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KoriEllis
08-27-2004, 04:29 AM
Brown is out of line

U.S. coach does a disservice to hoops team

JOE POSNANSKI

www.kansascity.com/mld/ka...175.htm?1c (http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/sports/9508175.htm?1c)


ATHENS, Greece — Today's question on manners comes from Team USA basketball coach Larry Brown: Can “Do you want some of me?” be a sort of apology?

Answer: From Larry Brown, it's as close as you're going to get.

Here's the sad part: They had almost become likable. Sure, we know all the issues with Team USA men's basketball. The players are young, rich, cocky, can't shoot, don't pass, play rough, have tattoos, whatever. They are all that's wrong with America, the Olympics, the NBA, the world — you've heard it all.

But you know what? On Thursday in Athens, Team USA played its heart out. Really. This team is all alone here. Many Americans won't claim them. Other countries boo and hiss. They have to take the abuse from all corners of the world.

And still, for 39 minutes on Thursday, against a Spanish team that had not lost at the Olympics, they played gallant basketball. Stephon Marbury made big shot after big shot. Allen Iverson hustled up and down the court. Dwayne Wade played big defense. The crowd was down on them, there were people all over praying against them, but they just kept on winning. It was sort of inspiring in a way.

They were actually threatening to become a team you could cheer.

Then our man Larry Brown stepped in. With 23 seconds left and the United States up by an insurmountable 11 points, Brown decided it was a good time to call timeout. Why? Who knows? In America, we don't even blink when a basketball coach calls a pointless and self-serving timeout at the end of a game. Happens all the time. It's almost as if they're saying, “I'm the coach, and I can do whatever I want.”

It seems, though, that Europeans are not as tolerant of dumb and rude timeouts. When the timeout was called, jeers and whistles spilled down. The Spanish fans seemed to believe that Larry Brown was showing them up. Many of the players — particularly Jose Manuel Calderon — agreed; they raised their hands as if to say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, why do you beat us and then humiliate us, too?”

No one was angrier than Spanish coach Mario Pesquera. Now, to be honest, Pesquera seems like the kind of guy who yells at the woman behind the counter when his flight is delayed. After this game, he railed on the lack of traveling calls, the physical play, the NBA, the unfairness of the tournament, the quality of hot dogs in Greece and so on. You get the feeling that Mario has sent back a few steaks in his life.

But on this timeout thing, he was dead right: It was a no-class move. Even Brown did not try to defend it. He simply said it was “an honest mistake.” That one baffles me. Forgetting to return a video, that's a mistake. Calling timeout at the Olympics with 23 seconds left, your team up 11 and the other team heartbroken doesn't exactly seem like a “mistake.”

Brown also said he tried to wave off the timeout, but the officials would not let him.

“If it was a mistake,” Pesquera pointed out, “he could have sent his players right back on the court.”

Yeah, OK, that's a pretty good point. When, the game ended, Pesquera went after Brown. This is where we have our apology mystery. The two yelled at each other for a few minutes. Brown would claim later that he apologized (“All I can do is apologize and move on,” he said). But there was no apparent sign of an apology. There was a moment, though, when Brown very clearly yelled at Pesquera, “Do you want some of me?”

Now, that doesn't seem like an apology. But, then, it was hard to tell the context. It's also possible that Brown apologized before that (in which case, I guess, the “Do you want some of me?” line is Brown's idea of “moving on”).

Afterward, in one of the more entertaining news conferences in Olympic history, Brown again did not appear to apologize. He claimed that he had apologized. But that was about it. Brown was asked about the exchange he had with Pesquera. Here's what he said.

“That was like a disagreement I have with my son,” Brown said. “Sometime he doesn't want to hear an explanation.”

Apology? You decide. Pesquera did not understand the quote at all — condescension, apparently, doesn't translate well to Spanish. He wondered why Brown said he was a like a son to him. He also wondered why the man blabbed nonsense about how the timeout was a mistake, and how they wouldn't let him take it back. He wondered why Brown wouldn't just say he was sorry, say he lost track of the time or the points, say something that made even a little bit of sense.

“I had — stress ‘had' — great respect for coach Larry Brown,” Pesquera said.

It really was a shame. In so many ways, Team USA has gotten a bad rap. A bunch of NBA players turned down the chance to play at the Olympics. These players came. They have taken all the abuse, mostly with smiles. Everybody keeps talking about their bad attitudes, but the truth is, they genuinely seem to be playing hard now, they're coming together as a team, they have not created a scene, and they're a real threat to still win the gold medal. They should be winning over America.

And then their coach, who should know better, acts like a jerk.

“Do you want some of me?” he asked. The truth is, we could use a lot less of him.

Kevin Kaster
08-27-2004, 04:40 AM
How do these writers find jobs? Why even write a worthless piece like this, which doesn’t even attempt to really analyze the situation as it actually happened on the television?

It boggles the mind that people like Joe Posnanski are even given the opportunity to write this garbage.

KoriEllis
08-27-2004, 04:48 AM
Here's another one ...

Brown up to his old verbal tricks
By Ian O'Connor

usatoday.com/sports/colum...rown_x.htm (http://usatoday.com/sports/columnist/oconnor/2004-08-26-oconnor-brown_x.htm)

ATHENS — Larry Brown did what Larry Brown always does when trapped in a corner like a guard who stopped his dribble too soon: He lied. Larry the Liar claimed the humiliating timeout he called at the end of this victory over Spain was a simple misunderstanding, an innocent mishap lost in translation between the Greek and NBA alphabets.

And the coach sitting to his left on a news conference dais, Mario Pesquera, did what players, coaches and columnists have done around Brown across his self-serving basketball life.

Pesquera shook his head. Rolled his eyes. Huffed and puffed over the drivel Brown was spitting into the mike to cover his own dirty tracks.

"Do you want some of me?" earwitnesses heard the ugly American coach bark at Pesquera after the 102-94 quarterfinal score was frozen in lights. Brown and Pesquera were shouting and pointing fingers at each other before being separated by their assistants, this after the United States coach all but ruined a near-flawless performance by Stephon Marbury, who only broke his country's Olympic scoring record with 31 points.

Brown had called a timeout with 23 seconds left, U.S. up 11, and then stepped to a mike and said he tried to rescind the timeout when he realized the size of his team's lead. Brown lied and, yes, Mario Pesquera did want a piece of him.

"I had, I stress 'had,' a lot of respect for Larry Brown," the Spanish coach said. "If you ask for a timeout and you ask for it mistakenly, and it wasn't annulled by the technical officials, you can do something. You can actually send your players back out again. You don't need to have them there for 20 seconds to get instruction."

Pesquera gave Brown all he wanted, then threw the haymaker that put him on his rear.

"Let me just qualify that I will continue to respect Larry Brown as a coach," Pesquera said. "(But) for me, a (coach) who is up there with the best like Dean Smith would've never done anything like that."

If you can ever believe anything Brown says, the American coach holds nothing more dear than his bond with Coach Smith. Only it's doubtful Smith would even return a phone call from his former point guard right now.

Brown has embarrassed himself, his team and his country with yet another public display of hubris, and one ranking up there with his decision to chase a ref off the court as an assistant in Sydney. Put this in the bank: Not a single high-ranking official inside USA Basketball or the NBA is happy that Larry Brown is the head coach of the Olympic basketball team.

Brown has ripped the selection committee for the roster it dealt him, even though he wanted Emeka Okafor — a complete waste of a pick — instead of one of the shooters the committee wanted instead. Never mind that the committee waded through an overwhelming pile of rejection notices and still gave Brown the world's best player, Tim Duncan, and the best supporting cast in the field.

The U.S. coach has distanced himself from the team in the event it fails to win the gold. He has ripped players who are clearly trying their damnedest to win, and who haven't approached the level of bad-sport behavior Brown serves up on an every-other-possession basis.

The players aren't the problem here. Marbury proved he hasn't quit, lifting himself out of a miserable tournament by draining six three-pointers in nine attempts, breaking Reggie Miller's eight-year-old American Olympic record of five threes.

Marbury spent 90 minutes on his day off working on his long, lost jumper, beating the volleyball team to the practice court. He talked about how hard it was to meet Brown's demands, and how he looked forward to incorporating everything he'd learned from Brown into his game on the Madison Square Garden floor.

But what is Brown teaching when he diminishes an already beaten opponent, then declares 10 minutes later that American players sometimes "haven't acted the best"?

"When I asked for the timeout, it was an eight-point game," Brown claimed, even though the U.S. never held less than a nine-point lead in the final minute.

"I think some of the time went off the clock, and then when I saw the score I told (the official scorer) we didn't need the timeout, and she gave it to me, anyway....We had basically turned the ball over twice against their press, and I'm still trying to teach and win a game.

"I tried to waive (the timeout) off, but they wouldn't let me."

In Brown's world, it's always someone else's fault. But his story was like most of his stories: Littered with canyonesque holes. If Brown had asked for a timeout earlier in the final minute, there were any number of foul calls, free throw attempts and substitutions that would've stopped the clock and awarded that timeout.

Pesquera knew Brown was full of it, so when the U.S. was granted its precious timeout with Spain down 101-90, the fans whistled and the Spanish players and coaches pointed and gestured at the huddling Americans.

Diplomacy had no place in the postgame playbook. Pesquera got in Brown's face. The Spanish coach knew his counterpart was trying to play him for a fool.

"That was like a disagreement with my son; sometimes he doesn't let me explain," Brown said at his news conference, with Pesquera sitting two seats to his left. "I tried to explain and (Pesquera) didn't want to hear it. I don't know if he understood. I knew he went to North Carolina and watched them practice, so he had to understand something.

"But I tried to apologize...and he kept saying something about the NBA."

Pesquera didn't receive the proper translation for Brown's reference to his son. He did get the proper translation for Brown's reference to North Carolina, and pounced on the opening by summoning the saintly image of Dean Smith.

"I would never try to embarrass anybody," Brown said.

He majored in embarrassment at Chapel Hill.

On any other day, Pesquera would've come off as the biggest baby in Greece. He claimed that too many traveling violations went uncalled, that too much contact was allowed, that the game was played under NBA rules instead of FIBA rules. He complained about his draw after going 5-0 in the prelims. He decreed that Spain had the superior team.

"It was said that the public supported the weaker team," Pesquera said of the pro-Spain crowd. "I think in this case, the public was solidly behind the stronger team, because I think we were the stronger team."

Spain had the second-best team on the floor, and Larry Brown called an extra timeout to make sure everyone knew. Later, his dog-ate-my-homework explanation couldn't change the final score on the quarterfinal board:

The winning coach was the biggest loser in the house.

Solid D
08-27-2004, 10:28 AM
I heard that coach Pesquera was coaching an undefeated team in front of royalty, his country's King - Juan Carlos. Pesquera may have projected his disappointment, embarrassment and anger onto Larry Brown in the closing moments and after-game altercation. Something to latch onto. I seriously doubt Larry Brown was trying to show up the Spanish NT and their staff.

I've seen Larry Brown and Pop both call time outs or create a stoppage in play in NBA regular season games when a player for the opposing team gets injured and is exposed during play. All four USA coaches are a class act. Larry is more a victim of projection of failures and disappointment than anything else.

Whottt
08-27-2004, 11:07 AM
I hate these types of journalists. Their stupidity is wearying.

Only an idiot can't see that Brown wasn't trying to offend with the time out and that he did try to apologize.

Oh well I hope this shit journalist impressed his American hating Euro friends. What's pathetic is he actually thinks there is a way the team could conduct itself to keep from being hated.

He's an idiot, Europe and most of the rest of the world is looking for any excuse it can to hate our country. They'll find a reason...it doesn't matter if it's legitimate or intended to be insulting.

You know what I find insulting? Being blamed for everything. I don't see these other countries worried about offending us.

On NBC they said there was an article in the Greek paper that said that the Greek sprinter who got busted for steroids was the victim of an American conspiracy.

**** em. Kick their ass and stop looking for acceptance...they are gonna hate us as long as Bush is president...

BigVee
08-27-2004, 11:09 AM
I love the USA and love our team. But, let's be honest here. Larry Brown can be a pompous ass at times, often breaking commitments to players and fans alike as he jumps from team to team. He calls out his players in public and thinks he is always right. He is not totally blameless in this.

However, who really cares what the Spanish coach thinks?

Shelly
08-27-2004, 11:11 AM
I think Mikey said it best in another thread.

If the situation had been reversed and instead Brown was the one bitching and moaning, he would have been labeled the Ugly American.

emmo
08-27-2004, 12:49 PM
did none of these guys even listen to pop after the game? did no one see larry approach the spanish coach to explain?

listen, LB cab be an ass, but he is not a poor sport. he may not respect the league or some players but he repects the GAME from what i have observed.

it's different rules internationally about time outs, a mistake was made. Simple complaining might have been an appropriate reply,maybe. but to for the spanish coach to throw such a tantrum and have to be physically restrained...KNICKERBOCKER PLEASE.

sour grapes...go home to spain, whiner, and bottle that shit up as crap up make some vino.

emmo
08-27-2004, 12:50 PM
did none of these guys even listen to pop after the game? did no one see larry approach the spanish coach to explain?

listen, LB cab be an ass, but he is not a poor sport. he may not respect the league or some players but he repects the GAME from what i have observed.

it's different rules internationally about time outs, a mistake was made. Simple complaining might have been an appropriate reply,maybe. but to for the spanish coach to throw such a tantrum and have to be physically restrained...KNICKERBOCKER PLEASE.

sour grapes...go home to spain, whiner, and bottle that crap up make some vino.

SAmikeyp
08-27-2004, 12:54 PM
Thanks, Shell. :makeout

Were Brown's manners Emily Post? no.
Was he justified in his actions? IMO, yes.

The foundation of Sport is desire. Desire is often times fueled by emotion. This was an emotional game and both coaches are obviously very passionate about their sport. I do believe LB was defending himself however. He doesn't know this guy and human nature dictates, we often get defensive in an unknown, hostile situation.

I always find it ironic that Americans get labeled as crude and savage, yet when you hear stories of soccer fan riots, disrupting basketball games because coins, nails and other sharp objects are hurled on the court, or soccer players get shot for screwing up....it is not coming from our country.

gospurs21
08-27-2004, 01:13 PM
the only time the competition is happy with you is when your losing. I dont care if the whole US press machine is against team USA. I love this team and we need more of this **** off attitude. I hope Arg goes home feeling the same way today.

They only like you when they beat you. I'd rather win, than be liked.

Bnasty21
08-27-2004, 01:42 PM
Have you seen the pictures of these guys? They look like the type that want attention. I watched the game and saw Brown try to call a TO when they gave up 5 points in a matter of 5 seconds. The coach from Spain got embarrassed because of the people who were watching the game (Da Kang!). He was still playing his players and pressing like crazy and LB wanted to setup a press break, but with the international rules the way they are it takes about 2 possesions before its registered.

Now that the explanation is over with, lets get into the meat of this. "12 Black Millionaires" representing USA. Kinda gives you enough to write about doesn't it. **** tryin to please everyone and not offend the foriegn snobs. Beat they ass come home and laugh about it.

Whottt
08-27-2004, 01:47 PM
I don't buy into the millionaire thing...

Gasol is also an NBA millionaire, as is Manu, as is Yao Ming...I am pretty sure some of the Euroleague players pull down good money as well. I know Jaskivisious and a few of the Argentinians are millionaires.

Bnasty21
08-27-2004, 02:00 PM
Thats not my point....Pau and Manu do make a lot of money but they also resemble the majority in their countries. These US players don't resemble "corporate America" and for damn sure don't resemble what people think the Olympics are. Now if you were to send some Mark Madsens, Fred Hoibergs, Wally Szerbiak's, and some other more majority rich kids do you think that this much anamosity towards the guys that committed themselves to this after 14 others dropped out would be present.

IMO NO!!!!

Whottt
08-27-2004, 02:14 PM
I don't think it's got anything to do with the way they look.

At least not as far as Americans are concerned...

The Europeans just hate us period right now...because of Bush...which is fine because I wasn't crazy about him either but somehow it pisses me off the way our athletes are being treated because of Bush...and somehow it offends me when I hear other countries being critical of Bush...I think it's the " he may be a bum but he's our bum" syndrome.

Anyway, as far as the team goes...why they aren't popular with Americans...well a lot of people just don't have the guts to support their team against the will of the world...

I think it's got to do with the fact that they are expected to dominate and they have struggled.

IF the team was comprised of the players you mentioned...of course more people would be pulling for them..but not because of the way they look...because they would be underdogs...

And you know what? I don't think they would have been able to adjust to the rules and getting to play together any better than this team has...and they damn sure wouldn't win a gold.

Shelly
08-27-2004, 02:49 PM
Quick--turn to woaihd.

the incident is almost on!

Bnasty21
08-27-2004, 03:48 PM
I see what your saying Whott. The thing that pisses me off is the double standard from the Europeans and the lack of support from the Americans.