Isiah Thomas loved to play road games, and the ones he could have been part of in 1980 might have been unlike any other in his career.The Olympics.
Inside the Soviet Union. During the Cold War.Much still gets made of how Thomas was famously left off the U.S. Olympic team — the first Dream Team — that won a gold medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics with ease.
But he could have been an Olympian 12 years earlier, had the Americans not boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games.Thomas, then a 19-year-old, would have been on that team.
When the decision was made to boycott, he remembers crying.“You know how competitive I am and how I want to win in somebody else’s building, on somebody else’s turf and territory,” Thomas said.