40 years of Los Angeles silver 84: a dinner to pimp the boss and two blocks for Jordan | Paris 2024 Olympic Games

It happened 40 years ago and changed the history of Spanish basketball. The silver that the men’s team won at the 84 Los Angeles Games inaugurated the modern era of its sport, shook complexes from a society that was opening itself to the world and injected the passion for basketball into thousands of people. That August 10, at the Lakers Forum and against Michael Jordan, Spain lost the final against the United States 96-65, but won eternity in the memory of a country.

Juan Antonio Corbalán, Nacho Solozábal, José Luis Llorente, José Manuel Bearán, Juan Antonio San Epifanio, José María Margall, Juanma Iturriaga, Fernando Arcega, Andrés Jiménez, Fernando Martín, Juan de la Cruz and Fernando Romay were the men of the feat. They were directed by Antonio Díaz-Miguel, a crazy romantic. It was the first Olympic medal for Spanish basketball after three European runners-up, and the preview of the unforgettable silver medals at the 2008 and 2012 Games against the Dream Team. That 1984, the United States was still a group of university stars trained by Bobby Knight and led by Jordan, already a national star about to knock down the door of the NBA with the Chicago Bulls, and Pat Ewing. A steamroller who won her matches in the Olympic tournament by 32.1 points on average.

The Spanish team came together in the middle of the Madrid-Barça war after the controversial league outcome of 1984, the fight between Iturriaga and Davis and the Blaugrana not showing up for the third game in protest of the sanctions. Madrid reigned as the great dominator of the time and Barça emerged with the generation of Solozábal and Epi. Seven of the 12 called up were from the two great rivals (four whites and three Barcelona fans). The tension was evident in the locker room. “Antonio fixed it,” recalls Fernando Romay about Díaz-Miguel’s conciliatory role; “As soon as we arrived he told us that the players could go to dinner and that he would set an arrival time, but that we could manage it and arrive a little later… Of course, the next day in the afternoon to train like beasts. Well, the truth is that we went a little overtime, and that’s how the unity between the team was created, believing that we were pimping out the boss.”

That team cannot be understood without Díaz-Miguel, the revolutionary who traveled to the United States, chatted with Bobby Knight and returned soaked in methods, plays, systems, training, a new world unknown in Europe and recorded on super 8 tapes. The first He once traveled with a dictionary, since he did not know English, and ended up making friends with American technicians who provided him with abundant audiovisual material that they sent him by mail to Spain.

The coach had taken command of the national team in 1965 and the players soon discovered “a man ahead of his time,” according to Epi. Romay is moved when he evokes the teacher: “I loved him very much. He was very innovative and at the same time without losing something that I miss today, the romantic side of the sport. He was a fucking romantic. He went around the colleges teaching on tapes the training and tactics that he had seen in the United States. Nobody here had that information. It takes a lot of love for basketball to do that as a coach.” Díaz-Miguel coached the national team for 27 years, until the Angolazo of 1992. In 1997 he was the first Spaniard in the Basketball Hall of Fame. He died three years later.

It was 7:00 p.m. on August 10 in Los Angeles, early morning in a Spain that did not sleep, when the final began. The team had beaten Canada, Uruguay (33 Epi points), France and China in the group stage. They lost in that round to the USA, 68-101. In the quarterfinals they defeated Australia (101-93). And in the semifinals, one of the giants of those times (the Soviet Union did not attend due to the political boycott), the Yugoslavia of a young Drazen Petrovic, 74-61, with 16 points from Margall. Before playing for gold against the empire, in that legendary Lakers locker room where Magic Johnson’s locker shone, bags of congratulatory and encouraging telegrams sent from Spain awaited the players.

The team faced Everest. “You are on time. Are you giving up?” Romay joked with Pat Ewing. “Well, we do,” added the Spanish center, who immortalized two blocks against Jordan. Spain started winning with two free throws from Corbalán. “What if we leave it like this?” the point guard proposed… There was no truce. “We weren’t used to how they pressed. And Jordan was a monster. When he caught the ball, the Forum collapsed. It was impossible to stop it. Physically he was a panther and at the scoring level there was nothing to do against him,” recalls Andrés Jiménez, still at Joventut before leaving for Barça and offensive leader in the national team that night with 16 points and eight rebounds (Jordan, who wore the number 9, added 20 points). Epi (149), Fernando Martín (134) and Jiménez (101) were the top Spanish scorers in the Games.

Silver fueled the basket boom decade. Basketball registered 65,170 licenses in 1980, behind football, handball, tennis and judo. In 1990, more than triple that, 205,019 members, only after football. The ACB was born in the 83-84 academic year. “It was a founding medal. We came out of the dictatorship and helped society to not be afraid to travel, to be a normalized country,” Corbalán recalls; “And for the players it was the reward for a generation that needed to burst. In 82 we won the United States, in 83 the Soviet Union and in 84 Yugoslavia. We were a team that was crying out to be in the books. Los Angeles crowned our highest aspirations. A silver that was like gold.”

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