Culture
U.S. men's basketball thwarts Puerto Rico to secure No. 1 seed
VILLENEUVE-D’ASCQ, France — The “Lille Olympics” are over for Team USA and went mostly according to plan.
A few defensive hiccups here, a minor injury there, oh, and a bus ride or two because someone lit the train track on fire last weekend, disrupting team plans for trains between Paris and Lille, which is on the Belgian border.
But otherwise, the American team of stars is exactly where it planned to be as the tournament shifts to Paris for the knockout rounds, with full steam ahead toward a fifth consecutive gold medal.
Team USA beat Puerto Rico 104-83 behind 26 points from Anthony Edwards on Saturday to finish 3-0 in pool play and as the No. 1 overall seed for the Olympic quarterfinals.
The U.S. emerged from pool play No. 1 overall due to a 64-plus point differential over the three games and will play Brazil in an Olympic quarterfinal Tuesday at Accor Arena — where the NBA typically plays when it has games in Paris.
“I mean, number one, it’s been really fun to be in Lille — it’s a beautiful place,” Team USA coach Steve Kerr said. “I think we got done what we wanted to accomplish, winning all three games and securing the top seed. We know we have to play better. Part of this tournament is it gets harder as you go, of course. And our goal is just to try to get better each game and we’ll have tomorrow off and then a one-week sprint, three games. So we’ll see how we do.”
Brazil went 1-2, losing by double digits to both France and Germany but connecting on 17 3s in an 18-point win over Japan to advance to the quarterfinals. The Germans and Canadians also went 3-0 in pool play and Germany is ranked second behind the U.S.
“We’ve seen almost everybody. We haven’t seen Brazil though,” Kerr said. “Brazil is our focus.”
The first portion of the men’s and women’s tournaments were moved to an outdoor soccer stadium with a retractable roof, just outside of Lille, primarily so gymnastics could take place in Accor Arena. The U.S. stayed and practiced in Paris but traveled to Lille the night before each of the three games, which also included comfortable wins over Serbia and South Sudan.
Edwards, Team USA’s youngest player at age 22, came off the bench to shoot 11 of 15 with three rebounds, three assists and two steals. The leading scorer for the Americans last summer at the World Cup, Edwards dazzled with an array of drives to the rim, mid-range jumpers and three 3s. His coolest play was a tap-away steal and windmill slam with about nine minutes left and the Americans up by 25.
Anthony Edwards breaks out the WINDMILL in Paris! 🔥 #ParisOlympics
📺 NBC and Peacock pic.twitter.com/FdFYNz5eXr
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 3, 2024
“I wanted to go between the legs (in the air for a dunk), but I ain’t tried it in a minute so I didn’t want to embarrass myself,” Edwards said. “I want to dunk on somebody, but I ain’t got a lane yet. I’m glad I got that one.”
LeBron James, as usual for this tournament, handed in a complete performance with 10 points, eight assists and six rebounds in just 18 minutes. Kevin Durant scored 11 points and still needs four more to become USA Basketball’s all-time leading scorer at the Olympics for both the men’s and women’s programs, ahead of Lisa Leslie (488 career points).
Edwards’ domination in the second half (he scored 14 points from late in the third to the middle of the fourth quarter, with Durant on the court) had something to do with Durant falling just short of passing Leslie.
Joel Embiid returned to the U.S. starting lineup after sitting out against South Sudan. He scored 15 points with three boards in nearly 23 minutes. In a confounding twist, the French crowd continued to boo him each time he touched the ball, but the crowd at large erupted in applause when he scored or blocked a shot. There were American fans in the building, sure, but the applause was so loud, that at least some of the people booing him for picking Team USA over France for the Olympics also had to be cheering when he scored.
“I think that’s all you can do is laugh about it and he’s done a good job just making light of it,” Kerr said. “And his teammates, obviously, have his back, but it’s all part of it. I’m sure he knew this was coming and what I liked is that after the French fans would boo, you could hear the American fans cheer and so everybody seems to be having some fun with it.”
With the U.S. ahead by an insurmountable number and the clock winding down, Embiid held the ball to run out the clock and was hit with another chorus of boos. He stuck his hand to his ear, as though he wanted the boos to grow louder. Over the last two games, Embiid’s U.S. teammates have joined him in taunting the crowd in response to the boos.
“I love it,” Edwards said. “I don’t get what’s going on, so I’m all for it.”
Jrue Holiday did not play due to an ankle injury suffered in Wednesday’s win; Kerr said Holiday will play against Brazil and could have participated Saturday. Jayson Tatum started for Holiday and finished with 10 points.
Jose Alvarado of the New Orleans Pelicans, the only NBA player on the Puerto Rican roster, led his team with 18 points. The Puerto Ricans outrebounded Team USA, 51-48, despite a distinct size and skill disadvantage in the post. By American standards, the 11 turnovers the U.S. committed weren’t bad, but giving up 18 offensive rebounds to Puerto Rico is something to clean up before Tuesday.
Nearly 20 years ago to the day (12 days shy of the anniversary, if we’re counting), Puerto Rico opened the 2004 Olympics by pulling one of the largest international upsets in history, defeating the Americans by 19 points. It was the first loss by a Team USA squad with NBA players.
And for about 17 minutes in the first half, a hint of possibility that another huge upset wafted in the air. Alvarado scored nine points in the first quarter and the Puerto Ricans led by as many as eight. It was a 46-43 game with 3:15 left before halftime when James threw a dazzling behind-the-back pass to Embiid for a layup. That play sparked an 18-2 run to close the half for the Americans, who carried a 64-45 lead into the break.
James, 39, had six points and three assists during the run.
It was ALL Team USA in the first half against Puerto Rico. 💪 #ParisOlympics
📺 NBC and Peacock pic.twitter.com/E2IOR4x55x
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 3, 2024
“I think we’re in a good place,” James said. “We can always get off to a better start to start games, but teams are very excited to go against us and it’s not a feel-out, but we could do a better job starting the games. Giving up (29) in the first quarter today, we didn’t like that and we got better from that moment on though.”
While Durant is looking for what would be an Olympic record four gold medals in men’s basketball, James can get his third gold with three more wins. He was on the team that lost to Puerto Rico 20 years ago, co-captained the Redeem Team four years later with Kobe Bryant and was part of the 2012 team that dominated in London.
This summer, counting five exhibition games and three Olympic contests, James leads the team in scoring and assists.
“Maybe one of the best things about this trip for me has been to see LeBron behind the scenes, see the preparation, see the focus and getting a picture for why he is who he is,” Kerr said. “It’s just amazing to watch him. He loves the game so much. He loves the work, he loves his teammates. There’s an energy and a joy to LeBron that just, it sort of spreads through the locker room.”
Required reading
(Photo: Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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