Can sports save the world? reflections of a former little leagueron sports, diplomacy, and globaliz

British soccer starDavid Beckham now plays for the Los Angeles Galaxy. You can see himin hamburger ads or modeling underwear on TV almost any evening. Other friends are planning their summer trips to London to attendthe 2012 Olympics. The sports pages of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times are filled with stories about the training regimens and backstories of potential medal winners.

Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt --"the fastest man in the world" -- is modeling a line of brightlycolored clothes designed by Cedella Marley, daughter of the famousreggae singer. Sponsored by Puma, the Jamaican team jackets willinclude Bob Marley's face on the shoulder. The success of Bolt andother Jamaican sprinters has been a boost to Jamaica'sinternational image. It's no surprise that Stella McCartney,daughter of Paul, was asked to design the outfits for Team GreatBritain.

A love of sports -- playing, watching, arguing, rooting, buyinggear -- is one of the great commonalities of being human. Alongwith religion, music, and, of course, war and trade -- sports is aglobal activity which crosses borders and has the power to unite aswell as divide. Sports diplomacy is increasingly an important toolin the "soft power" arsenal of nations. An invitation from Mao andChou En Lai to the U.S.

ping pong team to visit China paved the wayfor Nixon's famous visit and the opening of relations between thetwo countries. During the Clinton administration, the U.S. triedwrestling diplomacy with Iran to make overtures to therevolutionary government, and baseball diplomacy has been attemptedwith Cuba a number of times. When I served as U.S.

Ambassador to Finland, I regularly greetedvisiting U.S. sports teams. I engaged in a free throw contest at aFinnish basketball game, and threw out the ball at the championshipgame in the Finnish American football league at the Olympicstadium. The U.S.

embassy team on which I played point guarddefeated the Russian embassy for the diplomatic cup. During aspeaking tour of China in the late 90s, I recognized that the mostfamous American in the country was not President Clinton, butbasketball star Michael Jordan. Photos of him airborne in his Nikeshoes adorned the walls of cafes and dorm rooms. Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the State Department hasincreased its efforts at sports diplomacy.

Hillary recently namedNBA great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a cultural ambassador and sent himto Brazil. The U.S. has sent top women snowboarders AmberStackhouse and Erin Comstock to Armenia where they visited Yerevanand judged local competitions at a ski resort. Hillary has made ita priority to promote female participation in sports around theworld. Other countries also understand the use of sports as effectivepublic diplomacy.

New Zealand has used its love of rugby and theinternational success of the All Blacks to engage in rugbydiplomacy. The success of Serbian tennis players on theinternational circuit has helped to change attitudes about thatcountry and its checkered past. Nelson Mandela made use of theworld rugby tournament to highlight his public support for theSpring Boks -- the favorite team of Akfrikaners -- to reach out towhite South Africans (a story told by Clint Eastwood in the film Invictus ). As a former Little League player and currently an aging point guardwho plays basketball twice a week, I understand the appeal ofsports from the joy of winning the "big game" and playing well onthe field to the excitement of being a fan and watching your localteam. As a professor of diplomacy and globalization, I am intriguedwith how sports has gone global in the post-Cold War era, and whatit might mean for bringing people together across borders andbridging political and social differences.

This term, my friend and colleague at Occidental College emeritusprofessor of American Studies, David Axeen, and I decided toexplore these issues in a new course, Sports and Diplomacy in aGlobalized World. The academic study of sports has gone viral.There are academic journals ( Sports and History , Sports and Society , etc.), new experts like sports economists (Andrew Zimbalist atSmith is the star of the field), and sports institutes popping upat major universities. Not being proper academics in the field, wedecided to approach the subject more as amateur athletes who happento be professors. We wanted to cast as wide an intellectual net aspossible in constructing a survey course for undergraduates.

We selected as our basic text a new book, Gaming The World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics andCulture , by professors Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensman, which addressesmany of the issues which seem most relevant to us. In addition, weassigned topic-specific works, including: Beyond a Boundary , C.L.R. James' classic memoir of playing cricket in the WestIndies; Soccernomics by Kuper and Syzmanski, popular sports economists; RobertWhiting's reportage on Americans playing baseball in Japan -- You Gotta Have Wa ; British journalist John Carlin's book, Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation ; and diplomatic historian Walter LaFerber's book, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism . We also posted current articles from the sports pages of the New York Times which continually offers the best in-depth reporting on the globalworld of sports. To accompany the reading, we organized a weekly Sports and Diplomacy film series, as well as a slate of visiting lecturers.

The filmsincluded: Chariots of Fire and One Day In September , both on the Olympics; Mr. Baseball starring Tom Selleck as an aging Big Leaguer who goes to play inJapan; The Two Escobars , a haunting study of soccer and drugs in Colombia; Fire In Babylon , a documentary on the rise of the West Indies cricket team toworld champion; Harlem Globetrotters - The Team That Changed the World , on the role of the team in integrating the NBA and serving asU.S. sports ambassadors; Invictus , of course, on sports and politics in the new South Africa; and Youngblood , about a young American playing ice hockey in small town Canada. We opened the course with off beat presentations by a yoga experton why competitive yoga should be an Olympic sport and aphilosophical discourse by a professor on why curling is the mostdemocratic sport in the world.

From there we went internationalwith a short history of the Olympics in which British journalistDavid Goldblatt romped through every modern Olympics in 90 minutes-- an impressive feat. For those planning to watch the LondonOlympics, we recommend David's companion book, How to Watch the Olympics-- Scores and laws, heroes and zeroes: aninstant initiation into every sport . Goldblatt made it clear that the Olympics are more than onething. They are a global spectacle, a tool for national promotionand economic development, a substitute for war through peacefulcompetition (a big deal during the Cold War), and a celebration ofindividual physical prowess, skill and courage -- all played out onthe global stage, and now televised to billions.

Author Robert Whiting explained how baseball was adapted to theJapanese cultural setting and how the lure of the Major Leagues ischanging aspirations of Japan's best players. The Canadian consulgeneral in Los Angeles, David Franzen, a former amateur hockeyplayer, addressed the question: "If Canadians Are So Polite, Why IsHockey So Violent?" He also explained the origins of hockey in theneighborhood clubs of Montreal. Professor Nigel Boyle from PitzerCollege gave a brilliant lecture on European soccer and how theteams reflect national character (well worth noting for those whoplan to watch the European championships this week and see if theSpanish team, La Roja, can repeat). We called on Oxy's sport coaches to discuss their fields.

Long-timeOxy rugby coach Michael Godfree regaled students with stories ofinternational rugby competition. A new book, Rugby for Dummies , co-authored by two former Oxy rugby players coached by Godfree isdedicated to him. Oxy basketball coach Brian Newhall talked abouthis days playing professional basketball in France, and toldstudents how one of his best Oxy players, an Asian American, wasrecruited to play professional basketball in China and had topretend to be native Chinese to avoid the limit on foreign players. Oxy soccer coach Colm McFreely reminisced about playing soccer inIreland and how the teams reflected religious differences, givingthe students a window in to cultural identity and sports.

He alsotalked about his days as a player and coach in Hong Kong. Dean ofthe college Jorge Gonzalez, a leading Mexican economist, gave alecture on the joys of being a fan and how he spent a monthfollowing the Mexican national team around South Africa during theWorld Cup. For the session on cricket, we asked two Oxy colleagues,professor Elmer Griffin and campus policeman Joe Cunje, to organizea demonstration match on an Oxy playing field. They divided theclass in to sides, sent them out on to the "pitch" and let them trytheir luck.

In his classroom lecture, Professor Griffin, a nativeof Nevis in the West Indies, deconstructed James' Beyond a Boundary , and challenged the students to think about sports which arespread by colonial powers, and then adopted by local peoples.Cricket, spread by the British Empire, is now the national sport ofIndia, as well as the West Indies. Soccer, a more working classsport in England, was spread informally by British economicinterests and has become the most popular sport in the world (seeDavid Goldblatt's book, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football ). Invented by James Naismith in Springfield, Massachusetts,basketball was initially made popular abroad by YMCA missionaries,including in China. Later, the NBA and Nike took over the job. In the second half of the course, we gave students the stage.

Forteam presentations, we selected five themes: Economics and theglobal business of sports; Nationalism and international sportscompetition; Race, ethnicity and religion (and the relationship tocolonial and imperial history); Gender in sports; Sports Diplomacyand sports as "soft power." In their oral presentations, the students covered sports like trackand field, golf, tennis, and sailing which we had neglected in ourlectures and films. They probed the impact of nationalism onsports, especially during the Cold War, analyzing events like thefamous U.S.-U.S.S.R. hockey match and "soccer wars" in CentralAmerica, and explored the promotion of sports and sports figures byglobal companies like Nike and Adidas. The role of race and genderin sports and the progress that has been made in both areas wereexamined, including a presentation by an Oxy athlete who is theonly registered female golf caddy in California.

Sad to say, racismis not gone from international sports. Many family members of theBritish national soccer team (one third of whose players are black)have decided to stay home rather than listen to the racial tauntsof fans in Ukraine. The topics of student research papers varied widely, althoughsoccer proved to be the most popular. Brazil's preparations for theWorld Cup and the Olympics were analyzed, as well as the impactthat hosting the World Cup had on South Africa. Two studentsinterviewed the Consul General of New Zealand about the importanceof rugby for promoting Kiwi soft power.

One student looked at therole of sports in North Korea and how the state uses sports fornational interests. Another described the tensions between soccerteams in Israel over the role of Arab players. An interesting paperwas written on the history of baseball in Cuba and the impact ofthe U.S. embargo.

And another described the social and politicalimport of maintaining Irish national sports against the inroads ofBritish games like soccer. A few papers explored the expansion of NBA recruiting to Africa andits positive and negative effects in countries like Senegal. Onepaper, by the son of a diplomat, looked at the rise of Asianbasketball players in the NBA from Yao Ming to Jeremy Lin. The mostoutstanding paper was a description and analysis of the rivalrybetween two Spanish soccer teams -- Real Madrid and Barcelona --which for decades symbolized and reflected political and regionaltensions in Spain.

The annual match, El Classico, as it is called,is the title of new documentary by Los Angeles filmmaker KellyCandaelle. The next time that the course is taught we will add thefilm to our play list. Professor Axeen and I did not press the students for a conclusionor an answer to the question in the title of this post. Of course,sports can't save the world from the effects of global warming orby themselves solve economic inequality in the world economy. Forthat, politics is required.

Is sports a global business with all the contradictions that comewith it? Certainly, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. It ispreferable that young men and women get paid well to compete on thesports field with rules, referees and fans rather than asgladiators for the amusement of the mob or as soldiers on a fieldof battle. Do sports build character? Not so much as they reveal character.Character is built by good parenting, strong families, and decentcommunities. However, sports can represent universal values of hardwork, discipline, focus, courage, and teamwork. Organized sports isalso a good model of regulated competition and equal opportunity.

Can sports be used more effectively to bring people together acrossboundaries and religious and ethnic differences? Absolutely. Issports a good vehicle for spreading a nation's soft power. Yes,there should be more sports diplomacy, not less. We are going tomake sports diplomacy one of our ongoing areas of research andaction in Occidental's Center on Global Affairs and Politics. As someone who has always viewed himself as a scholar and anathlete, I believe that sports should be a part of everyone's life-- that we should all play a sport, not simply watch others play.Of course, watching the best players in a sport and rooting foryour home team are also part of the human experience.

Check your TVmenu for some great games this weekend. Play ball, now and forever. Postscript: Two excellent books which explore the world of sports werepublished after we began teaching our Oxy course. The Ball - Discovering the Object of the Game , by anthropologist John Fox, explores the historical beginnings ofpopular sports and reflects on why we play and watch ball games.The book is part history and part travelogue. Indian-born MihirBose, one of the world's leading sports journalists and the authorof books on cricket and soccer, has written his magnum opus, The Spirit of the Game: How Sport Made the Modern World.

He asks how changes in the sporting world have affected thespirit of the game, and whether globalization has destroyed what ismost important about sports. Bose takes the reader along on a worldtour as he seeks answers. Either book might fit well with a generalcourse on sports and globalization or simply make great summerreading when you are not playing or watching a game.

I am an expert from knittedbabywear.com, while we provides the quality product, such as Infant Flower Girl Dress , China Kids Plaid Shirts, Knitted Baby Wear,and more.

Related Articles - Infant Flower Girl Dress, China Kids Plaid Shirts,

Email this Article to a Friend! Receive Articles like this one direct to your email box! Subscribe for free today!