"I have tasted it all! Manager of the year! Sixty-three playoff games! Two world championships! The Hall of Fame! And there's nothing bigger than this! Nothing!" Lasorda crowed, even before Team Tommy had won the big one. "This is bigger than the World Series! This is bigger than the Dodgers! This is bigger than Major League Baseball!"

Bigger than the league you've given most of your 73 years to? Bigger than the team you've spent nearly a half-century with as a player, scout, coach, manager and now VP of Whatever You Want To Do? Don't even try to stop the Tommy train: Moments after trouncing the Cubans 4-0 in the gold-medal game, he proclaimed, "When the Dodgers win a championship, the Dodgers fans were happy. Today, the United States of America is happy!"

What he didn't know, of course, was that most Americans hadn't bothered to tune in to the 27th Olympiad, so they probably had no idea that he was even involved in another one of his huge upset victories.

Upset victory? Shouldn't American baseball players be powering through the Olympics like the Dream Team basketball players, the gold medal almost an afterthought to the consistent obliteration of opposing teams? After all, as Lasorda said, "This is our game. We can't let those people beat us."

"Those people" were the Cubans, Koreans and Japanese, who all sent their most talented players to the Games while America stuck with a bunch of washed-up has-beens and rejected minor leaguers who practiced together for only three days before heading Down Under. "I want 24 players who play baseball the way my wife shops: all day long," Lasorda said -- and that's what he got, a bunch of basically unknown gamers, as hardscrabble win-at-all-costs types of players are known. To this group, the gold medal wasn't an afterthought.

Only one loss came for the Americans, from the Cubans, the class act of international baseball in recent years and the winners of the first two baseball gold medals in 1992 and 1996. Lasorda has special memories of Cuba. During his minor league days, he found himself in the kingdom of the mojito cocktail during the changing of two governments, in 1952 when Fulgencio Batista took over and again in 1959 when Fidel Castro overthrew Batista. "Yeah, I met Castro," he says, "But now I'm sorry I did. I have a lot of friends living in Miami. I just hope and pray before I die, I see a free Cuba."

And yet here were the Cubans, pummeling America's team 6-1. The teams nearly ended up in a full-out bench-clearing brawl after an American player was "accidentally" beaned. All this extracurricular excitement just helped Lasorda -- who is clearly not applying for work as a diplomat anytime soon -- fuel the team's fervor when they reached the gold-medal game against our new baseball arch rivals. He simply said then that he wanted to beat the Cubans as a favor "to all the exiles living in Florida." So that's what they did.

A lot of the victory can be credited to Lasorda's pure motivational ability, a skill he's honed with the Dodgers and in the 100-plus inspiring speeches he gives annually. He's often quoted as saying, "I bleed Dodger blue and when I die I'm going to the Big Dodger in the Sky." This verbal dexterity has helped bring him '81 and '88 World Series victories, not to mention four pennants, seven Western Division titles and a slew of manager of the year awards from all different organizations. The man compiled a 1,599-1,439 record during his 20 seasons managing the Dodgers, and as he once said, "About the only problem with success is that it does not teach you how to deal with failure." So he just kept winning.

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In June 1948, after a two-year stint in the army, Thomas Charles Lasorda, then a promising 21-year-old lefthander in the Philadelphia Phillies farm system, pitched the game of his life: He struck out 25 Amsterdam Rugmakers in a 15-inning game. He even drove in the winning run for his Schenectady (N.Y.) Blue Jays.

Lasorda caught the eye of the Brooklyn Dodgers when he followed up his effort with another 15-strikeout affair and then a 13-strikeout game. The team picked him up from the Phils for a little cash, and Lasorda headed to Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Fla., in the winter of 1949, joining more than 700 other players: "I walked into my room, and there were five other guys there, three double bunks. The next morning, the line for breakfast stretched out to the street. I thought, Oh my God, how am I going to survive here? I went to Fresco Thompson, the general manager, and told him I wanted out of there."

Lasorda was sent to the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers' top farm club, where he spent nine of the next 11 years except for a few unimpressive call-ups to the majors and his two-year stint with the Kansas City Athletics' organization. In Lasorda's three short appearances in the majors as a player (two with Brooklyn, one with K.C.), he went 0-4 in slightly more than 58 innings. But he did set a then-major league record; unfortunately, it was for most wild pitches in an inning: three. In 1955, he was sent down for the final time as a Dodger to make room for eventual fellow Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax.

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