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You Tube Gold: The Great Oscar Schmidt

One of the first and finest stars from South America

By JD King
/ new
BASQUETBOL-OSCAR
 The Brazilian basketball star Oscar Schmidt “Oscar” (40) raise the arms after scoring a basket and overcome the 40 thousand points in its 22 years of professional career during a match by the Brazilian Championship in Barueri March 15. Oscar is the top scorer in the last three Olympic Games. The American Kareem Abdul Jabar holds the world record with 46 thousand 725 marked points in his career.
Photo by Marie Hippenmeyer/AFP via Getty Images

Over the weekend we did a YouTube Gold with Luka Doncic and forgot to put the link in. That’s fixed now. Here it is again.

Doncic comes at a time when international players are just taken for granted but not that long ago they were a novelty.

For instance, Brazil’s Oscar Schmidt never played in the NBA, preferring to play in Italy instead. But he was a supreme star in international basketball competitions like the Olympics and the Pan Am Games, where he went wild in the second half, leading Brazil to a comeback win.

In the first video here he is being inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2013. He requested that Larry Bird present him because Bird was his idol.

And in the second video, Bird talks about how good Schmidt was before we see some video from those Pan Am games where he just dominated the US.

There’s also something we didn’t expect.

Kobe Bryant grew up in Italy before the Internet and easily accessed video. So unlike most Americans, he was keenly aware of Schmidt, who in turn was one of Bryant’s idols.

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