45 YEARS AGO TODAY WAS THE BLOCKED SHOT HEARD 'ROUND THE WORLD!

September 10, 1972 is a day that will live on in sports history due to the disputed "loss" by the United States to the USSR in the gold medal game for basketball.

The following interview with Tom McMillen, President and CEO of The Lead1 Association, who was on the basketball team for the United States, explains why.

*On this date, 45 years ago in the '72 Olympics, you were swatting away a shot from Russia's Aleksander Belov's with 10 seconds left in the contest for the gold medal (wearing number 13 in video below), letting him know that the Munich Games were your house and to take that weak stuff back to Moscow. 

What happened next?

Doug Collins, then with Illinois State and later to coach the Bulls and other NBA teams, drove the length of the court and was fouled hard with 3 seconds left. He made both shots, giving the United States a 50-49 lead.

*That was the first time United States was on top as the Soviets scored the first basket of the game and never trailed!

But it did not last for long. From a Wall Street Journal interview with you: 

What happened next was “bedlam and hysteria,” Mr. McMillen recalls. “We’ve preserved America’s 63-game winning streak in Olympic basketball.” But wait. It’s not over. A thickly accented German official announces on the public address system: “Ze game is not over, put three seconds on ze clock.” The officials have decided that the Soviets did call a timeout. Now the Soviets hurriedly take the ball out again. This time their desperation shot misses, careening off the rim, and again the game is over.

More pandemonium. Fans storm the court as the young Americans players hug each other in celebration. A TV camera catches Tom McMillen dancing around with his arms lifted in what he says now was a combination of “joy and a lot of relief.” 

But then, Dr. William Jones, the British secretary of FIBA who was notoriously and unabashedly anti-American, intervened and ordered the clock to be reset to 3 seconds, and the play restarted. It took two attempts, but the Soviets made a shot at the buzzer to win the game and the gold medal, resulting in the first loss by the United States in mens basketball in Olympic history. The appeal lost the next day, too.

There were five members on the panel, including three from East Bloc countries. Can you imagine a Hungarian official voting with us? We never had a chance. . . . You have to understand. The Soviets really wanted to beat us—to show the world. Since this was all about global politics. “Brezhnev and Nixon could have saved us a lot of time if we had not bothered with the basketball game at all. They should have just had the two of them arm-wrestle.”

*Whatever happened with the silver medals?

We voted unanimously not to accept their silver medals, the first time that had happened in the Olympics, too. We are still holding that line. Kenny Davis’s will even stipulates that neither his children nor their descendants are to ever accept the silver medal.

*Was it just the officiating that worked against the American team?

Hank Iba was our coach and great for his era, which was 1950s ball. We were faster, more agile and more athletic, but we played exactly the style of play that suited the Soviets. As my Olympic teammate Tom Henderson said, "We should have run them off the court!"

*Its little known, but didn't you had another shot at Olympic Gold?

Yes, Dean Smith, the legendary Tar Heel coach, headed the 1976 USA team. He wrote me and asked me to be on the squad as I had been at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and, although playing pro in Italy, was still eligible. But it was time to start my NBA career with the Buffalo Braves.

*You guys on the American team looked like a bunch of college kids while the Russian team looked like a bunch of thugs. Did they play that way?

They were aged 30. We were called the ‘Kiddie Corps’ because we were 20-year-old college kids who had never played together. It was a very physical game, to say the least.

*What did you do to take care of that?

After I was elected to Congress, I introduced a resolution to allow professional athletes to play in the Olympics for the United States.

*What is interesting about that is how American colleges still train most of the Olympic medal winners.

That's true. In the 2016 Summer Olympic Games at Rio, athletes from LEAD1 Association members and other schools in the United States dominated, bringing home 121 medals. The universities of LEAD1 spend over $2 billion annually to prepare male and female athletes for the Olympic games. There are from non-revenue sports too as American football, which provides most of the funds for college teams, is not in the Olympics. Its not just athletes from the United States who benefit from LEAD1 programs as there are many foreign students competing in the Olympics for their country at American universities playing sports.

*That's an important point that much of the sports world misses when discussing college sports in the United States. What else is happening in college sports?

LEAD1 Association is having its annual meeting in Washington, DC on September 26. There will be a variety of topics discussed about college sports. That evening, there is the Celebration of College Sports with a video produced by ESPN for the event. It will be a must attend event for all in the college sports community.

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About the LEAD1 Association: The Honorable Tom McMillen is President and Chief Executive Officer of The LEAD1 Association, which represents the athletic directors, athletic programs and student-athletes of the 130 universities in the map below of the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS).

LEAD1 Association will be holding its annual meeting in Washington, D.C. for the first time on September 26-27, 2017 with the sponsors listed below. For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Otis Wiley at [email protected]:

ALL-AMERICAN LEVEL:

*Mintz Levin

*VICIS

*Tailgate Guys

*MG12/The Power of Magnesium

Vital Vio

Paciolan: A Learfield Company

SILVER:

*Private Jet Services

BRONZE:

*DHR International

*Fiesta Bowl

*Learfield

Essential to the mission of the LEAD1 Association are influencing how the rules of college sports are enacted and implemented, advocating for the future of college athletics, and providing various services to the members, ranging from professional development to pooled purchasing arrangements. The mission statement of LEAD1 Association is, “Supporting the athletic directors of America’s leading intercollegiate programs in preparing today’s students to be tomorrow’s leaders.” For more information, please contact Jonathan Yates, Director of Communications & Publication Affairs for LEAD1, by email at [email protected], by phone at 301-807-2523, or visit the website, www.lead1association.com.

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