After the round-robin medal round, the United States, Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia were all tied at 6–1. The Americans defeated Yugoslavia 91–88 but lost to the Soviets 105–94. On a tiebreaker, the Soviets were awarded gold, Yugoslavia silver, and the USA bronze. Buckner averaged 6.6 points a game, eighth on the team, and learned what international basketball was about.
“First of all, they’re men,” Buckner said of the foreign opponents. “We found that out along the way. I even say this now to some people. The want to take kids from the Baltic . . . guys, they live in some war-torn place. They’re tougher than you think they are.”
No one ever questioned the toughness of Buckner and May, who were all-state players in football and basketball. Buckner played two years of football for the Hoosiers. Both players belong to the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame. Also, Buckner is one of three men to have won a high school state title plus NCAA, Olympic, and NBA championships. The two others: Jerry Lucas and Magic Johnson.
Buckner was born August 20, 1954, in Phoenix, Illinois. His father, Bill, played football for the Hoosiers’ unbeaten Big Ten champions in 1945. Quinn played football and basketball at Thornridge High School in Dolton, a suburb south of Chicago, and was on hoop teams that went 32–1 and 33–0 in his junior and senior years. In 1971–72, the Falcons won every game by fourteen or more points and won the state championship 104–69 over Quincy. That Thornridge team is still considered the best in Illinois history.
Scott May was born March 19, 1954, in Sandusky, Ohio, the son of a steelworker. He was a high school All-American and averaged twenty-five points as a senior. He was academically ineligible as a freshman at IU but soon found his footing in the classroom and on the court. Without May, Indiana reached the 1973 Final Four and lost to number one UCLA 70–59 in a national semifinal in St. Louis.
Buckner once thought about transferring from Indiana but eventually developed a close relationship with coach Bob Knight. Buckner said his father told him to get used to the way Knight communicates.
“That was the switch,” Buckner said. “That’s just the way Coach Knight communicates. He was right 99.9 percent of the time, so I fully appreciated what Coach Knight was saying.”
In 1974–75, the Hoosiers became the first team to sweep an eighteen-game Big Ten schedule, winning by an average of 22.8 points. But in their twenty-sixth game—an 83–82 victory at Purdue, clinching the Big Ten championship—May broke his left arm. He returned to play limited minutes in a few games, but the goal of an unbeaten season and national championship ended in a 92–90 loss to Kentucky in the Mideast Regional final.
There was no stopping the Hoosiers that next season. Not only did they beat the Soviet Union, they opened with an 84–64 victory over UCLA’s defending national champions in St. Louis. May scored thirty-three. Then he scored twenty-four in an 83–59 rout of Florida State, which trailed by twenty-seven at the half. The Hoosiers’ route to the championship was so difficult—number one Indiana met number two Marquette in a regional semifinal—that the NCAA subsequently began seeding the tournament.
In order, Indiana defeated St. John’s 90–70, number seven Alabama 74–69, number two Marquette 65–56, number five UCLA 65–51, and number nine Michigan 86–68. In Philadelphia, the Hoosiers beat the Wolverines for a third time. May scored 26 points, Kent Benson 25, and Buckner 16. Benson was most outstanding player of the Final Four, and May swept the college player of the year awards. May averaged 23.5 points and 7.7 rebounds a game, and he shot 53 percent.
“Scotty,” Knight once said, “can do it all.”
In three seasons together, Buckner and May were 86–6 and won the Big Ten championship each year. Soon after they cut down the nets in Philly, there was another mission ahead: recapture Olympic gold.
The two Hoosiers went to the Olympic Trials in North Carolina—Dean Smith was the US coach—and then awaited the NBA draft. May was the second pick, by the Chicago Bulls, and Buckner the seventh, by the Milwaukee Bucks. It was all a “whirlwind,” Buckner recalled. “There was really no time to reflect that we had such a great college season,” Buckner said.
Perhaps Buckner’s greatest contribution to Team USA was to persuade May to come along. May was understandably conflicted. If he played poorly or was injured, he could be jeopardizing his NBA dollars. Others, notably UCLA centers Lew Alcindor (not yet Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Bill Walton, had passed on the Olympics.
May ended up sharing the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine’s Olympics preview edition with marathoner Frank Shorter and swimmer Shirley Babashoff. As the Olympic tournament evolved, May became as invested as he had in the NCAA tournament. “I had the same sensation,” he said. “The same feeling.”
Smith endured criticism for choosing four North Carolina players—Phil Ford, Walter Davis, Mitch Kupchak, and Tom LaGarde—and two others from the Atlantic Coast Conference, Kenny Carr of North Carolina State and Steven Sheppard of Maryland. Buckner said the coaching staff wanted “continuity,” which was one shortcoming of the 1972 Olympic team. Even so, Buckner said Smith’s offense “was perfect” for a smart player like May.
“It really couldn’t have worked out better,” Buckner said. “I played for, easily in that era, maybe the two greatest coaches of all time. They went about the game very differently. Coach Smith was Coach Smith. He never swore; he never raised his voice. Coach Knight, he raised his voice all the time. One was very demonstrative, and the other really wasn’t.”
In Montreal, the Americans opened with a 106–86 victory over Italy. In their second game, Marquette’s Butch Lee, a New Yorker born in Puerto Rico, nearly led his team to a historic upset. Lee scored thirty-five points on fifteen-of-eighteen shooting but was called for charging with eight seconds left and Puerto Rico trailing 93–92. Ford made two free throws to cap a twenty-point game, and the United States won 95–94.
“They had us in a tough spot. I will not kid you,” Buckner said.
The Americans rallied for a 112–93 victory over Yugoslavia behind Adrian Dantley’s twenty-seven points and May’s twenty-four. Egypt withdrew from the tournament for political reasons, so the United States won by forfeit. After beating Czechoslovakia 81–76, the Americans faced host Canada in a semifinal before a crowd of nineteen thousand. May and Buckner led the Americans to an early 22–8 lead, and then rolled into the gold-medal game with a 95–77 victory. May finished with twenty-two points and Buckner with twelve.
There was no rematch with the Soviet Union, which lost to Yugoslavia 89–84 in the other semifinal. In a rematch with Yugoslavia, Dantley scored eighteen of his thirty points in the first half, and redemption was complete with a 95–74 victory. The United States won an eighth gold medal in nine Olympics.
Dantley, of Notre Dame, was Team USA’s top scorer with a 19.3 average. May was second in scoring at 16.7 and led in rebounding at 6.2. Buckner was the fifth-leading scorer (7.3) and totaled eighteen assists, second to Ford’s fifty-four.
Buckner said he was indifferent to missing out on avenging the 1972 loss to the Soviet Union. That’s not what the Hoosiers, and Americans, were thinking atop the podium with gold medals around their necks and “The Star-Spangled Banner” ringing in their ears.
“It is by far the best feeling,” Buckner said. “Winning a national championship is tremendous. But there’s nothing better than representing your country and have that success. That’s the world stage, and you just showed you stand above all.”
” The magnitude of it was underscored to Buckner in Barcelona, where he was an NBC reporter at the 1992 Olympics. Within the first few minutes after the Dream Team went into the locker room, somebody spoke the words “got you” to Buckner.
“I didn’t pay any attention. It was Magic,” Buckner said. “I had not even thought about it. That’s how important it was to him.”
The Los Angeles Lakers superstar had joined Lucas and