In 1964 Red Auerbach assembled a group of NBA players to tour Poland, Romania, Egypt and Yugoslavia.
This is a story of the tour from the American side, written by Oscar Robertson for The Undefeated in 2016:
The Dream Team you’ve never heard of
Nicholas Rodis, athletic director, 87, of Needham – Boston Herald
Belgrade was lucky to have its basketball father Nebojša Popović, (founder of Red Star, the Yugoslav champion for 10 consecutive years years since 1945, and initially he was the manager, best player and the coach), as the editor in TV Belgrade from its inception in 1958, first as the editor of the sports section and then of the whole newsroom. He enabled prime time for basketball and had huge impact on its popularization.
Even if there are no subs, you can still see huge grins on the faces of the players and Bora Stanković talking about the time they played NBA stars.
Bora Stanković was still coaching at the time (and working as the veterinary inspector on the meat control until 1966 lol). Later he would become the Secretary General of FIBA, and include the NBA players in FIBA competitions.
This is a collection of photos from Karlovac, Croatia:
This is a story of the tour from the American side, written by Oscar Robertson for The Undefeated in 2016:
The Dream Team you’ve never heard of
Small note: this is the State Department official that organized the tour:
The 2016 Olympic Games have begun, and Team USA is heavily favored to win another gold medal in men’s basketball. This is the seventh team of NBA players to compete in the Olympics. Comparisons to the 1992 “Dream Team” — the first to feature NBA players, and supposedly the gold standard for all U.S. basketball teams since then – have become inevitable.
There was actually another Olympic “Dream Team” 32 years earlier, comprised entirely of players who had not yet turned pro. Coached by Pete Newell and co-captained by Jerry West and me, that team won all eight of its games by an average margin of 42.4 points.
Then there was a third “Dream Team,” one you’ve probably never heard of. It was actually the first team of NBA players to tour overseas on behalf of the USA — in 1964. I was a member of that team.
Our “Dream Team” of NBA all-stars was put together for a State Department goodwill tour. We played 19 games in the Iron Curtain countries of Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia — which doesn’t even exist as a country anymore — and two games in Egypt, winning them all by large margins. We also put on clinics in every city we visited.
Our team was personally selected and coached by Red Auerbach, the most successful coach, general manager and team president in NBA history, and anchored by Bill Russell, who won 11 NBA titles.
Eight was enough
We only had eight players: Boston Celtics’ Russell, Tom Heinsohn, KC Jones and Bob Cousy (retired a year earlier and then coaching at Boston College); Jerry Lucas and me from the Cincinnati Royals; Bob Pettit from the St. Louis Hawks, and Tom Gola from the New York Knicks.
Russell, Jones, Lucas and I had been Olympic gold medalists, all of us were all-NBA, and all eight players plus Red are now in the Hall of Fame.
But our “Dream Team” has essentially been forgotten by the NBA, the media, even our own State Department – just as we were largely ignored in our own country back then. But there’s a particular reason this tour should be remembered, which I will get to in a moment.
How the 1964 NBA All-Stars tour came about
In the 1960 Olympics, the “Original Dream Team” not only won all eight games by an average margin of 42.4 points, but our games were essentially clinics in how the game should be played. We had nine future NBA players, five of whom are now in the Hall of Fame. We had a brilliant and innovative coach in Pete Newell, and when other coaches saw how well his approach to the game worked, he was soon asked to give his own clinics all over the world. He did that for years and was rarely compensated for doing so.
Three years after our sweep, however, a new Team USA did not fare as well. It won the 1963 Pan American Games, but only finished fourth in the FIBA (International Basketball Federation) World Championship tournament in Rio de Janeiro, losing to Russia, Yugoslavia, and eventual champion Brazil. That team featured three future NBA players in Willis Reed, Lucious Jackson and Don Kojis, and nine other guys you never heard of.
The results in Rio did not go over well in the White House. It was the height of the Cold War and Team USA had lost to two Communist countries. So President Lyndon Johnson instructed the State Department’s Interagency on International Athletics to work on restoring American basketball to its rightful place in the eyes of the rest of the world.
A State Department official who knew Red asked him to put together a team to tour Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania and Egypt following the 1964 NBA season. The Russians took a look at the roster Red had put together and decided not to admit us into the Soviet Union.
Nicholas Rodis, athletic director, 87, of Needham – Boston Herald
There's a clip only from two games in Belgrade, from other cities there are only photos. In 1964 in Yugoslavia only TVs were able to register video.In the other four countries, we were welcomed with open arms. For one thing, they knew our games were likely to sell out, and the gate receipts would help build their local basketball federations.
The first rumblings of player rebellion
By the time Red called me about the tour, 1964 had already been a very eventful year, marred only by the continued inability of our Cincinnati Royals team to get past the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Division finals.
I was named MVP of both the 1964 All-Star Game and MVP for the entire NBA season, becoming only the second guard after Bob Cousy to win that honor. I was also becoming increasingly active in the National Basketball Players Association, of which Tom Heinsohn was president and Bob Pettit first vice president.
That 1964 All-Star Game, the first scheduled for national television, almost did not happen. Heinsohn had organized a boycott, and it was not lifted until the owners agreed to recognize our executive director Larry Fleisher as our authorized bargaining agent and to meet with him to discuss a pension plan and improved working conditions. This boycott became known as “the 22-minute strike that changed professional sports.” We were finally able to negotiate a true collective bargaining agreement instead of just accepting whatever master agreement the owners put in front of us.
Held over by popular demand
Before the NBA All-Stars tour began in May, we were summoned to Washington, D.C. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other State Department officials briefed us, and we visited the White House, where Johnson wished us well and encouraged us to do our best in representing our fellow Americans.
We began our tour in Warsaw, Poland, without Red, who was occupied with the NBA draft. Cousy coached our first two games, which we won by 20 and 28 points. When Red joined us in Krakow, Poland, he felt like we were taking it too easy on the opposition, so we blitzed our next two opponents by 49 and 44 points.
While the tour was originally scheduled to last four weeks, the host countries kept asking for more games and clinics, so we were on the road for six weeks. We played national teams, military teams, college teams, and what were essentially pickup teams. To this day I could not name all the cities in which we played. I remember Warsaw; Krakow; Bucharest, Romania; Belgrade and Zagreb, Yugoslavia; and that’s about it.
Otherwise, for NBA veterans accustomed to the endless grind of an 81-game schedule, it was a road trip much like any other. But for the host countries, our tour was a big deal. They may have had less than state-of-the-art facilities — in fact, we played quite a few games outdoors in soccer stadiums — but they were hungry for improvement.
Red takes a stand
In Zagreb, there were 16,000 people in a soccer stadium waiting for tipoff. But our local hosts were not flying the Stars and Stripes alongside their national flag, and they were not planning to play our national anthem. So Red pulled us off the court and refused to play. After a tense delay, our flag was finally raised, our national anthem was played, and we beat the Croatian team by 32 points. Then we beat them again the following night by 52 points.
Our European opponents were well-conditioned. The games could be pretty physical, and the level of competition was better than we expected. They basically worked the ball around to an open man who could shoot from outside, and they were pretty good outside shooters. But they were not very adept at running a motion offense or creating shots off the dribble. And they did not have much of an inside game, not that it would have done them much good anyway with Russell lurking under the basket.
As for us, we had almost no preparation. We were chosen not only for our skills but our basketball IQ. Red was never big on Xs and Os to begin with; his teams were built on speed, conditioning, rebounding, defense, and a balanced attack. Since NBA teams played each other so often back in those days, we all knew the Celtics’ plays anyway.
Flying under the radar, then and now
Now, you’d think a team of eight NBA All-Stars would get a lot of media coverage, right? Well, we may have been covered in the host countries, but back home we got virtually no coverage at all.
In 1964, there was no ESPN, TNT or CNN; there were three TV networks and two wire services, and the NBA was a distant third to baseball and football in terms of media coverage anyway. A couple of articles made their way onto the wire, Heinsohn sent some dispatches to the Boston Globe, there was a post-tour article in Sports Illustrated, and that was about it. If there is film of any of our games, I’m unaware of it.
Belgrade was lucky to have its basketball father Nebojša Popović, (founder of Red Star, the Yugoslav champion for 10 consecutive years years since 1945, and initially he was the manager, best player and the coach), as the editor in TV Belgrade from its inception in 1958, first as the editor of the sports section and then of the whole newsroom. He enabled prime time for basketball and had huge impact on its popularization.
Even if there are no subs, you can still see huge grins on the faces of the players and Bora Stanković talking about the time they played NBA stars.
Bora Stanković was still coaching at the time (and working as the veterinary inspector on the meat control until 1966 lol). Later he would become the Secretary General of FIBA, and include the NBA players in FIBA competitions.
This is a collection of photos from Karlovac, Croatia:
