ONE OF MY childhood cricket heroes was “Goofy” Lawrence, an honest South African fast bowler who played five test matches in the early 1960s, and should have played more. The funny thing, however, is that Goofy wasn’t South African at all, but a citizen of what is now Zimbabwe and was then Rhodesia, a quite different country, but which in those days was simply annexed by South Africa for cricketing purposes.
When Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party won an overwhelming victory in Zimbabwe’s first independence election in February 1980, the country’s cricketers were perturbed. They asked if this meant they weren’t part of South Africa anymore and would have to stop playing in its domestic Currie Cup competition.
It was an absurd enquiry. The apartheid South African state was then at the height of its international isolation, not to mention that many of the largely white cricket team had been fighting Mugabe in a bloody civil war for the past few years. Mugabe explained to the cricketers that there was no way that they could carry on as before. But then—showing a proper sense of priorities for a lifelong cricket fan—he gave them a special dispensation to play out the last matches of that Currie Cup season.
The historical incorporation of Rhodesia into the South African cricket team isn’t an isolated case. There are a surprising number of sporting countries that aren’t in the United Nations. Sporting nations and political nations don’t always line up together. This mismatch offers a number of insights into the basis of nationhood.
We tend to take political states for granted, assuming that their boundaries were laid down by natural divisions long ago. But in truth many recognized states are arbitrary and relatively recent constructions, shaped by the outcome of diplomatic negotiations, or by the happenstantial location of armies when a truce is declared. Sometimes the arbitrariness of existing states is exposed by sudden realignments, as when the end of the Cold War precipitated the reunification of Germany and the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. But in other cases the potential for political repositioning remains implicit in sporting affiliations. In this chapter, we will look at a range of national teams that demand loyalty to countries that don’t appear on the official map of nations, from Hong Kong and the West Indies to Ireland and Wales.
Perhaps these sporting allegiances point the way to a more flexible international order for our increasingly globalized age. Healthy political units need their members to think of themselves as engaged in shared projects. But this needn’t demand the familiar division into nation states, with a single governing body wielding legitimate power over any given place on the surface of the earth. There are various other possibilities, including federal structures with nested powers, and even overlapping authorities with differentiated responsibilities. We need only think of how the free trade, monetary, customs, and migration unions in contemporary Europe all involve different sets of countries.
National sporting success can do much to unite a fragile nation-state, as Nelson Mandela demonstrated when he co-opted the traditionally white Springbok rugby team as part of his rainbow project. By donning a South African rugby jersey and joining the newly named “Amabokke” in lifting the trophy after their 1995 Johannesburg World Cup victory, he did more to reassure the rugby-loving white Afrikaner settler community about their future than any promises could.
But sporting loyalties can also serve to unify people who don’t live within the boundaries of a single official country. Some sporting countries lump different political states together, while others split them up. Perhaps political structures would do well to piggyback on these unofficial liaisons. The wide variety of sporting unions points to the possibility of less rigid political arrangements than fixed divisions into non-overlapping nation-states.
The British Isles consist of two principal islands, Great Britain and Ireland. In the nineteenth century both were ruled as a single country from London, but after the First World War the Republic of Ireland gained independence. It wasn’t given the whole of Ireland, though. The largely Protestant northeast corner of the island was partitioned off, and remained within the renamed United Kingdom of “Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.
You might have supposed that sporting arrangements would have followed suit, with national teams representing the new sovereign state. But that’s not how it worked. Soccer is the only game where the Republic of Ireland has its own national team. In every other sporting discipline, it’s as if partition never occurred. “Ireland” teams live up to their name. They represent the whole island, and draw players from both north and south.
Perhaps this isn’t surprising for the Gaelic games of hurling and Gaelic football. These largely Catholic and working-class games have long been associated with Irish nationalism, and so might be expected to repudiate the separate existence of Northern Ireland.
But Irish sporting unity is just as strong in games supported by the Protestant middle classes from the other end of the political spectrum. Most prominently, the Irish rugby union side is a world force. They are regular quarter-finalists in the World Cup, and command fanatical support on both sides of the border. In the same vein, cricket, tennis, field hockey, and squash all select proud pan-Irish teams. When it comes to sports, the bitter differences that dominate Irish politics seem to go out of the window.
Ireland isn’t the only sporting oddity within the British Isles. Scotland is unsure about whether to stay in the United Kingdom. The nationalists narrowly lost an independence referendum in 2015, and the issue is by no means settled. Still, separation wouldn’t make any difference on the sports field. In sporting terms, Scotland is already as independent as could be.
When it comes to soccer, rugby, cricket, and nearly every other sport, Scotland is no more part of the United Kingdom than Peru is. It has its own national teams, and the rivalry with England could not be more intense. The annual Scotland-England soccer match was one of the great sporting fixtures until it was discontinued in 1989 because of the fans’ excesses.
Wales is somewhat less favoured in the sporting autonomy stakes. They have their own rugby and soccer teams all right—indeed these are both currently world forces in a way that Scotland’s are not—but when it comes to cricket they are simply absorbed into England, Rhodesia-South-Africa style. The governing body is the “England and Wales Cricket Board”, but the team itself is “England”.
The distinguished and very Welsh cricketer Robert Croft was once asked what he felt about playing for the old Saxon enemy. He explained that when he played for his county Glamorgan, he thought of himself as representing Wales; but that when he played for England, “I always looked at it as like playing rugby for the British Lions.”
Actually, in these less hegemonic times, we nowadays take care to refer to the “British and Irish Lions”. Another oddity. Every four years the rest of the rugby-playing British Isles joins in the atavistic Irish pretence that history never happened. When it comes to selecting touring sides to do battle with the rugby giants of the Southern Hemisphere, we stand united as one nation. The political incoherence of this construction does nothing to dampen the intensity of the sporting contests.
It isn’t only Britain and Ireland that ignore political settlements in the sporting arena. Is Hong Kong a country, or Taiwan for that matter? The People’s Republic of China says no. “One country, two systems,” they insist, affirming their sovereignty over these territories. But then what are Hong Kong and Taiwan doing with their own national teams on every international sporting stage, including the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing?
The Spanish soccer club Athletic Bilbao requires its players to have Basque ancestry or upbringing. I must say that this offends my cosmopolitan sensibilities. It strikes me as racist. I’m surprised that it’s allowed under European law. You’d think that it violated antidiscrimination rules, not to mention laws against restraint of trade.
All right—maybe it’s my intuitions that need examining. When exactly did soccer clubs stop being emblems of local pride and turn into commercial bodies subject to competition law? Still, whatever you think about Bilbao’s sectarianism, it seems to me that FIFA and Spain would do well to take a leaf out of the British book. Why not give the Basques a proper national team, à la Scotland, and release Athletic Bilbao from the need to represent a nation by a club?
This would no doubt be resisted by opponents of Basque independence. But they shouldn’t assume that it would encourage the disintegration of Spain. Perhaps it would actually help to keep Spain united, working to make the Basques happier with devolved power in a federal Spain, as has arguably happened with Wales and Scotland in Britain. In the same spirit, perhaps the Catalans would also like to become separate FIFA members, even while remaining part of Spain.
On the other hand, the Catalans might prefer to go the other way, even if they were to gain the full independence they supported in their 2014 referendum. A number of Catalan soccer players played a major role in Spain’s World Cup and European Championship victories in 2010 and 2012. Their share in the Spanish team’s successes might persuade them to stay federated in soccer even if they become politically independent. The example of Ireland shows that there is no need to break up a functioning sporting nation just because political boundaries get redrawn.
The most striking example of a sporting country that isn’t a real country is the cricketing West Indies. The side has played a central role in cricket history. If you ask an average cricket fan about the West Indies, they will probably tell you that it’s a country distributed across a number of islands in the Caribbean.
But in truth it’s not a country, and never was. The team draws its members from various modern Caribbean countries that were once British colonies. However, these particular islands were never governed together. Although several attempts were made by the colonial powers to amalgamate them for administrative purposes, such plans were inevitably scuppered by inter-island conflicts of interest.
Even so, there have been combined teams on the cricket field since the 1880s, and in 1928 the “West Indies” became the fourth “country” to be granted test match status. Early twentieth-century West Indian society was dominated by fine distinctions of skin colour, and the first test teams always had a white captain. Nevertheless, from early on the sides drew members from all racial groups. As Edgar Mittelholzer explained in his 1950 Trinidadian novel A Morning at the Office, “Cricket was taken too solemnly… no one stopped to ask what was his shade of complexion or his position in society; his performance was enough. Was he capable of wiping up the Barbados bowling? Was he capable of mowing down the Barbados wickets?”
At the time of decolonization, there was a short-lived attempt to transfer the cricketing unity into the political arena. A West Indies Federation was formed in 1958, with the intention of creating a federal nation from the former colonies, on the model of Canada or Australia. But by 1962 the Federation had collapsed under the weight of the old island rivalries.
The cricket team, though, was unaffected by the political disintegration. and indeed was about to enter its period of greatest strength. The West Indies had always been an exciting side, but historically had a reputation for “calypso cricket”, favouring flamboyant gestures over hard-won victories. However, for two decades from the mid-1970s, under the leadership of Clive Lloyd and Vivian Richards, the side added steel to their flair. With their unprecedented phalanx of fast bowlers, they dominated the test match scene for two decades.
A federal government might always have been a pipe dream, but at a different political level there is no doubt about the significance of this cricketing success. By now there were no white players in the side, and the symbolism of the ex-slaves thrashing their colonial masters was never far below the surface. For many West Indians, both in the Caribbean and elsewhere, the all-conquering cricketing side of the 1980s was a beacon of black pride.
Today the West Indies team is no longer the force it was. Soccer and basketball have been growing in popularity in the Caribbean, and the contemporary cricket side is struggling at the top level of international cricket. Perhaps their time will come again. In any case, the future will not undo cricket’s role in creating a postcolonial identity for Anglophone West Indians.
In sporting terms, the United States of America is the mirror image of the West Indies. It is second to none as a political power on the world stage. But when it comes to international sporting competition, it is almost invisible.
Americans don’t really do international sport. A couple of years ago, I invited visitors to my website to help me construct an alphabetical list of families that included two or more international athletes (A for the Armitraj tennis brothers from India, B for the soccer-playing Boatengs.… See the Postscript at the end of the book). I recommended reciting this alphabet as an excellent cure for insomnia, and called for some help with the trickier letters.
One American commenter suggested M for the football-playing Mannings. When I queried their international status, he responded that Eli’s Giants had once played a game in London. I had to explain that, to the rest of the sporting world, “international athlete” has only one meaning—you have to represent your country, not just play for your club in some foreign location.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by my commenter’s blind spot. After all, American sports fans have scarcely any exposure to sporting contests between nations. In gridiron, for a start, there’s no real question of a national team, for lack of any plausible opposition. The other major sports—basketball, baseball, ice hockey—are played in other countries, and indeed the United States is a presence in most major international tournaments. But their teams are often denied the services of the top professionals. Their clubs that pay their generous wages generally aren’t keen to let them go, and in any case many of the star athletes seem to think they have better things to do with their time. While the US teams dutifully turn up, and sometimes win, no one seems to pay much attention.
Soccer is the one exception. Its recent rise in popularity is starting to give Americans a taste for international challenges. Bleacher Report, the leading US sports website, has a list of the “50 Biggest International Sports Moments in US History.” Not surprisingly, given the dearth of international competition, fully thirty-eight of these are from the Olympic Games (and most of them, for that matter, feature individual rather than team events). Of the other twelve slots, nine involve soccer matches. Both the men’s and the women’s US sides have become significant world forces on the world stage, and Americans are learning to follow their fortunes.
Still, even here the enthusiasm is muted. During the 2014 World Cup I watched the last-sixteen knockout match between the US and Belgium with American friends. It was a riveting game. The US team, led by the creative drive of captain Michael Bradley, came close, but Belgium pipped them in extra time. My companions were excited all right, but somehow seemed uncomfortable at the same time, as if it were unbecoming to get excited about a contest that their country might lose.
I hope that this interest in soccer marks the beginning of a wider trend. Sometimes I can’t help feeling that the world would be better off if America were less isolated in sporting terms. Exceptionalism on the sports field encourages exceptionalism off it. A country that shies away from international sport can be tempted to stop thinking of itself as one nation among others.
One of the great virtues of sporting partisanship is that it is so manifestly ungrounded. As I explained earlier, sports fandom hinges on “agent-relative values”, rather than differences in objective worth. Sports fans commit themselves to their teams and care about their fortunes, but only the most pig-headed of them think of their side as intrinsically more virtuous than the opposition.
This ensures a kind of generosity about sporting results. You might be cast down if your side loses, or elated if they win, but you are unlikely to feel that intrinsic entitlement has been thwarted or rewarded. Sporting contests are essentially even-handed. Both sides can see that the other has an equal right to succeed, and that the appropriate result is victory for the more skilful team.
The same point applies on the international sporting stage. Sometimes competing nations will share a history of political conflict and perceived wrongs. But the sporting context itself washes out past resentments and places the opponents on an even footing. On the sports field, all are created equal, and depend only on their skills.
A country that shuns international sporting contests, like the United States, can lack this natural reminder of the standing of other countries. And this can lend support to the belief that the non-competitor is special among nations. A powerful section of the American right supports the exceptionalist theory that their country is entitled to bypass the rules that apply to other nations, just as they bypass those nations on the sports field. Maybe the rise of soccer in the States will in time put pressure on this exceptionalist thinking. Even if you view the United Nations as a tiresome constraint on your world power, it is hard to take the same attitude to the World Cup.
What about the Ryder Cup? Every second September the golfing nations of Europe take on the might of the United States. The European golf fans become terribly excited by these contests. But once more the Americans seem less keen to engage. The interest is muted on the other side of the Atlantic. Only one American victory, the spectacular 1999 comeback in Brookline, features in the Bleacher Report’s “International Moments”.
Perhaps this lack of interest is a hangover from the monotonous years before 1979 when the Ryder Cup opposition was limited to Great Britain and Ireland, and the United States won time after time. Or maybe it has as much to do with the reversal of power once the rest of Europe came in—since 1985, when Seve Ballesteros inspired the first American defeat in twenty-eight years, the States has won only five of the sixteen matches. In any case, whatever the precise reason, the Ryder Cup proves no exception to the general American pattern of international sporting disengagement.
Still, even if it is no catalyst for American involvement, the Cup is arguably of broader political significance in the European context. As I said, the golf fans of Europe don’t hesitate to join forces every two years. Perhaps this augurs well for a future federal Europe. In general, you’d expect the regulars in the golf club bar to line up on the Eurosceptic right. If they can be made to unite behind a European golf team, perhaps they will also be ready to support other pan-European projects.
Before we draw any political morals, however, I need to explain some points about golf fandom.
The first thing to understand is that every adult golfer who is not American has only one concern when watching any professional golf tournament—they don’t want an American to win. Viewers of European TV golf coverage are regularly shown an “International Leader Board” listing the scores of all the leading non-Americans. Nonpartisans might find this puzzling, but from the viewers’ angle it makes perfect sense. The point is to keep track of the prospects of some—any—non-American victory.
It seems that this attitude is shared by the players as well as the fans. The English golfer Paul Casey was asked before the 2004 Ryder Cup to confirm that the teams’ rivalry was friendly. His response was “No, we properly hate them.” Afterwards he said he was joking, but I’m not sure.
This transatlantic golfing antipathy is mutual. Some years ago I was at a conference in the former Yugoslavia with two archetypical Midwestern philosophers, George Pappas and Marshall Swain. It was the year that the Masters ended in a play-off between Seve Ballesteros, Greg Norman, and the journeyman American Larry Mize. It wasn’t easy to get news, but in a bar I found a newspaper with a sports section.
“Shit,” I said to Pappas and Swain, “Mize chipped in from 140 feet to beat them both.” I assumed they would share my disappointment. But, on the contrary, they were all whoops and high fives. How could anybody be pleased at that? It was like a warthog getting into the garden and killing two peacocks.
But I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, their sentiments were nothing but a mirror image of my own. I can appreciate that Phil Michelson and Bubba Watson are charismatic magicians on the golf course, and may well be delightful companions off it. But I will happily sit up until 3:00 AM to watch a Northern Irish grafter like Graeme McDowell beat them in a major.
What’s going on here? I’m pretty sure that it’s to do with golf rather than America. I count myself as an Americophile. Many of our family holidays have been spent motel-hopping across the States, and I love working in New York. And I don’t feel the same about other sports. For example, I experienced nothing but pleasure when Andre Agassi completed his career grand slam in Paris in 1999, or the USA women’s soccer team lifted the World Cup before a crowd of 90,000 in the Rose Bowl that same year.
Maybe it’s to do with the way that America dominated golf for decades after World War II. Or perhaps it stems from the time that Deane Beman, the American PGA commissioner, made it so difficult for Seve Ballesteros and other European stars to compete in US tournaments. And we can’t ignore the determined provincialism of the many American golfers who rarely test their skills in the rest of the world. (This attitude has a long history. Sam Snead for one was a notoriously reluctant traveller. He regularly shunned the Open after his single 1946 victory, explaining that “as far as I’m concerned, any time you leave the USA, you’re just camping out”.)
So I wouldn’t be too quick to assume that the European Ryder Cup fervour is a harbinger of European unity. It seems as likely that the Pringle-sweatered blimps in the members’ bars are united by their antipathy to the opposition, rather than their enthusiasm for the European project.
Still, who knows? As we have seen, sporting arrangements often uncover political affinities that cross-cut conventional state boundaries. Some national teams represent countries that no longer exist, while others are potential heralds of political units yet to come. The golf fans certainly seem to view Europe as a natural unity. Perhaps this points to an incipient sense of common political purpose.
At the time of writing, the future of the European project is uncertain. Britain has now voted to leave the Union, and other countries seem likely to follow suit. Europe may well now end up as a loose customs union, rather than the federal state favoured by its more enthusiastic supporters.
In this context, it would be interesting to know if pan-European sides in other sports would get their supporters whooping alongside the Ryder Cup fans. I don’t find it too hard to imagine cross-national enthusiasm for a European soccer or rugby side. I wonder whether the hard-pressed supporters of European unity should try to make something of this. They might do better to stop touting the supposed economic and political benefits of union, and start appealing to untapped reservoirs of federal sporting fandom instead.