Basketball as a Driver of Globalization (CESH 2024 Presentation)

The below was part of my Committee on European Sport History 2024 Conference presentation, “From Allez-Hop to Alley-Oop: Basketball as a Driver of Globalization.” It is informed by research for Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA, as well as my other projects, including the “Basketball Diplomacy in Africa Oral History Project” I co-directed with Simon Rofe at SOAS University of London pegged to the NBA’s Basketball Africa League, and more.

The sources are diverse: from government and media archives to oral histories and media interviews. But the end argument converges into one finding: that basketball, as a motor of globalization, has created a global identity that by the 2020s isn’t necessarily an “American” one or an “Americanized” identity. Thanks to different types of sports diplomacy this sport has created a global identity that transcends other identifiers and divides. That thanks to basketball’s evolution, today it’s everyone’s game.

Basketball, the first born-global team sport, is unique in this sense for its fueled by identities, lifestyle, fashion, culture, diplomacy, and more thanks to longstanding indigenous roots in societies across the planet that still appreciate an “elite” version of the game in the NBA. Just look at the recent winners of the NBA’s 2023-24 awards. This season’s Most Valuable Player is a Serbian, Nikola Jokic, who took home his third MVP trophy in a category now dominated by international players. Joel Embiid won last year, and before The Joker’s previous accolades in the field, Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmpo won it back-to-back. The last time a U.S. player was named MVP was James Harden in 2018. Defensive Player of the Year accolades went to France’s Rudy Gobert for the fourth time, who is now just the third player ever—alongside Dikembe Mutombo and Ben Wallace—to earn this feat four times; a category that Giannis has also won. And the league’s Rookie of the Year was French alien and unicorn Victor Wembanyama, perhaps the country’s biggest, and best, ambassador to the United States.

But it’s not just the NBA that reflects a global melange of players and identities. FIBA World Cup champions Germany prove that it takes more than star names to win international competitions, while the recent surge of interest in the women’s game, after decades of toiling in the shadows, proves that it isn’t just a U.S. game. At the 2024 March Madness women’s tournament, in which 64 of the best tames from U.S. division one universities competed for the crown, some 16% of roster spots were filled by non-U.S. women. And one of the teams presently vying for the French championship, Paris Basketball, although owned by two Americans, was built on the idea of being a global basketball team, not just a Parisian one or an American implant on French soil.

It’s clear that there’s something super interesting going on within and around the game that makes it stand out.

Invented 1891 in the United States by a Canadian with “family heritage and Scottish upbringing,” as Ross Walker has shown, by 1900 the game was introduced in France, Brazil, China Australia by YMCA educators. Within a decade it was played in Italy, Russia, and elsewhere. 

Listen to French basketball journalist, L’Équipe’s Arnaud Lecomte, on the contested 1972 Olympic Basketball Tournament between the United States and Soviet Union.

Sixty years later the diversity of homegrown basketball cultures made it an ingredient in Cold War soft power cultivation and sports diplomacy by countries like the United States, Soviet Union, China, France, Senegal, and Angola. There were memorable basketball moments that seemingly reinforced national identities via the game, and early FIBA World Championships, now known as World Cups, were an opportunity for different nations to discover each other’s hoops styles.

Basketball reinforced a national identity and broadcast that to the world through the communication, representation, and negotiation of sports diplomacy via national team performance and comportment. But as former FIBA Africa Executive Director Alphonse Bilé noted, in the 1960s it also began to forge a pan-African identity.   

“This creation [of FIBA Africa], which responded to the need to affirm the identity of our countries, provided an area of solidarity and cooperation that allowed us to go beyond cultural and linguistic borders and thus to promote peace, friendship and mutual respect.”

— Alphonse Bilé

Yet, by the late 1960s, increased migration of basketballers between the Americas, Europe, and Africa in particular, began to change things. As these players, men and women both, encountered other nation’s basketball cultures on and off the hardcourt, they engaged in types of sports diplomacy, citizen-to-citizen engagement that helped to seed different tactics, techniques, or approaches to the game.

Take the example of France. The first Americans to mark French basketball in the post-1945 era, Martin Feinberg and Henry Fields who both played with the era’s elite side, Paris Université Club, were well-regarded by the hoops community. Fields himself introduced Bill Russell-style defense to French hardcourts, first with PUC and later with Antibes. But this wasn’t necessarily an ‘Americanization’ of the game, although by the 1970s there were complaints of an ‘American colonization’ of French hardcourts as ever-more U.S. players plied their trade in the hexagone. While the character of French basketball changed—from a “ballet on the court” to a more up-tempo, athletically inclined one—this reflected the cosmopolitanism of the leagues, with players from France, the United States, Europe, and Africa mixing their different styles and cultures.

The changed French game also reflected the evolution of the game more broadly. While Russell was part of the wave of players who introduced a vertical game, literally taking basketball to new heights, there was also increased emphasis on ever-taller players, a type of arms race, if you will. Thus to remain competitive in international competition, France—and other countries—sought out ever-taller players, men and women both.

The 1980s and 1990s changed the game, thanks to the NBA’s efforts to globalize its brand and product. An ‘Americanized’ basketball identity, such as the one fashioned by Michael Jordan and the NBA (LaFeber, 1999), began to spread around the world, amplified by the U.S. Dream Team’s explosion onto the international scene at the 1992 Barcelona Games. Because basketball had a natural market that included lifestyle and community, not just game opportunitiy or television broadcasts. This was thus not just about the style of game, but everything that surrounded it: fashion, sneaker culture, music—specifically hip-hop and rap, movies, artwork, graffiti, language, and more.

That had a profound impact on kids worldwide who absorbed what they saw and sought to imitate it. While there was a certain U.S. accent to the game and culture that surrounded it in the 1980s and early 1990s around the world, non-U.S. players still brought a country-specific approach to their game in the United States, such as France’s Paoline Ekambi, Katia Foucade, Isabelle Fijalkowski.

Then a funny thing happened: as the Cold War ended, more international players entered the NBA. These international players weren’t just All-Stars and MVPs, but most of them were rank and file team players. And they began to transform the NBA thorugh their technical sports diplomacy exchanges. It’s there in the culture, too, thanks to sports diplomacy’s cultural exchanges.

In 2022, FIBA celebrated its 90th anniversary with 90 clutch moments in the game’s history. While some of those are tied to the United States, the majority center on basketball’s global story. It’s just one step to help recenter the narrative among those not intimately involved in the game. 

These are just a few examples for how basketball has forged a more global identity. At the end of the day, I’d argue that this isn’t truly an Americanization of basketball; instead it is something more complex. Thanks to generations of nonofficial sports diplomacy, basketball became a global entity, a global identity, and everyone’s game.