Here’s a fascinating little bit of video from the early ‘80’s when the USSR team was on an American tour and stopped in Charlottesville.
Students of basketball history will already realize the implications: it was a rare matchup between the great Arvidas Sabonis and Virginia’s all-time great Ralph Sampson.
You see more of Sampson’s greatness here than that of Sabonis. He’s a full 7-4, he’s incredibly agile and he gives Sabonis some real problems.
Things changed of course and both of these guys had, in different ways, tough careers.
Sampson’s knees robbed him of sustained NBA greatness; for Sabonis, it was injuries compounded by the USSR denying the Lithuanian star (most Americans saw him simply as a Russian, which was obviously not the case) the right to play in the NBA until he was 30.