If there was any doubt the Boomers had become Australia’s favourite team at these Rio Games, it was dispelled firstly when they scrapped and scraped their way to a near-upset in their preliminary round encounter with Team USA, and secondly in the immediate aftermath of that game, when the team’s NBA champion center and hard-elbowed spirit animal Andrew Bogut wiped the smiles clean off the faces of back-slapping Australian media types waiting in the post-game interview area.
“The Australian media is going to be like ‘you guys did great, this and that’. No we didn’t. We lost,” Bogut barked after the game to the mild discomfort of everyone in the room. “We’re not going to take small moral victories... We still lost the game. It means nothing.”
There are times when athletes say these types of things performatively, to gee themselves and the rest of us up. Not Andrew Bogut. He looked like he wanted to spear the camera and its operator through a nearby wall and head back out for an immediate re-match. So is the spiky confidence of this Australian basketball team.
Take a look at Bogut’s Twitter feed and you’ll quickly note his biggest and reoccurring gripes about the modern world: political correctness, social justice warriors and “privilege”. The latter point is possibly a bit rich for one boasting career earnings north of $100m, but it also speaks of a man who is raging against what he sees as the everybody-gets-a-ribbon culture that would peg his Boomers team as underdogs who should be content with plucky losses. They’re not. He’s certainly not. And they’re all playing like it.
As far as the national mood, all other competitors for Australian affections are now gone; the Kookaburras, the Hockeyroos, the Opals, the Matildas, and the swimmers (called the Dolphins but the Roosters would be more apt) have all disappeared from view, which is cause for sadness only in the case of the women’s footballers. Basketball is all Australia has left, and who would have thought that leading into these Games?
Well, a lot of people, as it turns out. Australian basketball has endured its boom and bust years, but it’s now unquestionably entering the sparkliest of all its golden eras; not only does it boast its best and most balanced national line-up ever, the NBA – where many of those player ply their trade – is more accessible and popular among Australians than ever before.
Late on Wednesday night Australian time the Boomers beat down on Lithuania, the basketball nation which denied the county a bronze medal in Sydney 2000. Led by Patty Mills and Bogut, they not only won but blew out an Olympic quarter-final to the tune of 26 points. They’ll face either Croatia or Serbia for a second shot at the Americans in the gold medal game. Australia have already beaten Serbia in this tournament, by 15 points. None of these things are a matter of luck.
“Everyone is prepared to sacrifice in the best interests of the team,” coach Andrej Lemanis said after the quarter-final. “With players being established already, no one has another agenda other than what is best for the team which puts us in a particularly good place.”
The Boomers’ success at these Games is actually not unforeseen, nor fortunate, which is the essence of what makes it so satisfying for the game in Australia. This is a strong roster. These players actually are this good. Bogut is a star in the world’s best basketball league, the same one where team-mates Matthew Dellavedova, Mills, Aron Baynes and Joe Ingles have had meaningful roles. All of the aforementioned bar Ingles has a championship ring. This is a team that has shown it can actually cope without Ben Simmons and Dante Exum, players whose absence in any other era would have been disastrous to Australia’s chances. Bogut says the fact that none of his team-mates are playing for contracts also helps: the team comes first, egos lie elsewhere in the Olympic village.
Bogut loves his country and hates losing, and those are surely among the primary reasons he’s punishing his already-pummelled body in Rio. He shouldn’t actually be there. He should be laying on a sofa, or maybe a hospital bed. No player of his size in the NBA has so relentlessly driven his body to breaking point, nor suffered such wince-inducing misfortune at the hands of the injury gods. He has been rested for some games, a measure of this team’s depth, but he won’t be from here. Bogut is rare among current Australian sportspeople: infuriating and brave, obnoxious and utterly brilliant. You wouldn’t be speaking figuratively to say he’d break both arms and legs for a gold medal.
That kind of leadership is one thing, backing it up with a talented and motivated roster boasting genuine depth is another. So far Dellavedova is playing out of his skin and all over that of his nearest opponent. In between raining down ungainly threes and racking up assists, Australia’s cult hero has harassed on defence like an unhinged spider-monkey, never letting his opponent settle, always pushing them into more difficult shots as his hands flash in front of their faces and dig into their ribs.
To someone who doesn’t follow basketball, it’s hard to explain how a player whom the great majority of seasoned fans deem unfit to ride an NBA bench in fact earns almost $10m per year and ended up playing key minutes in NBA finals games. It wouldn’t worry Dellavedova. He’s probably the MVP of this tournament right now, while Mills is its highest scorer and a chief architect of Australia’s campaign. When this squad met for its Rio preparations and mooted the prospect of a medal, Mills stood up and abruptly clarified: gold is what they were after and nothing less.
So far the Boomers have also triumphed against the odds dictated but the disparate locations of their professional careers, taking place as they do in locations as far-flung as America, France, Russia, Lithuania and Illawarra. The last time the Boomers challenged for a medal, at the 1996 and 2000 Games, they did so with a core group of stars – Andrew Gaze, Shane Heal, Mark Bradtke, Andrew Vlahov, Scott Fisher – who grew into a tight and cohesive unit based on playing together regularly and since they filled the same junior teams. That the current team has gelled so quickly is worthy of note.
So the stars have delivered, but what’s also so endearing about this team is the productivity and combativeness that’s come from the bench-riding role players, each of whom plays every second as you’d hope: as though he doesn’t want to be taken off. Once was the time when Australia could barely afford to give its starting five a breather in games like the Olympic semi-final they’re about to embark upon. Not anymore.
For pure sporting romance you don’t have to look much further than Damian Martin, who used to play for the NBL’s long-defunct West Sydney Razorbacks and now comfortably mixes it with NBA All-Stars, or Chris Goulding, who wouldn’t be recognised on the street in Melbourne but now has the attention of the basketball world.
Are they going to give Goulding some pt? Dang put the man in the game so he can shoot 3′s and flip his hair.
— Josh Childress (@JChillin) August 17, 2016
Then there’s Ryan Broekhoff, as cherubic as a 6ft 7in 25-year-old from Frankston could possibly be. Aside from crime statistics, the only other notable things to come out of his home town are Madison Avenue’s dance pop single Don’t Call Me Baby and the movie adaptation of Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, after which Ava Gardner was claimed to have said it was the perfect kind of place to make a film about the end of the world. Yet there Broekhoff was against Team USA, forcing LA Clippers center DeAndre Jordan to foul him, not in that Charles Barkley-Shane Heal I’ll-show-you-who-is-in-charge way, but because the Australian was causing trouble on offence.
Also from Frankston is four-time Olympian David Anderson, whose low profile in Australia doesn’t match his long list of achievements in Europe and the NBA. The record books say he’s 36, but he might be an actual zombie. Anderson is so old he probably dunked on Phil Smyth, and when he did, Phil Smyth probably still had hair. If Anderson and Broekhoff win gold, Frankston City Council should close the doors of every bong shop and pub and have them chaired through the streets. So, quite frankly, should the rest of the country.
Yet we should make no mistake: USA – both as a nation and as a basketball team – does not take Australia 100% seriously. They’re still more scared more of flying forearms and sneaky knees than raining threes. The Americans shot like garbage in that preliminary win, lighting that might not strike twice.
Yet if the Boomers get past the semi-final it’ll be on for young and old in the gold medal game. They’ll come hard. Bogut, Dellavedova and Mills are not only primed for something remarkable but now expect it of themselves. The beauty of their hard-nosed performances in the last two weeks is that the rest of Australia now holds them in similar esteem.
