Sports History On This Day: August 14

August 14, 1936 – If I gave you a final sports score of 19-8 what game would you first assume was played? Football? Perhaps baseball? Well, how about Olympic Men’s Basketball? If you guessed hoops then you would be correct.

The United States beats Canada, 19-8 to win the gold medal in the inaugural men’s basketball competition at the Olympic Games in Berlin. It wasn’t that the athletes were inept at scoring, no there was another factor. The host Nazi Germans had the event scheduled outdoors and the conditions… were abysmal.

First of all the court was not concrete, clay, wood, or any other expected surface…it was played on compacted fine gravel! Try running and dribbling on that in a game. To make matters worse, it rained. The Montreal Gazette said that the court had been turned “into a skating rink by the incessant downpour” and that “a high wind did weird things with a soggy ball.”

There were reports that the contestants left the court that day: tired, wet, and muddy. Hardly a description we would expect from a world championship basketball game with the prize of Olympic Gold on the line.