August 10, 2016
Source: Bigstock
In contrast, American corporate sports don”t care all that much about drugs, with the partial exception of baseball. Few seemed to worry that, say, basketball superstar LeBron James was not really a normal-looking 240-pound 17-year-old.
Why do we so often see athletes and officials complaining about doping in sports that are arranged nationally, but not in sports that are organized on franchise lines?
Because if Ben Johnson or Florence Griffith-Joyner are getting away with doping, they can”t change nationalities. When American swimmer Shirley Babashoff was cheated out of four gold medals by the East Germans at the 1976 Olympics, she complained vociferously. After all, the U.S. team couldn”t trade for Kornelia Ender.
In contrast to international competitions, there are strikingly few examples in the history of American pro team sports of executives or jocks going public with kvetches about rival teams doping. American franchises have typically chosen to wink at or even encourage juicing rather than complain about it.
For instance, if the New York Yankees brain trust in 2004 had surmised that the reason shortstop Alex Rodriguez of the rival Texas Rangers is averaging 52 homers per year is because he’s on the juice, they could complain. Or they could sign Rodriguez to a $275 million contract to play for the Yankees themselves.
Over the course of Rodriguez’s juiced-up career, which is now approaching the end after being fired by the Yankees this week, he will pocket $420 million.
More generally, the current mania for antinationalist ideology has gotten so dopey that a few heavyweight center-left intellectuals such as former Canadian Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff and Larry Summers, the Clinton-administration treasury secretary and Harvard president, have taken to spelling out the old-fashioned commonsense reasons for nationalism that have been forgotten by their fellow Davos Men. Ignatieff pointed out:
…what we”re seeing is, in part, an ideological split between cosmopolitan elites who see immigration as a common good based in universal rights, and voters who see it as a gift conferred on certain outsiders deemed worthy of joining the community.
Summers called for:
A new approach [that] has to start from the idea that the basic responsibility of government is to maximize the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good…. What is needed is a responsible nationalism”an approach where it is understood that countries are expected to pursue their citizens” economic welfare as a primary objective but where their ability to harm the interests of citizens elsewhere is circumscribed.
In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson would have been puzzled that this would ever have to be spelled out as “a new approach.” How is something this sensible not obvious?
One reason that elites have been able to get away with rewriting our fundamental assumptions to promote their own financial and status interests is because we are discouraged from drawing analogies from one realm to another. The Olympics have major problems, for example, but they continue to bump along because of the appeal and workability of nationalism.
There was much excitement in the media because the IOC invited a “refugee” team of charity cases, but little recognition that the other 206 teams represent countries. The world is organized territorially and there aren”t any practical alternatives.
It’s important to note that for many decades it has been speculated that the Olympics would soon be organized along corporate rather than national lines: Team Coke vs. Team Pepsi, Nike vs. Adidas vs. Under Armour. The 1976 decathlon gold medalist Bruce Jenner joked that on his deathbed he would auction off the right to put the Coke or Pepsi logo on his coffin. In 1990, when Atlanta, home of Coca-Cola, was awarded the 1996 Olympics, it briefly seemed as if these sci-fi speculations would be coming true.
But that has yet to happen with the Olympics. And it seems unlikely to ever happen, because nationalism is ultimately more appealing to human nature than is marketing.
