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BEIJING — "Have you talked to Coach K yet?"
Bryan Colangelo, president and general manager of the Toronto Raptors, is asked about Chris Bosh's performance in the men's Olympic basketball tournament and suddenly he is excited. A twinkle enters his eye and he is ready to share some scuttlebutt floating around the U.S. basketball team about his prized forward and franchise player.
Coach K is Mike Krzyzewski, head coach of the U.S. team and Duke University, whose word is gospel in American hoops circles. He is an unabashed Bosh admirer, and he told Colangelo as such earlier in the tournament.
Their conversation took place before the United States' 118-107 gold-medal victory over Spain Sunday, a wondrously entertaining game that had 18,000 Chinese cheering for both teams as though they were about to win another gold in table tennis or diving. Once again, Bosh was not a front-and-centre player in the gold-medal game, but he was an important player, entering the game in the final five minutes when the score was close and the coach turned to the players he trusted most.
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"He has been as valuable a player as we have on our team," Krzyzewski said when asked about Bosh. "He has played with such maturity and smarts. You can see it in his play, but if you could hear him talk to our team and talk to the other big guys, in practice, in games and on the bench …
"In this tournament, we are seeing an already outstanding player raise his game to another level. I'm very proud of him. He has been a real man for us."
Bosh was not the star on the U.S. team. He wasn't the high scorer, he didn't get the ball in the clutch and he wasn't asked to be his team's focal point as he is on North American soil.
But Bosh symbolized what the U.S. team was trying to achieve in Beijing, and why it was so successful in an undefeated Olympic tournament where only the Spanish came close - on their second try. The U.S. outfit may have been called the Redeem Team, but Bosh's Olympic debut needed no redemption. He wants to play again in London in 2012, and if Krzyzewski is back, there's no doubting Bosh will be there.
"I know I can score the basketball, but that wasn't my duty," Bosh said. "I had to realize that as a basketball player and do everything I could to affect the game some way.
"If they threw me a bone, I'd take it."
The U.S. team needed unselfish players who did odd jobs, and that was Bosh.
He rebounded. He motivated. He played defence, especially against the international pick-and-roll that so wounded the Americans four years ago in Athens, when the great basketball power slumped to bronze. He stayed active on offence, always presenting himself as a threat, even if he didn't always get the ball.
"I think sometimes you have to have someone behind the scenes who does the little things," Bosh said. "You have to keep everybody motivated. If we come out flat, I'm not afraid to say something. If we're not playing well, I have to pick everybody up."
Bosh admits it wasn't easy, checking his ego, not taking shots he would take in the NBA and not looking at the stats sheet. But that was the pledge the U.S. players made when they bound together and decided that global basketball supremacy was more important than egos, shots and stats.
Tellingly, happy as they were, many cited the Olympic victory as an unburdening more than a triumph. The United States failed to win gold for just the third time in Olympic history four years ago — one miss was the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Games — and it failed to win the 2006 world championship, a quadrennial title the Spaniards carried into Beijing.
"It's a great relief for us," Bosh said. "We've been waiting for this for a long time. Personally, it's as big as you can get. This only comes once every four years, and now I can join that elite class of gold medalists."
Soon after joining that class, Bosh finished his media obligations and was walking through the basement corridor of the Olympic Basketball Gymnasium when he spotted Raptors assistant coach Jay Triano, who is in China working for the CBC as a television analyst.
Still riding an emotional high, the player had a pep talk for the coach.
He repeated to Triano what he had said seconds earlier — "I just have to build on this momentum" — and pledged that when NBA training camp opens one month from now, Toronto's franchise player will also be its most driven player. He said that every teammate will get the message, even fellow star forward Jermaine O'Neal, the Raptors' major off-season acquisition.
"You going to be there?" Bosh asked Triano with a firm handshake. "We have some work to do."
