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Grudge Match. Another sport in which a confrontation of superpowers got sidetracked was men's basketball. Yugoslavia upset Russia in the semifinals 89-84, thus depriving the U.S. of a chance to avenge the 1972 team's infamous last-second, one-point loss to the Soviet Union. The basketball final was still a grudge match of sorts, but the spirit of vindication was directed less at the Yugoslavs than at doomsayers in the U.S. who had predicted that this year's team was too short (average height: 6 ft. 6 in.) and too Southern (seven players and a coach from the Atlantic Coast Conference). "All of the complaining back home cut into the pride of the players," said victorious Coach Dean Smith of North Carolina University. "That was a greater motivational factor than the 1972 defeat."
Smith himself was a substantial motivator. He drove his players hard and they liked it. One U.S. workout last week was a brutal 75 minutes of top-speed action. The squad was divided into two basic units that were rotated to keep maximum pressure on opponents, a ploy that proved highly successful. Smith studied 14 reels of film on the Yugoslavs, another 20 reels on the Russians, and preceded each practice session with a movie show.
The gold medal result seemed assured long before U.S. Team Captain Quinn Buckner of Indiana University boogalooed the ball downcourt in the last seconds of the 95-74 rout of Yugoslavia in the finals. Except for a 95-94 squeaker over a scrappy Puerto Rican team whose backcourt had been largely trained in the schoolyards of New York, the U.S. romped through the tournament, dazzling opponents with laser-beam passing, intrepid rebounding, brazen ball stealing and an irksomely tenacious defense.
Their shooting? Despite taking out 3½ min. to tend a seven-stitch gash that had been elbowed into his right eyebrow by a rebounding Yugoslav, Adrian Dantley fired in a game-high 30 points. Lamented Canadian Coach Jack Donohue after his team's 95-77 debacle against the U.S. in the semifinals: "The Americans are like a Sherman tank. They just keep coming at you."
Five of the six teams playing in the first women's basketball tournament in Olympic history had to reconcile themselves to the fact that the gold medal was nearly a foot out of their reach—in the hands, that is, of Russia's 7-ft. 2-in., 281-lb. center, Uliana Semenova. Backed up by four teammates who stood 6 ft. 5 in. or more, the awesome Semenova, who maintained a kind of awkward dignity as she lumbered up and down the court, so overpowered her opponents that only the scrappy Japanese team was able to end up within a respectable 23-point distance (98-75) of the Soviets. Despite losses to Russia and Japan, a feisty U.S. team won the silver.
The closest thing to an old-fashioned display of American might took place in the boxing ring at the new saucer-shaped Maurice Richard Arena. Letting fists fly in flamboyant style, a showboating young squad of Ali-inspired Americans sent six of its eleven members into the Saturday-night finals—a total matched only by the other boxing powerhouse of the Games, Cuba.