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.
Hello, and happy new year! May yours be merry and bright. I usually take the first week of the year to take stock of how the “best of” the past year puts greater focus into events of the coming one.Thus, here’s my watch list for the first half of the year. They’re less predictions and more things to take note of…though, if I’m honest, should things work out, I hope you give me some credit for my foresight!
Your NBA team is more global than you think, and there's a reason why (hint: predates the NBA's international expansion). Here's my recent piece for the Washington Post's Made By History series: "How the NBA Went Global."
The storyline is familiar to many of us: the first-ever basketball match was played on December 21, 1891, in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was a game invented by YMCA educator James Naismith as a means to keep his students – many of them young men – occupied during the more snow-bound months of winter. But less familiar is how the sport quickly spread around the world.
I recently wrote a paper for the #GoldenGamesNUS sports diplomacy conference on the three times the French men’s basketball team played in China (1966, 1980, and 2006). The subject may seem odd to the casual eye, but these countries boast the oldest hoops traditions outside of North America, dating to 1893 (France) and 1895 (China). As it turned out, “La France en Chine: The Power of Basketball Diplomacy” is one of the more fun, quirky papers I’ve written and the challenges involved in stitching it together are instructive on many levels.
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.
