The below is derived form my recent “Through the Hoop: Lessons from Basketball Diplomacy” presentation at the “Using Sport as Diplomacy: Taiwan and the United States Jointly Build an Asia-Pacific Sports Peaceful Exchange Platform” conference, which sought to illuminate the ways that different types of sports diplomacy can work to promote greater gender equality.
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.
Basketball is well suited for examination through the sports diplomacy lens for several reasons. It is what I call the first “born-global” sport, invented by a Canadian educator in the United States and rapidly disseminated to the far corners of the globe, played in such diverse places as France, Brazil, China, and Australia mere years after the first game was played in 1891. Thus, many countries had their own indigenous basketball cultures and reference points long before Michael Jordan and the NBA burst onto the scene in the 1980s and 1990s.
Moreover, basketball has always been about more than just a game. Basketball was long associated with education and health thanks to its DNA, and in many societies did not suffer the same class associations as other global sports of the era, such as football soccer or rugby. It was a game played by men and women alike, one in which female players did not suffer the same negative stereotypes, taboos, and bans they confronted in other sports deemed too violent, ‘masculine,’ or ‘vulgar’ for women to play. And it could be played indoors or outdoors, with far fewer people needed than for other team sports. It was thus easier for basketball sides to travel internationally, once they began to do so for exhibits and competitions, and afforded relatively accessible opportunities for player mobility.
Basketball was one of the milieus of Cold War sports diplomacy:
Before the classic US-USSR clashes on Olympic hardcourts, both countries engaged in basketball exchanges between women’s and men’s teams, as the work of Kevin Witherspoon details.
France and the People’s Republic of China engaged in basketball diplomacy in 1966 to reinforce the recent establishment of diplomatic relations between Paris and Beijing. Here is a behind-the-scenes look as to what it was like for some of those players.
Newly independent countries such as Senegal, used their FIBA African Championship dominance to forge national identity, soft power influence, and enhance legitimacy within the international order.
I would argue that, as the concept of who engages in sports diplomacy has become more diffuse in the twenty-first century, basketball leads the way. It showcases how sports diplomacy can be a tool, framework, strategy, and storytelling mechanism. Particularly with regards to gender equality.
It is helpful that since 2019, FIBA has made women in basketball a strategic priority across several key areas: increasing female player participation; developing and leveraging female coaching and technical expertise; maximizing female competitions in 5X5 and 3X3; increase the number of fans consuming women’s football; increasing gender diversity in NFs and FIBA elected bodies; and increasing gender diversity within FIBA itself.
Take the example of Franco-American basketball diplomacy. My forthcoming book, Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA examines the question of how and why France became a major labor pipeline into these professional American leagues.
At the start of the 2022-23 NBA season, forty-one Frenchman had played in the league, the most of any non-North American country all-time; the numbers of Frenchwomen in the WNBA are smaller as that league has just a fraction of the number of franchises as its male counterpart. However, adjusted for this differential, France has sent roughly the same percentage of players all-time to the WNBA as to the NBA. Last month, a record-setting three Frenchwomen were drafted by the WNBA, and next month the number one NBA draft prospect is a nineteen-year-old French unicorn, Victor Wembanyama.
The answer to my original research question is multifaceted. But at its heart, one of the main reasons is that generations of informal sports diplomacy exchanges between French, Americans, and francophone Africans fomented a variety of cultural, technical, and knowledge transfer that helped make the country a basketball breeding ground.
Even more interesting is the finding that this “basketball empire” owes as much to women’s basketball and women in basketball as to the men’s side. The first French player to complete four years of Division One NCAA basketball on scholarship was female, Katia Foucade; so were the first French to play professionally in the United States for Isabelle Fijalkowski and Laure Savasta opened the WNBA’s maiden season in June 1997, several months before Tariq Abdul-Wahad became the first Frenchman in the NBA that October.
When asked what about their U.S. experiences they learned and imparted to their Team France colleagues, both Foucade and Fijalkowski cited different aspects. For Foucade, it was belief in a team’s ability, regardless of the opponent.
“The thing I learned in the States is that anyone is as good as anyone else, even if on paper it shows that the other team is better. It doesn’t matter when the ball goes up in the air. It’s only at the end of the game that we’ll see who’s the best.” –Katia Foucade
For Fijalkowski, the NCAA experience strengthened her game but she was also impressed by the fact that entire coaching staffs were composed of female coaches, something that was more rare back home at the time.
Both players transmitted knowledge and understanding to their American teammates, too, helping them to better understand modern France. They were both part of their university’s starting five, with Foucade as three-time co-captain, and did their best to represent that Frenchwomen can hoop.
Fellow countryman Abdul-Wahad also played in the NCAA, first with the University of Michigan and then with San Jose State before drafted by the Sacramento Kings. Born Olivier Saint-Jean in the greater Parisian region, Tariq grew up in the heart of women’s basketball for his mother played. As a boy he was a constant presence at her practices and games, influenced by her teammates, who he remembered as “hard nosed winners”' like American legend Denise Curry, his first basketball idol. His early understanding that playing basketball could be done at a high level was when his mother traveled to Siberia to compete in a continental European club competition, a lesson in the hard work ethic required to be successful in the game.
You can read more about their stories in Basketball Empire, out this September, as well as on the FranceAndUS project site (www.FranceUSsports.com). But basketball diplomacy can be instructive in other ways.
Part of the Basketball Empire story pulls from the “Basketball Diplomacy Africa” Oral History project that I co-directed, pegged to the NBA’s Basketball Africa League but taking a wider approach. That archive consists of nearly 20 oral history testimonies from different stakeholders in African basketball, from NBA officials to grassroots organizers and those in between. One of the areas of inquiry was on how basketball could be a tool to promote gender equality in different parts of the continent. The transcripts are anecdotal and certainly not all-encompassing, nor can they speak for all of Africa, which is vast and diverse. But examination of the francophone and lusophone examples provide further insights.
Take the example of Senegal. Amadou Gallo Fall, President of the NBA’s Basketball Africa League, grew up in the 1960s and 1970s when the country’s women’s team dominated continental competition. That left a lasting impression. “It was our women’s national basketball team that was a big source of inspiration in terms of team sports in Africa,” he testified. “I used to know the names of all those ladies on the team through listening to national radio broadcasts. Those names remain legendary to this day.”
Basketball journalist, communications professional, and grassroots organizer Syra Sylla was born in France but witnessed first-hand the game’s power and potential for women and girls in her parents’ home region in Ferlo, Senegal. Sylla noted that basketball was played by both men and women, boys and girls, in the country. “It’s for everybody,” she said.
Several years ago, she noticed that her parents’ village had four basketball courts but that nobody used them; so, she taught the girls there how to play and later organized donations of sneakers and other game gear so that they could play more properly shod and clothed. She relayed:
“I think basketball empowers girls there, because now they have a sport to play and they don’t feel that their only role is to cook and educate their children. Now with sports, and basketball in particular, it can feel like they are something else, not only housekeepers.”
Amadou and Syra integrate these formative experiences, influences, and lessons into their present-day sports diplomacy work. For Amadou, as head of The BAL, a men’s professional basketball league, he’s instituted several initiatives to promote and advance women in basketball, helping to transfer his home country’s culture of women’s basketball to other African countries. A small sampling includes: the BAL4Her initiative, focused on gender equality education and advocacy; and the BAL welcomed the first female coach in any NBA-affiliated team last year when Australian Liz Mills took over as head coach for AS Salé (you can catch her with Abidjan Basket Club Fighters in The BAL’s final phase later this month). In communicating, representing, and negotiating through these and other measures, including promotion of women in basketball, Amadou and The BAL engage sports diplomacy for gender equality.
Syra, for her part, operates in a unique space as a Frenchwoman with a double cultural heritage rooted in Senegal, representing, communicating, and negotiating about women’s basketball, women in basketball, and how the game can help promote greater equality for all.
These examples are all examples of what informal sports diplomacy can look like, the power of individual citizens, and how basketball diplomacy can promote greater gender equality.
Importantly, it isn’t just about the cultural exchange that occurs in people-to-people exchanges, but also the technical and knowledge transfer that results. We can extrapolate a few lessons about informal sports diplomacy that can be applicable here in Taiwan and Asia more generally, for basketball, baseball and other disciplines:
Role models matter; when you normalize women playing sports (any sport, any level), its easier for kids, boys and girls both, to aspire to play.
Access and opportunity to play sports are vital.
It is important to storytell and communicate about and through sports diplomacy, particularly how it can foster and promote greater gender equality. Specifically, it necessitates applying the sports diplomacy framework to make the implicit more explicit. All of the examples I discussed would likely be covered in the press, perhaps as feature stories or as part of a coming-of-age/youth experience story. But when you tell the story as one of sports diplomacy, its larger importance instantly comes into focus.
Thus my challenge to you: how might we extrapolate these lessons and apply them to baseball? Or a Taiwan-specific context? Thank you.
