Beautiful music

Oscar could play (basketball)

Want a sports quote for the ages? Consider this from 1987, by Marcel Souza, regarding his and—especially—teammate Oscar Schmidt’s starring roles when Brazil knocked the heavily favored U.S. national basketball team off its hoops high horse to win that summer’s Pan American Games gold medal:

“There is a saying in Brazil. We are the piano players. And the others are the piano carriers.”

“One of us shoots,” Schmidt clarified, “and the others go for the rebound.” Artists collaborating with manual laborers.

Never heard of Oscar Schmidt (who just died at 68)? Basketball, after all, long has been a United States-centric endeavor—specifically, an NBA showcase—and Schmidt chose instead to play out his 29-year career with club teams in his homeland, in Italy and in Spain. When the then-New Jersey Nets drafted him in 1984, NBA rules still banned its employees from Olympic competition, so Schmidt prioritized remaining the headliner for his national team.

“I would rather play with my friends and play 40 minutes,” he said then, and went about scoring 49,973 career points (with a per-game average of 30.7), more than anyone in history until LeBron James passed him two years ago. In five Olympics, a record, Schmidt totaled 1,094 points, also a record, averaging 28.8 per game and including an otherworldly 42.3 average at the 1988 Seoul Games.

He was the maestro of point production, a 6-8 ½ virtuoso of the long-range jump shot, scoring from binocular range before anyone had seen the likes of Stephen Curry’s dead-eye three-pointers. Schmidt years later told NBC Sports that “there was not a shot I didn’t like. I like them all because I practiced them all….So give me the ball. If you don’t want me to shoot, don’t give me the ball.”

In that ’87 Pan Am final, Schmidt scored 46 points, 35 in the second half of the 120-115 upset in which Brazil overcame a 20-point first-half deficit that seemed to reinforce the sport’s assumed pecking order. Fellow piano player Souza had 30 that game. Quite a recital, pretty much eliminating the need for the Brazilian piano carriers.

“Any shot,” Schmidt said many times, “is a good shot. Any time.” To perfect his three-point wizardry, he said, “My wife goes with me in practice and passes me the ball 500 to 1,000 times. That’s why I married her.”

There were 16,408 spectators at that Pan Am final in Indianapolis, smack in the middle of Hoosier Hysteria, when Schmidt introduced himself to the mostly jingoistic American hoops fans. In Brazil, he was Mao Santa (Holy Hand); to the international basketball community, simply “Oscar.”

The Yanks, at the time, had lost only two of 67 games in 36 years of Pan Am basketball, and featured a roster including two All-Americans, David Robinson and Danny Manning; two NCAA championship Final Four MVPs, Pervis Ellison and Keith Smart; plus future NBA players Rex Chapman, Pooh Richardson, Willie Anderson.

More than four decades of my covering international sports offered few treats to compare with Oscar’s Pan Am show, which he later called the highlight of his rollicking athletic career. He wound up on four separate basketball Halls of Fame, praised by such NBA greats at Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. At the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, he was honored as one of six who marched the Olympic flag into Maracana Stadium for Opening Ceremonies.

Possibly a candidate, when he showed up in Indy in ’87, for American sports viewers’ “Who’s That?” list, Oscar left town as one of the Pan Am Games’ three most endearing characters, along with Souza and Hortencia, the flashy, emotional Brazilian women’s basketball star who would pound the press table in exultation over every point and gesture wildly in animated discussions with her teammates.

Theirs were universal displays of competitive joy with which anyone, anywhere, could identify. But most of all, at that event, there was Oscar, who wound up on the “Who’s Who” catalog of athletic heroes and goodwill ambassadors. He wasn’t just Brazil’s best piano player; he was a basketball Franz Liszt, a hoops Vladimir Horowitz.

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