The sport of politics

It is a weird moment in the United States. That’s how I feel today, having recently returned from Europe, where things are also weird…but in a different way.

In the United States, the sensation may be part-effect of two extraordinary weeks of media saturation. The first was a deluge of what brilliant Washington blogger Wonkette calls “Gipperporn,” the 24/7 coverage of the death of Ronald Reagan – a man who, like Spain’s General Franco, is still dead and likely to remain so. During this extraordinary outpouring, Americans had all discussion about their current wars, economic flux, corporate corruption, and the national basketball championship crowded out by foggy and inaccurate reminiscences of a man so distanced from reality that he thought lasers in space could stop nuclear weapons.

The second week brought a barrage of “Bubbaporn.” The former president Bill Clinton, who is still married to his first wife, loves and cares for his child as well as any man alive, and did more for working families than any president since Franklin Roosevelt, was again being pilloried for failing to grace us with details and self-flagellations about what should by all rights be his private life. Clinton’s supporters respond to publication of his memoirs by recalling his charm and balanced governing style, but more audible were the merciless voices of reporters who want to talk about nothing but sex, sex, sex. In this case, Bubbaporn really is porn.

The official line that “unofficially” emanates from this two-week torrent: Reagan made us feel good; Clinton made us feel embarrassed. Most Americans don’t actually conform to the official line; we are far too jaded. Clinton remains a more popular figure as president than Reagan was. But the official line, and the waterfall of unknowing that transmits and recycles it, never changes. Its agents, an army of overexposed and undereducated pundits, consistently render stupid – or at least stupid-sounding – a complex nation of richly varied experiences and opinions.

The weirdness of the moment is compounded by awareness of two other men who can’t seem to catch a break or generate the attention their accomplishments deserve – as if the nostalgia, evasion, and amnesia of Gipperporn and Bubbaporn have overwhelmed our ability to keep their work in perspective.

I refer here to two names less known that they should be, even in America: Larry Brown and Phil Jackson, coaches respectively of the Detroit Pistons and Los Angeles Lakers basketball teams. The teams met in the finals of the National Basketball Association NBA) championships. Jackson’s Lakers were stocked with high-paid superstars like Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. They had Hollywood swagger (and Hollywood scandals). They had bombast. They had experience. They had talent. And they lost.

Brown’s Pistons are working-class, like Detroit itself. Their coach specialises in getting the most out of journeymen, rather than in priming the most talented.

The Pistons’ win should have been the story of the week, if not the year. They stifled their overpaid and overrated opponents. They worked harder, as a team, than any of the individual stars of the Lakers did. Americans should celebrate this team more than we have. Both Clinton fans and Reagan fans could have cheered their triumph. But if we did, no one noticed.

Sports champions often do captivate public attention. But without superstars in the mix we can’t seem to focus well enough. The television tells stories of individuals quite well. But teams and movements get left behind, unexamined and unappreciated.

The focus on stardom also misrepresents the fervent regionalism that actually dominates American sports fandom and thus undermines shallow assumptions of the continuity and cohesion of national identity. There is no “America’s Team” in any sport. The Lakers are not even California’s team!

Americans tend not to feel that their national identity is at stake in sport. Only rarely – the Olympic Games in Greece in August 2004 are an exception – do we think of sport as a “national” event where we engage with other nations. Our baseball teams compete to win a “World Series” in which no teams from (baseball-playing) Japan, Cuba, or Venezuela are invited. And Americans only occasionally choose to invest our emotions nationally in sports in which the rest of the world has a decided advantage. We reluctantly and politely applaud our overachieving men’s soccer team. Yet we go crazy for our women’s squad, knowing that few other nations bother to support women’s soccer like we do.

Meanwhile, a recent trip to Europe involved an encounter with another – even opposite – form of weirdness to the American. There, people seemed to be paying too much attention to sports and not enough to politics.

At the very moment when Europeans were invited to act as responsible citizens of the European Union and vote for their direct representatives in the European parliament, many more of them were fixated on their national teams playing in the quadrennial European (men’s) soccer championship in Portugal. They sure came out to support their national squads. But they somehow neglected to vote. This was clearly bad planning.

The coincidence of the two events vividly revealed the tension in Europe – between its noble, unifying plans and ideals and its historic, national passions. There was little of the serious and sober, the cosmopolitan and high-minded, on the streets of Amsterdam. These were filled with people carrying orange balloons and streamers, while cafes and bars overflowed. The streets of Lisbon, Oporto and other Portuguese cities similarly teemed with fans of the sixteen competing national teams, the efflorescence of modern soccer worship manifest in every rude colour and corporate-sponsor jersey imaginable.

How were Europeans supposed to make sense of the conjunction of political moment (the first elections to the parliament of the enlarged union of twenty-five nations) and sporting tournament? How were they supposed to be at once national fans and European citizens? Well, as the continent-wide low turnouts showed, many preferred to ignore politics and concentrate on the sport. Perhaps only the appointment of French soccer hero Zinedine Zidane himself as president of the European Commission could have won their attention.

America and Europe have sharply contrasting political and sporting cultures. But this constellation of experiences over the last month – Gipperporn, Bubbaporn, the NBA, Europe’s soccer championship and its elections – offer two shared lessons.

The first is confirmed by the extraordinary course and climax of the Portugal event, won by an unfancied, star-free Greek team who rose above the giants of Italy, France, Germany and England to win its first-ever soccer trophy. From Larry Brown’s Detroit Pistons to Oscar Rehhagel’s Greece, success comes to those who work as part of a team, who show loyalty and commitment to something beyond the individual. Teamwork matters.

The second is that sport can be a model for politics. Too often the political scene is reported as if it were a sporting event. But where American basketball and European soccer are concerned in the early summer of 2004, the sporting scene should have been covered – rather, illuminated – as if it were a political event. That way, we would have learned less about sex, lies, and fallen heroes, and more about the world that quiet teamwork could make.