Shane Heal vs The Dream Team

One of my mates sent me this article last week and its a good look back at a famous moment in Australian basketball history.

The forgotten story of ... Shane Heal v the Dream Team

The Boomers guard was a thorn in the side of the NBA's biggest stars as Australia punched above their weight at the Olympics

The Dream Team III enforcer Charles Barkley was clear from the outset. “We’re here to prove we are the best country in the world. We’re the best at basketball. We have got to kill them all.”

Heading into Australia’s 1996 exhibition match against the reigning Olympic champions, peroxide-blond guard Shane ‘The Hammer’ Heal and his Boomers team-mates were excited but not daunted by the prospect of taking on the NBA’s best.

“I think it was a defining sort of a moment,” Heal tells Guardian Australia 17 years after a fiery confrontation that remains the first thing basketball fans want to discuss when they meet the veteran of four Olympic campaigns.

The Australians, a blue-collar line-up by international standards, approached the game with respect for their opponents but didn’t fear them. Heal recalls “we’d seen other teams getting photos taken with them and autographs before and after games and things like that. We said that wasn’t the Australian way and we certainly weren’t handling the game like that.”

Heal would finish the Olympic tune-up with 28 points and shoot a remarkable 8-from-13 from three-point range, many of them a remarkable distance out from the line, but it was his confrontation with the notorious Barkley that captured the attention of the media and fans alike.

Click here to read the full article.