Come on, admit it all you non-Americans out there. We love to see the Yanks humbled and we particularly love it when they are humbled at something they claim to own and master. When Team USA, a collection of millionaire NBA players, lost last week to Greece in the semi-finals of the World Basketball Championships in Tokyo, it made far more people around the world happy than it would have made Americans happy if they had won.
For Yank haters, the reason they lost a game they had more than enough talent to win was even more rewarding: institutional arrogance. From top to bottom, Team USA were beset by it basically the moment they touched down in Guangzhou a little more than a month ago to begin their Asian odyssey.
The players were relatively accommodating, or as much as they could be considering many of them are industries unto themselves. Someone like young superstar LeBron James was wearing the red, white and blue not just because he wanted to serve his country, but because he wanted to serve his shoe sponsor as well. While in Asia, James and a number of other players, as well as US coach Mike Krzyzewski, did promotional events for their shoe people. Nothing wrong with that, really. It's the simple reality of the modern athlete, and coaches, that they squeeze what they can out of endorsement dollars.
That was not the reason the US lost. The institutional arrogance and the blame for losing rests squarely with the men behind USA Basketball. Former Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo put this organisation in place and hand-picked Krzyzewski, a legend at powerhouse Duke University known simply as Coach K, to run things on court. The US had come off an embarrassing bronze medal at the 2004 Olympics and a woeful sixth place finish at the 2002 world championships. Colangelo came up with a roster of 24 players and a three-year plan for winning this world championship and more importantly, an Olympic gold in Beijing in 2008.
With the talent they had, they would simply roll it out there and, well, shock and awe their opposition. Coach K intimated as much at a press conference before an exhibition game in Guangzhou. When asked how he was going to defend against a player from China, one he didn't know, he said he was more concerned about what his players did than what players on other teams could do. Far from a quote machine, the vanilla Krzyzewski was right on with this quote.
Nothing else, he said, mattered over the next month he was in Asia.
While Team China rolled over for the US almost on cue, nobody else did. After watching a mediocre Brazil team - one who did not even make it to the round of 16 at the world championships - almost beat the US before some puzzling referee calls changed the outcome in a Guangzhou exhibition game, an Asian based scout for one of the top teams in the NBA said it was a portentous moment.