The below is an excerpt from the similarly-titled presentation given at the World Congress on Sports Diplomacy in Donostia-San Sebastian, June 29, 2023.
The 2023 NBA Draft was historic by many measures, from its French accent to its overall international flair. This year, 12 international players from eight countries were inaugurated into the NBA brotherhood, one more notch in the larger, longer trend of a league transformed by a global influx.
Today, the NBA sports a very international labor force. Nearly one in three players last season were born and trained overseas, and those who dominate the league as All-Stars and MVPs now have names like Giannis, Luka, Nikola, and Joel. Many in the U.S. media point to how the 1992 US Dream Team unleashed this trend; at that time there were just 21 international players from 18 countries in the league. While that was an accelerant, the fact is that basketball was a global sport prior to 1992, with its own local indigenous cultures. So unlike other U.S.-affiliated sports leagues, the NBA was able to build upon long-established hoops cultures.
As a result, basketball is uniquely primed for twenty-first century sports diplomacy. It can—and often does—lead the way thanks to several realities.
First, basketball is the world’s first born-global team sport, thus sports diplomacy is baked into its DNA. Invented within the United States in 1891 by Canadian-born educator James Naismith, two years later his student, Melvin Rideout, introduced basketball to the European continent when the first game was played on December 27, 1893 in Paris at the rue de Trévise YMCA, today the oldest basketball court.
This is our earliest known example of informal basketball diplomacy. And it’s through informal basketball diplomacy that the game spread in less than a decade. In 1894 it reached Brazil; by 1895 some of the open ports in China; and by 1897, Australia.
During the First World War, the game grew and democratized. Post-1919, basketball was used to heal bodies, strengthen citizens, and for “education” in the larger sense. In some countries, like in France, it was used as an educative tool. According to Larousse dictionary, “education” can mean the “Action of educating, training, instructing someone; how to deliver this training” or “Knowledge and practice of good manners, customs of society; good manners.” Thus, this basis reflected Naismith’s original ethos for creating the game: as an educative tool for his students.
For more on the China-France 1966 example, read the author’s write-up for the LA Review of Books here.
Second, after 1945, basketball took on new dimensions in sports diplomacy. It was harnessed by states in formal sports diplomacy. Kevin B. Witherspoon’s work on the US-USSR basketball exchanges of the 1950s and 1960s details how it was used to try to defuse early Cold War tensions. In Summer 1966, France and the People’s Republic of China used basketball diplomacy to cement their 1964 establishment of diplomatic relations as Les Tricolores (as Les Bleus were then known) became one of the first Western national basketball teams to visit mainland China after 1949. Countries such as Senegal after 1960 used basketball as a way to foster new national identity and assert itself on the international stage in the post-colonial era.
Third, basketball’s ability to serve as a function of informal sports diplomacy increased significantly with the increased ease of player movement in the 1960s. Some examples include the U.S. players and coaches who toured and played abroad thanks to agent Jim McGregor, early international players in the NCAA and NBA like Jean-Claude Lefebvre (France), Hakeem Olajuwon (Nigeria), and Dikembe Mutombo (Congo).
Fourth, there were similar trends within women’s basketball, too, because unlike football, women’s basketball was never banned. In fact, in some societies, such as France, basketball was long considered an ideal sport for women. There were women’s championships, albeit at the amateur or quasi-professional level, and by the 1980s U.S. women began to compete in those leagues. Women like U.S. Basketball Hall of Famer Denise Curry, who inspired one of her French teammates’ sons (he later became the first Frenchman to play in the NBA).
The 1972 passage of Title IX legislation in the United States created sports opportunities for women within the university sports system and after the NCAA tookover the women’s collegiate basketball championship in 1982, new pathways for international players were carved out. This meant that more women from overseas now had an opportunity to live, play, and study in the United States thanks to Title IX-backed sports scholarships. Women like Paoline Ekambi, the first Frenchwoman to play NCAA Division One ball on scholarship.
Read more from Amadou Gallo Fall’s “Basketball Diplomacy in Africa Oral History Project” transcript here.
That’s why basketball is primed for twenty-first century sports diplomacy: it is global, holistic, created and still used as an “educative” tool, particularly in the ways that the game’s players and stakeholders learn from each other through informal people-to-people cultural, technical, and knowledge exchanges.
Read more from Syra Sylla’s “Basketball Diplomacy in Africa Oral History Project” transcript here.
Basketball diplomacy is also being used creatively in a variety of different ways and forms across the African continent, as highlighted through examples from the “Basketball Diplomacy in Africa Oral History Project.”
What’s more, informal basketball diplomacy is creating ripple effects for formal sports diplomacy. National teams worldwide have gotten far more competitive with Teams USA in FIBA and Olympic competition, which helps to explain why France is one of the few that has beat its U.S. counterpart in those competitions. It’s a great thing that the world’s got game for it makes it fare more competitive, exciting, and can inspire new generations to create their own hoop dreams.
You can read more about what this looked like for the France-United States-Francophone Africa example in Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA, due September 7 via Bloomsbury Publishing.
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