During the most important play in U.S. Olympic basketball history, James Ricardo Forbes seemed an unlikely choice to guard Alexander Belov.
On a team featuring a number of taller players, Forbes hardly stood out. But aside from McMillen, all of them—from Burleson to Bantom to Brewer to Dwight Jones—watched from the bench, having either angered Iba, fouled out, gotten knocked out, or been ejected.
Turning twenty only a few weeks before the games, Forbes was one of the least experienced U.S. players. Replacing the injured John Brown at the last minute, he didn’t even train at Pearl Harbor and lacked time to prepare with his teammates and to get into ideal shape.
The fact that Haskins coached him at the University of Texas at El Paso, though, helped his transition. And in the semifinal game, Forbes scored 14 points to propel the Americans to another gold medal opportunity.
But now he lay sprawled on the floor in disbelief, having watched the U.S. victory streak disintegrate because of an uncontested basket only a few feet away. He jumped up, appealing to Righetto to change what had just happened. After handing the referee the ball, Forbes swept his flattened hands across his midsection, hoping that making a disallowed motion would somehow negate the improbable basket.
“All these years later, you ask yourself, maybe if I’d have fronted him, maybe if I had bumped him a little bit harder instead of getting knocked down,” Forbes said. “I think about it every day of my life.”1
Little did the one-time National High School All-American from Texas know that lying on the hardwood in Munich, unfortunately, served as a portent. During his junior year at UTEP that fall, he ended up strewn on the court again after coming down the wrong way following a layup. He severely injured his knee. Recalled Forbes, “I’d just come back from the Olympics and, even though we’d lost, I was really riding high. I figured a good junior year, a good senior year, and then I’d make me a little money in the NBA.”2
The premature end of Forbes’s career saddened Haskins.
“He was going in for a layup and he stopped to keep from running over a smaller guy. That was typical of Jim. He was an automatic first-rounder. From our first scrimmage, it was obvious he was an NBA player. It was just a tragedy.
“In fact, Mr. Iba told me after the Olympics that that kid would make a cellarful of money someday if I didn’t mess him up.”3
Even without the knee injury, being at school after the 1972 Olympic loss pained Forbes.
“I’d go in my room and close the door and not come out,” he said. “I’d lie there and just think about it. My mind would play tricks and I’d start thinking, If someone else had been back there, would it have happened? But I never should’ve been put in that situation—those last three seconds never should’ve been played.”4
To express their dismay, the vanquished Americans could choose from plenty of words. The dictionary groans with appropriate ones. Heartrending. Gut-wrenching. Stupefying. Galling. They all work. And there are others for them to champion—including unprecedented, both for the extraordinary chaotic ending and for the first U.S. defeat in Olympic history.
The way it finished, in fact, was almost akin to a pickup game, where a player yells, “That doesn’t count,” or “Redo,” and that person’s sentiments win the day. Nothing was typical about the last moments in Munich, nothing that dignified the game of basketball, nothing that felt like victory or defeat had been deserved.
That didn’t stop Alexander Belov from chugging down the length of the court with unmitigated joy, his arms raised triumphantly and mouth in an open roar.
“We have an expression to go crazy from happiness,” Sergei Belov said. “When Alexander Belov made the last basket, he was running without understanding anything.”5
A number of years ago, Bobby Jones was approached by a woman after a talk he gave. She said her mother was a missionary in Germany and served as a housemother during the Olympics. Rather than stay in the Olympic Village, the Soviet basketball team rented the home.
“She shared Jesus each night with these athletes, and they looked at her blankly,” said Bobby Jones, recalling her story. “Before the last game, she asked if any of them would accept Jesus as their savior. Alexander Belov said he would if she could promise through Jesus they would win the last game. She said she couldn’t pray for them to win, but she could pray for God to do his will.
“After the game, Alexander Belov came back and said he would give his life to the Lord.” Had the atheistic Soviet authorities known that, despite his newly heroic stature, he could have been ushered to Siberia.
Piling on top of each other in front of their bench, the Soviet players jettisoned their widespread perception as robotic zombies. They lifted their coach, Kondrashin, off the ground, tossing him into the air. Once standing on the court again, Kondrashin received a kiss on the cheek from a Soviet player (probably not from Alexander Belov, whom Kondrashin lambasted after the triumph for the wayward pass Collins stole). Sakandelidze—who had been spread on the floor moments before after fouling Collins—laid on the court by the baseline again, an ecstatic smile on his face. Bottles of vodka were raised triumphantly, and some threw their jerseys aside and celebrated shirtless.
Soviet television commentator Nina Eremina, a former player for the women’s national team, was overcome.
“I yelled ‘Victory!’ Nothing but victory!” she recalled. “And I was jumping and dancing with complete joy.”6
At home alone in Russia, a seven-year-old boy watched the game on a black-and-white television. His name was Mikhail Prokhorov. About forty years later, he would become well known in the United States as the owner of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets. But on this day, he was an excited, dumbfounded fan who listened to Eremina’s historic call.
“As the game went on, she was so incredulous that she nearly lost her voice,” recalled Prokhorov, whose father, Dmitri, attended the game as the head of the international department for the Soviet Sport Committee. “We had been leading for most of the game. I remember thinking as we got to the very end that we could lose this thing. I couldn’t believe we won.”
After witnessing the astonishing final basket, Gifford’s words were more measured than those of his Soviet television counterpart. “And this time it is over,” he said.7
After the Belov game-winner, U.S. players who hadn’t participated in the last three seconds (which lasted more than five minutes in real time) were frozen on the bench. Some stared vacantly; others pressed their hands against their face and lowered their heads. Expressions were anguished—especially Forbes’s, who was convulsed in tears while walking off the court.
Unlike today, no on-the-spot TV reporters grabbed U.S. players to ask how they felt. Bewildered and angry no doubt would have been their responses—along with cheated. Said Kevin Joyce in the aftermath, “They’ve been trying to rook the Americans in the Olympics and they’ve finally done it!”8
Long after the powerful, painful emotions had ebbed, U.S. players still offered strong visuals of their postgame suffering.
“It was sort of like being on top of the Sears Tower in Chicago celebrating and then being thrown off and falling one hundred floors to the ground,” said Collins, more than thirty years later.9
Noted McMillen, “Never before or since have I plummeted from such heights to such depths so quickly.”10
Think how angry you get if a referee or an umpire makes a bad call against your favorite team. Now magnify it a hundredfold—you’re on the field, playing for a world championship, and a referee and an administrator make dumbfounding decisions to keep the gold medal from resting on your chest.
It might be easier to consider how unfathomable the situation was by comparing it to a similar scenario in another sport. Think if this happened in, say, baseball’s World Series.
Your visiting team is up by one run, bottom of the ninth inning. Two outs, an 0-2 count with the tying run on first. The pitch . . . strike three looking! But wait . . . the batter says he had called time, and the home-plate umpire missed calling it. The umpires confer . . . one more pitch to go.
Reset. Another pitch . . . a swing and a miss! The celebration sprawls across the infield. But wait . . . the manager had been trying to get the umpire’s attention to put in a pinch hitter. He argues his case. A few minutes later, the pinch hitter stands in the batter’s box. Another pitch . . . it’s a home run! Your team loses the World Series. And, if it’s like the ’72 Olympics for the U.S. players, none will get the chance to play in another one.
True, bad calls here and there have transformed outcomes—perhaps umpire Don Denkinger’s safe call during the 1985 World Series that helped Kansas City come back to beat St. Louis is the most infamous among U.S. professional sports championships—but never before or since has a sequence of freakish events matched the ones that beset the 1972 gold medal game. In basketball, the only parallel (however slim) seems to be when a scoreboard malfunctioned near the end of a Harlem Globetrotters game in 1957. It showed the perennial winners enjoying a 61–57 lead over the Washington Generals. The Globetrotters performed their usual showboating, thinking they had pocketed another victory. But the scoreboard was wrong. At the end of the game, to the Globetrotters’ astonishment, they had lost 67–63—though they refused to acknowledge it as a defeat in their official record for many decades.11
It comforts the U.S. team little, but other controversial competitions marred the 1972 games. Perhaps none matched the craziness of the field-hockey championship between longtime champion Pakistan and upstart West Germany. In a savage battle that included a brawl, West Germany—an obvious crowd favorite in Munich—won 1–0. Pakistan scored a goal, but it was disallowed.
What happened after didn’t quite match Pierre de Coubertin’s vision of the Olympics. “The players smashed the goal nets, while Pakistani fans raced onto the field and laid siege to the judge’s table, pouring a pitcher of water over the head of Rene Frank, the Belgian president of the Internationale Hockey Federation,” according to David Clay Large in Munich 1972. “Team members also physically assaulted a doctor who tried to administer the required postgame drug test.”12
Other contentious Olympic finishes arose in later years. The 1988 gold medal bout between U.S. boxer Roy Jones and South Korea’s Park Si-hun, representing the host country, featured Jones landing close to three times more punches than his opponent. Yet he was awarded the silver. And during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, two French officials (including a judge) were suspended by the International Skating Union for fixing the figure-skating pairs gold medal event. In an unprecedented move, the IOC handed silver medalists Jamie Salé and David Pelletier duplicate gold medals.
In both instances, judges created the scores, meaning that results were based on subjective rankings and thus open to corruption. In the USSR-USA game, team points determined the outcome—something supposedly out of the realm of outsiders to influence. But that proved not to be true.
Protesting vociferously at the scorer’s table once again, this time accompanied by a handful of players, Iba’s objections yielded nothing (Jones stood placidly nearby, immune to Iba’s barking and again displaying the number three, as if reiterating his belief that his intrusion had been justified). Even writer Gil Rogan of Sports Illustrated bounded down from the stands, giving up journalistic objectivity to argue the team’s case with others at the table. When he became the magazine’s editor, he recalled the moment.
“[I was] eloquently discoursing on the international rules of basketball, pointing out with devastating effect why the last Soviet basket should be disallowed, that the U.S. had won,” he wrote. “I know as much about the international rules of basketball as I do about the rules of taekwondo. But I was in a zone and the ref was . . . hanging on every word I was saying. Or so I thought until I heard someone behind me saying, ‘Give it up.’”13
His main takeaway: Learn the referees’ language.
When it seemed nothing else could go awry, Iba suffered another indignity. Amid the mayhem of the final game of his coaching career, while exhorting that his team had been robbed, Iba, in fact, was robbed; a wallet containing nearly $400 was lifted from his tan-colored pants during the chaos on the court in Munich.
It’s almost inconceivable that the United States—the best team by far in Olympic history—lost its first game ever on an uncontested layup during the most critical defensive play of its thirty-six-year run. And though the scoreboard clock finally read zero, the real-time minutes continued to tick on the still-crowded basketball floor.
“It was very surreal,” McMillen said. “You don’t have those moments in life very often. It was a real comedy of errors. The ending of the game was just unbelievable.”
Joyce was flummoxed.
“I was very confused when they first put time on the clock. I thought, ‘What do you mean? You can’t do this.’ Then they don’t score again, and they put time on again?
“When it was all over, I evaluated what went on, and I said, ‘This is bullshit.’”
Noted Kenny Davis, “It seems that everything was suspended in terms of legality. Our contention was you can’t add time to the clock when the game is over. The whole thing was the Jones guy said the Russians were trying to call a time-out so they gave it to them. We were trying to score 100 points too, but no one was giving that to us.”
Stunned at what he was watching, Dwight Chapin of the Los Angeles Times recalled the aftermath.
“No one seemed to have any idea what was going on. I opted to go to the coaches’ press conference rather than the U.S. locker room, looking for a few quotes and hopefully a little clarity, so I could make the bus back to the press center. The press conference was chaos, officials talking but saying nothing, and poor old Hank Iba looking as if he were having a stroke.”
Iba complained bitterly to the reporters.
“There’s no possible way that game could have been won by those guys. Even if the ball’s out of bounds with three seconds I know this: They’re not going to get the ball down there and score legally. I sent two guys back there and they both ended up on their cans. I don’t think they could have got it down there in five seconds.”14
Dejected, players wandered in a trance into their tiny white-brick locker room, featuring not much more than a long bench with angled hooks above it.
“You’re kind of in shock,” Ratleff recalled. “We knew the game had been taken away from us. How could we be losers if we won?”
Shooting for Life magazine, Rich Clarkson joined them in the tight quarters.
“The locker room was mostly quiet with much frustration,” Clarkson recalled. “Mr. Iba paced and conferred with the other assistant coaches. No one ever called him Hank—it was always Mister. I think some thought his first name must have been Mister.
“After perhaps forty to fifty minutes we were told a decision would be announced later—later that day as it turned out. I have seen controversies at games’ endings before, but never anything quite like this—for it resulted in no decision at the time.”
Only one avenue remained for the United States to attempt to overturn the result: lodge a protest. According to the rules, the team had four hours to do so. The protest cost fifty dollars, to be paid to the Technical Committee.
Bill Summers, chair of the 1972 U.S. Olympic Basketball Committee and manager of the U.S. team, crafted the protest. Written on a typewriter whose y key seemed not to work—and typed so quickly that Summers spelled his last name as “Summer” (adding the final s by hand)—the protest emphasized eight points. A crucial detail concerned the score sheet, which did not list a time-out in the last three seconds, meaning that, truly, only one second was left during the last two attempts (and the Soviets didn’t score in that amount of time during either play).
Summers handed the one-page protest to FIBA chief R. William Jones, who was also the president of the Technical Committee. Jones deferred the decision to the Jury of Appeal, the ultimate arbiter. According to FIBA rules of the time, five members and four alternates made up the committee, and all were required to represent a country taking part in the basketball tournament.
Problem was, the head of the committee for this novel case, Ferenc Hepp, hailed from Hungary—which hadn’t competed in the Olympic basketball tournament. Hepp not only was absent from the original list of five; he wasn’t even listed as one of the four alternates. Appointed by Jones, a fellow graduate of Springfield College, his biggest qualification seemed to be that he was one of the secretary-general’s closest companions; as a caption for a photo of the duo notes in Jones’s biography, “The two friends never turned down a drop of good vodka.”15
Granted, Soviet and American representatives were obligated to recuse themselves, but the bylaws demanded that any representatives added needed to field a team in the tourney. Aside from Soviet-dominated Hungary, the five-member jury included Claudio Coccia of Italy (a NATO ally), Rafael Lopez of Puerto Rico (a U.S. unincorporated territory), Soviet-dominated Poland’s Adam Baglajewski, and Andreas Keiser of Cuba (dominated in different ways by the Soviets). Available as an alternate, Spain and its representative for some reason were not chosen.
Neil Amdur of the New York Times stayed in the basketball arena until at least 4:00 a.m., and some players hung around as well, hoping to hear a decision on the protest. But others on the U.S. team, zombielike, shuffled out of the arena.
Recalled Henderson, “I got drunk that night. Went to the Hofbrau House after the game and drank the biggest beer I could find. Then I had another one. Had to crawl to my room. The cabbie driving me back was driving like a lunatic. I told him if he didn’t slow down I’d knock him out.”16
Davis returned to his room, changed out of his uniform, showered, and headed downtown with a few others. “We decided there wasn’t anything to do in the Olympic Village except mope around,” he recalled.
One player, Forbes, was forced to stick around the arena, having been picked for a random drug test.
“I couldn’t go to the bathroom,” he said. “I sat there in that nurse’s office for 2½ hours, drinking umpteen glasses of water, thinking about what had just happened. It must have been 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. before I finally peed.”17
Bantom was torn up.
“That was the first time I ever cried over a basketball game,” he said. “My heart was broken.”18
Dawn arrived in Munich. The morning slowly passed, as scores of people awaited a decision. Around noon on September 10, in a secret ballot, the verdict arrived: a 3–2 vote against the United States.
The Jury of Appeal statement released that day read, in part, as follows:
In the early hours of 9/10/1972 the Jury of Appeal clarified the facts by hearing both the umpires of the game and the competent parties responsible at the scorer’s table. In addition, the Jury of Appeal studied very carefully the televised versions of the last two minutes of the match, this being the version made by the German television (DOZ) and the American television network ABC.
The Jury of Appeal confirms the final result on the score sheet which is 51:50 for the USSR Team.19
How was the United States team officially notified of the decision? A delivery boy showed up at Davis’s room in the Olympic Village. He handed the team captain a torn story from the Associated Press wire that said the protest had been rejected.
Quickly word spread that Poland, Hungary, and Cuba had sided with the Soviets. Puerto Rico and Italy voted to overturn the 51–50 result. The decision mirrored Cold War politics. Cries of a kangaroo court were uttered to no avail.
The press conference to explain the decision that afternoon was as crazed as the end of the game—lacking only a horn blasting at inopportune moments. Doing his best to appear unflappable in a hot, crowded room, Hepp tried to justify the panel’s decision, explaining the sequence of events. His reasoning was lambasted:
Enraged, U.S. Assistant Manager Herb Mols asked, regarding the first stoppage with one second remaining, “We are asking you, who caused the referee to stop the play, and it was the Russian bench. You looked at the movies, and this is established. Why not credit this, and how can you penalize an American team for the Russian bench coming illegally on the floor with no technical foul called, which is in the book?”
“I don’t indeed see the point of the question,” Hepp responded to uproarious laughter and a shout of “You’re kidding!”20
Hans Tenschert of West Germany, the game’s scorekeeper—a position of anonymity akin to a company’s bookkeeper—voiced disbelief about the Jury of Appeal’s decision during the news conference.
“It is true that when [referee] Righetto came to the scoring table,” said Tenschert, “that he said only one second remained on the clock. But there was a sign of three seconds held up by a person not on the scoring table, by Mr. William Jones. Righetto had no choice but to rule the clock back to three seconds.”
Declared the scorekeeper of the gold medal game, “Under FIBA rules . . . the United States won.”21
The conference broke up. Bobby Jones, who had witnessed the theater of the absurd with teammate Collins and ABC broadcaster Howard Cosell, had had enough.
“It was another eye-opening experience for me,” he said. “At that point I was thinking the Israeli tragedy, the farce of the game and the appeal, I had missed a lot of classes at school—just let me out of here.”
To see if the United States’ protest was justified, it is worth examining the happenings following Collins’s second free throw, point by point.
Manfred Ströher, part of the FIBA Technical Commission that sat behind the Soviet bench and coauthor of Jones’s FIBA biography, says he saw Soviet assistant coach Bashkin attempt to call a time-out with the electric signal after Collins’s first free throw.22 The timekeeper told Mols he saw the light indicating a time-out request from the Soviets and, without checking the status of the ball, blew the horn to alert the referees. But the ball was already in Collins’s hands, negating any time-out request.23
A technical foul on Bashkin should have been assessed for leaving the bench and yelling at the scorer’s table that a time-out had been called. As FIBA rules stated at the time, “A Coach or a substitute shall not enter the court unless by permission of an Official to attend an injured player, nor leave his place to follow the action on the court from the boundary lines.” The penalty: one free throw for the Americans.
Yet that didn’t happen. R. William Jones, with no power to do so as per FIBA rules he helped craft, demanded the clock be reset to three seconds, though no time-out had been granted (a scoreboard shot before Collins’s free throws and after the game ended shows the Soviets with one time-out left) and only one second remained after the Soviets had inbounded the ball and played two seconds. Those seconds cannot be undone—they were officially played. Further, Edmond Bigot served as FIBA’s authority at the scorer’s table, not his boss, Jones, making the secretary-general’s imposition even more glaring.
The penalty: one free throw for the Americans. That didn’t happen.
Under FIBA rules at the time, referring to the Decision of Game, “a game shall be decided by the scoring of the greater number of points in the playing time.” Thus, the United States won the game and the gold medal.
Critics of the U.S. protest would point out that a horn sounded during the play as the game clock had been erroneously set at fifty seconds. Mols talked with the Longines technician, who discussed the horn on the second play: “The technician confirmed that the horn to end the game had to be operated manually by the timekeeper since no automatic signal could operate while he was changing the clock. . . . He emphasized that there was nothing deficient in the clock operation and that ‘one second was all that legally remained.’”24
In any case, why does it matter if the scoreboard showed three seconds or not? The public-address announcer had made clear to everyone more than once that three seconds remained. In the FIBA rulebook of that era, there is no mention of the scoreboard clock having to be accurately set for a play to count, just that the timekeeper will keep a record of playing time. He did, blowing the horn after the final second elapsed.
And then Alexander Belov scored.
In the game’s aftermath and in ensuing years, many other claims were made. Some U.S. players and coaches said Edeshko stepped on the baseline during the final pass (he did after the pass had been tossed, which is fine) and that Alexander Belov should have been called for a three-second violation and/or traveling and/or a foul after grabbing the heave (all debatable). Whatever the case, the final three seconds were actually played over eight seconds—nearly triple the amount of allotted time.
None of that bothered Soviet coach Kondrashin.
“We deserved the victory no matter what the circumstances,” he said after the game. “We had them puzzled from the start since we used a different lineup to confuse them at the beginning.”25
(Beyond the game, according to FIBA rules, the United States could have lodged a different protest—about whether the Soviet Union’s team was composed of amateurs. They were clearly organized paid professionals—but the chance of winning that protest was nil as well.)
What was the reaction to the controversy in the United States? Remember the game was played before the creation of ESPN, so no endless loop of the final three seconds was replayed. No outrage fomented on Twitter. About the only ones commenting consistently at a public level were newspaper columnists, both at large city dailies and in smaller locales across the land, and they were generally appalled at what had happened.
“I wonder how long the championship basketball game might have continued if Alexander Belov had blown that layup which ‘won’ the game for Russia, 51–50, over the U.S. Saturday night,” mused Don Cronin of the Anderson Daily Bulletin in Anderson, Indiana. “It hardly seems possible that a R. William Jones, secretary-general of the Federation of International Basketball Associations, could do so much damage to the U.S.”26
Over at the Brainerd Daily Dispatch in Minnesota, columnist Jim Wallace suggested if this was the way the sport was run, basketball might as well be dumped from the Olympics:
We’ve been covering basketball games for a great many years, but have never seen such a tampering with the clock. . . . How can an FIBA official, one Dr. R. William Jones, take it upon himself to rush down out of the stands to award the Russians three extra seconds of play when they created the disturbance asking for an illegal time-out which helped run down the clock to one second? . . . If the International Olympic Committee, which is to review this game at its February meeting in Switzerland, rules the Russians won this game legally, then it’s time a substitute be found for basketball play in the Olympics.27
The impact of the game immediately resonated in political circles. On September 10, 1972, only hours after the controversial finish, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev and U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger talked in the Kremlin. Kissinger had just arrived from Munich, where he’d met with West German chancellor Willy Brandt.
“We are hoping to finalize” plans for a conference on European security, Brezhnev told him.
Kissinger didn’t miss a beat. “You will defeat us in the last three seconds,” he replied.28