CENTAUR SEASONS: Six Degrees of Michael Bantom (part 2 of 3) — Film maker Rory Karpf’s "Silver Reunion" and the 1972 U.S. Olympic Basketball Team

Posted on April 26, 2013

This post, like the two before it on CENTAUR SEASONS and here on HoopU.com — Micheal Bantom of the ill-fated 1972 U.S. Olympic basketball team and his sudden appearance at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales’s 1973 Spring sports banquet (This is the most unusual experience of my entire life), and the answer he gave to a question about why the U.S. team refused the silver medal after losing 51-50 to the Soviets in a still-debated finish (I would proudly wear the silver medal. But I did not earn the silver medal) – has been inspired by a recently posted short film on Grantland.com.

It is by the film maker Rory Karpf and it is called “Silver Reunion.”

Last summer Karpf brought together all twelve men from that team and filmed them as they talked about the game — the disappointment, the hurt, the anger — and had them vote to “accept, or forever refuse” the silver medal they had walked away from in the immediate aftermath of that Munich game. The decision would need to be unanimous.

“Silver Reunion” is a terrific dozen minutes with a dozen men who once were boys.

For as Frank Gifford, the ABC game announcer in 1972, reminded his audience too many times: At an average age of 20.6 years, this was the youngest hoops team the U.S. had ever sent to the Olympics, with scant international experience. The Russians, meanwhile, had been playing together for years: five had won bronze in 1968; Gennady Volnov was at his fourth Olympics.

It is also worth noting that Bill Walton, the dominant player of that U.S. basketball generation, opted not to participate. His UCLA back-up, Swen Nater, made the team but then quit. And Ernie DiGregorio, the wizard-like passer from Providence College, wasn’t asked to try out, near as I can ascertain. I know Friars basketball people who still shake their heads over that.

None of which is to cast aspersions upon those who did play. The opposite, in fact. These were the guys who raised their hands, wore the colors, took the court. These are the guys who have lived with the outcome now for forty years. All best to them:

Michael Banton (going alphabetically), Jim Brewer, Tom Burleson, Doug Collins, Kenny Davis, Jim Forbes, Tom Henderson, Bobby Jones, Dwight Jones, Kevin Joyce, Tom McMillen, Ed Ratleff. All of them still alive.

Here they are in “Silver Reunion,” bound together at the same table, inextricably bonded by the same experience. “We went through a lot together,” Doug Collins says. And doesn’t he know best?

It was Collins, of course, who made the now-iconic pair of free throws with three second remaining to give the U.S. its first lead in the game, at 50-49.

And then it was all chaos.

*The distracting horn from the scorers’ table during Collins’s second shot.

*The timeout the Russians wanted but either didn’t call for correctly or was botched by the officials.

* The sudden stoppage after the Russians inbounded the ball.

* The hand-of-god appearance by the head of the international basketball federation – who later conceded he had no authority to do so — demanding three seconds be put back on the clock and the play run again.

* The Who’s-On-First routine when the referees restarted the game before the clock was reset to three seconds.

* The insistence that it all be done … again.

* The overlay of American-Soviet Cold War politics.

*The referees waving the 6-foot-11 Tom McMillen back from the baseline, clearing the way for the Russian’s try at a full-court inbounds pass.

* Aleksandr Belov’s lay-up.

That’s a lot to get into a 12-minute film (the massacre of the Israeli athletes is given proper context, too) but Karpf expertly fits it all together, the story fully told. Oh, for such efficiency when the team could’ve used it!

Karpf bills his film as a hoops version of “12 Angry Men,” and he sits in as a sort of jury foreman. The vote to accept or refuse must be unanimous. This part is forced and artificial.

Karpf gets much closer to his hoped-for angry men when Tom McMillen, ever the politician, suggests his pet project: A duplicate set of gold medals be struck for the U.S. team. Mike Bantom, for one, is among a few who seem O.K. with that. A few more seem noncommittal. The rest do NOT want to hear it. Kenny Davis looks as if he wants to get up and leave the table. As Jim Forbes says: “Why would we accept dual ownership, when we won the gold medal?” And don’t miss the final comment on this subject from Bobby Jones.

Where Karpf does succeed, he succeeds wonderfully: In the details. He has the players watch the game, and we watch them watching (or, now and again, not watching still).

A grimmace from Doug Collins. A quick shake of the head from Jim Brewer. Tears from Dwight Jones and Jim Forbes. Stone silence from Kevin Joyce. It’s great stuff.

Karpf juxtaposes pictures of the men at the table with photos of the players they were immediately after the game. Bobby Jones wears the same thousand-mile stare in both portraits. And they all share the identical look – hurt, disappointment, anger. Then and now. Forty years later.

It is – no lie – Mike Bantom who brings it all together, stating the case for all twelve of them. Mike’s afro is gone, probably long gone, but he still has his hair, going gray. His face is rounder, the sharp edges softened. He’s wearing a pale-red Polo shirt, a little thick around he middle.

But when he talks, he could still be standing tall and thin in front of us at the Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales spring sports banquet of 1973, stylishly attired in gray turtleneck and blue double-breasted blazer.

“If we had actually lost, and won a silver medal, I would have proudly walked up there and claimed the silver medal,” he says in “Silver Reunion,” echoing closely his words at Billera Hall that brought forth from us a standing ovation. “Because winning a silver medal in the Olympic Games is a great accomplishment, and I would have been proud to take that medal.” Which in “Silver Reunion” brings forth a full round table of wistful affirmation.

For these twelve men this is what it’s been for these forty years: They would take the silver medal had they earned it. But they can’t take what they didn’t earn. That is why they vote as they must.

Denied the glory of winning gold, they have been no less denied the honor of winning silver. So they have nothing to show for anything except their adamant insistence that they accept nothing short of the one thing they will never get. And so the final three seconds will play in continuous loop, the ending never ending, never changing.

They ask no one to feel sorry for them. They don’t appear to feel sorry for themselves, either. They understand what happened to them was no tragedy; tragedy is what happened to the Israeli athletes, their fellow Olympians.

That’s the final irony, of course. From their 1972 Games these members of the U.S. basketball team did not take a medal. But the nothing they came home with was — and is — certainly something more.

“Hey,” Mike Bantom says toward the end of the film,” “I’ve always said, if this is the worst thing that ever happens to me in my life, I’ve lived a blessed life.”

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Steve McKee

Steve McKee is the author of CENTAUR SEASONS, a memory blog about his basketball-playing days at Allentown (Pa.) College of St. Francis de Sales in the early 1970s (a good excuse for using his college yearbook picture -- though there's NO excuse for that mustache and hair!).

CENTAUR SEASONS can also be found at www.centaurseasons.com. The centerpiece will be the posting in "real time" of the diary that Steve kept of his 1972-1973 junior-year season, beginning on November 30. Prior to that (and after), Steve will be posting regularly about his freshman, sophomore and senior seasons, as well as about what it was like to be there at the beginning to help get a struggling college basketball program off the ground.

Steve was the original writer of The Wall Street Journal's popular sports blog, "The Daily Fix" in 2001-2002, and was even dubbed "The Unwitting Father of the Sports Blog" by Gelf Magazine, the online publication of the "Varsity Letters Reading Series. Steve was the Journal's sports editor for its original Weekend sport section and was involved in all of the Journal's Olympics coverage, Winter and Summer, from 1996 through 2008.

He is the author of three books, most recently "My Father's Heart: A Son's Reckoning With the Legacy of Heart Disease," which he is adapting as a one-man show. For his first book, "The Call of the Game," Steve traveled the country in search of sports events -- including the famous N.C. State Wolfpack victory over "Phi Slamma Jamma" of the University of Houston. For his second book, COACH, among the 150+ coaches Steve interviewed are/were college basketball coaches John Wooden (UCLA), Pat Summitt (Tennessee), Frank Layden (Niagara), Bobby Cremins (Georgia Tech), P.J. Carlesimo (Seton Hall), Bill Guthridge (North Carolina), Abe Lemons (Texas), Stan Morrison (USC), Kathy Rush (Immaculata), Jim Satalin (Duquesne), Charlie Thomas (San Francisco State), Butch Van Bredda Koff (Princeton), Bill Whitmore (Vermont) and LaDonna Wilson (Austin Peay).

For more, you can click on www.steve-mckee.com, where you can find a TODAY show appearance and an NPR interview.