As young Vince Boryla set sail on a historic journey with his teammates on the U.S. Olympic basketball team in 1948, the small-town kid from the Midwest wasn't immediately awed by the prospect of taking his first steps on foreign soil. Nor was Boryla nervous about his pending appearance in the London Summer Olympics.
No, as Boryla made the slow boat trip across the Atlantic Ocean, his concerns were a little more immediately pressing.
Boryla, a University of Denver alum who was a pioneering basketball player before embarking on a remarkably diverse career in business and sports management, recently caught up with DenverPioneers.com on the eve of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
One of the most prominent memories on Boryla's mind was his own excursion to London in 1948 for the Summer Olympics. It was a monumental venture, as Boryla was part of a contingent participating in the first Olympics since 1936 due to a World War II-forced hiatus.
The team didn't exactly travel in luxury, as the group spent more than a week aboard the USS America sailing from New York to England. Boryla, displaying an early sign of the sort of initiative that would eventually make him a shrewd businessman, decided to take matters into his own hands when the ship's food proved less than fulfilling.
"I sat with (former Kentucky star) Alex Groza," Boryla said. "He and I became very close. He was the center for the Kentucky club and a great guy. I think he gained about 11, 12 pounds. I gained about nine. All we were doing was eating. Alex and I grabbed a table for two, and the first thing I did was give our waiter 20 bucks. Twenty bucks then was quite a bit of money. I'd never been on a ship before and I told him, 'Just give us the best food that you would eat at each meal.' And he did."
Boryla was selected for the squad in a process completely foreign to today's standards of simply hand-picking the best NBA players available, and it even was decades before the tryout camps that filled Olympic rosters from the best of the best at the collegiate level from the 1960s through the 80s.
In the months prior to the '48 games, Boryla was playing for the Denver Nuggets (then an AAU squad in the pre-NBA days) at a tournament in New York City's legendary venue Madison Square Garden, where the Indiana native would later star for the New York Knicks. Boryla lit up the Garden to the tune of 30-plus points in the first game, but he tweaked his knee and didn't play another game in the tournament.
The Phillips 66 AAU squad defeated Kentucky, the reigning NCAA champs and the dominant dynasty of college basketball. Selecting the Olympic team from this particular result was less than democratic. The five Phillips 66 starters were selected, as were the starting five from Kentucky. The final four members of the roster were selected from an at-large pool. Boryla, thanks in large part to his huge opening game, made the cut.
Coached by Phillips 66 coach Bud Browning and legendary Kentucky leader Adolph Rupp, the newly christened U.S. Olympic team played a series of exhibitions on native soil before sailing to London.
"Adolph, he thought he invented the game. But he was a nice guy," Boryla said. "He was funny. He had sayings about this and that. And he liked me. I don't know why he liked me. Maybe he thought I was going to transfer to Kentucky. But he treated me fine. And I liked him. He was really a funny man. We divided into Phillips and Kentucky. I was in the Kentucky bunch along with Ray Lumpp. Jack Robinson and (Don) Barksdale were with the Phillips bunch. We played four exhibition games against each other-one in Tulsa, one in Kansas City, one someplace else I can't remember, and the fourth was played outside at the Kentucky football stadium. We got the court out there and we had 18,000 people in the stands or whatever the stadium held."
Upon arriving in Great Britain, the team played a few more exhibition games on rustic courts in Scotland before beginning its Olympic competition in London, where entire blocks remained lumps of charred rubble, left over from the war. Although the squad endured a close call against Argentina, the U.S. largely rolled through the tournament, ultimately capturing the gold medal with a 65-21 win against France. Boryla's gold medal remains among the vast treasure trove of basketball relics in his personal collection at his south Denver home.
"First of all, this was the first Olympics to be held since 1936. So the teams we played were not very good," Boryla said. "However, the game against Argentina was tough because the referees didn't understand each other. Ralph Beard, who was a hell of a guard, was probably the first guy I had ever seen who could dribble as fast as most guys could run. They must have called travelling on him 15 times or so. Because in their minds nobody could dribble that fast. That was the closest game we had. I think we beat them by two or four points. Then we played France in the finals and we beat them easily."
Follow Pat Rooney on Twitter: @prooney07
