EuroBasket: A Continent of Cagers
I originally wrote “A Continent of Cagers” for The All-Rounder (RIP), a publication created by Dr. Bruce Berglund to marry scholarly insight and analysis to present-day sports. While the site ceased publication several years ago, you can learn more about that venture here.
Book Reviewed: Le Continent basket: L’Europe et le basket-ball au XXe siècle Fabien Archambault, Loïc Artiaga et Gérard Bosc (dir.) Brussels: PIE Peter Lang, 2015
While you were on vacation, the basketball world was hard at work. Across the globe, FIBA tournaments were played or prepared for as countries vie for a trip to next summer’s Rio Games. Olympic host Brazil automatically qualified, and the United States earned its berth with a gold medal win last summer at the FIBA World Cup. Nigeria and Australia, champions of their regional competitions, secured their places last month, and Asia’s tournament will commence in late September. For now, however, all eyes are on Europe where the European Championship, EuroBasket, kicks off September 5.
Basketball, born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891, is one of the few American team sports played across the globe in any significant fashion, particularly in Europe. Despite the rich fields of scholarship surrounding the Olympic movement and football, at the transnational level basketball is typically given short shift—until now. In time to help us better understand the socio-cultural and political development of the sport and EuroBasket is a new work, Le Continent basket: L’Europe et le basket-ball au XXe siècle (The Basketball Continent: Europe and Basketball in the Twentieth Century) under the direction of Fabien Archambault, Loïc Artiaga, and Gérard Bosc.
The evolution of the European game is testament to the turbulent twentieth century, perhaps more so than football. As the authors in The Basketball Continent attest, Europe’s hoops division was indeed geographic, but not along the typical East-West axis of the Cold War that traditionally dominates Western (especially, American) concepts of sport. Instead, the holistic portrait of Europe that emerges in this compilation is one split by influences, not ideology, by nation-specific and transnational considerations and not necessarily a clash between capitalism versus communism. While the stories are mostly sculpted by larger actors (federations, governments) or factors (war), The Basketball Continent reminds us that individuals can also drive the game.
Well before 1945, Europe was divided hoops-wise. As Sabine Chavinier-Réla explains in “The Rules of French Basketball in the Interwar Years, Between National and Continental Dimension,” the divide was old versus new. The first countries to start shooting hoops, France, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal, did so shortly after the sport’s invention. The rest (the Baltic States, Balkans, Netherlands, Italy, Greece, and Central Europe) were not introduced to the sport until the First World War. These latecomers received their first taste of basketball from Americans—U.S. doughboys, the YMCA, or the American Red Cross—or emigres who returned in the aftermath of the war. For Chavinier-Réla, basketball’s bipolarization was revealed through its Interwar development. From 1919 until 1939, the two Europes of basketball developed different systems, styles, and strictures. While the rules of the French game were at first imposed across Europe, they were ‘Americanized’ during the 1930s as the game was taken up by more countries who played per U.S. regulations. Thus the need to codify the game across national borders gained greater urgency.
By the 1930s, most European countries sported basketball leagues, clubs, and national teams, which provoked its international organization. Loïc Artiaga picks up the thread of Interwar development in “Power Games in the Early Days of the International Basketball Federation.” The 1932 creation of FIBA (International Basketball Federation, Fédération International de Basketball) placed the sport firmly within the globalizing athletic infrastructure. Artiaga rightly views this as an important step to secure basketball’s legitimacy. It also conferred respect. Inclusion in the Olympic Games starting with Berlin 1936 further cemented the orange ball’s future.
Concurrently, basketball gained independence from federations under which it was first placed, usually athleticism or handball. The creation of FIBA thus strengthened the cause for dedicated basketball federations. Artiaga highlights that FIBA by the Second World War had roughly 40 members, only a few less than FIFA, a strong statement about basketball’s rapid growth.
Another indication of growth was the advent of basketball exchanges. Julien Gueslin’s examination of 1930s and 1950s Franco-Baltic games, “When the Small Become Masters,” articulates how basketball became a sign of national vitality and strength. It was a sport where smaller countries could make a name for themselves. For Latvia and Lithuania, he argues, victories on the court cultivated recognition at the international level. Baltic basketballers were thus very much sports diplomats.
Here, the bipolarization of European basketball comes to the forefront. The Baltic States of the late 1930s, devotees to the American-style rules and way of play, were hoops-swooshing successes. Results from the earliest EuroBasket tournaments testify to their abilities: Latvia won the first European Championship in May 1935, Lithuania won the 1937 and 1939 competitions, and Latvia garnered second place in the last pre-war tourney. The ties and networks created between French and Baltic basketball clubs were vital escape routes after 1945 as many Balts were recruited to coach or train French clubs. Those who remained powered the USSR teams of the postwar period.
Development of the women’s game occurred simultaneously across most of Europe, for in many countries, basketball was perceived primarily as a girls’ sport. As Davia Majauskieine, Vilma Cingiene, and Mindaugas Bobikas note in “Characteristic Traits in the Evolution of Female Basketball in Lithuania (1920-1940),” it was seen as an aesthetically pleasing endeavor, well suited for women as it exercised all parts of the body—but not too vigorously. The authors examine the story of basketball pioneer Elena Kubiliunaite-Garbaciauskiene, the first woman to introduce and play hoops in Lithuania as well as facilitate its spread through her translations of the YMCA’s rule book. Through her story, they demonstrate the power of an individual to sow the seed of sport.
It is unfortunate that there are not more chapters in The Basketball Continent devoted entirely to the women’s game. The Lithuanian context, however, speaks to the near-parity that existed in men’s and women’s basketball in the first half of the century. An indication of strength was the first women’s European Championship in 1938. In contrast, the men’s football European Championship began in 1960 and the women’s in 1984. The fact that the Soviet Union insisted in the early 1950s that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) create a women’s Olympic basketball tournament is another poignant illustration of the place of the women’s game. As the editors point out, basketball became such a Cold War clash because both men and women played, with near parity.
The battle was waged at all levels, including EuroBasket. The men’s tournament resumed in 1946 in an effort to draw the Continent together again after years of war and destruction. The Soviet Union joined EuroBasket—and won—in 1947. Aside from the 1949 tourney, the USSR medaled at each iteration of the competition until 1991, an exceptional feat given the sport’s slow incursion in Russian and early Soviet life.
Basketball first made its way to Tsarist Russia in 1908 thanks to an American YMCA gymnastics coach, Robert Edelman tells us in “From the Revolutionary Dream to the Dream Team.” As in so many other European countries, the sport remained a cloistered endeavor, played by the bourgeoisie who could afford the gymnasium fees to access the courts. It remained a marginalized sport in early Soviet society, a victim of football, a sport prized by the working class and thus ‘the people’s sport’ within ‘the people’s state.’ Conversely, women’s basketball was quite popular in several of the republics. For Edelman, one of the virtues of Soviet basketball was that the game was played by both sexes, by nearly every nationality, and in unique styles.
Basketball’s perception and reception in Russia and Soviet mirrored that of most other parts of Europe. The similarities speak to the sport’s ability to transcend geographic, gender, class, and ideological divides. The sport’s use within the Cold War context is a statement not of an East-West transom, but of a Continent-wide use of basketball.
In some cases, basketball helped forge unity for polyglot states. Loic Trégourès provides a fascinating contrast to the Soviet ‘red machine’ in “A Yugoslav Model?” As elsewhere, basketball was not popular in Yugoslavia until the Second World War. Thanks to its popularity amongst Tito partisans and the army, basketball emerged post-war as a unifier of the country’s peoples. For Trégourès, the Yugoslav game’s emphasis on team spirit, multi-ethnic player base, and creativity based on American-style play and rules, helped produce strong teams in the 1960s and beyond. So did the regime’s commitment to youth development.
The Yugoslav model was to build basketballers from the ground up, encouraged through a growing hoops culture and bolstered by national side and club wins, titles, and trophies. Others jump-started their basketball programs before building systems, as Sylvain Dufraisse articulates in “Soviets, Finalists at Helsinki (1952).” The USSR silver medal at the 1952 Games was the result of several factors, Dufraisse notes, though most immediately the absorption of Baltic players into the national team after 1940. The win served notice of Soviet investment and determination to build competitive players after the Soviet’s 1948 decision to strive towards athletic dominance. Integration of USSR teams into European tournaments and exchanges enabled the Soviet game to improve through observation of different styles of play, tactics, and techniques of East and West European opponents. Basketball was thus a multifaceted tool that encouraged a pan-European spirit in a variety of ways.
The USSR clashed with the United States at the 1972 Munich Games, one of the more memorable basketball battles. As Fabien Arhambault writes in “Three Seconds of the Cold War,” the three seconds put back on the clock at the end of that gold medal game, in which Team USA thought they initially won, enabled the USSR to score the game-winning basket. The contested outcome was heavily mediatized, Archambault argues, added to cultural antagonism between the two superpowers, and provided a long-reaching cast over other Cold War sports skirmishes—a testament that basketball was at times more than just a game.
Of the different European attempts to build basketball players, the one without much success was that of Nazi Germany. In Hans-Dieter Krebs’ “French-German Relations During the Third Reich” one learns, surprisingly, that the first basketball games in Germany occurred in 1932. A late-comer to the sport, the Third Reich sought to improve play through a series of sports exchanges in the final prewar years, particularly across the Rhine. The regime hoped to reap a hoops dividend upon absorption of Alsace in 1940. Things were promising at first, for Alsace was a pre-war basketball powerhouse and two French Alsatian internationals, Charles Hemmerlin and Eugène Ronner, opted to play for the German national team. Unlike the Soviet Union after annexation of the Baltic States, however, the Third Reich did not see a bump in its basketball prowess.
Nothing of a collaborator nature could be said about French basketball in the post-1945 era in which its game and players were remade. According to Gérard Bosc’s “Basketball in France,” French hoops has always faced a struggle. At first, it was the fight to gain popularity. Then, in the Interwar years, it was the quest to fight increased isolation of the French style of play (ripopo) in face of the American-style game played elsewhere on the Continent. After 1945, the French incorporated more American elements as they struggled to improve. They resisted then acquiesced, to a certain degree, to the ‘mercenary American players’ who entered French leagues in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Elsewhere Bosc has coined this incursion the ‘American colonization of French basketball.’ While contentious at the time, it is widely acknowledged that American players helped revive the French game and elevated its competitiveness.
The Cold War demonstrated that basketball divides existed in how to create hoops cultures and players rather than between how the game was used or viewed. It also created national basketball myths, many of which are still in evidence today, particularly in Europe’s Mediterranean basin. The Basketball Continent’s last several contributors show the power of sports legends and their influence, whether an individual, team, or league.
Juan Antonio Simón’s “The Man of the Shadow” illustrates how Raimundo Saporta, a French-Spaniard banker who moonlighted as a basketball official left his mark. In the immediate post-1945 period, Spain was isolated diplomatically due to the country’s questionable neutrality during the war. This extended to Spanish hoops which. Saporta changed this beginning in the 1950s as he brought his nation’s players into the European fold. He helped create the European Cup, and paved the way for Spanish clubs to play Soviet ones in the competition, a near miracle in an era before Madrid and Moscow established diplomatic relations.
In Greece, as Lampros Flitouris argues in “Basketball in Greece,” the sport long associated with the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie, Thessaloniki’s Jewish community, and the American way of life was jolted by the regime’s 1970s commitment to youth development. The investment paid dividends in the 1980s when Greek clubs started to dominate internationally. The national team’s first-ever appearance at the 1986 World Championship (now World Cup) stoked interest and pride, but its EuroBasket gold medal win the following year took the dynamic to a totally new dynamic. Flitouris points out that the victory on such a large scale stimulated Greek pride, a first of its kind for basketball, and was a barometer of national vigor. Courts filled with kids who wanted to emulate their new basketball heroes and thus fed the myth of Greek hoops prowess.
For Italy, the game’s maturation was intimately tied to its association with the American way of life. As Saverio Battente and Tito Menzani argue in “Uncle Sam in the Country of Pulcinella,” basketball was a battle ground for different socio-political currents. Oddly, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) strongly supported the game, despite its close taint of the capitalism espoused by the United States, for the Italian clergy embraced calcio and basketball was the natural antithesis. Yet, the sport was also embraced by those who wished to emulate American popular culture and its emphasis on self-help. By the 1980s, many elements of the NBA’s court culture, such as the game as entertainment factor and the introduction of pompom girls, were adopted into Italian leagues thus fusing the American league’s myth with the Italian game.
The Basketball Continent’s explanations of the rise of today’s European basketball powerhouses owes much to archival collections. Daniel Champsaur bridges the transom between past and future when he discusses “Digitization of Basket-Ball Magazine.” Through a public-private partnership between the French Basketball Federation, the Museum of Basketball, and the National Library of France begun in 2009, the entire archival catalogue of Basket-Ball, the federation’s official publication, was made available online through the Gallica.fr portal. Champsaur describes this tremendous accomplishment, important on many levels for enabling researchers access to the changing perspectives and attitudes of the federation—and the sport’s place within France—from 1933 through 1993. If other sports federations could engage in something similar to the FFBB/BNF’s golden standard, the field would be exponentially enriched.
With EuroBasket 2015 underway across four countries—a first for the tournament—the basketballing histories of Europe East and West, North and South, unfolds on the courts before our very eyes. The Basketball Continent reinforces how an understanding of history and twentieth century socio-cultural and political changes significantly shape and sculpt today’s sporting world. In the past several years, France (2013) and Spain (2011, 2009)—two of Europe’s original basketball nations—have dominated the tournament. Who will make history next and how will it build their hoops dreams?
Author’s Note: “A Continent of Cagers” was originally published September 11, 2015 in The All-Rounder.
Thank you Bruce Berglund for being a fantastic editor of this piece! -lsk