An American Sport, Except When It’s Not

It was May 2012 and I was about halfway through a two-month trip that had taken me across the United States. Beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was slowly making my way towards New York City.

I was in Philadelphia and, after attending an NBA playoff game the previous night between the Celtics and the hometown Sixers, I was free to enjoy the city, soaking in the attractions rich in freedom, patriotism and artery-clogging cholesterol.

It was while enjoying the latter of these rich attractions—a Philly cheesesteak—that I struck up a conversation with two men. One was a young man best described as nondescript, the type you typically meet while travelling; the other, a police officer. We talked about basketball and, more specifically, the local Philadelphia 76ers.

The discussion was robust and centred on the make-up of the team’s roster. The conversation, however, had quickly descended to patronising jingoism on the cop’s behalf after I had apparently said something that he found difficult to agree with.

‘Now, nothing against Australia,’ the cop said, ‘but this is an American sport.’

He continued in his accusatory tone as he collected his order and made for the door.

‘Do you know what happened thirty years ago?’

‘No,’ I said, familiar with what a rhetorical question was and that any answer I provided would be superfluous.

‘The Sixers went into the Garden and won Game 7,’ he said smugly. ‘I was just trying to figure out how much you knew.’

It wasn’t this last comment, or the venom with which he had said it, that had me hoping he would choke on his cheesesteak; after all, if Officer Know-It-All had simply used his powers of observation he would have assumed I was under the age of thirty and, in fact, born years after 1982.

No, this didn’t worry me. But what had irked me was the ownership he had claimed on behalf of a nation, planting ‘Old Glory’ smack in the sport of basketball, a game that I love to this day. The implications that, given my nationality, I couldn’t contribute to the discussion and have an opinion on the sport. As a straight white male this was new to me. Foreign even.

Albeit drastically watered-down—the cop claiming I was not qualified to talk about something as frivolous as sport based on where I was from—these same attitudes turned out to be scarily foreboding. These attitudes would be espoused by a future president, further silencing the marginalised, preventing them from partaking in public discourse on far more important topics. 

It’s now February 2018. Philadelphia’s coach, Brett Brown, cut his teeth in Australia’s National Basketball League and has previously coached the Australian national team. The Sixer’s best player and lone All-Star for 2018, Joel Embiid, is from Cameroon, or what the United States’ current president would term a ‘shithole’ country.

The team’s backup at shooting guard is a young Frenchman, Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot. Marco Belinelli, the Italian journeyman, recently signed with the team after clearing waivers. Dario Saric, Croatian by birth and by accent, is the team’s versatile and talented power forward. And here’s the kicker: Saric will play in the 2018 Rising Stars Challenge, a showcase of the leagues best first- and second-year players, with teammate and transcendent point guard Ben Simmons, an Australian.

But this globalisation isn’t localised to the Philadelphia team. According to the NBA, at the beginning of this season, there were 108 international players from forty-two different countries and territories. Eight of these players are Australian if you include Kyrie Irving, who was born in Melbourne, which the list does.

Of the original twelve players selected to participate in this year’s All-Star Game, the league’s showcase, five were born overseas including a Latvian Unicorn, who is unfortunately injured and won't participate, and a Slovenian Dragon, a first-time All-Star.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s not like there was a sudden influx of international players. Even at the end of the 2012 season, when the cop had made his statement of basketball being ‘an American sport’, there had been seventy-eight international players from thirty-five countries.

And the world continues to shrink, made smaller and smaller by the internet. Where I had to rely on relatives to mail me VHS tapes of NBA games and All-Star Weekend—we never had pay TV—I can now watch it live or on delay when it pleases thanks to an internet connection and the NBA’s subscription service, League Pass.

The internet has globalised and democratised not just the sport but the best league in the world. The NBA is more visible and accessibility than ever before. The potential exposure of the sport is more far-reaching with kids from remote regions across the world just a click away from the day’s Top 10 Plays.

While the league was once the exclusive domain of Americans, the sport of basketball never was. I don’t write this to gloat, to state that the cop was wrong, only that there is a danger in claiming ownership of something that is so abstract. No one owns the deed to a sport.

Yes, American-born players still dominate in what is an American league. Their feats are unrivalled, amazing even. Basketball will always be central to the American cultural identity, that cannot be argued. But when you consider the sport was invented by a Canadian, that in itself is pretty amazing.