The University of Dayton Hall of Fame basketball player from the early 1970s was the only American to win a medal at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.
The United States boycotted those Games, but Sylvester — who grew up in Milford and was a prep star at Cincinnati Moeller — had dual citizenship thanks to his Italian-born grandparents.
Six years into what would be a stellar 17-year professional basketball career in Italy, he got an invitation to join the Italian Olympic team. And then, beyond everyone’s dreams, he and his teammates won the silver medal in Moscow.
It was Italy’s first-ever Olympic basketball medal and remains one of only two the nation has ever won at the Games.
So with all that in mind, the question for the 64-year-old Sylvester was a natural:
Does the medal now have a place of real prominence in his Cincinnati-area home?
“That’s kind of funny. I get kidded about it at work here all the time,” he said with a chuckle the other day from his office at Victory Wholesale Group in Springboro. “When we built our house a few years ago, it was supposed to be our last home, so we’ve got a big area downstairs with the pool table and the whole recreation thing.
“My medal was up on the wall, right in the middle of the room.
“But then my wife (Lisa) started playing golf and winning so many cups with her girls’ group. And every time she got a new award, my medal got pushed a little farther from the center of the room. I’m currently around the corner in a kind of hidden area. You have to have someone tell you where it is to actually see it now.”
His laughter signified not only an acceptance, but the acknowledgement that that’s how things are in the Sylvester family, where everyone seems to have a sporting resume filled with championship hardware.
Son Matt won a state basketball championship at Moeller, made a hoops name for himself at Ohio State and then played in Europe. Mike’s brother Steve played football at Notre Dame and then won three Super Bowls with the Oakland and Los Angeles Raiders. Brother Vince starred at the University of Cincinnati.
“When it comes to this stuff, people in our family have always had their feet planted firmly on terra firma,” Sylvester said.
Back in Italy, though, his Olympic accomplishment still has some starry status to it.
Part of it has to do with the lofty standing he once had there.
Right before the Moscow Games his pro contract was sold from the Milan team to Pesaro for $500,000, which, at the time, was the largest amount ever paid for a player in Italy’s pro league.
To understand the ripples it created, consider the story he once told a Cincinnati reporter:
“That was about the same time there was an attempt made on the Pope’s life. They had these placards out on the newsstands and I saw one where the headline said:
“’Sylvester transfers to Pesaro’ and below that was ‘Attempt made on Pope.’”
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All these years later – after playing for the teams in Milan and Pesaro, as well as Rimini, Bologna and Marsala, Sicily – Sylvester is still not forgotten by the Italian people..
“I have about 2,000 Facebook friends and almost all of them are Italian,” he said. “Since I retired in 1991, I haven’t been back. But my wife is a travel agent and she’s organizing a big trip there in 2017.
“People are clamoring there that they want me to come back in the biggest way and they’ll get 10,000 people in an arena and it’ll be a real love fest.”
He stated to laugh again as he remembered some of the rabid fans of the rival pro teams when he played there:
“Then again, they might throw tomatoes.”
From Dayton to Italy
Sylvester and Donald Smith, the star out of Dayton’s Roth High, came into UD together and turned heads when they asked to be Founders Hall roommates, a living arrangement that would last all four of their college years.
Back then it was a rarity for black and white athletes to room together, especially when you consider it was happening at UD just three years after the departure of Rudy Waterman and Glinder Torain, two black players whose Flyers careers ended here in racial strain.
Sylvester had never had a black teammate at Moeller and never had a close black friend before coming to UD either. It was mostly the same for Smith, who had had few close white associations.
The pair became great friends and they helped carry the Flyers. They combined for 2,903 career points. Smith still holds the single-game scoring record with 52 points against Loyola in 1973.
Sylvester is best known for the 1974 NCAA Tournament regional game when he scored 36 points in the Flyers triple-overtime loss to a Bill Walton-led UCLA team that had won seven straight NCAA titles.
After UD, Sylvester was drafted by both the NBA’s Detroit Pistons (sixth round) and the ABA’s Carolina Cougars (10th round), but accepted an offer to play for Olimpia Milano.
The team was looking for American players with Italian roots to bolster its roster for a European tournament.
Sylvester immediately stood out and after that Olimpia Milano offered him a regular season contract. Within a year, the team had won the FIBA European Championship and a career was born.
When the Moscow Olympics approached, Sylvester was asked to join the team. His grandfather, Vito Sylvester, had emigrated from the port city of Bari in the Puglia region of Italy to the U.S. After going through Ellis Island, he settled in the Cincinnati area with his Italian wife.
Although his grandfather died before he was born, Sylvester discovered that Vito had not renounced his Italian citizenship and that enabled Mike to get a dual citizenship and made him eligible for the Olympic Games.
Still, the offer initially was problematic for Sylvester because the U.S. and 60 other nations boycotted the Moscow Games over the Soviet Union’s December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.
That meant American athletes like Dayton hurdler Edwin Moses and Hamilton archer Darrel Pace — both of whom had won gold at the 1976 Olympics — could not defend their titles in Moscow.
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Sylvester sympathized with the American stand, but also was in tough spot because the Italians considered him to be a citizen. Turning down the Olympic offer would, at the very least, jeopardize his pro career in the country.
As he wrestled with his decision, he met with U.S. State Department officials, explained his situation and was given the OK to participate.
The embrace though was not universal on the Italian end.
“I was the only guy invited onto the team who was not full-blooded Italian, so there was some controversy there, too,” he said. “Some people didn’t want an American with a dual passport representing the country.
“I was in a really, really peculiar position, but I decided to play the game the only way I knew how – all out.”
The Italians first had to get through a qualifying tournament against other European teams in Geneva, Switzerland.
“We didn’t play well at the beginning and finally I said, ‘You know what? I don’t care what anybody thinks: I just got to start playing basketball,” Sylvester said.
He then put the team on his back, averaged 25 points a game and the Italians got into the Olympic field.
Silver in Moscow
Sylvester recalled living with his teammates in the Olympic Village in Moscow.
“I remember seeing the little Romanian gymnast, Nadia Comaneci,” Sylvester said. “She and her little teammates walked around like a little family of ducks all over the Village. They were so incredibly tiny. To this day, I remember looking at them and thinking, ‘My God, these girls look like they’re not even 10 years old.’
“The whole village thing was pretty cool. One of the neatest things was that every country had these series of pins – like lapel pins – and people went all over the Village trading them.
“You’d see these world famous people running around doing it. I can remember the big Cuban boxer (Teofilo) Stevenson, he was all over the place collecting them.”
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Besides Sylvester, there were just a few other Americans — Bill Rea, a Pittsburgh dentist. was a long jumper for Austria, Minnesota-raised Wayne Brabender, played basketball for the Spain, there were three boxers from Puerto Rico — competing in the Games.
“I was one of the unique people there and I ended up with a little entourage of American publications following me around,” Sylvester said. “Newsweek and Time magazine and Sports Illustrated were there. There were a few clips of me on the NBC Nightly News and back then Phil Donahue wanted me on his show.”
Once the Games began, Sylvester was hampered by a badly sprained ankle he suffered at the end of the qualifying tournament in Geneva.
In Moscow, he averaged 14 points a game against Cuba, Australia, Sweden and Spain, but because of the sprain, he played sparingly in an upset victory over the Soviet Union and then the loss to Yugoslavia in the gold medal game.
He said he’ll never forget the medal ceremony afterward:
“It was very emotional. I’ve still got pictures of it with my teammates on the stand and that medal around my neck.
“I was overcome by great pride. I felt more Italian right then than I ever did at any other time in my life. I knew how important it was to the people of the country.
“The Italian president (Sandro) Pertini brought us to Rome and we became Knights of the Republic. The teams we all played for were excited to have an Olympic medal winner on the roster. It was really special to everyone then and it still is to me now, even though it hasn’t really make me a household name.”
Maybe not in his own house here in Ohio, but back in Italy — that’s a different story.
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