WHILE PREPARING to enjoy the Olympic Games this summer from his air-conditioned TV room in Glendale, Calif., Frank Lubin nonetheless knows a potential emotional conflict looms. If and/or when - Lubin insists on the "when" - the United States Dream Team basketball squad faces the Lithuanian Dream Team basketball squad, the 82-year-old Lubin doesn't know just what he'll do. Of the two Dream Teams, he feels strongly both ways.
For one thing, he was captain of the 1936 U.S. basketball team that went to Berlin and won the first-ever basketball gold medal of the Olympic Games.For one other thing, he was going to be player/coach of the first-ever Lithuanian Olympic basketball team, scheduled to play in the 1940 Games in Japan.
Those 1940 Games were never held, of course, because Adolf Hitler, after hosting the Berlin Olympics in 1936, followed that with World War II and put a temporary stop to any and all friendly worldwide competition. Lubin, living in Lithuania in 1939, barely got out of the country before the borders were closed and the Soviet Union assumed control of the land and its three million inhabitants.
Lubin, born and raised in L.A., had gone to Lithuania, the birthplace of his parents, directly after helping the U.S. team win the basketball medal in Berlin. It had only been 18 years, since the end of World War I in 1918, that Lithuania had been independent. Prior to that, the country had been subject to czarist Russian rule, an oppressive situation that caused Lubin's parents to flee to America and change their name (from Lubinas to Lubin).
Flushed by its newfound freedom in the '30s, Lithuania was energetically rebuilding its country and urging American-Lithuanians such as Lubin to return - and impart any new-found wisdom they
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might have discovered in the new world.
To the 6-foot-7 Lubin, a former All-American at UCLA, that meant imparting the intricacies of the pick-and-roll, the set shot and the bounce pass.
He liked being in his homeland so, along with his wife, Mary Agnes, Frank took out dual-citizenship and stayed for three years. Only they didn't call him Frank in Lithuania, or Lubin. They called him by his Lithuanian name, "Pranas Lubinas," either that or "Coach."
In a way, he was Lithuania's Christopher Columbus of basketball. He introduced the game to the country and vice versa. He taught fundamentals to schools and sports clubs. In his students, naturally rawboned and rugged, he saw an inherent aptitude for the sport invented in America.
By 1939, Lithuania secured the privilege of hosting the European basketball championship. Pranas Lubinas was asked to coach the national team, and also play in the pivot. He agreed. In the opening game against neighboring Latvia, the perennial European champs, Lubinas made an in-the-lane hook shot with time almost expired that gave Lithuania a 37-36 win and, as it turned out after subsequent round-robin wins over France, Italy, Estonia and Poland, the European crown.
Lubin still remembers that play.
"I was standing in the middle - in those days the three-second rule didn't exist - and Latvia was ahead by a point and time was running out and I just screamed at my teammates, in English, `Get me the ball!' he says, "so they did and I made that shot and the crowd just mauled me."
Just like that, Pranas Lubinas became the Babe Ruth of Lithuanian basketball, and Lithuania became the Indiana of eastern Europe. Basketball became a source of lasting national pride. That much was evidenced three years ago, when the break-up of the Soviet Union began and Soviet premiere Mikhail Gorbachev allowed Lithuanians to again fly their flag and commemorate their past. The first celebration the country chose to plan was a 50-year reunion for its 1939 European Championship basetball team.
Lubin returned to his homeland for that celebration, where, at the age of 79, he re-enacted the hook shot and was treated like a returning Pranas Lubinas.
In the days since that visit, he has told anyone who will listen that Lithuania basketball, the old Lithuania basketball, is back, and it's in terrific shape despite its imprisonment the past 53 years.
Lubin is quick to point out that it was primarily because of Lithuanians that the Soviet Union was able to excel in international basketball circles the past half-century. In the USSR's 82-76 win over the U.S. team in the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, for instance, 62 of the Soviet's 82 points were made by Lithuanians - 19 by Sarunas Marciulionis, who is now the property of the Golden State Warriors; 28 by Rimas Kurtinaitis, 13 by 7-foot-4 center Arvidas Sabonis, and two by reserve guard Valdermaras Komicius. All four of those players, along with Seton Hall standout Arturas Karnisovas, are on the Lithuanian team that will compete later this month in Barcelona.
Lubin calls them "my second-generation students" and wishes the Lithuanian team all the best in Spain.
Then, too, he sends his best wishes to the United States team, of which he is a member in good standing from the charter class.
"The U.S. team we're sending is wonderful," says Lubin. "Just don't be surprised at the strength of Lithuania too."
After all this time, the team the Lithuanians, and Frank Lubin, dreamed about for 53 seasons has arrived - and in Barcelona it will finally make its Olympic Games debut.