In the Footsteps of Lafayette
The annual extravaganza kicks-off tonight with the Rising Stars Challenge where New York Knicks’ Frank Ntilikina will make his debut with Team World. It’s yet another ‘first’ for the 19-year old rookie Frenchman, who is starting to settle in to the league—helped possibly by the echoes of French in the locker room (teammates Joakim Noah and Emmanuel Mudiay are both fluent). Like generations of other ‘Frenchies’ in the NBA (who have similarly arrived more or less fluent in English), Ntilikina still has an aura of starry-eyed optimism surrounding his desire to succeed.
Welcome to Pyeongchang
As the kick-off to the Pyeongchang Games gets underway, I revisited a post I wrote for DipNote, the U.S. Department of State's blog, on the evolution of the Winter Games. Can you guess when the first functional snow-making technology appeared?
The Power of Sports: Super Bowl Edition
As you’re getting ready for today’s Super Bowl spectacle, it’s a good time to recall that #EverythingHasAHistory. Including American football which, as Ben Halls at VICE Sports reminds us, is a much closer cousin to rugby than many Americans likely realize. In fact, the changes that occurred as American football developed in the late nineteenth century leads to one of the earliest, surprising, and fascinating stories of transatlantic influences in French sport.
Bridging Cultures One Ski At A Time
Women from North and South Korea will compete together as a unified ice hockey team at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games, the latest example of sport’s power to unite. It’s a triumph for sports diplomacy, an illustration of how people can learn and better understand each other despite divisions through people-to-people interactions. And while everyone will be watching the team, for many other elite athletes, sports bridges cultures on a daily basis.
What I'm Watching 2018
Hello, and happy new year! May yours be merry and bright. I usually take the first week of the year to take stock of how the “best of” the past year puts greater focus into events of the coming one.Thus, here’s my watch list for the first half of the year. They’re less predictions and more things to take note of…though, if I’m honest, should things work out, I hope you give me some credit for my foresight!
How the NBA Went Global
Your NBA team is more global than you think, and there's a reason why (hint: predates the NBA's international expansion). Here's my recent piece for the Washington Post's Made By History series: "How the NBA Went Global."
Happy Birthday, Basketball
The storyline is familiar to many of us: the first-ever basketball match was played on December 21, 1891, in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was a game invented by YMCA educator James Naismith as a means to keep his students – many of them young men – occupied during the more snow-bound months of winter. But less familiar is how the sport quickly spread around the world.
Space and Time in the Sports Continuum
Space and time. These two words aren’t frequently associated with sports, although they impact a historian’s work and influence every communications pro’s tool box. Yet, as a sports writer and historian, I’m thinking a lot about space and time in the sports continuum.
French Basketball in China & Phantom Documents
I recently wrote a paper for the #GoldenGamesNUS sports diplomacy conference on the three times the French men’s basketball team played in China (1966, 1980, and 2006). The subject may seem odd to the casual eye, but these countries boast the oldest hoops traditions outside of North America, dating to 1893 (France) and 1895 (China). As it turned out, “La France en Chine: The Power of Basketball Diplomacy” is one of the more fun, quirky papers I’ve written and the challenges involved in stitching it together are instructive on many levels.
Athlete Activism in Context
Some of my thoughts on today's athlete activism and why it's so different this time around, compared to earlier eras, as presented at the Tignes #SportsValues conference on behalf of Sport & Démocratie November 26-27, 2017.