Indiana University Olympians. David Woods

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СКАЧАТЬ allow players to address the media afterward. He surprisingly pulled Alford aside to ask what was wrong with the team. Alford said he “took a deep breath” and responded that players were not paying attention to their notebooks during pregame. At Indiana, Alford said, players studied information Knight asked them to write down.

      “You know, Steve, if you’re not with us tonight, we probably don’t win,” Knight said, according to Alford’s autobiography.

      Alford could not respond. His coach had never paid him such a compliment.

      At practice the next day, Knight said players would study those notebooks or would not play. No exceptions.

      Mullin scored twenty points in a 78–59 victory over Canada, setting up what Knight and the twelve American players had focused on since mid-April: the goldmedal game. They would face Spain, a team they had already beaten by thirty-three points, at the Forum in Inglewood.

      The Americans needed no more preparation, explanation, or motivation. After Knight stepped out into the hall for final consultation with assistant coaches, Jordan went to the whiteboard, picked up a marker, wrote a message, and signed it “The Players.” He wrote: “COACH: DON’T WORRY. WE’VE PUT UP WITH TOO MUCH SHIT TO LOSE NOW.”

      Knight returned, started to speak, and saw Jordan’s message. He smiled, looked at each player individually, and said, “Let’s go play.”

      Knight told the other coaches the game against Spain would be over in ten minutes. It was. Alford started for Team USA.

      By halftime, amid chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” the score was 52–29. In a 96–65 victory, Jordan scored twenty points, Tisdale fourteen, and Perkins twelve. Alford added ten points and seven assists.

      Spectators stormed the court. Alford was hoisted up and handed a pair of scissors to cut the net; he then handed them to a teammate. Players were going to lift Knight on their shoulders, but he pointed to eighty-year-old Henry Iba, who had been a consultant. Knight wanted to honor Iba, who was coach for the US team that controversially lost the gold-medal game to the Soviet Union at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Witnesses said Knight might have shed a tear for the coach he respected above all others. After players put Iba down, they carried Knight off the floor to chants of “Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!”

      Of all the days, weeks, and months of his journey, the Olympic moment Alford remembers best is of standing on top of the podium and hearing the national anthem. He said he gained a better appreciation of the entire experience as the years passed.

      “The thing I watch the most in each Olympics since is the playing of the national anthem when you’re on the gold-medal stand,” he said.

      He did not see any other sports while at the Olympics, and that wasn’t really the point anyway. That was reiterated regularly by Knight.

      “He was there to win the gold medal,” Alford said.

      Alford did not stick around for the closing ceremony. He and his parents and brother, Sean, rode home in a van at a leisurely rate. They stopped for two hours in Las Vegas and walked around Caesars Palace. Steve had been “put through the ringer,” as his father, Sam, put it, and he slept a lot. As they crossed the Illinois-Indiana border, he saw the first sign: “WELCOME HOME, STEVE. CONGRATULATIONS.”

      There were more signs and banners on Interstate 70 overpasses. East of Indianapolis, he saw a police car in which a girl was waving from the backseat. It was Tanya Frost, his girlfriend at the time and his wife since 1987. Past the Greenfield exit, the Alford van pulled over, and Steve and Tanya loaded into a convertible for a caravan home.

      For six miles along I-70, all the way to the State Highway 3 exit, cars lined both sides. Helicopters hovered overhead for TV cameras. After arrival in New Castle, townspeople reached out to shake Alford’s hand, and hundreds of people were lined up on both sides of the family home on Hickory Lane.

      “The reception in New Castle is something I’ll never, ever forget,” Alford said.

      Two nights later, on Steve Alford Day in New Castle, the world’s largest high school gym filled with spectators. The ceremony was capped by Alford’s speech, in which he lamented never winning a state championship for Sam, his father and high school coach. Steve took the gold medal off his neck and put it around his father’s.

      As his father had told him on the phone while the Olympic team was in San Diego, “There’s a lot of players in Indiana who can say they’ve won a state championship. Very few can say they’ve won an Olympic gold medal.”

      Steve Alford was seemingly fated to be basketball royalty in Indiana.

      He was born November 23, 1964, in Franklin, Indiana, the son of a coach. Soon after his second birthday, his parents, Sam and Sharan, sent Christmas cards forecasting that their son would be a Mr. Basketball in Indiana. Mom and Dad were right.

      By age three, Steve was sitting on the bench at Monroe City High School, where his father was the coach. He learned to add by watching numbers on the scoreboard and to read and spell by looking at game programs and last names on the backs of uniforms. At five, he was playing in a YMCA league in Vincennes while his father coached at South Knox.

      He would shovel snow from the driveway to shoot baskets if he couldn’t get in a gym, practiced broadcasting games in a closet, and kept journals of his progress. Until he left for IU, he missed just two of his father’s games—one when he had the chicken pox, another when he finished fourth in a regional Elks Hoop Shoot free throw contest at age ten in Warren, Ohio.

      Sam Alford coached for four years at Martinsville, where local hero Jerry Sichting was idolized by his young son. (Sichting went on to be an All–Big Ten guard at Purdue and played and coached in the NBA.) Then his father moved onto New Castle and its 9,325-seat gymnasium.

      If there is anywhere in the world for a basketball junkie to grow up, it is New Castle. Alford was no physical specimen—he was all of five foot ten and 125 pounds when he got his driver’s license—but he tirelessly worked on his body as well as his game. He would shoot one hundred to three hundred free throws a day, charting them all and punishing himself with fingertip pushups or sprints when he missed.

      He played in nineteen varsity games as a freshman, totaling 30 points, and averaged 18.1 for the 13–9 Trojans as a sophomore. He averaged 27.3 as a junior and 37.2 as a senior for teams that went 12–10 and 23–6. He was indeed Mr. Basketball in 1983, finishing with 1,078 points, one off the single-season state record set by Carmel’s Dave Shepherd in 1969–70. Alford was 286 of 304 on free throws for .944, which would have led the NBA or NCAA that year.

      In the next-to-last game of his high school career, he scored fifty-seven points— one off a state postseason record that has stood since 1915—at the Hinkle Fieldhouse semistate in Indianapolis. New Castle beat Broad Ripple 79–64 but lost to eventual state champion Connersville 70–57 that night, despite Alford’s thirtyeight points. So he scored ninety-five points in one day. He was eighty-two of eighty-three on free throws in seven sectional, regional, and semistate games.

      He and Tanya missed prom so he could play in the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic at Pittsburgh. Alford scored just four points, but he said, “The basketball game still was better.”

      At IU, Alford averaged 15.5, 18.1, 22.5, and 22.0 during four seasons in which the Hoosiers were a collective 92–35. As a senior, he was a consensus All-American for the 30–4 Hoosiers. He scored 23 points, featuring seven-of-ten shooting from the three-point line, as Indiana beat Syracuse 74–73 for the 1987 СКАЧАТЬ