101 Greats of European Basketball

The Polish legend
Who was the top scorer at the
World Cup 1967 in Montevideo,
Uruguay? A question like that in a
trivia contest would test even the
most knowledgeable experts in
world basketball history.
The answer is Mieczyslaw Lopatka, a Polish forward
considered to be the best scorer of all times in his country.
In Montevideo, he scored 177 points for an average
of 19.7 per game. His Polish national team finished fifth,
but it also had the tournament’s second-best scorer,
Bogdan Likszo, with 19.3 points per game. Finishing as
the eighth-best scorer was Radivoj Korac (at 14.6 ppg)
and 10th-best was tournament MVP Ivo Daneu (14.0
ppg) – both of Yugoslavia. In the All-Tournament Team
with Daneu were Lopatka, Luiz Claudio Menon of Brazil,
Korac and Modestas Paulauskas of the Soviet Union.
Lopatka, who was born on October 10, 1939, in
Drachowo, Poland, was a star of European basketball
in the 1960s. Poland, at the time, was one of the best
national teams and won medals at the European championships.
It’s true that Poland never took the top step
on the medals podiums, but its principal star, Lopatka,
has three European medals: silver from EuroBasket
1963 in Wroclaw, and bronzes from EuroBasket 1965 in
Moscow and EuroBasket 1967 in Helsinki.
Before becoming an outstanding basketball player,
the young Mieczyslaw practiced various sports. He
started with field hockey, continued as a soccer goalkeeper,
but abandoned that sport after giving up nine
goals in one game. Lopatka started to train as a boxer,
but when his engineer father heard about it, he had to
give that up. Then he discovered handball, where coaches
saw in him a great player, due to his size, 1.96 meters
and 95 kilos. But it was a physical education teacher,
Alexander Kwiecinski, who discovered Lopatka’s talent
for basketball.
Lopatka needed few games to become a key part
of his school team. In one game, his team scored 150
points and Lopatka had 130 by himself! Soon, in 1955,
he began to play for Kolejarz Gniezno, in a small town
near the village where he was born.
Eyes open in Rome
The best Polish clubs fixated on the young Lopatka,
who, despite not reaching 2 meters, played center
thanks to his strength and excellent rebounding. In 1958,
he was signed by Lech Poznan and two years later participated
in the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. It’s true that
Lopatka was on the Polish national team as a substitute
for the injured Wlodek Pawlak, who was hurt in practice
crashing into a teammate. But Lopatka’s average of 8
points wasn’t bad at all for the young player. Just like other
European players, Lopatka returned home from Rome
enamored with the basketball played by the American
“Dream Team” of that time, with Oscar Robertson, Jerry
West, Walt Bellamy, Jerry Lucas and others. It was another
kind of basketball the Polish had not seen before,
and it motivated Lopatka to work harder.
In 1961, Lopatka for the first time became the top
scorer in the Polish League with 582 points. He would
repeat that feat three more times: in 1963, 1966 and
1967. In the 1962-63 season, playing for Slask, he
scored 77 of his team’s 96 points in a game against AZS
Gdansk. That remained the league record until seven
years later, when Edward Jurkiewicz scored 84, to be
101 greats of european basketball
Mieczyslaw Lopatka
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