England’s loss to Italy on penalty kicks in yesterday’s Euro 2020 final was the cruelest possible way to lose; you couldn’t have scripted a more painful public immolation. Former sportswriter Bill Simmons coined the term “gut-punch loss” a decade or so ago. This was a sledgehammer shot right to the crumpets.
There will be much recrimination and garment-rending in the British press for years to come after the loss, with not a small part of it focusing on the relentless racist abuse many England fans poured on the three Black players who missed in the shootout. Watching the game, it was obvious that whatever happened, the fans—who seemed to be levitating throughout the game, like a bomb that hovered above the ground right before it exploded—were going to have an outsized, overwhelmingly dramatic reaction. That bomb was going off, one way or another.
As brutal as the loss was, though, it is a reminder of just how obsessed that nation is with the game it pretends it invented: The pain felt from the loss is better than no pain felt at all. In fact, as an American, I found myself almost envious by how collective the misery was. We have no equivalent to that sort of sports trauma, no national team we care nearly enough about to rattle us to our foundation. The USWNT is too good to toy with our emotions; the USMNT too irrelevant on the global stage, at least for now.
If there’s a team with the clout and celebrity status of the England soccer team here, it’s probably the USA Men’s Basketball team, an ever-evolving team of superstars that will forever feel like the descendants of the great Dream Team of Barcelona 1992, the one with Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Charles Barkley and also Christian Laettner. It’s a team that is supposed to dominate every year … but weirdly doesn’t. Fortunately, We don’t care enough to lose much sleep about it.
On Saturday night, in Olympic exhibition play, we saw one of the most remarkable upsets this year. Nigeria, a team coached by former Cavaliers and Lakers coach (and current Warriors assistant) Mike Brown, played Team USA and … they beat them! Nigeria, the only African team in the Olympics (none have ever made it past the preliminary round), somehow outlasted USA 90-87, their first international loss in more than two years. (Though there was a pandemic in there.) This is not one of those starless USA teams, either: Thelineup includes Kevin Durant, Damian Lillard, Bradley Beal, and Jayson Tatum. Sure, coach Gregg Popovich hadn’t had much practice time with the team all together, but the USA beat Nigeria by 83 points the last time they played. The lowlight was when Durant—you know, the guy who just nearly beat the Eastern Conference champion Milwaukee Bucks by himself a couple of weeks ago--went up for a layup and was blocked into the floor by the Miami Heat bench player Precious Achiuwa.
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The loss was just an exhibition one, and Team USA is still favored to win the gold in Tokyo. But if they don’t, I doubt anyone will freak out about it. The last time the USA men’s team didn’t win the gold was the 2004 implosion (they lost three games in the tournament, despite having LeBron James, Allen Iverson, Tim Duncan, Carmelo Anthony and Dwyane Wade) that led to an overhaul of how the team was constructed.
But the difference between the way England sees its national men’s soccer team (in a sport they consider “theirs”) and the way the USA sees its national men’s basketball team (in the sport we consider “ours”) is that we have no inferiority complex about it. England dreams of bringing an international cup home, because they haven’t done it since 1966; Americans consider the gold medal the bare minimum achievement, and, all told, not as important as winning the NBA Finals anyway.
We don’t even credit our athletes much for winning gold. Do you know who the all-time Olympic medals leader in USA men’s basketball is? It’s … Carmelo Anthony, the player is forever known as the guy who was a superstar but not superstar enough to ever actually win anything in the NBA. The narrative sturm und drang of international competition … that’s just not what we do here. This is probably healthy. It sure beats what England’s going through right now.
Besides: The true dominant USA team in Olympic sports is women’s basketball, which has won every Gold Medal since 1992 and hasn’t lost a game in a decade and a half. But if they happen to lose this year, we’ll all move on with our lives. We’ll all be just fine.
The best part of the Milwaukee Bucks’ 120-100 Game Three victory over Phoenix on Sunday night, which brought the NBA Finals to 2-1 and assured that we’re going to have a series after all, was five minutes into the game, when Giannis Antetokounmpo motioned to his coaches to pull him from the game. He didn’t appear to be hurt, and he just sat down on the bench by himself, quiet. What was going on? Why did he leave? As True Hoop noted, it turned out he just was a little “overhyped” and needed to calm down; he even walked toward the locker room to catch his breath. Think of this as another positive step in the evolution of NBA players: perhaps the greatest player in the world admitting that he needed, for just a few minutes, a little mental health break.
It clearly worked: Giannis ended up scoring 41 points in a dominant Milwaukee victory. Giannis is a superstar unlike many others—quiet, internal, even cerebral. (His famous free-throw routine is almost neurotic in its meticulousness.) He also is wise enough to understand when he just needs to chill out for a second … and then to dominate. If the Bucks end up winning this series, you wonder if that little brief moment of Me Time will be the pivot point. Sometimes you just need to collect yourself for a second. Even when everyone’s watching. Perhaps because everyone’s watching.
Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, national columnist for MLB, a writer for Medium and the founder of Deadspin. Subscribe to his free weekly newsletter and buy his novel “How Lucky,” out from Harper Books now.