Time has come today…The Chamber Brothers
Hi Friends. Another installment of my essays this Wednesday 1/17 at 8:40am on WJTN. Streaming at https://radio.securenetsystems.net/cwa/index.cfm?CFID=eb6dc10d-c215-45d0-b2e7-e39b6ee456ab&CFTOKEN=0&stationCallSign=WJTN
Time tugs, inexorably, incessantly at the world in general, and you and me specifically. It doesn’t waiver, it doesn’t sleep, takes no vacation, no days off….
Check it out…
Hear it on WJTN Podcast
https://wjtn.com/podcasts/bill-burk-talks
I recognized him as soon as he walked in the gym, the father of an old friend. He comes to watch the local high school teams play basketball.
His face is familiar, he knows most of the other fans (though fewer and fewer each year). A walk from the doorway to his favorite seat is fits and starts of conversation, handshakes, well wishes; “How’s your mom doing?” “You get that tractor fixed? Snow tires soon, going to be cold winter.”
He’s stooped at the shoulders, hunched, but just a little, head bent slightly forward. Gravity has done it’s inevitable, inexhaustible work on him for a lot of years. He wears a driving cap that covers a bald pate and sits above bushy eyebrows. The hat is soft and worn. You can tell the two of them, man and brim, put in some miles together.
This time, walking through the gym, he has his grandson in tow. A young boy who’s tenth birthday is somewhere in the future. The boy holds the old man’s hand firmly, smiles easily as grandpa makes his slow, sure way to the far end of the bleachers. They stop and watch the home team do warm-up drills.
A stray ball bounces where they stand courtside. The boy instinctively lets go of the man’s hand and bends down to grab the ball, picks it up and holds it to his chest. A player run over to him and holds out his own hands, palms up. The boy looks to the old man as if to say, “The ball, Don’t I get to keep it?”
The old man waves a wrinkled hand from inside a too-big coat. The boy frowns and pushes the ball to the player, who steps closer and bumps knuckles with the boy, an adult move from a teenager. The boy smiles, the old man smiles.
From the scorer’s table, the horn blows. Game time.
The PA announces the visiting team. Then the home team.
This same scene is playing out all over the county, the country. Boys and girls are lining up across a thousand foul lines. Toeing the hardwood in various degrees of physical and emotional condition, some strong, some weak; some confident, some wary. Some hurting, some hurtful. Some filled with excitement in their full flush of youth. Some in pain and confusion at their increasingly awkward and vulnerable place in the world.
But all are trying, to do well, to find their place, to hold their heads somewhere important in this gym, along this continuum of time in their lives. None are trying to fail, to do harm that is outside their capacity for reason and accomplishment. That’s a good thing to remember, for everyone assembled to understand. We all act at our capacities of experience and development, we are what we’ve been built to do, by society, by our upbringing, by our relatives, our situations and our teachers. The old man will bark at the officials, demean the coach, question the motive and effort of the kids playing the game.
Or he won’t. He’ll sit and watch and enjoy and appreciate all that the game has to offer.
The boy will take it all in, he’ll learn, he’ll remember.
The national anthem begins. The man drops the boys hand and places it over his chest, motions for the boy to do the same. The boy does, and the Star Spangled Banner plays, not the note dragging Whitney Houston one, the fast one, all horns and percussion.
“What so proudly we hailed…”
The boy, righthand across his heart, reaches across and tugs on the old man’s sleeve. The man, a little distracted, frowns and looks down at the boy. The boy points to the man’s head where the old friend, the driving cap sits. The man’s eyebrows go up, and a quick flush of embarrassment crosses his brow. He removes the cap and returns to the flag. The boy mouths the words, “oer the land of the free…”
I watch this from across the gym,
“and the home of the brave…
And I smile.
Hi Friends. Another installment of my essays this Wednesday at 8:40am on WJTN. Streaming at https://radio.securenetsystems.net/cwa/index.cfm?CFID=eb6dc10d-c215-45d0-b2e7-e39b6ee456ab&CFTOKEN=0&stationCallSign=WJTN This one titled “We’re doing it wrong”. Suggesting there might just be a better way consume our entertainment. Tune in, give a listen and share with your peeps. Thanks. Bill
You can hear the live readings at https://wjtn.com/podcasts/bill-burk-talks
The Mother, The Son and The Buffalo Bills
When the Bills scored, timely, surprisingly (this was years ago, before the recent resurgence), it propelled them to the NFL playoffs. Finally. It had been awhile. Mid-cheer, the Son looked at his phone, waited for the call. Silent. He frowned, shrugged it off, pushed himself off the stool and celebrated with his friends. Probably busy, he thought. He moved around the bar, high-fived everyone in his considerable reach. Let’s Go Buffalo!
It didn’t completely escape him that the phone didn’t ring. It almost always rang when something good happened in a Bills game. The first seeds of doubt were planted that day, way back in his mind, germinating in the form of sour thought.
Something’s off.
The Son is an enduring fan of the Buffalo Bills national football team, year in year out, roster to roster, coach to coach, one-dimensional classic logo (the profile of a regal buffalo) to three-D Jumbo-Tron videos. War Memorial Stadium (“aka The Rockpile”) to Rich, The Ralph, New Era, and now Highmark Stadium. Joe Ferguson and Juice, the glory days of Reed, Kelly, Biscuit, Thurman and Bruce. The son played both ways in high school, a lineman, so he’s partial to Joe Delamielleure, Kent Hull and Fred Smerlas. He’s a fan of Shane Conlan, played against him in high school. Has replica jerseys, club-head covers, hats, gloves, socks. He models exactly one tattoo, on his arm, conspicuously hidden by a sleeve. It’s an old-school buffalo colored the distinctive red and blue of his favorite football team.
Like a lot of western New Yorkers he’s suffered, rejoiced, suffered and rejoiced again. It’s the way of sports fans everywhere, different for Bills faithful because of how close the franchise has come to perfection. He’s realistic, fatalistic and dedicated. He can pack a living room or a bar with his infectious enthusiasm. He’s the mayor of Bills-Town, USA.
The Mother, also a Bills fan, found in the local team a language she and her football-loving son could share when traditional ways of communication stalled out. It started when he was young, an absent father, and a mother looking for points of contact. It carried into adulthood, common ground, those phone calls every Sunday.
“Did you see that Son?”
“Yes Mom. I saw it.
“Wasn’t it great?”
“Yes it was. It was.”
You can call your child when you need help around the house, an errand run, a chore done. But that’s not nearly the same as calling when you share a visceral moment, even if it happened on T.V., even if you’re sharing over the phone.
“Hang on I have to take this. It’s my Mom.”
Then came that time the phone didn’t ring.
Because we have surety, we can bear existence. We know things to be true, real. We’re confident that we’ll wake to find a familiar world, that we’ll recognize the faces of people in our lives, identify the halls we roam, the rooms we inhabit. We travel our roads without a map, gather wool, positive we’ll arrive at our destination. We know who we are.
When that changes, when the familiar world shrinks and uncertainty creeps into our everyday lives, what do we do? How do we negotiate daily rituals, the grocery store, gassing up the car, Thanksgiving dinner? How do we remember who we are?
Sport is a great match-maker, a conduit for easy communication, a real-time experience to share. It requires only basic understanding, no memory or complicated thinking (it can accommodate those, but doesn’t need it). That’s what makes it a generational conversational structure. You don’t need to recognize a face to celebrate or commiserate a win or loss, you don’t need recall, you don’t need to know where you left your keys to travel, which relative is which, how to mail a letter. You don’t have to track characters or plot. You can sink yourself into moments of feeling, one at a time, as they come and present themselves to you in a blessed solitary series of experiences.
The descriptors of dementia are cliché, there’s no new way to portray it; diabolical and sinister, defiling and brutal, life-sapping, a thief, a hostage-taker. When our veracity slips, how do those left carry on? How do we figure a world where your mother doesn’t recognize your face? Who teaches that class? Physical diseases are certainly hate-able. Curse heart and lung disease, rail against cancer, look it in the face and judge it, name it and fight it. Mental deterioration is an unforgivably insidious betrayal of our capacities, more so because it leaves caregivers to gather the puzzle pieces and sort through them.
We are robbed too soon of our people by disease, accident and catastrophe, they go away plenty fast. We don’t need them pushed from our lives by a memory-starving condition.
The Mother passed recently. It wasn’t unexpected or easy. The day the Bills won and the Son’s phone stayed silent was the first sign of a downward spiral of her faculties, a hole she couldn’t climb from. Rarely, but treasured, she had moments of clarity, when everything was like it used to be. More often she forgot the Buffalo Bills, forgot the Son, familiar people faded in and out of her awareness; here one moment, gone the next. Sometimes replaced by an offset, a memory untethered to reality, sometimes just a hole where recognition should have held.
Inevitably comes that day for all of us when the phone simply doesn’t ring.
For this and more of my writing, please go to www.billburkwrotesomething.law.blog Or check out my book RUN! From Civil War to the NFL; The Jehuu Caulcrick Story, available on Amazon.
Would love to hear from you with a comment or review.
TUNE IN WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6th at 8:40am to WJTN, 101.3 on your FM DIAL, or live streaming at https://wjtn.com/listen-live
Our mothers, those of my friends, like most who raise bunches of young boys, put up with a LOT. A special one when I was growing up was Georgia Porter, the mother of my good buddy Bill Wassman. She was tolerant of a couple decades of nonsense and shenanigans….ooohhh the stories she could tell.
Well, have told. She passed recently (me and my guys are at that age when having parents is much more rare than having buried them), and it inspired me to try to capture the very cool relationship Bill and Georgia had right up to the very end. That’s the second installment of Bill Burk Talks; About Sports and Life. It’s called The Mother, The Son, and The Buffalo Bills.
I hope you enjoy it, Give a listen and leave me a review. I’d greatly appreciate it.
Special thanks to Macey Estes for producing the production!
You can revisit the live readings at https://wjtn.com/podcasts/bill-burk-talks
TUNE IN WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22nd at 8:45am to WJTN, 101.3 on your FM DIAL, or live streaming at https://wjtn.com/listen-live
When I was real little, the song “I Got You Babe” came on the car radio. I remember thinking Sonny Bono (the OG Bono in my opinion…did I use OG right there?) had a great voice. I said as much to my mom, she in the front seat, me rolling around the back of the wood-paneled station wagon with the mono-phonic AM push-dial radio, belt-less and perfectly safe. She made a face, I saw it in the oversized rear view mirror, and said, “No…he doesn’t. Someday you’ll understand.”
And I do, I understand. Sonny Bono did not have a good voice…he must have had an indomitable ego to believe he could sing on a record that anybody would want to listen to; Cher the vocal Mozart to Sonny’s Salieri (look it up, kids).
Anyway…I hate the sound of my voice. I have no such ego as Sonny Bono, or Paul David Hewson for that matter (look it up, adults). And yet, here I am, reading essays aloud and putting them on the radio.
Check out my first installment of Bill Burk Talks; About Sports and Life, a Thanksgiving piece I hope you’ll enjoy and relate to (yes, I know I’ve now ended at least two sentences in prepositions…it’s called artistic license).
If you enjoy it, Dennis Webster and WJTN have agreed to put their listeners through my (meh) voice every other week, Wednesdays at 8:45am. Give a listen and leave me a review (of content and not voice quality, please…PLEASE). I’d greatly appreciate it.
Special thanks to Macey Estes for producing the production!
You can revisit the live readings at https://wjtn.com/podcasts/bill-burk-talks
You’re doing it wrong.
I’m doing it wrong too. I don’t remember when I started. It just sort of crept up on me, the way you get hungry after seeing a Burger King commercial. I used to like the best in sports, in athletes. Used to revel in the stories of the games, of the athletes. Used to read the box scores. Then somewhere along the way I lost that. You did too. We were led by the nose into a world of false outrage, forced drama, became weaned on hyperbole; an inexplicable desire to be offended by people we don’t even know.
The pollution has been in news cycles for a while, probably starting when cable TV was invented and the competition for our attention ramped up. It didn’t have to be this way. When programming became a twenty-four-hour cycle of desperate attention-grabs, they could have featured any subject matter to steer our interests, to harvest our awareness. For some reason they chose seamy, belligerent content. News became a competition for who could outrage the most people, up and down the dial.
It’s not our fault, probably has something to do with human nature, or Nixon. Maybe it was the internet.
Sadly, at least from where I sit and watch, the contamination of consumable public media seeped into sports entertainment. Talking heads on sports media report global tragedy as if it’s their place, running in the lane of national news, using their shows about games to share their opinions on super-serious matters.
And we buy in. We scroll past the scores, the highlights, the human achievements, to see who got arrested, who got fined, who’s fired or traded, to decide which professional athlete is more petulant than the next, to gnash teeth over the latest imbecilic thing to come out of the mouth of millionaires who, as a group, aren’t the most fertile source of unique or critical thinking. Reporting of our national games (and that’s what they are, games) used to come as a weekly Sports Illustrated magazine, once-a-week highlight shows, Howard Cosell at halftime of Monday Night Football, the next to last segment on your local news at six broadcast, right before the weather and the closing piece on the local chili cook-off. Now there are entire suites of channeling dedicated to what sports content a producer believes you should see. That’s powerful, heady stuff. And when the Nielson ratings skew negative and provocative, we’re all forced to follow it down the toilet.
There are better uses of your sports entertainment attention. Here’s one.
In 2017 over a hundred Alfred University football players lined up and paraded past nurses to be part of a cause called the Be A Match registry, stopping briefly to have their mouths swabbed for samples. The players and other volunteers hoped that their DNA would match someone on the other end of the registry who needed a bone marrow transplant.
Imagine that. They didn’t hope and dream of an NIL deal, the transfer portal, an highlight on SportsCenter. They hoped to someday save a life. (Disclosure; My son stood in that line. To this day, he’s waiting, along with another few million heroes, for a call that he’s a match, understanding his great fortune to be on the healthy side of that ledger).
The goal of Be A Match is twenty-five million potential donors. That’s how many samples they need to cover enough DNA types to find a donor for every need. You know how to get to that number? You register one, then two, the twenty, then fifty. The Alfred University Saxon football team has added between fifty and a hundred blood types/DNA every four years since 2017. Gotta start somewhere, as long as you start. This is one team in one small corner of the United States, doing one thing, on one day.
According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association 87% of women and 83% of men volunteer on an annual basis. Fifty percent of student-athletes report they are required to take part in community service as part of their athletics participation. Most collegiate organizing bodies give away an award for community service, from NCAA Division I, through NJCAA (Jamestown Community College won the inaugural NJCAA Region III Community Service Award in 2010).
In January of 2022 Russell Kohler, a sophomore on the Alfred University football team from Seaford, NY, took an injection meant to stimulate the marrow in his blood and platelets, which the doctors would later make into stem cells. Later that year a 50-year-old male diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was treated using Russell’s marrow. Russell said, “It happened so quickly, and I know a lot of guys that didn’t get phone calls and others that weren’t matches. I was just lucky enough to be a match. It really was not that big of a deal in my opinion. It was just doing the right thing.”
Try to tell me (or that 50-year-old man) that a single thing on (or off) a field of play is a more important story than that. It’s happening every day, all over the country.
Sport as entertainment, is an opt-in proposition. Nobody makes you buy a ticket for a game, watch ESPN, care about the latest grievance of owners versus players. You control the content of your world. They have to come to you. The only power we have over media is our attention. The only control we possess is what we choose to tune in to. If enough people chose to watch only the good stuff, the world of sports, the true value of it, would be a better place.
Note: To date, Be the Match has facilitated 80,000 marrow and cord blood transplants, treating diseases such as leukemia, anemia, immunodeficiency, sickle cell and various metabolic disorders. For more information about Be the Match, visit www.BeTheMatch.org
He cut the grass low, along a straight line, always as straight as you could with a push-mower. It made for a truer infield, easier on the eyes, better hops. There wouldn’t be a rider for a few years yet, so for now he pushed in the summer sun. Neither you nor I know how many times he cut that field, or raked the mound or weeded the base paths. Let’s just say a lot. He’s from a generation where you don’t count things like that. Stats don’t matter, but kids playing on a decent ball field do. He taught me to throw it over-hand, the shoulder fairly brushing the ear on its way through. He grimaced when I dropped to three-quarters or, horrors, side-arm! You just don’t throw that way. And you catch with two hands. Once in a Babe Ruth game at Falconer field I tried a basket catch in the outfield, missed badly, and prolonged an inning. I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe that I was good. That was the longest time I ever spent in the outfield in my life, hoping to get another chance to help the team and do it the right way, waiting to come back to the dugout and explain myself to him.
He hooked his arm in mine, maybe the only time I remember this happening. Senior year, final home football game, parent’s day. We walked down the cinder track, him on my left, mom on my right. My high school girlfriend (and current wife) snapped an iconic picture of he and I looking bigger than life, me because I was wearing pads, him because of who he is, who he was that day. He would have pulled on pads had someone let him, though he wasn’t a football player so much as an athlete. The cardio needs of the game would have killed him, but not the spirit and the competition. No, that part he would have been fine.
He has said more than once (more than ten times, more than twenty times) that he could stand under the basket and leap off two feet and curl his fingers around the rim (he’s maybe 5’9”). It’s impossible to doubt him; he’s prone to hyperbole only when talking about other people. They called him Leaping Lena. Don’t ask me why; try him, he might know, nicknames being what they were back in the day. After my basketball games we would dissect what happened, the good and the bad. I loved and hated those conversations, accountability comes hard to teenagers sometimes, and you are what you left on the court, and your dad sees and he knows everything. No getting around that. Today I do the same thing with my son, and I am more careful I think, but I hear him in there, almost always.
My dad is a great man, not a good man, but a great one. It took me a while to understand that, almost 50 years of trying to negotiate my own life and realize what a man endures in 70 plus years. I learned it because of sports, our common language when politics and home improvement and work and relatives didn’t match up in our stubborn heads. Sports did, and still do. Everyone deals with demons, sometimes they are big and scary, and sometimes they are small and manageable. But they are ours, we have to own them, and we have to look at them daily, weekly, year after year. Dads and sons share a few, they do so through lives mingled in ways they don’t get to predict or control; it’s made up as it goes.
How do you write a piece about your dad without it sounding like a eulogy (he’s still quite alive), and how do you encompass it in 800 words or less? Actually, you don’t, or at least you don’t if you have only my limited skills with words to work with. So instead I’ll leave off with this:
Every game, every play. Every class, every grade. Every cold, every bruise. Every age, all the news. Every house, every home. Every ball, every phone. All the fun, all the shame. The win, the loss, the rides, the pain. A frown, a laugh, a silent tear. Metal forged year on year. A pile of days without end. A hero, a tyrant, the bank, a friend. Everything the mirror sees. Who you are, who you’ll be.
We’re built to accept the world beginning to end; a start, middle, the finish. It’s how we live. It just makes sense. A kindergartener can’t start with calculus curriculum, you can’t read Shakespeare without knowing the alphabet. Same with physical activity, especially complicated movement patterns. We learn in a predictable sequence:
-Prepare; stance, grip, etc.
-Initiate action; load the club, racket, ball, stick/bat, etc. with potential energy.
-Complete a bunch of other necessary gyrations to get the most out of that energy; bend the knees, open the hips, rotate the shoulders, etc.
-End the skill; follow through, thumb to nose, pick up grass, etc.
-Repeat; recreate movement patterns in that same order
The golf swing is a complicated kinetic chain of physical movements, almost always taught start-to-finish; set-up, backswing, downswing, follow-through. In the book, Total Golf: A behavioral approach to lowering your score and getting more out of your game, Thomas Simek and Richard O’Brien propose teaching the golf swing back to front, end to start.
In forward progression you repeat a series of movements in order to get to what is usually the most important part of the skill, the finish. To be able to hit a golf ball, for instance, you need to progress through set-up, backswing, downswing, and contact before you follow-through. Most teachers will tell you that the follow-through is at least as important as every other part, but some of us never get there.
Backward progression learning teaches the finish first. Foundations like grip and balance are taught to build a foundation, but posture, tempo, and body position are taught finish to start, follow-through-to-set-up. When errors occur in the process, you go back to the stage that you performed correctly, re-master it, and start all over again.
Features of Backward Shaping include:
-The rate of learning is much faster than forward progression. In one study of moderate skills, mentally challenged subjects using backward shaping techniques learned at approximately the same rate as normal subjects using forward progression.
-There are fewer errors inherent in backward shaping, increasing a learner’s self-confidence in perfecting complex physical activities.
– The number of repetitions needed to achieve physical activity goals is significantly fewer.
– In backward shaping the latter parts of the skill are better developed, because you practice them more, which leads to an overall higher level of skill performance than in forward progressions.
So, why isn’t Backward Shaping more popular? The answer is most likely tradition. Forward progression is easier to understand, rarely questioned as the correct model for learning. You tend to teach how you were taught. It just makes sense. But comparisons have shown that backward shaping can be superior in developing speed, accuracy, fluency, and skill maintenance. It may be the alternative to teaching the old fashioned way.
It’s safe now, everybody breath. Going to be okay. The sporting world is restored, back on level. On the basketball floor in the Basketballhalle in Greater Munich the youngest team ever to represent the United States in an Olympic basketball tournament celebrates, glorious in victory, relieved of their burden. We did it, they say, we represented! Sixty-four straight wins in amateur play for USA basketball, less than twenty for this particular lineup. 6,500 spectators pack the arena, including FIBA Secretary General Renato William Jones. The game was decided by a single free throw, oh so close, but a win is a win. Gold medals for everyone, names in the record books, all that.
It was sweet for the USA team who persevered despite their head coach, and his slow-down, defense-first philosophy. Had they run up and down the court, fast paced, they wouldn’t have needed two pressure-packed free throws with three seconds left on the clock to take the final lead of the game. Had they done what they do best, out-sprinted, out-jumped, used talent and fitness and confidence (arrogance) that defined America’s game of basketball, and our country as the framers of the new world, the gold medal would never been in doubt. This game was designated a microcosm of the Cold War, a test of political systems and what they can do, as fair or unfair as that may be. As starting guard Tom Henderson said, We should have ran, and we’d have ran them back to Russia.
This was that heartrending 1972 Olympics, that epic tragedy in Munich when the games ground to a mind-numbing halt as eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team were murdered by Arab terrorists. The games went on hold for nearly two days as the world digested the terror, sorted it against an Olympic ideal of purity and well-being, and came out the other end. When competition resumed, so did USA basketball, defeating Italy to advance to the gold medal game and extending their Olympic winning streak to 63 games.
They were the favorites, sure, under the strict, ornery stare of legendary Oklahoma State dictator Hank Iba, he of the suffocating defense and half-court sets. No American team had ever lost in men’s basketball in Olympic play, seven gold medals dating back to 1936. The bigger, more experienced Soviets weren’t typical underdogs, well-seasoned and well coached. They had a great team, said U.S. assistant coach John Bach. Their team, it was reported, played almost 400 games together. 400 games. We had played 12 exhibition games and the trials. That’s right, an amateur team that played 400 games. And there was that Cold War thing.
No matter, there was team USA on the floor celebrating, game over.
And then this happened.
At the Basketballhalle in greater Munich on September 9th, 1972, the final buzzer sounded four different times. The scoreboard read USA 50, USSR 49 after three of them. The problem was that it read USSR 51, USA 50 after the fourth. Here’s what happened (see if you can follow it):
With three seconds on the clock and the score ties 49-49, Doug Collins is in the middle of shooting his second, game-winning free throw, when the horn sounds for no particular reason (Horn #1). He makes the shot with the horn going off and the score changes to 50-49, USA. International rules say you can’t call a time out after a made second free throw, so team USA thinks maybe time has miraculously expired and the game is over. The officials realize this isn’t the case and continue play. The Soviets inbound and get the ball to half court, stopping the clock with one second left. The Russian coaching staff charges the scorer’s table, insisting they had tried to get a time out BEFORE the second free throw by Collins. Officials rule that play will resume from the point when the Soviet coaches disrupted the game, with one second remaining on the clock. The Soviets inbound the ball and miss their desperation shot. Game over (Horn #2). But FIBA Secretary General Renato William Jones comes down from the stands and insists play re-start from the point of Collins’ made free throw, against FIBA rules since you can’t call a time-out AFTER a made second free throw. Jones, by his own admission, after the fact, had no authority to make rulings on a game in progress. Okay, whatever, celebration postponed. Play resumes, three seconds left, Soviets down one, inbounding under their own basket. The Soviets miss another last-second attempt (Horn #3), and the game is FINALLY over, let the party begin.
But, as Lee Corso says, Not so fast.
As it turns out, the referees allowed play to resume before the scorer’s table had finished re-setting the clock; the game clock still showed 50 seconds when the play was completed. So what, right? Manually count three second off the play and end the game. Instead, a decision was made to re-play the final three second again.
And, of course, with another crack at it, Aleksandr Belov catches Ivan Edeshko’s pass as two American defenders stumble. Belov hits the game-winning layup. Horn #4 sounds. Final score USSR 51, USA 50.
The American team voted unanimously not to attend the medal ceremony or accept the medals themselves, some have even written that protest into their wills. Forty-eight years later, the silver medals sit unclaimed in a vault in Lusanne, Switzerland.
Bill Burk's collective writing...and some other stuff. 