Introduction

Certainly it was special to be one of the 8,500 or so fans to witness arguably the most famous game of all time.

A team of upstart U.S. collegians knocked off the USSR hockey juggernaut, 4–3, in a jaw-dropping Olympic upset. Before the rest of the country, mired in 1980 tape-delay technology, knew what had happened, Lake Placid partied. Spectators at the game—my father and me included—streamed out of the arena into a celebration of incessant yelling and beer drinking. If memory serves, fireworks exploded in that crisp winter night. Two days later, the United States topped Finland, 4–2, to win the gold medal.

So why write a book about the 1972 USA-USSR gold medal basketball game—which, at age nine, I neither saw in person nor even watched on television?

Some stories are more interesting than others. Indeed, the hockey game offered scintillating drama and triggered streams of tears, but the basketball championship possessed those qualities too—along with time moving backward, as if God had intervened, what appears to be subterfuge to end a thirty-six-year undefeated streak and, finally, an historic refutation by twelve angry men of perhaps the most coveted item in all of sports: an Olympic medal.

There’s something about dramatic losses that affix themselves to the soul. The anguish Boston Red Sox fans felt as the ball dribbled through Bill Buckner’s legs in 1986, moments after they were one strike away from winning the World Series; Greg Norman’s agonizing, historic collapse during the 1996 Masters, blowing a 6-shot lead in the final round, ensuring he would never win the tournament he coveted; and the Atlanta Falcons squandering the biggest lead in Super Bowl history, finally losing to the New England Patriots in overtime. And there are many other similar episodes in the annals of sports.

Thanks in part to my training as a journalist, I approached this story with disinterest, as a judge would. I would be swayed by the facts, not emotions or national pride, while I exhaustively researched the game. While reviewing numerous articles about the gold medal contest and its aftermath, interviewing those who competed, and more, I was initially amazed at how much misinformation about the end of the game is out there. To help compensate, I watched the final seconds of ABC’s broadcast (along with the Russian television view) again and again, like a JFK assassination sleuth watching the Zapruder film—trying to gather incontrovertible evidence from a somewhat limited view.

After much research, two conclusions were hard to shake: a purportedly objective, yet powerful, observer who had no authority during the game wedged himself into the outcome by twice demanding time be put back on the clock at the conclusion of the contest, both times with the United States ahead. Also, the decisions of a referee from a Communist country were unnerving. His foul calls near the end of the game were disproportionately against the United States. Then he motioned a U.S. defender away from a Soviet player (who had entered the game illegally under his watch) so the player could clearly inbound a pass down the court in the team’s only chance for a victory. To paraphrase a line from an officer in Hamlet (a Shakespearean player, but not an Olympic one): Something was rotten in the city of Munich.

Getting players on the U.S. team (eleven out of the twelve are still alive) to return my calls and my emails was not an easy task. A possible reason presented itself when I read Frank Deford’s memoir Over Time.

Though heartbreakingly not at the Olympics, all twelve American players ended up, like Nicklaus, champions in their lives—NCAA champions, NBA champions, number-one draft choices, whatever your measure. But most—grandfathers now, young men then—cannot shake the injustice of that late night in Munich nearly fifty years ago.