Wither, Oh Wither?

Two years ago, when a fast-breaking, aggressive team of Soviet basketbolisty walloped a U.S. quintet 62-37 in a world amateur tournament in Santiago, Chile, Communists everywhere hailed it as another landmark in Khrushchev's campaign to overtake the U.S. in everything from meat production to widget manufacture. "When it comes to shooting at the moon or at the basket, the U.S. cannot keep up with Russia," trumpeted a leftist Chilean paper. "We won," declared Russian Coach Stepan Spandarian loftily, "because we did what we planned to do."

In his trumpeting, Dialectician Spandarian ignored the objective fact that the U.S. basketball team at Santiago was a third-rate Air Force pickup squad. And a year later, when the Russians during a U.S. tour lost four out of six games against Industrial League teams, Spandarian again looked at his score card through rose-colored glasses. To a Soviet coaches' conference, he reported confidently: "The contests between the Soviet and U.S. teams were like a struggle of equals. The decisive advantage the Americans once had no longer exists."

Time for Analysis. Result was that when the U.S. all-star Olympic team trounced Russia's professional amateurs 81-57 at Rome last summer, the commissars of Soviet sport could only conclude that the "inevitable triumph" of Communism on the basketball court had been sabotaged. Auto-criticism was clearly called for. Recently, months after the Rome debacle, it came in the columns of Moscow's Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Now that "passions have calmed down," wrote Basketball Expert Viktor Grigoriev, "it is time to make a sober analysis." The analysis: Spandarian had been guilty of deceit in reporting that U.S. and Soviet teams had competed as equals; he and other coaches spent too much time on paper work and not enough time on coaching--which resulted in poor discipline among the players, who conducted themselves in Rome with un-Soviet individualism while the Americans ran a happy, smooth cooperative. Moreover, top Soviet Basketball Boss Nikolai Semashko believed Spandarian's tall tales, and together they had "shelved" resolutions exposing the sad fact that the Russian team was "inadequately prepared physically, tactically, and especially technically." Noted Grigoriev sadly: "The fast break, once our most dreaded weapon, is now used only sporadically, and chiefly against our weakest opponents."

The Ex-Optimists. Last week, with increased vigilance against backcourt deviationists and Trotskyite dribblers, Soviet basketballers returned to the task laid down by Soccer Fan Khrushchev at the 21st Party Congress-- preparing for the withering away of the state in the world of sport. Best guess was that this goal was being pursued without the advice of ex-Optimists Spandarian and Semashko, who had already taken just about all the withering a man can stand.

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