![]() ![]() Naismith, who is naturally the most important figure in basketball. What’s more, no ceremony was planned for Dr. He was ignored there and his name was stricken from the pass list. We managed to get him a pass for all games, but it was not the American Olympic committee’s efforts. Naismith arrived in Germany without even a pass to see a game. The Lincoln Evening Journal quotes Olympic referee Jim Tobin as claiming that Naismith, then 74, was deliberately omitted from the guest list:ĭr. If you’re not familiar with the history of sport, this is notable because Dr. How big an asshole? Well, on the Olympic basketball front, he managed to forget a basketball enthusiast named Dr. This is all to say Avery Brundage was a huge asshole. Would you trust a man who wore this tie?īrundage, meanwhile, was thwarting the proposed boycott of Hitler’s games and proudly embracing anti-Semitic support: “he fact that the Jews are against us will arouse interest among thousands of people who have never subscribed before, if they are properly approached.” According to Carolyn Mervyn, writing decades later, Brundage’s political interest (although, like all of his ilk, he claimed that there was no space in sports for politics) was in thwarting communism, and he considered Nazi Germany a friend in that venture. Allen quit his post, citing ‘deceitful political bartering ’ the AOC responded with the outrageous claim that he’d never actually worked with them in the first place.Īvery Brundage. The AOC at large clashed with their director of basketball, Phog Allen, who was both one of the most important figures in the history of the game and the man who had done more than anyone else to get the sport to the Olympics. Things had gotten heated long before that point. In fact, the proposed American basketball team of 13 players and three coaches hadn’t even managed to fund itself. At the end of June, Brundage was forced to announce that the AOC had a funding deficit of $146,000. This was a nice idea that went badly wrong. Avery Brundage, President of the American Olympic Committee, hoped that basketball might change that, bringing in enough cash during qualifying tournaments that the smaller sports didn’t have to scramble to fund themselves. ![]() Back then, teams were meant to be self-funding, which meant they had to raise the cost of travel themselves. Indeed, basketball was so popular in the States that it was expected to power the rest of the American Olympic delegation. While international basketball was just becoming A Thing, college hoops had been thriving for decades, leaving the United States the obvious favorite in a sport which was only just starting to catch on with the rest of the world. Expectations for the American team’s first Olympic venture were naturally high. ![]()
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