PARIS — Whenever anyone asked the late Chuck Chapman of Victoria to show his silver medal in basketball from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, he would display a thin piece of rusted wire along with it.
It once held the olive wreath that was placed on his head — and those of fellow Victoria players Doug Peden and brother Art Chapman — by basketball’s founder Dr. James Naismith during the medal ceremony in Berlin. The leaves of the wreath disintegrated within the year. Chapman kept the wreath-less wire, he would say, to remind himself that “all glory is fleeting.”
It may be just that, but it’s a fleeting glory that is being chased in Paris by Canada’s Golden Generation of NBA players. They went 3-0 in group play and have advanced to Tuesday’s quarter-finals against a team to be determined. The last time that happened was in 2000 at Sydney, when Steve Nash of Victoria captained Canada but the two-time NBA MVP could not get past Tony Parker and France in the quarter-finals.
Former University of Victoria Vikes great Eric Hinrichsen of Campbell River was also on that team that went 5-2.
The crossover playoff quarter-final stage is the trickiest of any in sports — just ask Nash, Hinrichsen or Wayne Gretzky, the latter whose dreams of Winter Olympics hockey glory were dashed by Dominik Hasek and the Czechs in the quarter-finals at Nagano in 1998.
But Canada has twice survived the quarter-final trap in basketball at the Olympics post-Berlin.
Mercurial shooting-guard Billy Robinson of Chemainus led Canada past that stage and into the semifinals of the 1976 Montreal Summer Games and University of Victoria stars Eli Pasquale, Gerald Kazanowski and Greg Wiltjer beat Italy in the quarter-finals to advance to a semifinal date against Michael Jordan and the U.S. at Los Angeles in 1984.
Both those occasions, however, ended in Canadian bronze-medal game losses, to the Soviet Union in 1976 and Yugoslavia in 1984. So Canada is still chasing that Berlin basketball ghost.
It looked like it might have a chance last time at the delayed-to-2021 Summer Olympics but that dream ended in shocking fashion on Blanshard Street when the Czech Republic upset Canada’s NBA players in overtime in the qualifying tournament at Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre for the Tokyo Games.
As evidenced by all this history, the journey which has now reached the quarter-final stage in Paris, is intertwined with Island sporting history.
Kelly Olynyk is now the only B.C. player on the Canadian Olympic men’s basketball team that was once dominated by B.C. players such as Robinson, Lars Hansen, Derek Sankey, Alex Devlin, Kazanowski, Wiltjer, Howard Kelsey, Gord Herbert, Nash, Hinrichsen, or stars who played university in B.C. such as Pasquale and Jay Triano, as well as other Western Canadian players such as Martin Riley, Karl Tilleman, John Hatch and Rommel Raffin.
Many of these former Olympic players travelled to Toronto to inspire and encourage the current GTA-dominated NBA Canadian team players before they departed for Paris.
The current players were reportedly moved by the gesture, and listened and absorbed the lessons the veterans had to offer about what it means to put on the Leaf in the Olympics and what it will take to finally win a medal and exorcise the ghosts of Berlin.
“We have a really talented group and we should be in this position [heading to the quarter-finals undefeated], but it’s nice to see it kind of come to fruition and seeing how many years it took us to get back to this point,” said Canadian guard Andrew Nembhard from the NBA Indiana Pacers.
“It’s good for the country.”
