In 1987, in a gymnasium in Indianapolis, something happened that was not supposed to happen. Brazil was down 20 points at halftime to a United States squad loaded with future NBA players. Then Oscar Schmidt took over. He scored 35 points in the second half alone, finishing with 46 for the game. When the final buzzer sounded, Brazil had won, 120–115. It was the first time in history that a U.S. basketball team had lost a major international tournament on home soil. The American players were stunned. The Brazilian players were weeping. And Oscar Schmidt — the 6-foot-9 force of nature from Natal whom his countrymen called Mao Santa (“the Holy Hand”) simply smiled, the way a man smiles when something he always believed finally comes true.
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Oscar Daniel Bezerra Schmidt, who died last week at the age of 68, was born on Feb. 16, 1958, in Natal, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Norte. He began playing club basketball at 13 and, within a few years, was already a known commodity in Sao Paulo’s competitive basketball scene. He turned professional at age 16 and never really stopped scoring from that moment forward. Over a professional career that stretched an almost inconceivable 29 years, Schmidt accumulated nearly 50,000 points across club and national team play, a total that held the unofficial record as the highest in basketball history until LeBron James surpassed it in 2024.
The numbers, staggering as they are, only begin to tell the story. Schmidt competed in five consecutive Olympic Games from 1980 through 1996 — a record he shares with just one other player. He is the all-time leading scorer in Olympic history, holds the Olympic single-game scoring record (55 points against Spain in 1988) and the World Championship single-game record (52 against Australia in 1990). He was the leading scorer at three different Olympics — 1988, 1992, and 1996. At the 1992 Barcelona Games, he led all scorers, even with the U.S. Dream Team — Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird — competing in the same tournament.
In the celebrated 1984 NBA Draft — the one that yielded Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, and Hakeem Olajuwon — the New Jersey Nets selected Schmidt and offered him a guaranteed contract. He trained with the team, but ultimately chose to return to Brazil. (I know you might think that turning down the NBA sounds crazy, but in his defense, can you really blame him for not wanting to play for the Nets?) NBA players at the time were barred from Olympic competition, and for Schmidt, playing for his country was not a career consideration but a vocation. He explained it best at his 2013 Naismith Hall of Fame induction in Springfield, Massachusetts, with his idol Larry Bird standing beside him: “I said thank you very much, but if I play one game here, I will never again play for my national team. Three years later, we beat the Americans here in the U.S. Sorry — that was the greatest thing I did in basketball.” Bird laughed.
Instead of the NBA, Schmidt built a career across three continents. After starring in Brazil, he moved to Italy, where he became the top scorer in the Italian First Division seven times — and where a young Kobe Bryant, whose father was playing in the same league, watched him in wide-eyed wonder on television. Bryant later compared Dirk Nowitzki to Schmidt, then caught himself: Schmidt, he said, could do things Nowitzki couldn’t. “He’s out there scoring 45 points, 47 points, and, as a kid, I was just extremely curious on how the hell that’s possible.”
On Pardon the Interruption, ESPN’s Michael Wilbon — who was in Indianapolis in 1987 to witness Schmidt take down Team USA — described Schmidt as “one of the seminal figures” in basketball history and called that Indianapolis upset one of the greatest games he’d ever seen. It was that game, and that brilliant Brazilian player, according to Wilbon, that convinced USA Basketball to allow pro players to play in the Olympics. Without Oscar Schmidt, we may’ve never had the Dream Team. Schmidt’s influence can also be seen in the bevy of international stars that are currently dominating the NBA, from Nikola Jokic and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to Luka Doncic and Victor Wembanyama. You can trace “a direct line straight from Oscar” to these stars, Wilbon said.
For those like me who never saw him play, the Hall of Fame induction speech is as good a window as any into who he was: a man who turned down a guaranteed NBA contract, beat the Americans on their own floor, and stood at the podium decades later with precisely zero regrets. “Three years later, we beat the Americans here in the U.S. Sorry.” The “sorry,” of course, was the most Brazilian possible way of saying he was not sorry at all.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the Allen and Joan Bildner Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University. Find him on X @DanRossGoodman.
