It’s been a tough week without that je ne sais quoi magic that the Paris 2024 Games conferred. here are a few things I’ll integrate into my global communications, sports diplomacy, and teaching work this fall.
One hundred thirty years ago, the first basketball game played outside North America was held in Paris, France, the first step in a global movement recently celebrated with World Basketball Day—one that Philadelphia now has a unique tie into thanks to its very own Batman, the 76ers’ French swingman Nicolas Batum.
Even though baseball is the dominant sport in Taiwan and its neighbors, basketball offers up interesting lessons in how sports diplomacy can be used to promote greater gender equality.
That’s a bit of a provocative question, but one that lent itself well to a workshop I co-directed with Dr. J Simon Rofe last week at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London.
Hello there, and welcome! I’m glad you stopped by.
This space is designed as a general catch-all for my ideas and what inspires me across the international sports-, history-, and communications worlds.
Why focus on these three “hats”? Many people silo these off into individual industries. But in fact, from my professional experiences as well as what I’ve learned in the field, today’s sports, communications, and history worlds are in fact intricately intertwined.
Ahead of the NBA Draft 2023, learn more about the intergenerational story told in Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA for, contrary to some media analysis, over the past 25+ years France has become a main pipeline for talent into the North American leagues. This didn’t happen overnight, nor is it a “new” phenomenon this year.
This year’s NBA Finals are underway, along with the end-of-season accolades, both of which sport a very global face for today’s NBA workforce is truly international. By January 2023, nearly one in three players were born outside of the United States. It’s a trend that accelerated significantly as the first generation inspired by the U.S. Dream team crafted careers in the NBA and showed kids back home how to spin hoop dreams into reality.
Earlier this month I had the honor to speak about basketball as part of a sports diplomacy panel at the “Using Sport as Diplomacy” conference, a two-day seminar rife with lessons learned from meeting and exchanging with international colleagues from Asia, North America, and Europe. Surprisingly, in a land where baseball reigns supreme, there were several unexpected sports diplomacy lessons through the basketball hoop.
France has already won at the FIFA World Cup, regardless of what happens on the pitch, for their deep run in this year's tournament reinforces the approach towards formation à la française, on producing the best quality players, not the most number of players, that has enabled this country of 67.5 million to dominate the football diplomacy stage.
One of the things I’m greatly encouraged by is how the way we tell the stories about women’s sports is evolving. And while much of this rests on how societies are rethinking the role, import, and investment in women’s sports, it’s also highly dependent upon access: to present-day sources but also, vitally, to past accounts, statistics, and more.
How we communicate the story pertaining to issues and events in global sport shapes popular memory and sporting myths. Thus sports industry professionals, executives, investors, and the media should think more intentionally about how the ways that they tell their stories will shape, constructively or negatively, the larger narrative.
