Centrality of sports in Latin America
The nations of Central and South America may be poor but oh, do they have world-class sports!
MAYDAY. That’s one word one never wishes to hear, because we know it’s the pilot’s words to control tower that come what may, the plane is going down. I’ve heard it a few times in my millions of miles flown, most memorably in October 1987 when our pilot told us the landing gear wouldn’t engage and we would belly up on Boston Bay; water being a bit softer than asphalt for a crash.
Then the pilot got new orders; a visual flyover showed the gear was in place, and the question was merely whether the light in the dashboard was burned out or whether the gear hadn’t engaged.
It was a no-brainer; if the gear had descended from the plane, why would it not have engaged?
Well, we prepared for crash landing and I made a promise. If we made it, I’d sell my stock holdings and lower my stress.
We made a smooth landing, aviation learnt something, and I rushed to a phone to call my broker to sell all my stocks and my mum’s stocks. That “black Monday” was historic.
By day’s end, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dived more than ever. I bought everything back the next day at half price and so doubled my portfolio. I was almost rich.
A colleague said he’d not care about dying in a plane crash, as he’d not have been singled out, it was a group event. Me? The slightest tremor in the wings, no matter that I know its cause, and my brain turns to butter.
So when a British-built Brazilian plane crashes into a Colombian landing strip, with a rising team that only just made it into the premier leagues, we grieve for the players of the Chapecoense Real football club. They were a new hope, a fresh face for football, and it all ended on a Medellin airstrip, once a drug centre of the dreaded Medellin cartel.
If there are three things about which I know nothing, they are Latin America (I’ve visited everywhere else), competitive sports (I’m a loner — a marathoner) and Spanish.
Yet look: Latin America survives on sports, its countries maintain their national enthusiasms through sports (what else is there?), they get their national identities through sports — and they live for sports. We are compelled to take a look.
True, every country’s readers tend to turn to the sports page first. Indians obsess about cricket, Americans about baseball in the spring, what we call football in the autumn.
And what a great way to make friends! After Stanford University, Nicholas Thompson, an editor at The New Yorker magazine, took a round-the-world trip in 1997 and found early on in Africa that football (as in soccer) was an easy entree into locals his own age and inclination.
In Asia, they played altogether differently. We wrote a book together comparing African and Asian development patterns — that is the failure of the former and the success of the latter — in which he added wonderful commentaries on national styles in the game.
Latin America just doesn’t connect with the rest of the world. Even using mathematical techniques to establish intensity of patterns of relations among states, Latin America is, as it were, off the maps.
Too many of its countries have messed up their economies for too long. Argentina for example was in a league with the big Europeans and America in the late 19th century, but the Peron couple came along in the 20th, gave their people a taste of unearned glory, ate up all the accumulated economic capital, then left everybody wondering why suddenly they were so pathetically poor.
And, still assumed they were in the big leagues — while crawling to the working rich countries to beg for loans. They needed vast help from the international lending agencies they’d laughed at for so long.
The lesson is that ceteris paribus, or other things being equal, national power and economic strength are handmaidens. Europe survives now on German wealth, and so Angela Merkel, the dowdy pastor’s daughter from the former communist East, will now no doubt win her fourth term as chancellor in the elections she has called.
Sports for Latin Americans now makes up the difference; they may be poor (and accept it) but oh, do they have world-class sports! Mayday for Chapecoense was a truly continental Latin American tragedy that the whole world has noted. It has given the region a sense of international identity.
P.S. a note on a certain telephone call from Taiwan.
Yes, in itself it’s no big deal for a United States president-elect to take a call from a president who buys billions in arms from us. It’s definitely the way a businessman would see it. World leader? Hmm.
Donald Trump would have had briefings on the implications here. Beijing is upset. They may realise there was nothing strategic in Trump’s chat with President Tsai Ing-wen; that he accepted the call rather routinely or unintentionally.
Therein lies the problem. World politics doesn’t work that way. Phone calls between leaders are events in themselves and lead to consequences. Let’s just follow this one and see what mischief it leads to. I have a feeling a lot will happen.
thompsonwscott@gmail.com
The writer is professor emeritus of International Politics, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, United States
Latin America survives on sports, its countries maintain their national enthusiasms through sports (what else is there?), they get their national identities through sports — and they live for sports.