The Goodwill Games
Billions of people worldwide are getting their impressions of America not from US economic or military might but by watching its sports on television. And they like what they see.
Outside the arena, New Jersey smells of swamp and hydrocarbons and anonymous dead things. Inside, the New Jersey Nets and the San Antonio Spurs are committing basketball upon each other. Surrounded by the best "game preparation" that the National Basketball Association can offer -- which is to say, for lights and sound, somewhere between the MTV Movie Awards and the battle for Saipan -- the two teams are bumbling and stumbling around each other in the third game of the NBA Finals. Neither team is sinking 40 percent of its shots. The turnovers are piling up. Watching this clattery mess in the context of the NBA's patented Sturm und Rap entertainment filigree is very much like spending Derby week at Churchill Downs only to discover, right as the contestants turn for home, that the race has been run this year by a field of spavined plow horses.
Up in Section 206, however, genuine excitement reigns. The same turnovers sound more exciting and more exotic in Hebrew and Spanish than they ever will in English. The 200 TV broadcasters -- the great wall of Babel here in the arena -- send the game out, with a little crawl at the bottom of the screen suggesting that fans around the world comment on the action as it is played. Those people talk back, sending their real-time reactions into a trailer that sits with a lot of other trailers outside in the parking lot, in a fenced-off compound thick with cables on the ground. There, this game, choppy and inartistic, seems to gleam a little more the farther you are from it. Get far enough away -- to Tahiti, let's say -- and it becomes almost golden.
"It's 4 p.m., and I'm watching this fantastic game with hundreds of paradisiac Wahine," writes Leopold from Tahiti, quite possibly from the beach. "Go Spurs!"
The e-mails come in 10 to 20 at a time, many of them in a kind of fractured American hip-hop that demonstrates the reach not only of the NBA but of the league's predominant connection to American popular culture. There's a restlessness in the arena. Out here in the trailer, though, out here in the wider world, Xiaoxiang from Shanghai is being transported almost religiously by what's on the screen.
"I'm not Catholic or Christian," Xiaoxiang writes, "but I'm praying for the Nets to win."
The game seems to be carrying its own America with it, not dissimilar to the country that Mick Jagger created for himself in London, listening to American music, or the one Francois Truffaut fashioned for himself in Paris, watching all those Hollywood films. An America is created that is neither military hegemon nor corporate leviathan -- a looser place, less rigid and more free, where anyone who works hard shooting a ball or handling a puck can become famous and (yes) rich. Just as all those people once did, strumming a guitar or working with light and shadow through the lens of a camera.
And that country speaks even through this wretched basketball game, through its bad shooting and ghastly ball handling and, worst of all, through KC and the Sunshine Band at halftime. It speaks through all the broadcasters up there in Section 206, and people speak back to it, inventing an America for themselves. Xiaoxiang in China has more to say:
"I am home missing school examinations because I have SARS. I am lucky, because I am watching this great game.
"Go Nets! Hello USA!"
IT USED TO BE THAT AMERICAN popular culture was carried abroad in kit bags and memories. Sailors on their way to World War II took the blues records to Great Britain and built an audience for American music. Soldiers played the games of their youth on fields in France and on islands in the Pacific. As American power and influence spread generally across the globe, baseball came to Japan and to the Caribbean, basketball to Lithuania, and even American football came to American Samoa, where, in a spasm of New Frontierism and as part of a campaign to modernize the islands, the Kennedy administration embarked on the widespread introduction of television, bringing the National Football League to a society already mad for rugby. Last season, there were 28 Samoans on the various NFL rosters.
In a way, the whole world is Samoa now. American sports -- and the various media that bring those sports to the world -- are possessed of a global reach and a depth of market that make them by far the primary vehicle through which American popular culture reaches and influences the rest of the world. Like so many other things, this hegemony prospers now because its primary counterweight, the Soviet Union, which actually sought to make its sports a direct demonstration to the world of the superiority of its political system, fell apart so precipitously. What was left was the United States, the influence of which was so vast that the rest of the world came to watch American sports and inevitably to draw its own political and social conclusions about the system that produced them. Which the rest of the world has done with great alacrity.
"I never cease to be amazed that the basketball phenomenon -- to pick one example, because it's one I'm familiar with -- has reached parts of, say, Africa, that the NBA has barely touched," says Richard Lapchick, the founder of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University and now the chairman of a sports business management program at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. "You see gear, the logos of the teams, and a knowledge of the players."
Partly, this is because sports themselves are universal. "I think the competitive impulse is universal," says Tim Brosnan, an executive vice president who handles overseas marketing for Major League Baseball. "At the core of it is human competition. It's what draws people to a sport. It's human drama, after everything else has been stripped away." And that same competitive impulse that drives people to play the games also seems to drive them to attach themselves to the people who play the games best.
Also, as a means of feeding that impulse, sports proved to be uniquely suited to providing content for the explosion of mass media that took place throughout the last century. Sports were willing to tailor themselves to television, for example, and, as television spread across the world, as it beamed itself down from satellites and flowed through cables, it brought sports with it, until, today, the numbers by which we measure the global impact of those sports have become staggering.
The NBA regularly reaches 750 million households, covering 212 countries in 42 languages and providing that audience with 18,752 hours of NBA programming during the 2002-03 season. The league has 148 broadcast partners televising its games, including the NBA's new friends in Turkey and Romania and Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan, and 40 percent of the traffic on the league's NBA.com website comes from outside the United States. Broadcasts of Major League Baseball games now flow to 224 countries in 11 languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, and Papiamento. In July, more than 12 million people in Japan alone watched the Major League All-Star Game, which featured local heroes Ichiro Suzuki of Seattle and the Yankees' Hideki Matsui, despite the fact that the game aired locally at 9 in the morning. Earlier last season, an otherwise unremarkable slate of Wednesday-night games was carried on 18 different networks from the Middle East to New Zealand.
The reach of American sports extends even to those American sports that are uniquely, well, American. The American brand of football is played indigenously almost nowhere else in the world, and yet the NFL has proven itself to be compelling international television. Last January's Super Bowl brought in an estimated 800 million viewers, a large percentage of whom can be presumed not to have understood much about the game and even less about the star-spangled foofaraw that annually attends it. And the NFL sent the winners of that game, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, to Tokyo to kick off this year's exhibition season. And even NASCAR, the distinctly American stock-car racing circuit that emerged from the American South, has gone global. After only two years of international programming, NASCAR races now are broadcast to 115 countries in 21 languages, allowing NASCAR to make a dent in that existing overseas motor-sports market that heretofore had been the exclusive province of the open-wheel astronauts of the Grand Prix circuit.
"Outside of the US," says Robbie Weiss, NASCAR's director of international development, "there was already a following for motor sports, but NASCAR was more like the other American sports than other kinds of auto racing were. It was something different, and that's what people over there wanted."
Moreover, as a means of projecting American popular culture -- and, thus, American cultural hegemony -- the reach and depth of American sports dwarf anything else. Consider, for example, the movies, which once were often the only image of America available to foreign audiences, and out of which those audiences fashioned a cowboy-culture America that stubbornly persists in their minds to this day. In 2002, in what the Motion Picture Association of America calls a record year, 7.3 billion people worldwide went to see American movies. That figure pales in comparison with the international television market for American sports.
The spread of the influence of American sports also has firmly established those sports as part of the global economy. Somebody has to sell those T-shirts in Africa, and the ancillary corporate partners of American sports have followed them overseas. Last year, for example, Nike's overseas earnings, particularly in Europe and in Asia, grew substantially, while sales in the United States were falling off by as much as 8 percent. When the NBA beams its games to those 212 countries, it does so from arenas festooned with electric advertisements from Coca-Cola and McDonald's.
This, it would seem, might embroil the games themselves in the various controversies regarding globalization and in the general ambivalence and occasionally open hostility toward American hegemony that has reasserted itself as the time since the attacks of September 11, 2001, has lengthened.
In July, an exhibit titled "The American Effect" opened at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, and it demonstrated signs of a resentment toward what critic Peter Schjeldahl called "the hula-skirt syndrome -- the local becoming vestigial in a global forest of signs, where the big trees are Americans." Somehow, though, the games themselves appear to be largely immune to all of that. The controversies and ambivalence seem to stop at the television screen or the computer terminal, where another America seems to present itself to the world.
Two tales of T-shirts, then.
Ten years ago, before the United States turned Qatar into an aircraft carrier with sand, the Qataris hosted the Asian zone qualifying round for soccer's 1994 World Cup. Three American journalists went off into Doha, looking for souvenir gewgaws to buy, and they stopped at a store with a sign that said "Sporting Clothes." They asked if they could buy jerseys for any of the competing teams -- in this case a historically fractious bunch made up of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, and both Koreas. (Iraq's soccer mission was led that year by the not-then-yet-late Uday Hussein.) The man behind the counter shook his head.
"Sorry," he said. "All we have is Michael Jordan."
And another.
In his book The Paradox of American Power, author Joseph Nye Jr. describes an episode wherein, "child soldiers in Sierra Leone committed atrocities . . . while wearing American sports team T-shirts." This is a particularly gruesome illustration of what Nye has come to call the "soft power" of American culture in the world.
In his book, Nye defines soft power as "the ability to entice and to attract, and attraction often leads to acquiescence and imitation. . . . The values of democracy, personal freedom, upward mobility, and openness that are often expressed in American popular culture . . . contribute to American power in many areas." Nye sees sports as fitting neatly into a world dominated by American soft power.
"Soft power refers to our ability to attract others and not to coerce them," explains Nye, the dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "It can grow out of our popular culture, where it is most attractive. Sports, I think, certainly can be a part of that, and probably a more neutral part. It's not as likely to be unattractive in some places where a movie that has nudity or permissiveness might be. Watching Baywatch on TV might be soft power in China or Latin America, but in Saudi Arabia, it might seem to be repulsive. In Iran, it might be repulsive to the mullahs and attractive to the teenagers. A game on TV is far more neutral than that would be."
(Of a piece with Nye's argument, Hodan Hassan of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington last winter told The Kansas City Star that viewers in Islamic countries might be offended by the "immodest dress" of the cheerleaders along the sidelines at the Super Bowl, but that those viewers also do understand something about sports fanatics. "They'll give the Americans a pass when it comes to sports.")
The idea of a sport's transnational appeal is hardly new, and neither is it especially American. Soccer was established on a worldwide basis before the NFL was established in California. And the concept of using sports as a vehicle to project national purpose is even less new and less American; almost from the end of World War II, the old Soviet bloc countries concentrated on using the Olympic Games especially as a public demonstration of their implicit superiority in a great number of arenas beyond those in which people toss the shotput or run the 100-meter dash. However, the ability of sports to become the raw material out of which people can fashion -- and, in some cases, to imitate, as Nye argues -- their own individual idea of a country is a uniquely American phenomenon.
The delicate problem for the people who run these sports is to expand their foreign markets to increase their profits and those of their corporate partners without engendering so much resentment of the latter that it damages the former, and without appearing to swamp the sports that already are in place. For example, it was important for Major League Baseball not to be seen as treating the long-established Japanese professional teams essentially as minor leagues while at the same time securing a huge Asian market by signing away stars like Suzuki and Matsui. All the other sports have had to exercise similar finesse.
"What [Rupert] Murdoch and the others have done overseas, and Ted Turner was the first one to do this, was to present American sports in another country in a way that is seen as indigenous," explains Walter LaFeber, whose book Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism was one of the first to deal with the transnational nature of American sports. "You get the NBA, for example, but you don't get it as CBS or as a vehicle for McDonald's. The games are presented in such a way that an international broadcast gets nationalized in the different countries. It is very shrewd."
"I believe that sports transcend national boundaries," agrees Alessandra Durstine, the vice president for international marketing for ESPN, the US-based global all-sports television network. "We're not trying to sell people a lifestyle. They already have a lifestyle."
The long reach of American sports is just beginning to result in a flood of foreign athletes into the various American leagues. There are now 65 players from 35 countries playing in the NBA, and 230 players from 16 countries on the Major League Baseball rosters, and 33 percent of the players in the National Hockey League come from outside North America. More than ever, foreign athletes look at American stardom -- and American celebrity and American riches -- as a viable career goal. And the fans come with them.
"We understand the universality of being a sports fan and what makes them tick," says Durstine. "We are sensitive to the concerns of the sports fan overseas. We have local sports and international sports, and we try to bring to each market what they're interested in. We don't pretend to be simply a local brand."
What is created is a kind of loop. Foreign fans transfer their loyalties from a specific player to the American team on which he plays. (In Tokyo, fans line up to pay $2,000 for a weekend package tour to Seattle in order to see Suzuki play.) The higher the profile provided to a foreign athlete by the global reach of the American media, the higher the profile back home of the sport that the athlete plays. The quality of play there improves as the tantalizing prospect of a lucrative career in the United States increases, a classic example of what Nye calls soft power's ability to entice rather than coerce.
Perhaps the classic case study in the success of selling American sports overseas is the NBA. Over the two decades in which the league has committed itself to developing a foreign audience, the NBA's global presence has grown until, last year, roughly 15 percent of the NBA's $900 million in total broadcast revenues came from foreign markets, and the NBA sold $430 million worth of its merchandise overseas. The NBA also pioneered the development of interactive technology among sports leagues, and it attached itself to burgeoning hip-hop culture so securely that the letters-to-the-editor section of Slam, a popular American basketball magazine, regularly contains shout-outs to homies in places like Winnipeg and Hamburg, which are both about as far as boyz can get out of the 'hood.
Through the involvement of its professional players in the Olympic Games -- dating from the regal progress of the Larry Bird-Magic Johnson "Dream Team" across Europe in 1992 -- the NBA has aided in the worldwide growth of basketball, to the point where 20 percent of the league's players are from outside the United States, and to the point where, last summer, a team of NBA pros straggled home in seventh place at the World Championships of Basketball in Indianapolis.
That's also how it happened that the biggest story in the NBA last season was the arrival with the Houston Rockets of 7-foot-5 center Yao Ming, a rookie from China whom the NBA had gathered up in its global reach since he was 14, when young Yao watched the Rockets win the NBA championship behind center Hakeem Olajuwon, himself born in Nigeria. In China, 14 separate broadcast outlets carried Yao's games last season. In the United States, Yao's first year in the league was marked by his appearance in a popular credit-card commercial that debuted during last year's Super Bowl.
"One of the things that gets lost in the shuffle, because people jump right into the merchandising, is illustrated by Yao," says Terry Lyons, the director of international marketing for the NBA. "We'd been working in China since the mid-1980s. One thing leads to another, some goodwill tours and clinics, and, boom, suddenly you've got the number one pick in the draft. That's going to sell you some T-shirts, but think of it from the standpoint of player development. It's astonishing, and the business end flows from that."
The pivot for the NBA's success was the iconic figure of Michael Jordan throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He was the first athletic superstar of the global village, and, in his wake, he carried not only basketball and the NBA but Nike and McDonald's and other lucrative manifestations of the American economic dominance of the village in question. This put the NBA on the cutting edge not only of the enthusiasm for American sports but also of whatever sensitivity exists overseas to what is perceived as an American cultural and corporate behemoth. In his book, LaFeber relates how basketball surpassed cricket in popularity in the British West Indies and how, in Trinidad and Tobago, "the black lower class took over basketball and turned it into a statement for their class and their racial pride. . . . They adopted NBA team and player names, while mimicking the moves of the players."
"Thus," LaFeber concludes, "the sports of the British Empire gave way to the technology of the American Century." He meant it as a caution, too.
It was 1968, and Dan Doyle was nervous. He was part of a team of American basketball players on a goodwill tour of western Europe at a time during which there was little goodwill to be found anywhere. Every stop the team made, in Norway or Denmark or England before it could get into the arena, it had to run a gantlet of demonstrators gathered to protest the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
The team was considered a handy extension of the nation whose actions the protesters so vehemently disapproved. "In those days," Doyle recalls, "it was the first time since the end of World War II that Americans were seen as villains, as intruders.
"Once they met us, a lot of those people thought, `These guys aren't so bad. Maybe the country isn't, either.' We had to convince people then. We don't have to try so hard now. I hope we never have to again."
Back when Doyle went to Europe, the American involvement in Vietnam was sufficiently bloody and sufficiently controversial so as to obliterate the distinctions between soft power and hard power. Subtle influence and naked might seemed to be wearing the same face all over the world, and the international reaction was public and angry. In that same tumultuous year, the Olympic Games in Mexico City became one of the most openly politicized sports events in history, from the massacre of protesting students before the Games began, to the famous black-gloved demonstration by American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos atop the victory stand, to the subtler protest of Czech gymnast Vera Caslavska, who averted her eyes rather than watch the Soviet flag raised. Persuasion generally seemed to have lost the field to coercion.
Joseph Nye differentiates between the soft power of popular culture and the hard power of the state itself. The more closely the former seems allied with the latter, the less enticing and the more coercive it appears and the more distrust and resentment it engenders. "For soft power to succeed, there has to be a willing recipient," Nye explains. "It's not like something you bring in with the 82d Airborne."
However, sports once again seem close to the point at which they were in 1968. From Kyoto to Baghdad, American unilateralism has alienated a good portion of the world, further energizing existing resentments regarding the reach of American corporations and what can be perceived as the corrupting effect of American popular culture. It is subtler and more nuanced than it was in 1968 -- but it puts at risk all the work that the various sports corporations have done to tailor their games to local audiences, thereby keeping the games themselves from being associated with the more unpopular manifestations of American cultural hegemony.
For example, the American Major League baseball teams have established "academies" to develop the talent in the Dominican Republic, a tiny and otherwise impoverished country that produced 79 players who began this season on Major League rosters. Recently, there has been a spate of angry reports out of the Dominican Republic accusing the American teams of exploiting poor children, using them up, and then cruelly discarding the ones not good enough to achieve the golden long-shot dream of a Major League career.
"This is part of the overarching problems created by the globalization of sports," explains Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, a Yale University professor and the author of The Pride of Havana, a well-received history of Cuban baseball. "To a certain degree, you are seeing the same thing here that you see in other industries -- that you have American industries going in search of cheap labor, where the constraints that exist in our country don't apply, like the cars that are assembled in Mexico or the shirts made in Venezuela. That is the metaphor that we are starting to hear."
It is a dangerous metaphor for American sports, threatening to drag the games themselves into the controversies that have erupted over the past decade regarding the social costs of globalization. Walter LaFeber argues that, because Nike and other corporations so clearly made Jordan and other athletes their worldwide public faces, they also made themselves high-profile targets. (Not that it wasn't profitable. In 2002, Nike's profits rose 14 percent in Asia, where the company's labor practices always have been the most controversial.) "The Nike endorsers could be seen as a symbol of American arrogance," says John Miller, an economist at Wheaton College in Norton who has written extensively on the issues regarding international workers' rights. "But, so far, that hasn't been the case. It just might be that the sport itself is so attractive the way that Michael Jordan plays it, that people overseas don't make the connection with him."
Of course, the latter argument depends vitally on the image of America that is projected by the Americans whom all those people are watching overseas. The American way of being an athlete -- loud, brash, and arguably arrogant -- has begun to grate on foreign audiences and is exacerbated by the perception that the United States is behaving generally in the world in much the same fashion. This past summer, when Manchester United's David Beckham left the flagship franchise of British soccer in order to sign a huge contract with Real Madrid in Spain, he was accused of behaving like an American celebrity athlete. In addition, an Israeli scholar named Yair Galily has written extensively on what he calls the "Americanization" of basketball in that country, where an influx of Americans playing professionally, according to Galily, "have brought with them manners . . . that did more harm than good."
At the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, American athletes were regularly booed for what the audiences there saw as unseemly behavior. Four American sprinters preened and posed with the American flag after winning a race. One American swimmer made a habit of spitting in her opponent's lane prior to the race, and an Australian crowd enthusiastically backed a Cuban baseball team in a game against the United States. And the same communications technology that brings the games to the whole world brings the news there, too, so that the various crimes and misdemeanors committed by American athletes get fed into that same maw.
What LaFeber says about the dual nature of celebrity endorsements holds true in the end for celebrity itself. If, like Kobe Bryant, say, you are world-famous, everything you do is world-famous, and that means that if you are accused of a crime, you are accused of a world-famous crime. The same mass media that brought Bryant's transcendent skills to a vast international audience are going to make his rape trial available to that same audience. All over the world, in all those households, to all those people sitting at their computer screens and announcing how much they love his game, the America that Kobe Bryant represents will go on trial with him.
Maciej Lampe is playing as hard as he can, considering the unfortunate piercing accident he had before the game. Around him, players in the Reebok Pro Summer League are running faster than he can, and jumping higher, but he's 6-foot-11, with a nice touch from the outside, and the New York Knicks paid $2 million to buy him out of his European contract as the team's second-round pick in this year's NBA draft, and he's got this bandage on his left earlobe where the needle went awry. He's in the NBA, Lampe is, so he needs the earring.
Lampe is 18 years old, and this already is the third country in which he's played basketball professionally. Born in Lodz, in Poland, he played in that country's junior program before joining the Alvik team in Stockholm in 2000. He then moved on to Real Madrid -- the same sports club whose soccer team just purchased Beckham -- in Spain a year later. The Knicks drafted him from there, largely as a future possibility because of his size, his willingness to run the floor, and his gifts as a ballhandler and passer at his size. That is how he wound up in this gym at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, with other draftees, desperate hopefuls, and superannuated college stars, many of whom have no chance of having even the NBA career that Lampe will have this season.
"Of course, I watched the games and I read the magazines and the Internet, so I knew about the NBA and the players," Lampe says after the game. "I knew the teams, and I knew where the players play."
Curiously, the NBA in America is living through much of what LaFeber described when he wrote, "As Americans went abroad to spread their culture and fatten their pocketbooks, they would instead have to change their own culture. . . . They would have to become less nationalistic, less ignorant of and more open to other cultures."
Which is what can happen to you when your professional creme de la creme comes stumbling home in seventh place. The influx of foreign players to the NBA has reintroduced some of the basketball fundamentals that purists had complained were lost when the American players took to the air to Be Like Mike. "These kids learn to play the old way in their clubs back home," says Kevin Stacom, a scout for the Dallas Mavericks, whose lineup last year included Dirk Nowitzki from Germany and Canadian point guard Steve Nash. The loop closes here, and you can almost hear Francois Truffaut explaining John Ford or the Rolling Stones reintroducing us to Muddy Waters. Sometimes, you can only see the best of yourself when someone shows it to you new.
Maciej Lampe is looking forward to seeing the United States, even on the NBA's traditionally surreal travel schedule. "I think I know something about the country and the cities from watching the games," he says. "I think Denver looks like an interesting place." Lampe's got an idea about America, and he wants to see how it plays out. He started with Denver, and now he'll see where it goes.
