Do We Need an NBA Hit Squad?

The invitations have been mailed, requesting the presence of 10 NBA All-Stars at Barcelona, Spain, next summer, and the U.S. Olympic Committee should be ashamed.

Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Patrick Ewing.

Has winning become so all-important, so all-obsessing, so all-defining to the American psyche that we must stoop to dispatching a professional hit squad to finish the job our amateurs left undone in Seoul in 1988 and Seattle in 1990?

David Robinson, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone.

Nobody wants to turn the Olympic basketball tournament into a demolition derby. Nobody wants to sit through round-robin scores of USA 131, Egypt 57 and USA 142, Uruguay 64.

Chris Mullin, John Stockton, Scottie Pippen.

Do we?

Every time I think of Magic & Friends in Barcelona, I think of that shattered glass backboard at the Pan Am Games, captured as it happened in living color, and in slow-motion, by the behind-the-board Jam Cam.

It will be brutal.

It will be grotesque.

It shouldn’t have happened.

But did you get a load of the way that backboard vaporized?

When the time comes, the NBA Stars and Stripes will have us gawking and talking. We might be embarrassed, but we watch nonetheless. Call it the semisweet chocolate-dipped Dove bar of the ’92 Olympics. Our guilty pleasure.

It has been admirable, all the high-minded discussion about the equity of competition and true Olympic spirit. Yes, the NBA entry could make a mockery of the event. Yes, an Olympic invitation would mean more to an unpaid, unjaded college senior. For him, it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Ewing and Jordan have once-in-a-lifetime experiences every time they cash a paycheck.

But just think of that USA lineup . . .

Magic dishing to Michael in the backcourt.

Ewing in the paint, flanked by Barkley and Malone.

Bird and Robinson, coming off the bench.

One more time: Larry Bird and David Robinson . . . coming off the bench.

Add that to your once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Never mind China and Greece. I’d pay to watch this team warm up.

Note, please, that the rest of the world accepted these terms, and not at gunpoint. In 1989, the International Amateur Basketball Federation (FIBA) voted overwhelmingly to open the Olympics to all professionals, home and abroad, NBA, CBA and USSR. The final tally was 56-13. For the record, the United States voted against it.

Now that it’s here, of course, the United States isn’t fighting it. The U.S. basketball organizers could still pick 12 collegians if they so chose.

Thanks, but, no thanks, the U.S. team is planning to go with a 10-2 split--10 pros and two collegians, one of them presumably LSU center Shaquille O’Neal. That leaves one spot for a role player, most likely a swingman with good grades and keen towel-dispensing skills.

For some reason, the U.S. organizers have been made to feel unclean for doing this. Why? Because, finally, the Americans are taking the international basketball system and making it work for themselves? Unlike the way we dealt with the international three-point line, which is how we got here in the first place?

For Europeans and Asians and South Americans who were able to grow up without the onus of basketball being Our Game, the three-point rule was an issue of basic math. If you get two points for scoring here and three points for scoring there, doesn’t it make sense to teach your players to shoot out there?

Back in the USA, our coaches didn’t see it that way. We invented basketball, we invented it to be a power game, we will continue to pound the ball inside. Stubbornly, John Thompson clung to this Edsel-like thinking as he brought his cocky American squad to Seoul for the 1988 Olympic Games.

Stubbornly, Thompson clung to a bronze medal on the flight back.

Not one to learn from history’s mistakes, Mike Krzyzewski arrived in Seattle for the 1990 Goodwill Games without a three-point shooter--unless you count Arkansas’ Lee Mayberry, who didn’t. Krzyzewski lost a round-robin game to the outside-savvy Soviets and the gold-medal game to You-Go-For-Three Yugoslavia, apparently conserving brain energy for later use against Nevada Las Vegas.

That’s a big 0-2 in international competition for a nation that went 9-1 in Olympic gold-medal games through 1984. Suffice it to say, it got our attention.

To paraphrase gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, a recluse in Woody Creek, Colo., now that the Nuggets have gone bad, when the going gets tough, the U.S. Olympic basketball movement goes pro. Bird, Mullin and Jordan ought to take care of that three-point problem, assuming they all RSVP. Jordan has been waffling--first he said he rather golf, now he says he isn’t sure. The curiosity is wearing down even His Airness.

That and the phone calls from his agent reminding him about the mother lode that awaits in the field of post-Olympic endorsements.

I don’t know, what’s really going to interest the Olympic viewer in 1992--Magic, Jordan and Barkley on the break against the Soviets, or the synchronized swimming semifinals?

Spain is in for a spectacle unlike any other. It can get the running of the bulls any year. What about the running of the Bulls and the Lakers and the 76ers?