Three Philly basketball stars recall 50 years later how the 1972 Munich Olympics became a nightmare

Hours before the U.S. took on the Soviet Union in the men’s basketball gold medal game of the 1972 Munich Olympics, 21-year-old guard Doug Collins tried to calm his nerves. “They had this place in the Olympic Village where you could go in and pick out music,” said Collins, reconstructing the scene recently. “I picked out Motown.

“The last song I listened to was Jimmy Ruffin’s ‘What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.’ Little did I know what was going to happen that night about 10 hours later.”

Fifty years ago, that’s how an Olympics clouded in controversy and tragedy came to an end. This was the Olympics of Mark Spitz, who won a record seven gold medals in the pool. It was where Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut captivated the world.

But it was also where American sprinters Eddie Hart and Rey Robinson were disqualified from the 100 meters when they were given the wrong information and missed the starting times for their quarterfinal heats. And where star distance runner Jim Ryun was eliminated from the 1,500-meter run when he was knocked off the track by another runner during a preliminary heat and his appeal to be given a second chance was rejected.

Finally, in the first Olympics since track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos had raised their fists in a Black power salute in the 1968 Mexico City Games, American 400-meter gold and silver medalists Vince Matthews and Wayne Collett were sent home by the International Olympic Committee because they refused to stand at attention or show respect for the flag during the playing of the national anthem. That meant the U.S. was unable to field a team in the 1,600-meter relay.

But the first Olympics held in Germany since Adolf Hitler snubbed Jesse Owens in 1936 was also marked by unspeakable tragedy. On Sept. 5, eight Palestinian Black September terrorists broke into the Olympic Village and held nine members of the Israeli wrestling team hostage after killing two attempting to resist. The rest were killed later that night after negotiations with the German government broke down and a rescue attempt failed.

“Afterwards we’re wondering: Are we going to continue the Games?” said Collins, the future 76ers player and coach who’d been playing in relative obscurity at Illinois State and had never been out of the country before this. “I was torn. My feeling was if we could honor those people killed by winning a gold medal, that would’ve been great. I just don’t think they would’ve wanted the Games stopped.”

By that point the U.S. had already advanced to the semifinals, having dispatched the rest of the field with ease. A three-month odyssey began with 67 players competing for 12 coveted spots at the Olympic trials in Colorado Springs, Colo., followed by a rigorous three-week training session at Pearl Harbor that was more like a military boot camp. A five-game exhibition tour against a team of NBA All-Stars followed. Now it was reaching the end.

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But there was plenty of sentiment to call the whole thing off.

“Everybody’s initial reaction was to get the hell out of here and go home,” said Mike Bantom, who starred at St. Joseph’s and persuaded Hawks coach Jack McKinney to get him an invite to the trials. “Unlike today, that was the first time anything like that had happened, where people took hostages for political reasons and killed them.

“We were all upset about what happened and fearful what could happen. But, like anything else, we tried to kind of block it out on court and play basketball.”

After taking a day to regroup, International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage decreed the Games would go on. “Brundage was ticked because this was going to be his last Olympics and they had messed it up,’” said 96-year-old Jim Becker, then the lead writer for the Associated Press in Munich. He now lives in Honolulu. “Brundage gets up there and says we shouldn’t let politics get involved. Eleven dead athletes, five terrorists and a policeman, and he’s comparing it to politics.”

Against that backdrop, Hank Iba’s Team USA went back to work, easily dispatching Italy, 68-38, in the semis, while the Soviets got past Cuba, 67-61, to set up the highly anticipated gold medal game.

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To accommodate viewers back home watching it live, the game didn’t tip off until nearly midnight Munich time, Sept. 9. “Imagine the anxiety and nerves you’re feeling sitting around all day when you’re 21 and getting ready to play for a gold medal,” said Collins, a product of tiny Benton, Ill. (pop. 7,000), where one of his friends was actor John Malkovich. “The first time I saw any of these guys was on the floor. They ground us down.”

“We didn’t like the pace,” said Bobby Jones, then a North Carolina sophomore and defensive specialist who went on to have a Hall of Fame career, primarily with the 76ers. “The Russians were very strong and physical. We struggled and kind of changed our pattern in the second half with steals and breakaways to turn it around.”

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Indeed, the Soviets took command early and had a 10-point lead by the third quarter before desperation started to kick in for the Americans, who decided to abandon their usual game plan.

“If you shot too quick, Iba took you out,” said Bantom, who went on to have a nine-year NBA career, then work for the league in various capacities for 30 years. “What you would normally think is a good shot, he didn’t necessarily agree. Unless we were out on the break, we didn’t know.

“With five minutes left, [guard] Kevin Joyce said we need to throw whatever programmed way of basketball out and get after these guys. We were ramping up our pressure and playing freely and [the Soviet players] started panicking.”

The Soviets clung to the lead as the clock ticked inside a minute. Moments after Bantom fouled out, Jim Forbes’ foul-line jumper cut it to 49-48. They then trapped a Soviet player, who tried a cross-court pass from a corner out of the double team.

Here Collins picks up the story. “I was on the left side of the floor when I tipped the pass and tipped it to myself,” he said of the play he still believes should have led to gold. “I didn’t know how much time was left, so I just took the ball and said, ‘I’ve got to get to the bucket fast as I can.’

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“What I saw then was this Russian just bend over and knew he was going to submarine me.”

The impact knocked Collins into the stanchion behind the basket, the kind of play that might be called a flagrant foul today, resulting in two free throws and possession. But in Munich, some wondered if the dazed Collins would be able to stay in the game and go to the line.

“I had fallen on my wrist and had a mouse under my eye,” Collins said. “One of the coaches says to Iba, ‘We’ve got to get someone ready to shoot these free throws.’ To this day I still feel the power of these words Coach Iba said: ‘If Doug can walk, he’s shooting.’

“I thought, the man believes in me. I make the first one, the Russians are gesturing to get a timeout as the referee gives me the ball for the second free throw. They hit the horn trying to get a sub in, but I’m in my routine and I didn’t hear it. I made it. Now we’re up one with three seconds to go.”

Much has been written about how those final three seconds transpired. To this day, still no one seems quite sure. In Moscow, it’s celebrated as a magic moment when the U.S. Olympic basketball giant, carrying a 63-0 all-time record into the game, was vanquished. The Americans, who refused to participate in the medal ceremony and never have accepted the silver medals, which remain locked in a vault in Lausanne, Switzerland, are viewed there as sore losers.

But Collins, Bantom, Jones, and Jim Brewer, who missed the end of the game after suffering a concussion from being knocked to the floor on a jump ball, don’t quite see it that way.

In their minds, the Soviets should have never been given three chances to get the ball inbounds following Collins’ free throws, the third time the harm. That’s when 6-foot-7 Alexander Belov took Ivan Edeshko’s length-of-the-court pass (it appears Edeshko may have stepped on the end line before releasing the ball) and bounced off the 6-7 Forbes and 6-3 Joyce contesting the play before laying in the game-winner.

That set off a wild celebration among the Soviets amid stunned American disbelief. Most of their dismay came not so much from the Belov basket, although Bantom is convinced Belov simply shoved Forbes out of the way to position himself to catch the ball. And no one knows why the referee motioned 6-11 Tom McMillen, guarding the inbounds pass, to move away from the line, giving Edeshko a clear sight line.

Of course, none of that would have happened had not William Jones, the British head of FIBA, whom according to many had expressed being tired of American supremacy and was hoping to expand the game internationally, marched down from the stands to order those final three seconds be replayed not once, but twice. The first time, the Soviets inbounded the ball to Sergei Below, who was approaching midcourt when the referee blew his whistle with :01 on the clock.

The Americans didn’t know what to think. “I’m guarding Sergei Belov,” Collins said. “My thought is if I can turn him once and he has to spin, we’re going to win the game. He did it, but then the referee blew the whistle. I’m thinking, ‘They better not call a foul. I never touched the guy.’ But they stopped the game. To this day there was no reason for them to stop the game.”

The stoppage came because Soviet coach Vladimir Kondrashin was trying to call a timeout. But rather than have the Soviets inbound the ball from midcourt with :01 left, at William Jones’ insistence, that first inbounds play never happened and Russia got a do-over, still with :03 left.

If Doug can walk, he’s shooting.

“We thought we had won, but there was this undertone at the scorer’s table going on,” Bantom said. “All the people in the stands were wondering what was happening, as they started doing all this talking and bringing our coaching staff into the discussion.

“Finally after some period of time, they tell us we have to replay the three seconds, but they don’t tell us why. Now watching the film, they talk about the coach trying to call timeout. So they tell us to get back on the court.”

There was some resistance, but eventually the game resumed. Well, sort of. The timer had yet to reset the clock when the ref inexplicably handed the Soviets the ball. After the inbounds pass, one of them fired the ball from three-quarter court. The ball clanged harmlessly off the backboard, triggering an American eruption of jubilation.

“We thought we had won,” Bantom said. “More important, they thought they had lost. We were jumping up and down like kids. Then we’re going off the court and they say we’ve got to go back.”

“Iba wanted us to leave the court,” said Brewer, who was trying to keep up with the action despite his concussion. Brewer is Sixers coach Doc Rivers’ uncle. “[Assistants Johnny] Bach and [Don] Haskins talked us into coming back, because they said we’d forfeit otherwise. [William] Jones interfered where he didn’t have any authority.”

Ultimately, since the clock had never reset to :03, the second play didn’t count, either. Given a third chance, Kondrashin inserted Edeshko with the express purpose of throwing the long ball to Belov. It was a play similar to the perfect pass Duke’s Grant Hill threw to Christian Laettner 20 years later in the NCAA Eastern Regional at the Spectrum. With the same result.

Why Iba didn’t have McMillen or little-used 7-4 Tom Burleson defending Belov, no one knows. But it seemed a fitting conclusion to an Olympics in which little went as planned.

“Because it was the final game, we knew they would bring out the podium,” Bantom said. “We were discussing whether we should come out and someone said we could file a protest because we didn’t believe we’d lost.”

The protest was voted down, 3-2, with Cuba, Poland, and Hungary — all Soviet bloc countries — voting in the Soviet team’s favor. That left the Americans with a choice.

They’ve never looked back on their decision.

“I feel like if we had won a silver medal, I’d have been proud of it,” Bantom said. “I feel like we won that game and to accept the silver under those circumstances would be wrong.

“I’m proud of our guys for standing together.”

So is Brewer. “I haven’t had any change of heart. We were there and we accomplished what we set out to do, and then politics got involved. You can’t control that.”

As for Collins, now 71, he went from player to coach to broadcaster. While Collins was working for NBC in Beijing in 2008, Team USA coach Mike Krzyzewski had him address the team, urging the players to get that Olympic gold medal he’d missed out on.

“I got teary-eyed,” Collins said. “I told them, ‘I want you do something I couldn’t do, to get that gold and listen to the national anthem as your last song. Ours was ‘What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.’”

A year later while he celebrated being inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as the Curt Gowdy broadcasting recipient, Collins’ patience was rewarded.

“My son Chris was on the staff for Coach K in Beijing,” Collins said. “We’re having this party and my daughter-in-law Kim says, ‘Chris has something he wants to give to his father.’

“Chris stood up and he started crying and said, ‘Dad, this is 37 years too late, but you’ve got your gold medal now.’ And he gets up and puts his gold medal that Coach K had made for his staff around my neck.”

But that rare moment of vindication won’t make up for what happened in Munich 50 years ago, which will forever remain a part of them.

“The immediate impact was it matured me a lot,” Bantom said. “I realized good guys don’t always win and life isn’t always fair.

“And some things you can’t control even if you do everything right.”

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