William Watson: Pro sports will save the idea of globalization
Last Sunday, after a cancelled flight home from holiday, my wife and I were stuck in a hotel room near the Amsterdam airport — quite a nice one, actually, with a terrific buffet: thank you, Air Canada. While she did useful things, I caught up on sports, including two complete NFL games courtesy a live German-language broadcast on RTL. “Oh my God!”, the play-by-play guy kept saying as the bodies flew into each other concussively. Or maybe it was “O mein Gott!” I couldn’t really tell.
The commentators were in-studio in Cologne but there was a sideline man live at each game doing colour spots during breaks in the action, i.e., U.S. TV time-outs. The meatiness of the barbecued ribs on offer in Houston got special attention. Language wasn’t really a problem as there was copious NFL jargon, like “cover-zero,” “zone blocking,” “deep post route,” “holding” and so on. And the CBS feed kept spewing data onto the screen in English.
The other kind of football, which we call soccer, also got big play, of course. There was both live action and re-caps of seemingly dozens of games all over the dial, including Arsenal vs. Crystal Palace in the Women’s Super League. Based in North London, Arsenal has players from 13 countries, including Canada. Funny game, soccer: Crystal Palace was ecstatic with a 0-0 tie, Arsenal morose. As so often in life, expectations are everything.
As one of the few neoliberal fans of globalization left these days, one thing I found striking was the dramatically diverse makeup of the players being interviewed post-game. Quite often they seemed not to be of the ethnicity or nationality commonly associated with the city or region they were representing.
That appears to be just fine with fans. Whether you own a team or merely support one, you want it to win, which means getting the very best players available, wherever they come from. It’s hard to imagine a purer meritocracy or a more performance-based allocation of talent than professional sports.
Another thing hard to imagine is a more globalized sports world than we have today. Also last Sunday, a German won the United States Open men’s tennis championship. On Saturday Kazakhstani Elena Rybakina had defeated Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka for the women’s title. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump was at the Irish Open, which was being played on a golf course he owns. Atypically for this era, an Irishman won — Shane Lowry — though he beat a Chilean, American, Dane and Italian to do it.
While all this was happening, the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams were presumably recovering from jet lag after their season-opener in Melbourne before more than 100,000 Australian fans two days earlier. Or was it three? Or maybe just one?
In December 1945, after Moscow Dynamo soccer team finished a four-game “friendly” series against British club teams, including Arsenal — a friendly series that included fisticuffs in at least one match — George Orwell wrote a famous piece on “The Sporting Spirit” in which he contested the shibboleth that sport brings peoples and countries together. Quite the contrary, he argued, nation-to-nation sport was “an unfailing cause of ill-will … war minus the shooting.”
In this vein, older hockey fans will remember a distinctly unfriendly game between the Philadelphia Flyers and Soviet Red Army in 1976, in which the Soviets left the ice for a time in protest against the Flyers’ heavy hitting. Also the 1987 “punch-up in Piestany,” when Canadian and Soviet players brawled in the final game of the world junior championships, with both teams ending up disqualified. The fighting ended only after officials turned out the lights. (Piestany is in Slovakia, then part of Czechoslovakia.) Just last year the first Canada-U.S. game at the Four Nations’ Cup started with three fights in the first nine seconds. When the Netherlands plays Spain in soccer there apparently are still hard feelings, though Spanish rule of the Netherlands ended almost 400 years ago.
The animosity attending many international sporting events is undeniable. But the deeper message sports sends these days is strongly globalist: if you want to compete at the highest levels, you need to equip, hone and test yourself in the world market. With rare exceptions, soaking in your own little backwater steeps you in mediocrity.
One of the sights we saw in the Netherlands was the wooden house, now encased in a stone building, that Czar Peter the Great lived in — supposedly incognito though he was 6-foot-8 and highly recognizable — when at the turn of the 18th century he travelled western Europe, in search of modernizing methods for still-medieval Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev had a similarly open nature. Vladimir Putin seems more insular.
Like global recruiting in professional sports, liberal economic policies, especially open borders, enforce competition and excellence. By contrast, if your home market is guaranteed to you whatever the price or quality of what you’re selling, what incentive do you have to improve? Commercial imperatives aren’t everything, but how often will patriotic altruism overcome the natural human desire to slough off, take advantage of a privileged position and live the quiet life?
