Wild Bill Ketelhut provides the "blog" to this anti-blog
Wild At Heart
When I think of the “Dream Team”, I think back to the first time American pro basketball players suited up for the Olympics and easily took home the gold. Seeing guys like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Michael Jordon along with the lone college player Christian Laettner was a bit of a disappointment to me from a purist stand point. I enjoyed the fact that it was college players which represented us for decades and after the Bird/Magic years, I was largely disinterested in professional basketball but was a serious fanatic of the NCAA tournament. However, it was the Russian victory over the US in 1988 the made us realize that if we wanted the Olympic gold we needed to super-size ourselves on the national stage.
That 1988 team was not purely Russian but made up of players from a number of Baltic countries including four superstar players, including Sarunas Marciulionis and Arvydas Sabonis, from the same town in Lithuania. So basically, you could put an * in front of this win and give it to Lithuania and not the USSR who only had two players on the roster. Despite that, this team was fast and tall much like American teams and put on a nice fast break tempo game. It is the accomplishments of this team that inspired the documentary “The Other Dream Team” by Marius A. Markevičius as he follows the team’s journey under the influence of Communist rule to the Summer Olympics in Barcelona.
The documentary does a good job providing a framework for what these athletes went through to play their sport interspersing achival footage going as far back as the 1930’s. I would have liked to see more of this aspect highlighted but we did get glimpses of them talking about standing in food lines for hours for a chance to get a loaf of bread despite their celebrity or having to give speeches that were written for them expressing lies that they did not believe in but had to read if they wanted to play basketball. They also told stories of being followed by the KGB (and sneaking out of hotel rooms) and buying good in other countries to bring back to sell for a profit as a way to supplement their meager earnings.
I would have liked to see more of the players families in this regard talking about the pride of their sons playing for their country despite the press focusing on Russia (and ignoring the Lithuanian ties) and the hardships the families faced to survive in this country prior to independence. That would be the real story for me but it does a decent enough job in this area.
A couple of these guys did eventually play in the NBA, esp Sabonis, that I also wish they had some more interviews with the American dream team members talking about their Lithuanian counterparts. The only member we hear from is Chris Mullen though we get a lot of good sound bites from famed center/sports commentator Bill Walton. I would love to hear Barkley give us his two cents and David Robinson would have been very appropriate because he was on the ’88 team that lost to Russia so he could have provided some nice insight, esp with his service history.
My favorite part of the documentary was when a newly free Lithuania was trying to get there team put together for the ’92 Olympics despite the country being broke. The story of basketball fans and heroes of the oppressed, The Grateful Dead, offering to help the team find its financial footing is quite fun, esp when they send the team tie-dye shirts which the team wears during press interviews and on the final medal stand for their bronze medal. What could be a ridicule inducing moment just feels right for that team at that moment of time and is one of the most memorable moments in that Olympics.
While the documentary covers a lot of ground, it doesn’t have the same gravitas that a documentary like “Hoop Dreams” brings to the table but it does a good job bringing perspective to sports that sometimes gets lost in today’s spoiled boys network where a lot of athletes feel they have a right to play instead of playing for the enjoyment of the sport that these players bring to the table. The fact that they were also playing for their country, which some of our players don’t seem to cherish as much, only makes them stand out more in my eyes.
I have full respect of these players and what they brought to the table but I wish the documentary covered more ground. Still, it can be very enjoyable at times and finds itself with a grade of B- in my eyes. Too bad it didn’t come out closer to the Olympics which might have boosted it up more.
The movie is playing at the Main Art Theatre.