Oscar Schmidt


Oscar Daniel Bezerra Schmidt is a retired Brazilian professional basketball player. He is also known as Oscar Schmidt in Spain, where he played for Fórum Valladolid for the 1993–94 and 1994–95 seasons, and simply Oscar, or Mão Santa, in his homeland. Schmidt played the small forward position, was 2.05 m tall and weighed 107 kg. He was born in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil.
He is considered to be the all-time leading scorer in the history of basketball, with 49,737 career points scored. He is also a record holder for the longest career span of a professional basketball player, and the top scorer in the history of the Summer Olympic Games.
He was named one of FIBA's 50 Greatest Players in 1991. On August 20, 2010, Schmidt became a FIBA Hall of Fame player, in recognition of his play in international competition. On September 8, 2013, Schmidt was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

Athletic career

Club career

While playing with E.C. Sírio of the Brazilian Basketball Championship, Schmidt won both the South American Club Championship and the FIBA Intercontinental Cup in 1979.
He was drafted by the New Jersey Nets in the sixth round of the 1984 NBA Draft, and had several other opportunities to play in the NBA, but declined them all in order to continue to play for Brazil's senior national team.
Schmidt won the Italian Cup with JuveCaserta in 1988. He was the Top Scorer of the Italian Basketball League 7 times. He also led the Spanish Basketball League in scoring in 1994, while he was a member of Valladolid.
While playing in Italy, he earned a fan in future NBA star Kobe Bryant, who called Schmidt one of his childhood idols and later said Schmidt could have been one of the greatest in the NBA if he had played there.
He returned to his native Brazil in 1995, to play once again in the Brazilian Basketball Championship with S.C. Corinthians Paulista, and was the league's top scorer 8 times. He retired on May 26, 2003.

National team career

With the senior Brazilian national basketball team, Schmidt played in five Summer Olympics and was the top scorer in three of them. However, he never went past the quarterfinals. In the 1980 Summer Olympics, he played seven games and scored 169 points, for a 24.1 average.
He again scored 169 points in seven games in the 1984 Summer Olympics. His best Olympic performance was the 1988 Summer Olympics. He scored 338 points, for an average of 42.3 points per game.
In 1992, he scored 198 points in eight games, and in 1996, he scored 219 points in 8 games. In 38 career Olympic basketball games, Schmidt scored a record of 1,093 points, for an average of 28.8 points per game.
He is the all-time career leader in total points scored in the FIBA World Cup, having scored a total of 906 points in 34 games, for a scoring average of 26.7 points per game. He won the bronze medal and made the All-Tournament Team at the 1978 FIBA World Cup, and made the All-Tournament Teams of both the 1986 FIBA World Cup and the 1990 FIBA World Cup, which he also led in scoring, averaging 34.6 points per game.
Schmidt played in the gold-medal match of the 1987 Pan American Games in Indianapolis. The US national team, composed of college players at those games, featured two All-Americans in David Robinson and Danny Manning, two NCAA Championship Final Four MVPs, in Pervis Ellison and Keith Smart, and other future NBA players, such as Rex Chapman and Dan Majerle. Brazil faced a 68–54 halftime deficit. Schmidt finished with 46 points, in a 120–115 win.

Post athletic career

In 2004, Schmidt started his career in management. He was the CEO of "Telemar Rio de Janeiro", a Brazilian professional basketball team which won the "Campeonato Carioca" in 2004, and the Brazilian Championship in 2005.
In 2006, Schmidt, along with other Brazilian basketball greats such as Paula and Hortência,, led the NLB: Nossa Liga de Basquete, an attempted rival to the Brazilian Basketball Championship. However, the league folded a year later.

Personal life

On May 13, 2013, Schmidt had brain surgery to excise a malignant tumor. At first, nobody knew about it except for his family. The press found out about the disease fifteen days after the surgery at a dinner celebrating the 50th anniversary of the two-time World Champion senior men's Brazilian National Team. Schmidt did not appear as he was recuperating from daily chemotherapy sessions. The disease is now in remission.
In 2016, he was one of the guests at the opening ceremony of the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, alongside other Brazilian celebrities such as model Gisele Bündchen, actor Gustavo Goulart, and singer Caetano Veloso, among others.

Club teams

Olympic Records