Where’s Charles Barkley when you need him?
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Without Barkley to create an international scene with his old friends from Angola, as he did in the 1992 Olympics with a vicious elbow smash, there was nothing to distinguish Monday’s men’s basketball game between Angola and the U.S. from all those runaways back when the U.S. team was a Dream Team.
The Americans ran up a 40-point advantage before cruising to an 89-53 victory at the Helliniko Indoor Arena.
The U.S. took the court for its final preliminary game with a 2-2 record but also knowing it had qualified for the medal round. The Americans will face Spain on Thursday night in the quarterfinals.
Tim Duncan led the U.S. with 15 points in just 13 minutes. Carlos Boozer had nine rebounds on a day when coach Larry Brown emptied his bench.
“This was a fun game because we got to play a lot of people,” Brown said.
The whole Olympic experience was not a lot of fun for Angola, which failed to win any of its five games, but coach Mario Palma gains his satisfaction by just being in Athens. Angola has been ravaged by civil war since gaining its independence from Portugal in 1975. And even though an unsteady peace has come, these are still troubled times.
“Basketball is just not an important thing in our country right now,” Palma said. “We are concerned with education, food, refugees. To do what we do in basketball with all that is incredible.”
Those who do play must often learn the game on outdoor concrete courts.
“We are also small,” Palma said, “because most of the tall players are in the southern part of our country where there is still fighting.
“How can we beat the United States? It is impossible. No way. If we had our [three] injured players back, maybe we would lose by only 20.”
All most Americans know about Angola basketball is Barkley’s celebrated bash to the chest of that nation’s Herlander Coimbra. When some of Barkley’s teammates expressed embarrassment over the incident, especially considering the U.S. won 116-48, Barkley responded: “He might have had a spear. You don’t know.”
Yet after the game, Coimbra asked Barkley to pose for a picture with him. And, said Palma, there were no hard feelings in his country.
“He is a very competitive player,” Palma said. “That kind of stuff happens.”