Non Traditional Sports Fan Vol 35

Zach,

I enjoyed your latest on the globalization of sports. The comparison of world
football (soccer) to baseball is interesting.

You mention that the globalization of all things seemed to gather momentum after
the fall of the Berlin Wall. One thing which was not clear to me was how sports
had set things up for this.

Don't misunderstand, sports did not do the job by itself. It took events in
other areas to bring things about. But with international competition in sports
- from baseball and world football to cricket and lacrosse - sports set the
model for globalization in other areas.

The Italians can play world football in Iran - and have always been able to -
despite deep and bitter political differences. Canada can raid Scandanavia,
northeast Europe, and Russia for hockey players and the US can mine the riches
of the Caribbean and southeast Asia for baseball players. And basketball is
fast becoming a world-wide sport. While Olympics have been marked on a couple
of occasions by political differences, they have proceeded for the most part
free of partisan divisiveness.

It took more than sports to break down the final barriers, but it took sports to
set things up to happen when those barriers were broken down.

Your article is a nice way of realizing that sports has helped globalization and
globalization has helped sports.

-- John

5The car ride was beautiful, hawks riding the thermals in circles over the trees dotting the farmland along the I-5 corridor from Eugene to Portland. Brad and I were barreling along as night drew closer and the Hawks were preparing to play the Blazers at the Rose Garden. As the sun passed to our left and the miles flew by, we got to discussing some of the topics I had touched upon in last week’s column. The globalization of sport has indeed been good to the NBA, which has carved out its own international audience built on a foundation of inviting international stars to its courts and marketing them to fans in their home countries. Once a fan base is built up, it largely doesn’t matter where a particular player in the jersey happened to be born.

So Brad and I are driving along on this, my inaugural trip to a game at the Rose Garden (I’d wandered around the building a couple times, but that is another story for another time...). And as we cruise down the interstate, we get to talking about Nicolas Batum, the sophomore 6’8” forward from Liseux , France who was injured in the preseason and recently underwent surgery on his right shoulder to repair a torn labrum. What struck us both was how intertwined the world of medicine is to the world of sports. Pharmaceutical companies have for years depended on athletics, whether with the complicit support of a state actor or illicitly through the actions of rogue athletes or through commercially-backed teams, to determine how far a body can be taxed by any given chemical before one reaches the breaking point. From strychnine and amphetamines to erythropoietin and anabolic-androgenic steroids, their widespread acceptance into the medical community was fostered by the exploits of athletes. The first steroids, many of which if used in the correct medical situations can save and regulate the quality of life for an ailing person, were invented not for such altruistic purposes but in an extension of the Cold War.

Drugs have always been another arms race, ever since the globalization of sport really started taking pace at the end of the 19th century. It is no accident that the revenues generated for events have accelerated at the same pace as the biotechnology. But not all of this is bad for the average human even though they may decry the desecration of records that have long been rendered obsolete by changing technology in equipment, apparel, stadium design, synthetic field development, stronger and more lightweight padding to prevent injuries. And, most importantly, sports have helped foster advances in medicine which benefit all Americans and indeed anyone with access to doctors connected to the knowledge of their predecessors. As we have gone from Tommy John to Nick Batum, doctors have learned how to resurrect failed limbs and get people back to full physical capability. And because athletes provide the perfect, self-willed guinea pigs for such experiments due to necessity, we can now apply this knowledge to the common man who would otherwise have had to suffer an injury that might not nag as much as it does for an athlete and might have been cast under the rug.

It is a matter of drawing that fine line between the dopers and the genuine medical cases, the Alessandro Petacchis and the Andre Agassis of the world. The thing we cannot lose, though, is a healthy dose of skepticism. As more news comes at us more often than ever before, a never-ending cycle of data coming at us from around the globe in real time, we have to find ways to effectively parse that information and read it for what it is really worth. Just as a stat sheet never fully tells the real story of a given performance, so too can we cast aside a story without reading beyond the initial layers. That especially is the case with Agassi right now, as I went into earlier this week. An athlete can develop enough goodwill with the press that he is viewed as honest and sincere; harbor enough ill will with the sportswriters and Agassi would be getting the Jose Canseco treatment right now.

We were also discussing the value of sports in a societal context. They provide the artificially-planted olive trees for a mobile society. To lay it bare, think about my own often convoluted allegiances to teams around the globe, some of which have relevance in personal history and some of which was simply tossing darts at a map. The most obvious of the teams which I follow are those from Wisconsin -- the Packers, the Badgers, the Brewers, and the Bucks. It’s the place I was born, the place where all my family lives and rooting for these teams provides a link back to that community... to my roots. So, too, in a way, does the eye I continue to turn toward the fortunes of the University of Wyoming ’s various teams. Though I passed up a scholarship to the school, I still had rooted for its teams since moving to the state and will continue to do so for life. And now that is how it goes with teams from Oregon . Working at the University of Oregon makes one naturally a Duck (unless you came in with preconditioned allegiances to another Pac-10 school, which then makes you an outcast among the community in that one small but irrevocable sense) and the ties to the school of my wife’s family have further enriched my healthy dose of fanhood for the Swooshbucklers of Nike U.

I root for Montreal in the NHL because I had a cousin that was a Roy fan and so I became a Roy fan. When the time came to side between Roy and the Habs as the franchise traded him on the day of my thirteenth birthday, I had already developed enough of a vicarious connection to the bleu, blanc et rouge to stick with them as my team instead of picking Roy and the Avalanche and having a more natural local connection to the closest NHL team in proximity to my home in Grand Teton National Park. Bonds are strong like that, and first impressions of a league or a sport often reverberate for a lifetime.

That’s why I’ve always rooted for Newcastle United (and to a lesser extent for Aston Villa) in the English Premiership -- growing up on a resort, I had befriended a couple of seasonal workers from Newcastle and later Birmingham who were supporters of the team. The former even sent me back an authentic jersey, complete with my name and number on the back. In an era before globalization had homogenized jersey advertisement, that classic black-and-white-striped kit with the local Newcastle Brown Ale logo on the front will remain a staple of my wardrobe until it begins to crumble -- and then it will end up in a frame, most likely.

When it came down to picking a favorite Scottish team, it was a no-brainer... I was raised a Catholic. When it came down to Italy and Spain, it largely became a matter of whether I wanted to support or go against the trend of mega-clubs blossoming into global dynamos that consistently take the spoils and choke out any hope of advancement for those hapless fans who by birthright or by choice are forced to sit and watch year after year as a scramble for mediocrity is the best they can ask for from their underfinanced and underappreciated club. I picked Real Betis and Real Madrid in Spain as kind of a dual allegiance (ah, the joys of globalization... if you don’t like one club’s fortunes you can just pick another...); in Italy’s Serie A, I found myself picking Inter Milan but also over the years becoming drawn to various Parma, Bologna and Fiorentina sides. But once I’d picked a superpower in a league, I could never find it in my heart to root for another...

But that’s the thing that all fans must determine for themselves -- where their allegiance begins and ends. That’s the beauty of any sport these days... we can follow anything and everything to the ends of the globe. But at the same time there is the communal pull of the live experience that can never be captured in HDTV, no matter how big or how clear the screen. At best you can capture the luxury box experience, and even then you’ve got to do the dishes when the night is done at home. But in a globalized society we must also come to grips that yesterday’s hero might be tomorrow’s foe. The tie to the community, more often than not, is in the history of those who have worn the uniform rather than with any one player. That is why I was able to stick beside Montreal rather than Roy when a newly-minted teenager was confronted with the biggest dilemma of his young sports-loving life.

But that fan must also find a way to temper his fanaticism with a social consciousness. It would be crass for the billionaire to fly from wherever he lived each “home” game to follow his team, though I’m sure some have made the attempt before. But even the average fan is now scattered over a wider area. Take the Portland Trail Blazers, for instance. They sit in a metro area of two million potential fans, but they also represent the closest “local” team for an entire state and now, with the loss of the SuperSonics in Seattle , an entire region. My wife’s uncle, the aforementioned Brad with whom I shared this car ride, has a slate of 22 tickets for the season. That makes 22 trips back and forth along the I-5, 4400 extra miles of commuting a year for live sports (and that’s before possible playoff games are factored in to the equation). Brad was asking if I knew about websites where fans can get together in a particular city and carpool to games, softening the environmental footprint of being a fan.

These thoughts are of no small concern. A fan must know where to draw the line in all aspects. Just as teams can price themselves out of a market, so too can the sheer number of economic and environmental variables cripple a fan’s love of live action. Mitigating the effects of these variables, whether a local fan a few miles from the stadium who can use the light rail or other public transportation to get to the game or an out-of-town spectator who links up with a group of traveling fans to save resources on the trip, will become an even greater dilemma for fans over the coming years. But at the same time, the increasing connectivity of the fan base online at all times allows for greater facilitation of solutions.

One doesn’t want to lose the feel of the crowd at the Rose Garden, which is knowledgeable, passionate and genuine in its affection for the Blazers. It was wonderful getting to witness that in person finally, just as each of my trips to Autzen Stadium here in Eugene have been treats that will remain with me for a lifetime. Every fan should get the chance to experience what it feels like to feed off the energy of tens of thousands of fellow fans uniting in one place and sharing a moment in history, however big or small it might end up appearing in hindsight.

It’s funny... as Brad and I drove back to Eugene after the game, listening to the postgame show on Portland radio as the announcers dissected every aspect of the 97-91 loss for the home team, it wasn’t the game I’d just witnessed that spun through my mind as a just-past-full moon illuminated the ribbon of asphalt leading southward home. I was still stuck on the experience simply of being there. I was thinking about how that road trip fostered so many thoughts which burst through the Oregon night itching to reach through to the cerebral vortex. The range of emotions involved with being a fan is infinite, depending on whether the scoreboard favors your team or the opponent... and that holds true whether one is in the arena witnessing it in person or watching on an internet feed half a world away...

Submitted 11/05

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