November 2, 2021

After my sophomore year at Indiana (1984), I stayed in Bloomington for the summer. While working a paid internship for the IU Foundation’s publications office, I took six hours while living with a fraternity brother off-campus.

The US Olympic Men’s Basketball Trials also began that summer. Indiana’s Bob Knight had been named the Team USA coach for the ’84 Los Angeles games. Players from all over came to IU’s Assembly Hall that summer at the invitation of USA Basketball to try out.

In the heart of basketball country, this was big. My father and I planned to buy tickets to the exhibition games at the end of the Trials. That would come later, after my summer studies ended in late July (just before the athletes headed west).

My daily route to a B-school class consisted of leaving my apartment, backpack slung and water in hand. Then I’d hoof it across campus and endure the sweltering Midwestern humidity for about 15 minutes… until, for a brief cool down (never breaking stride, mind you), I would cut through the cavernous, aggressively air-conditioned HPER building. The “Hyper”, home of IU’s School of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, is the former Men’s Gymnasium. (Built in 1917, it is now called Bill Garrett Fieldhouse.)

I’d hit the entry door, breeze past the ten full-size basketball courts (all relatively quiet on summer mornings), and about two minutes later exit into the hot sun for the last quarter-mile.

On this fateful June morning at about 10:15, I entered the normally deserted HPER —and found Court One surrounded by around a hundred people.

As I stopped over to see what was happening Isiah “Zeke” Thomas of the Detroit Pistons, then the most accomplished Indiana basketball alumnus and a third-year NBA player, was grabbing the ball from the net and tossing it back to his opponent, North Carolina junior and recent Chicago Bulls signee Michael Jordan…

Needless to say, I was late for class.

For the next 25 minutes or so, Isiah — the game’s best young point guard (having just played his first All-Star Game) — traded baskets with Michael, soon to be the planet’s greatest basketball player.

But on this day they were simply two guys in workout clothes playing a little one-on-one.

Looking back, it could have been the first moment of their rivalry, which would later include the ’85 All-Star Game “freezeout” (in which Thomas plotted not to pass to Jordan), and the epic handshake controversy of the 1991 NBA Eastern Conference Finals chronicled in “The Last Dance” from 2020. (Sorry you didn’t make the ’92 Dream Team, Isiah. Shoulda shook hands?)

It was all smiles, on that muggy Bloomington morning in 1984. Nothing stunning took place on the hardwood, except for two great players putting on their best moves to get a shot.

They were enjoying themselves. And so were we. Those of us who were at the HPER that morning were equally (if not more) delighted to drop whatever we were doing to see it.

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I went looking around for anything that might be out there on this. Although I was unsuccessful, I found a nice 1984 Olympics basketball item here.