patrickanderson.ca

{The following post contains immature language and not a little irony.  Reader discretion is advised.

Seriously, I owe Troy Sachs an apology for the verbal sucker punch below.  Whatever his gifts or gaffes, I should have spoken to him privately before sharing my opinions publicly.  And there was no good reason to overstate them in such an ugly way.  

Congrats to him and again to the rest of the Aussies.}

Hey, remember me?  The guy with the blog?  Yeah, I know, it’s been a while.  As you probably know by now, if you’ve slogged it out with me these past few weeks or months, I am the proud owner of a silver medal and another colourful batch of memories.  I thought about writing a few times over the past week, but I couldn’t find a two hour span when I wasn’t wiped out, or still pissed off, or a little drunk.  Might have made for an entertaining read, but I didn’t want to say anything I might regret later.  So here I am back in Vancouver, practicing safe blogging, and wondering how to wrap this thing up.  I think I’ll tackle it in bullet form…

Losing Gold

This has to come first, cause it’s the first thing everyone wants to know about.  What happened?  Are we disappointed?  What does it mean not to win three in a row?  Well, as anyone who reads Bill Simmons on espn.com knows, there are levels of losing.  He has a fairly elaborate system worked out that I won’t get into.  Suffice it to say, losing hurts, but some losses hurt more than others.  Of course, I can only speak personally.  It’s different for each guy in the room.  For me, I can live with it.  Making history would have been nice and made for a good story, but it was never high on my list.  I would have loved to see a gold medal around the necks of the new guys, but they’ll have more chances.    I was only really bothered by one thing – that I couldn’t be the leader we needed in that final game.  The team needed me to get fired up, but I couldn’t do it (more on this later).  I tried, but everytime I did, I could only think of how tired I was.  Tired is the wrong word.  Empty is better.  Whether it was the double OT or ten years of chasing a ball around, the gas tank was empty.  And this loomed like a colossal failure to me.  Why couldn’t I dig deeper?  Fatigue is no excuse.  The grind is no excuse.  I let everyone down.

But now it’s a week later, I’m back in surprisingly sunny Vancouver, contemplating an open road of possibilities.  And looking back I realize that I gave everything that I had, no more, no less.  I wasn’t the same leader that I was in ‘04, but I tried to lead as well as I could.  Other guys like Deng, Jaimie, and Dirt stepped up and let me be myself and offer what I could.  (Well except Jaimie – he complained more or less constantly about me dumping responsibilities on him, but what are friends for).

Winning Silver

Second best.  That’s not bad, right?  Right??!

The Aussies

In my mind, besides playing good, smart basketball, they did two important things very well.  They hit free throws.  And they controlled the emotional game within a game.  If this was an intentional part of their game plan, then their coach deserves some credit. First a little history.  In the past, games between Canada and Australia usually went like this; they came out like a battering ram, we got pissed off, and then it was game on.  We fed off the aggression and occasional outright violence of their players, and it usually worked in our favour.  In the final though, I felt like they lulled us to sleep.  They were playing hard, fast, and with intensity, but it was channelled more productively than I’d ever seen before.  Even Troy seemed less obnoxious than usual, for most of the game at least.  Somehow they avoided getting under our skin until it was too late.

Speaking of Troy, and I never do publicly, I feel like I owe a brief explanation of what I was thinking at the end of the game, in case you catch it on TV.  I took a fake-flagrant on Troy Sachs with 0.1 seconds left.   The thing is, as the clock was winding down, I suddenly realized that if this was my last game, it might be my last chance to punch him in the face.  Believe me, there was nothing emotional in it.  I wasn’t angry.  It’s simply that he’s been hiding behind the refs and the integrity of the game for a long time, and no one holds him accountable for being an idiot. 

That’s not my job though.  Besides, I’m biased and I’m no choir boy myself.  But since no one seems to talk about these things openly, I figure I’ll go ahead and offer my two cents, for what it’s worth. Troy’s the most talented athlete and the most f’d up person I’ve ever met.  

Most of the Aussies are good guys though.  They paid their dues and earned their success the hard way.  I congratulate them.  

Team Canada

Hard to say what the team will look like at Worlds in 2010.  I can’t speak for others, but I know that a number of guys have either decided to or are considering hanging it up.  But for all my blathering on about the well running dry, it was great to hear guys in the locker room after the final game talk about how much fire they still have.  Regardless of who moves on, our program is in good hands, from our staff at cwba to the coaches to the players.  

Retirement and the Future

I’m not announcing anything, cause I don’t want to have to pull a Brett Favre someday.  I have a gut feeling that I’m supposed to move on to something else.  Within the sport, outside the sport, maybe both, don’t know.  I want to stay in Vancouver at least for a few more years, finish the music program I started at VCC, and take it from there.

So that’s it.  I’m going to post some photos, but there are some great photo galleries by Kevin Smith on the cwba site, here.  On the front page, there are still links to various articles and coverage.  Oh, and there’s a really good article about Jaimie’s chair here.