This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is the Dream Team Tapes, a diversion podcast's original series, in association with IHeart Radio.

This is a story of the United States Olympic basketball team that won gold in Barcelona in 1992, known worldwide as the Dream Team.

One of the signposts we could use to begin the complete Dream Team story is, believe it or not,

1936. Well, I guess we could go back to 1891 when good old James and A. Smith hung up a peach

basket in the Springfield YMCA, but we all know about that. In 1936, basketball became an Olympic sport

for the first time. And it happened at the much-remembered Olympic Games during which Adolf Hitler advanced the idea of Aryan superiority,

an American track athlete Jesse Owens with four gold medals, promptly unadvanced it.

Welcome to episode two of the Dream Team tapes,

in which we trace the history of Olympic basketball, including its humble beginnings,

and figure out how, over the course of a half century, it advanced to the orgiastic celebration

it became in 1992. Yes, if you want both basketball

and use of the word orgiastic, you've come to the right place. So let's travel back in time.

Basketball was an afterthought in those 1936 games, which were played on an outdoor clay court

that had become muddy and almost unplayable by the finals, which were played on an outdoor clay court that had become muddy and almost

unplayable by the finals, which the United States won by a football-like score of 19-8 over Canada.

Hmm, I wonder if Steve Nash knew that the U.S. Canada rivalry goes all the way back to 1936.

One of the stars of the United States team was a fellow named Bill Wheatley, who was working

for globe oil and refining at the time.

He was an example of the, well, eclectic method of selecting players back then.

College basketball was just a blip on the national radar, and the stars of American hoops were just as

...