Angola coach’s hilarious attempt to boost morale against Michael Jordan’s Dream Team at the 1992 Olympics failed spectacularly

“I don’t know anything about Angola, but Angola is in trouble.”

NBA legend and Hall of Famer Charles Barkley uttered those now-infamous words in 1992 before his Olympic-conquering “Dream Team” USA took on basketball powerhouse Angola.

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The African nation of about 12.5 million people (in 1992) had no NBA players on its roster while the American team featured some of the greatest basketball players – Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird – on planet Earth.

It was a David versus Goliath match in every sense of the word, and Angola head coach Victorino Cunha knew they needed a miracle to have any chance of slaying the giant that was Team USA.

According to 6-foot-4, 175-pound forward Herlander Coimbra in GQ’s “Oral History of the Dream Team,” Cunha tried to boost his team’s morale by essentially telling them that the Dream Team players weren’t very good.

Cunha told his players that “only Larry Bird and Michael Jordan were really, really good (and) the other Dream Teamers were just okay.”

Basketball wasn’t the global game it is today, and while Angolans had heard of Bird and MJ, they weren’t exactly familiar with players like Barkley, Karl Malone, David Robinson, Chris Mullen, Patrick Ewing, Clyde Drexler, John Stockton, Scottie Pippen and Christian Laettner.

However, as Coimbra and his teammates quickly learned, “these guys were on another level – a galaxy far, far away.”

The United States were Angola’s first match at the 1992 tournament and they “felt like they were the luckiest players in the world.”

“We were going to play against the best, but also against African-Americans, our little cousins ​​from America,” Coimbra recalls. “During warm-ups, we tried spectacular dunks to show them that we could play like in the NBA. They didn’t do a single dunk. They were really serious, very serious.”

It was a game that turned out to be a surprisingly epic affair.

Philadelphia 76ers star Barkley, known for his aggressive style of play, got himself into trouble early in the game after delivering a brutal elbow to Coimbra’s chest.

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The elbow from the Round Mound of Rebound was met with loud boos from the Barcelona crowd and prompted a technical foul that ended a 31-point run by the United States.

“They were playing a little too hard, and I warned him a few times,” Chuck said. “I thought he was getting away with some low blows.”

The 250-pound NBA superstar Barkley elbowing Coimbra, a 175-pound economics student, looked bad on a U.S. team that was supposed to be defending the values ​​and integrity of the sport in front of a global audience.

The image of bullies was not one the United States wanted to project to the rest of the world, and even MJ thought Barkley’s recklessness would get him kicked out of the Games.

Barkley’s elbow was a major talking point even after Team USA’s resounding 116-48 victory.

“After the match, all the journalists wanted to talk to me about the incident,” Coimbra recalls.

“They wanted to know why. Did I say something to provoke Barkley? I told them I didn’t do anything. The next few days, the press wanted to talk about nothing else. It got so crazy that I had to say in a statement that we were only here to show how good we were. We didn’t want to fuel the rumors. But between us, we talked about it.

“We weren’t really surprised that Barkley did that because he was known to be a dirty player.

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Chuck, however, insisted that it was not all his fault when he reflected on the incident later in his career.

“This team played dirty,” Barkley said on NBC footage.

“I told him, hey man, if you do that one more time, I’m going to hit you. So he did it two more times, and I hit him.”

To be fair to Barkley, he redeemed himself after the game by stopping to take a photo with Coimbra.

According to one journalist, “the two men developed something of a bond in the years that followed, as the elbow bump made Coimbra a big deal in Angola.”

Barkley kept his emotions in check for the rest of the tournament and proved to be the United States’ best player and scorer, averaging 18 points per game.

The United States won the gold medal in a gallop, outscoring its opponents by an average margin of 44 points and beating Croatia 117-85 in the gold medal game.

The 2024 version of Team USA, led by LeBron James, Steph Curry and Kevin Durant, is currently in Paris for the 2024 Olympics.

The United States is seeking its fifth consecutive Olympic gold medal and will face Nikola Jokic and Serbia on July 28 in its first group match.

They will finish their group stage with matches against South Sudan on July 31 and Puerto Rico on August 3.