The Bronze Age: Having triumphantly snatched third place in the Olympic Basketball Tournament, Team U.S.A. now returns home on the Queen Mary 2, confidently poised to take on the world again two years from now in the World Championships. In the meantime, the reaction stateside has been following the pattern the late Elizabeth Kubler-Ross elucidated in On Death and Dying. Having already gone through denial and anger, sportswriters and fans alike have begun to enter the bargaining stage. Once we get past the notion that the gold medal is somehow our birthright, which we were prevented from winning by some amorphous hindrance (the selection process, the lack of a consistent perimeter game, poor officiating, etc.), we will have to face the depressing reality that the U.S. is no longer the best at the popular sport it invented, and which still plays such a huge role in our culture.

This will not be unprecedented. In the early-50's, England, which had refused to play in the first three World Cups because it thought the competition was beneath it, suffered a series of defeats in international play (in particular, a 1-0 loss to a semi-pro team from the U.S. in the 1950 World Cup, and a pair of routs against Hungary in 1953), and only a win in the 1966 World Cup, played at home, provides any evidence that it was ever a world power in its national sport. In the 1970's, Canada suffered a similar blow when it agreed to face the "amateurs" from the Soviet Union in ice hockey. Although it had greater initial success, winning the Summit Series in 1972 and the Canada Cup in 1976, those victories were much narrower than expected, and it was apparent even before the Soviets whipped an NHL All-Star team, 6-0, in 1979 that the center of gravity in the sport had shifted overseas.

In both of these cases, there were excuses made about top athletes not playing. England's top player in 1950, Stanley Matthews, didn't play against the Americans, and the team as a whole blamed the humidity in Brazil for their early exit from that tournament. Canadiens could explain away the close call in 1972 by noting that Bobby Orr was injured and could not play, and that Bobby Hull was excluded for having signed with a rival league. Of course, injuries are always a part of sports, and their rivals also had key players out. As with the Athens Olympians, the reason why those national programs fell wasn't due to bad luck or poor player selection; it was the fact that the rest of the world had caught up, and that other countries were playing a more innovative, more exciting team-oriented game. If the U.S. is going to return to the top again in men's basketball, it had better re-think the way the sport is played in this country at all levels, or we will be doomed to hoping for a bronze medal.