South Sudan is the underdog story of the Olympics, and a former Sixers guard leads the way

LILLE, France — Behind the man who has been authoring the best story in international basketball, the just-beaten Puerto Rican players were filing through the mixed-zone maze at Pierre Mauroy Stadium. Royal Ivey turned his head to glance at them but never stopped talking.

His South Sudan team, the one that had put such a scare into the U.S. in an exhibition game last week in London, had just knocked off Puerto Rico, 90-79, for the first Olympic men’s basketball victory in his young country’s history. The former 76ers guard was careful not to revel too loudly or brazenly with his opponents within earshot, but this was too good, too satisfying, for him to stay quiet. In the first round of last year’s FIBA World Cup, South Sudan had forged a 10-point lead over Puerto Rico only to lose in overtime, and Ivey had employed a tried and true coaching tactic heading into Sunday’s preliminary round, imploring his players to use that disappointment as motivation.

And it worked.

“We had this one marked for a year,” said Ivey, who played for the Sixers twice, in 2008-09 and again in 2012-13. “They got us in the World Cup, and we had to return the favor. We had this circled for a year. This was definitely a revenge game. I don’t want to stir it up, but that’s the truth.”

Stir away, Coach. Stir away. Ivey wasn’t so silly as to play the revenge card for South Sudan’s next game — a rematch with the Americans this Wednesday — but he was more than happy to savor his contributions to the most lovable underdogs in these Olympic Games. “It’s a movie,” he said. “My life is a movie right now.”

Who in their right mind could blame him for his pride and giddiness? South Sudan was born just in 2011, breaking away from Sudan and earning its independence after a brutal and bloody civil war. Former NBA player Luol Deng has all but single-handedly funded the nation’s basketball program for the last four years. “Just think about it: paying for gyms, paying for hotels, paying for plane tickets,” Ivey said. “That’s all him.” The two of them were longtime friends when Ivey, an assistant under Steve Nash with the Brooklyn Nets in 2020, hungry to be a head coach, asked Deng for the South Sudan job.

“We had the same vision and alliance from Day One,” Ivey said. “He’s the president and focal point, and I follow his lead.”

Deng’s money can buy only so much, though. There are no indoor basketball courts in South Sudan, so the program held its training camp earlier this month in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. “Just imagine being on an 18-, 19-hour flight just to get to camp,” Ivey said. There, he had 25 players trying out … and only one court. “You get creative,” he said. “You use your mind.” One group drilled and scrimmaged on one half of the court. One group drilled and scrimmaged on the other. A third group lifted weights, and the three clusters switched assignments every 30 minutes. They kept up that routine for five days before Ivey started making cuts, paring down those 25 to the final 12 for the roster.

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“Then traveling to Spain and just moving around, long flights, giving up the exit rows to my 7-footers,” he said, “that’s the grind that people don’t talk about. People don’t see that — getting delayed seven hours in an airport while we’re in Chad. They don’t see things like that.”

The Sixers were two significant stops on Ivey’s road here. In his first stint with them, he got to pick the brains of Mo Cheeks and Allen Iverson, both in their final seasons with the franchise. In his second, he got to play for “a great coach, Doug Collins,” and got to groom the team’s rookie point guard: Jrue Holiday.

“I was getting little bits of people’s games and people’s input and coming up with my own theories and my own way of coaching,” he said. “Toughness — Philly is a blue-collar city. The fans will be on you if you don’t play hard. They’ll love you when you make shots. It’s a double-edged sword, but I love Philly.”

There isn’t much secretive or subtle about the style of basketball that Ivey prefers and demands. South Sudan shoots a lot of three-pointers, swarms the glass, and defends like mad. It wiped out a six-point halftime deficit Sunday by outrebounding Puerto Rico, 55-27. Marial Shayok, a second-round pick by the Sixers in 2019 who played just four games for them, scored 15 points, including four with less than 7 minutes to go, grabbing two offensive rebounds, turning them into a layup and two free throws, keeping Puerto Rico at arm’s length.

“We’re a new country, a new team,” said Shayok, a 6-foot-6 swingman, “and just to paint this narrative, it’s special.”

How long it might last is anyone’s guess. The U.S. escaped with its reputation, barely, last week when LeBron James dropped in a late layup for that shocking 101-100 win, and Ivey is under no illusions about the likelihood that Wednesday’s rematch will be so close. “They’re going to be ready for us,” he said. But no one who is part of or loves his team had any time Sunday for worry or dread. Outside Pierre Mauroy, pockets of people from South Sudan transformed the area around the stadium into a street festival as they danced and sang. Inside, a crowd of 27,000 screamed its support, and even the insult of having to hear the game-management staff play the wrong national anthem — Sudan’s anthem echoed throughout the arena until someone realized the error — angered Ivey and his players only until tipoff.

“We all make mistakes,” he said. “I told them in the huddle, ‘This is unbelievable, but guess what? That’s life. We’ve got to go out there and play and compete and move on to the next play.’ And they locked in. They locked in and got it right. We’re all not perfect.”

So far, though, this story is.

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