Sometimes It's Just A Game - Sports Diplomacy In The 21st Century

In 1959, during the height of the Cold War, the Harlem Globetrotters took a trip to the USSR to entertain Soviet basketball spectators. The goodwill tour was representative of how international sporting events can paradoxically bring nations together, while at the same time still driving them apart through nationalistic self-promotion. While the Globetrotters went to the USSR to dissipate the tension between the superpowers through the entertainment and levity of sports, their trip still reproduced American hypersensitivity to Soviet propaganda of US race relations, and showed the desire of the United States to assert its cultural and sporting superiority abroad. The trip reflected a politically conscious effort by the US to present the black players on the squad, like Wilt Chamberlain, as contributing to American exceptionalism, rather than as figures subject to the nation’s racial abuse. 

The Globetrotters met with Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev during their trip to the USSR.

Sports diplomacy in the 21^st century can be understood as an emblematic prefiguration of international cohesion, but a force that cannot bring tangible changes to global politics. National rebranding through international sporting events, like the Olympics and World Cup, mirror how sports paradoxically transcend, and yet also further national stereotypes. While sports diplomacy and international sporting events can act as a symbolic pretense of the breakdown of political barriers and as re-defining a national image and identity, sports in and of themselves cannot create substantive international harmony, or improve the lives of ordinary citizens.

Sports diplomacy can act as a symptomatic representation of common ground between nations, and athletic events can manifest themselves as a symbolic forum for the beginning of international understanding. The love of sports can universalize the human experience, as Sharon Robinson noted her gratitude for “the unifying game of baseball” because it highlights the common interests of nations. By bringing teams together in a sporting venue, countries intrinsically recognize the legitimacy of the other country on the field, and simultaneously acknowledge their national identity while still reproducing international commonalities. 

When the Tampa Bay Rays played the Cuban National Team with Barack Obama and Raul Castro in attendance, the willingness of the United States team and the President to take the field with the Cubans implicitly symbolized American attempts to normalize relations with Cuba. Obama's deputy national security advisor for strategic communication and speechwriting, Ben Rhodes, said, “Baseball is part of both of our heritages, and part of the type of exchanges we are pursuing in business, in culture, in the arts, in sports.” The nations' love for baseball acted as a symbolic illustration of political attempts to reconcile the countries. Sharon Robinson reflected how the fan’s sense of hope, because of Obama’s presence at a shared national pastime, “struck [her] as a sign of the beginning of a changing Cuba.” 

Rob Manfred’s desire for a legal path for Cubans to play in the MLB without defecting serves as a representative framework for a new dialogue with Cuba that moves away from a practice where, as Dave Zirin said on TSN Winnipeg 1290 Radio, “Cubans are separated from their families and delinked from their home.” Thus, the US and Cuba used a sport that binds the countries to serve as a representation of political diplomacy.

However, while sports diplomacy can act as an emblematic demonstration of international understanding, athletic events do not irrevocably change the longstanding conflict between national officials. Michael Rubin referenced in his article in the magazine Foreign Policy how “President Franklin Roosevelt had granted Hitler legitimacy by having the U.S. Team participate in his Olympics [in Berlin in 1936].” Even if President Obama's main intention in Cuba was to merely “bury the last remnant of the Cold War” and begin negotiations with the nation, by sitting with Castro at such a public spectacle, Obama legitimized the exceedingly precarious elements of the Cuban regime. Rubin added “Athletic contests can’t bring rogue states in from the cold… when the final whistle blows, the lights dim, and competitors break their final handshakes, it is the same politicians who remain in charge.” 

President Obama was the first US President to visit Cuba while in office since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. 

Although politics and political regimes are reproduced through sporting institutions, sports themselves cannot construct international harmony because they are subject to political structures. Therefore, sports are politicized through symbolic codifications, but can only make social change in conjunction with politics. 

While the baseball game in Cuba may have personified an attempt at international convergence through sports, the athletic event did not change the nature of the Castro political dictatorship. Sports cannot transcend politics because sports are inherently political, as Cuban descendant Dan LeBatard wrote, "I'm not in the mood to play ball with a dictator who still has the blood of our people on his hands.” While sports may not actively bring about political change, the public still paradoxically imbues athletics with symbolic political implications, and the game in Cuba may have also implicitly desensitized the past torment of the Castro regime.

Hosting international sporting events project the conscious effort of a state to disseminate specific images of their nationhood and act as an extension of governmental identity politics. By putting a nation’s capabilities in front of the world, organizing a global athletic competition inherently assigns an immediate mythic grandeur to the host nation. It also re-defines previous external perceptions of the country’s organizational competency, and implicitly effects how other nations perceive them. 

Rook Campbell said about the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, “The World Cup helped outlay a nation branding legacy in which a post-apartheid South Africa could show itself as truly democratic global power.” The value of the World Cup to South Africa was how other nations saw the event as a legitimization of the progress of the state from its internationally unaccepted past. Campbell added that the event “was celebrated as both a national and continental opportunity to correct stereotypes and forge new stature.” The World Cup acted as a symbolic divide between the state and the vestiges of apartheid, and shaped a nationalistic identity apart from racial oppression.

While hosting an international sporting event may act as a symbolic representation of a nation’s re-branding in global politics, it does not ensure actual structural changes to the nation on the ground. In the past, global sporting events have come at the expense of public facilities for the nation’s ordinary citizens. Even the public transportation in South Africa that was developed for the World Cup or received more funding because of the tournament, like the transit railway system Gautrain, are as Andrew Harding said in the BBC, "priced out of the reach of most South Africans, and highly controversial new tolls on the motorways mean drivers are still paying for the renovations.” 

"Soccer City" in Johannesburg is one of many World Cup Stadiums in South Africa that cannot cover its operating costs.

Sporting events may temporarily act as a shrine to national identity, but once the glow of the event is over, ordinary citizens are left with the brunt of the event’s cost. The protests in Brazil against the World Cup showed how the commercialization of a sporting event as national rebranding, regardless of the costs, removes it from being the “people’s cup.” Sporting events further the marginalization of a nation’s democratic masses, and often act as a symbol of national progress rather than actually helping to bring it about.

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Shaq squares off against Thorin on Inside the NBA.

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Trigger Fingers Turn To Twitter Fingers: Sports In The Digital Age

On June 30, 1962, Sandy Koufax threw the first of his four career no-hitters for the Los Angeles Dodgers against the New York Mets. Recorded baseball was so primitive at the time that only a single radio version of the game remains today for fans to relive the experience. More than 30 years later, when NBC cut away from game 5 of the Rockets-Knicks NBA Finals to follow the O.J. Simpson car chase in 1994, nobody outside of the arena knew what was happening on the court.

However, the technological revolution of the 21st century has created a more accessible viewing experience for fans at the game, and for those watching at home. The availability of sports data has allowed for more inclusive online sports fandom, and social media and massage boards have contributed to the continual reproduction of the sporting spectacle.

Despite individuals increasingly feeling associated with an online sporting community through social media, sports in the digital age remain reliant on the construction of heroic sporting narratives. While social media does not ostensibly exclude fans from the sporting sphere as much as it did in the past, it upholds a groupthink ideology that marginalizes opinions outside of the collective norm. Overall, social media and new sporting technology have allowed fans to establish a connection with each other and better understand the game, and for the players, new data has emphasized certain sporting techniques to perform at a higher level, but created ambiguity over who controls, and releases, technological data.

The data revolution has allowed sports teams to use wearable technologies to track player movement and apply health standards to regulate their physical activity. Teams have attempted to use data analysis to improve performance and keep players healthy, and biometrics have allowed players to use the data as a reference point for their physical activity. Player Position Tracking is penetrating all the professional sports, especially basketball and soccer, because the technology has given athletes a way to monitor themselves. 

The Seattle Sounders use wearable tracking devices to monitor their players during practice.

The proliferation of tracking technology has caused an ethical dilemma over the right of employers to have too much information about their employees. Teams blood testing their athletes, or tracking their sleeping patterns, can easily be construed as invasive labor practices. Moreover, the ownership and transparency of sports data could inhibit player’s earning power and freedom of mobility if teams use exclusive data gathering capabilities to limit their off-court activity or to manipulate their salaries in contract negotiations (agents are already deeply concerned about this potential).

Wolfram Klug contented in an article in The Guardian, "The wider stakeholders stand to benefit as much, if not more, from analytics than the players themselves.” Player’s privacy, and fairness concerns over how teams use the new sports technology, have been exacerbated by the fact that employers can sell their confidential data material for commercial benefits. Klug noted that teams should partner with “technology providers with a commitment to being transparent and acting ethically,” because of the moral ambiguities over data control. Teams may complicate the situation by distributing information to fans to ostensibly improve their experience, even though the data infringes on player’s rights.

In the pre-digital age, public engagement with sports through the radio or television medium constructed a circumscribed subjectivity of the individual viewer. Without social media to allow for fan expressionism or interaction beyond the sporting venue itself, sports fans were objectified through their subjugation to a narrowly contrived heteronormative, gendered identity of fandom. In Jeffrey Montez's Discipline and Indulgence, in a chapter of the book titled "The Best Seat in the Ballpark: Lifestyle and the Televisual Event," he said, “This [television] genre produced male sports fans as crucial objects of their technical narratives, but objects all the same.” Fans consumed sports through specifically delineated sporting spheres, restricting their access to athletes merely through a controlled and externally constructed media imagery that objectified their experience. 

However, fans over the last decade have directly interacted with athletes, and each other, through new digital technology. Maxwell Neely-Cohen referenced Durga Chew-Bose’s observation in The New Republic that, “Sports for so long were actually not inclusive… but [for] NBA Twitter fans, it’s almost, dare I say, it’s wholesome.” Social media has allowed for the creation of online fan groups that transcribe the traditional sporting spheres into online communities, especially subcultures like NBA twitter. Cohen added that through social media the NBA “promotes itself inevitably, a self-replicating monster.” Since most people have digital technology, Twitter allows the league to reproduce its sporting spectacle for a more democratized fan base. 

Amy Bass said in her book, Not The Triumph But The Struggle, track stars John Carlos and Tommie Smith “needed a space for people to see them represented in the public eye," which was only available to them during the 1968 Summer Olympics. Athletes today have a platform to speak directly to the public whenever they want. Overt political statements, like when the Miami Heat wore hoodies in solidarity with Trayvon Martin, have entered the public consciousness because of the mobility of images through Twitter. Since consumers derive their socially constructed identity from what they consume and follow, sports fans have refracted their sense of self through the accessibility they have to the actions of their favorite players or teams. As such revered figures, athletes can actively shape public discourse over political topics.

In 2012, players on the Miami Heat wore hoodies to show support for Trayvon Martin.

However, social media has allowed fans to interact with others that confirm their opinions, rather than challenge them. Cohen said, “On Twitter, each basketball fan gets to curate their own assemblage of voices.” The ability of an individual to tailor thoughts to a specific audience paradoxically allows them to interact with a specific subculture, and yet, still secludes them from experiencing dissenting opinions through a conscious social media filtering. 

Just as fans were once objectified by the television experience, as Montez said, “There is an objectified status of television sports fandom,” fans have lost their individuality by allowing groupthink on Twitter to formulate their subjectivity. As an argument solidifies itself on Twitter, and a mob mentality justifies the prescribed conventional wisdom, thoughts outside of the collective norm become ostracized. As sports media members tweeted their disdain over Cam Newton’s post-Super Bowl press conference, conformity to that opinion became the standard judgment, rather than an individual appraisal of the situation. Twitter facilitates an arena where the first opinion becomes sanctified as fact, regardless of how individuals conceive of that viewpoint. Sometimes first is not always best.

Moreover, due to the feeling of impunity online, social media has become a vacuum for societal negativity, such as when Michigan punter Blake O'Neill received death threats for his costly fumble against Michigan State.

The growth of sports documentaries in recent years has reflected a demand for stories that create a heroic imagery of the athlete in the digital age. ESPN staffer Connor Schell advised, “Sit people down and tell them a good story.” Documentaries like ESPN’s You Don’t Know Bo have consciously told a story that glorifies the sporting subject to compel the viewer towards classifying athletes as mythic paradigms. The conflation of reality and heroic narrative is not confined to modern day, as Michael Oriard said in his book Brand NFL, the original “NFL Films has sustained a sense of mythic grandeur in decidedly antimythic times." However, television networks today have even more incentive for documentaries that create a mythical athletic identity because they need a compelling story to fill their air time. These stories have reproduced the sporting spectacle to create an athletic pageantry infused with a dramatized, and often masculine, narrative of success.

Thinking Outside a Black/White Binary In Sports

American racial concretizations have constructed a racially polarized society, where self-identification has become classified based upon individual categorization into a black or white constitutive group. Sports act as a reflection of society, and the narrative surrounding athletes and sporting institutions has similarly been focused on conceptions of identity along a black-white paradigm to avoid pluralistic understandings of race. 

However, the sporting experiences of Latino athletes, a racially ambiguous ethnic group through the lens of the black-white identity binary, have shown the arbitrary nature of that very racial binary, and the fragility of racial boundaries. During the age of US Empire, non-white others delicately manipulated racial perceptions to move beyond black exclusionary sporting practices.

However, Latinos were never accepted as occupying the same sphere as white athletes, and racial standards forced the players to dissociate themselves from their ethnic backgrounds. The continued recognition of Latino “otherness” has proliferated throughout the sporting world today, and the sporting community has marginalized their self-identity and ethnic orientation. While sporting figures existing outside of the black-white paradigm have been able to transverse racial boundaries and slip into sporting leagues, their racial ambiguity has forced them to be identified as outsiders to the game, lacking any real agency beyond the playing field.

In the early 20^th century, Latino baseball players could negotiate the fluid understanding of race in America by defying the racial binary. Latino ballplayers transcended the black-white paradigm because American racial standards were based upon individualized racial consciousness. The very first Latino players in the major league, like Louis Castro and Frank Arellanes, began to blur the color line. Teams allowed for the presence of non-white others in the sport by implying that they did not directly challenge black exclusionary practices to take advantage of cheap Latino labor. Through the racialization of the Latin athlete, Latinos were prescribed a racial identity not based upon their ethnic background, but in comparison to American racial standards.

In his fantastic book Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line, Adrian Burgos said, “Latinos like Castro secured admittance in organized baseball, but this passage to acceptance did not necessarily translate into being accepted as a fellow white.” Latinos were only able to play in the big leagues because of their non-black status, but their foreignness was still pronounced because their identity was conceptualized merely as a differentiation from blackness. Burgos said Latinos “did not wholly reside in the same racial camp as fellow major leaguers,” and Latinos lack of holistic acceptance in baseball implied their lack of accepted whiteness. 

Thus, Latinos had to distance themselves from their ethnic backgrounds, and as Marcos Breton said in his article "Fields of Broken Dreams: Latinos and Baseball", lie about their African ancestry" to associate their racial identification separate from blacks. The only way Latinos could remove their inherent differentiation was through an Americanized process of racialization by distancing themselves from anything that would cause suspicion to the public’s racial perceptions. Latinos could play in the majors based upon their orientation along “Americanized” ethnic standards, but they were never truly accepted, and as Breton said, “they were treated like novelties.” 

While the slew of current Latino baseball players (Yasiel Puig, Jose Fernandez, Yoenis Cespedes, Miguel Cabrera, Robinson Cano, Felix Hernandez, Adrian Beltre, Jose Bautista, Yadier Molina, Carlos Gonzalez to name just a few) have been able to paradoxically transfix racial boundaries by starring in the major leagues, sporting discourse has constantly alienated their identity. Whereas Latinos in the past quietly slipped into the big leagues and failed to alter public sensibilities, Latino ballplayers today often play with a cultural flare while actively displaying their ethnic pride. Although so called "baseball traditionalists" like Goose Gossage ostensibly criticize foreign players for disregarding baseball’s unwritten rules, their underlying antagonism has been rooted in their lack of acceptance of Latinos, and their fear of foreigners taking over the American game. 

Since Dominican outfielder Jose Bautista’s now famous bat flip in game 5 of last year’s ALDS against the Texas Rangers in one of the craziest innings of baseball I have ever seen, Bautista has been defending himself against claims that he was showboating or disrespecting the game. (Russell Martin hitting Shin-Soo Choo's bat throwing the ball back to Aaron Sanchez in the top of the 7th, the game being played under protest, fans in Toronto throwing stuff onto the field, the Rangers making errors left and right in the bottom of the 7th, an interference review, and Bautista's home run all happened in one inning).

Jose Bautista's massive home run and bat-flip

Breton notes that back in the mid-20th century, Latinos faced the same stereotypical criticism because “labels were rooted in negative white perceptions of Latinos, labels that took hold and became a burden even the great players had to carry.” The expressionism of Latino baseball players, like Bautista throwing his bat (that was not just a normal Big Papi bat flip), symbolically threatens American racial and cultural control over foreign players, which has changed from the early 20^th century when Latinos were forced to adhere to the dominant white culture to stay in the league.

There have been many attempts within baseball to suppress Latinos, as evidenced by the fact that after studying "67 bench-clearing incidents in Major League Baseball over the past five seasons [it was] found that the main antagonists hailed from different ethnic backgrounds in 87% of the cases." The “playing the game the right way” argument implies that the correct way to play the game is based upon a white dictation of the sport in reaction to perceived Latino empowerment. Current Braves pitcher Bud Norris said, “If you’re going to come into our country and make our American dollars, you need to respect the game.” Norris's comment showed how the attempts of the baseball community to “normalize” the on-field actions of Latinos have marginalized their freedom.

Off the field, teams exploit players, and Latinos continue to be classified as outsiders. The institutional signing rules of baseball can be aligned with the long American history of imperialism, and reinforces the cultural inequality that baseball players are often trying to maintain on the field. Latin players have particularly been exploited by clubs as a source of cheap labor. 

Every MLB team today, including the San Diego Padres, have a baseball academy in the Dominican Republic. 

In an except from his book Raceball: How The Major Leagues Colonized The Black and Latino Game, Rob Ruck reflected,“Ballplayers today rarely take stands that resonate beyond the ballpark” since Latinos specifically fear any action that could subvert their chance at baseball survival. When Colin Cowherd said on ESPN Radio, “I’ve never bought into that baseball is too complex, a third of the sport is from the Dominican Republican,” he reflected a misunderstanding of the educational opportunities embedded in a racialized society for the non-white community, or the education present in foreign communities.

Furthermore, the presence of Latino players in Major League Soccer has similarly shown attempts to separate white and Latino athletic spheres, and efforts to systemically regulate the behavior of the racially non-white other. Chivas USA, which ceased operations in the league in 2014, was designed as an MLS team to attract Hispanic fans in Southern California, who comprise the largest single ethic group in Los Angeles County.

However, since the MLS consciously segregated its own league by having one team made up of Latino coaches and players, they alienated the Latinos from the rest of the league and symbolized that their presence could only arise in a specific sphere. Moreover, by constructing the team as the US version of a Mexican club team, the MLS did not allow the Latino players on the squad to define their own identity. Brandon Valeriano said on a broader scale in his article from The Washington Post, “We need to understand that the national sport should be a reflection of our views and values,” and the MLS underestimated Latinos wanting to value their American identification and not wanting their identity to be defined as “Mexican,” or as league outsiders.

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SoundCloud Podcast Homepage: https://soundcloud.com/ctellallsports