A Basketball Game that Put Israel ‘On the Map’ Dani Menkin’s new documentary, ‘On the Map,’ recounts how the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team’s 1977 triumph galvanized Israel By Matthew Futterman
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-basketball-game-that-put-israel-on-the-map-1481207560
Sports and sports movies are at their best when the players involved understand something far larger than just a game is on the line.
Israeli filmmaker Dani Menkin proves this with his documentary “On the Map,” the story of the 1976-77 Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team. The team won for Israel its first European basketball championship and forever changed Israelis’ view of their country and its sporting prowess. It opened in Los Angeles last month and premieres in New York Friday.
Menkin was a boy in Tel Aviv when former U.S. collegiate star Tal Brody led Maccabi to the pinnacle of European basketball. He watched Israelis pour into the streets to celebrate the shocking win over Russia’s CSKA Moscow team.
“Everyone remembers where they were when Tal Brody said we are on the map and we are here to stay,” Menkin said in a recent interview from Los Angeles, where he lives now. The exact quote, delivered by a delirious Brody after the 91-79 beatdown of the Russians on February 17, 1977, in a small gym in Belgium, was: “We are on the map. And we are staying on the map—not only in sports but in everything.”
Brody chose Israeli basketball over the NBA in 1966. On a post-college trip, he learned firsthand that the country, especially Tel Aviv, wasn’t a desert backwater but rather a soulful and hedonistic oasis.
“The social life was very attractive,” said Brody, who has lived in Israel for most of the past 49 years.
ENLARGE Brody said he never planned to make a declaration after the Maccabi vanquished what was essentially the Russian Red Army team—at a time when Israel and Russia didn’t have diplomatic relations. The victory “took a country out of four or five years of mourning,” he said. The grieving began after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics and deepened after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when some 6,000 soldiers died.
Menkin couldn’t believe no one had ever made a movie about the 1977 triumph. After Jim Boatwright, a small forward for Maccabi, died of cancer in 2013, Menkin decided he better make the film soon. He tracked down the former players and acquired game footage.
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