International Basketball
In London 1948 after a continued dominance by the United States in the Olympics basketball competition, his 18 points while playing Center, helped the Argentina national basketball team stay within a basket of them during a 59-57 loss. After the game, the United Sates coach Omar Browning called him "one of the finest ball players I ever saw". The Argentina national basketball team finished fifteenth in the 1948 tournament after not being able to qualify to the eight-team second phase. Furlong would also receive and declined offers to play in the United States for the Minneapolis Lakers, the Baltimore Bullets and legendary coach Adolph Rupp of the University of Kentucky.
Furlong was a member of the Argentine team which won the first World Championship in 1950, being the star of the team, the second top-scorer and the MVP of the tournament. He also scored 20 points in the final against the United States national basketball team.
In the 1951 Pan-American Games, he helped Argentina win the Silver medal in basketball.
In the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, his team earned a fourth place finish in the basketball tournament, after losing in the semifinals against the United States 85-76.
In 1953 after his team won the Gold medal in the World University Games, he received a scholarship to play basketball for Southern Methodist University in the United States.
In 1955 he would help the Argentina squad repeat the Silver medal result in the Pan-American Games.
Furlong was inducted into the FIBA Hall of Fame in September 2007.
Read more about this topic: Oscar Furlong
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)