clock the Americans were pretty sure of winning.

Good times. But if you think a return to college players is going to mean a return to them, you're kidding yourself. It's a different world now.

With the elite players skipping college or leaving after a year or two, college all-stars aren't what they used to be. And in the meantime, the rest of the world has learned to play basketball a little bit.

Next page: The original Dream Team was boring, but now we're really on to something