If you listened closely to the wailing and gnashing of teeth when the United States finished an "embarrassing" third at the 2004 Olympics, you might have been able to distinguish the particularly horrifying grinding of Jerry Colangelo's molars and bicuspids in the background.

Colangelo, a former All-Big Ten basketball player at Illinois, the man largely responsible for shaping the Phoenix Suns since joining the team as its General Manager in 1968, and a member of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, set about to completely redefine the process by which a US national team was fielded and trained.

Today, the flat-out awe, the air of invincibility that surrounded the first Dream Teams, advantages that probably translated into a good 10 or 15 points on their own, are gone, washed away in the flood of international basketball talent that has swept across the world and, as pretty well evidenced in 2004, not only leveled the playing field but also eroded much of the confidence and not-unfounded-swagger that made those first Dream Teams so good.

The game today is different, and Jerry Colangelo, now Managing Director of the Men's USA Senior National Team, has set about to craft a wholly different team to match it. The very idea that the team would be coming together as it did last week, two years before the start of the next Olympics, is a testament to what Colangelo is doing and has done. On top of that, Colangelo and his head coach, Coach K, the Great Satan (depending on which end of Tobacco Road you might be from), Mike Krzyzewski have somehow convinced 24 of the best basketball players in the country that ostensibly invented the game to do something most of them probably haven't had to do since high school: try out.

Of those 24 players, only 15 will be invited to go to China in preparation for the FIBA World Basketball Championships in Japan, and of those 24 original players only 12 will make the 2008 Olympic roster.

There was a certain amount of palpable joy about the rest of the world when Team USA stumbled to a Bronze Medal finish two years ago, a certain smug satisfaction in knowing that we had, indeed, been beaten at our own game. The U.S. could no longer rely on its rabbit-quick super-shooters jacking up shot after shot in the hopes of burying its opponents under an avalanche of unguarded scoring. The rest of the world wised up and emphasized a (shockingly) team-oriented approach on both ends of the floor, passing the ball so many times on offense that the American defenders began to more closely resemble spinning tops than professional athletes and setting up such cloyingly sticky zones on defense that our shooters had a hard time even getting the ball and when they did get it just chucked it up without paying any attention to the possibility that, just maybe, there was another, more open man somewhere else on the court.

There's nothing quite like rubbing someone's nose in it, particularly on an international level, and it's even better when the noses you're rubbing in it are attached to multi-million-dollar athletes who've forgotten what it means to play for home and country.

Which was why it was all the more enjoyable to watch two Americans win two very different contests this weekend, two contests which could not be less "American" (with the possible exception of soccer or team handball), with the whole world watching, and with such utter grit and gumption as to make people wonder if they were even human at all.

Tiger Woods did what Tiger does best to win the Open Championship at Royal Liverpool this past weekend; he minimized mistakes and made the shots he had to make when he had to make them. Sergio, Ernie, Phil and all the other Tiger "challengers" the media has contrived to force down our throats simply couldn't get it done.

In France, Floyd Landis rode a hip so riddled with avascular necrosis that it will need replacing within the next few months to a stirring, near miraculous come-from-behind victory in the Tour de France.

And those two examples are precisely what Colangelo and Coach K are hoping for from their squad over the next two years: commitment, passion, and absolute dedication. A Team USA basketball squad that brings that to Beijing in 2008 will be a force to behold, and will remind those other basketball teams from the world over why, exactly, you don't tug on Superman's cape.