I am an Olympics junkie, I admit. I’m thrilled that it won’t be in Chicago, and I think that the IOC’s demands on cities are unreasonable and unfair. I also love the pageantry, the heartwarming human drama, and the hard work of obscure athletes in obscure sports.
As I writer, I love something else: the reminder that the world has more sports than soccer.
For a trade magazine story, several years ago, I included an analogy about Michael Jordan and basketball – not necessarily the most original way to illustrate a point, necessarily, but it worked. The editor cut it, replaced it with a mention of David Beckham and soccer, and told me that I should not have used basketball because that was too American a sport for a global audience. “But basketball is a global sport, and Michael Jordan is a global star,” I said, pointing out that basketball was an Olympic sport, with professional leagues in Europe and China, and with a healthy following all over the world. Why, my husband had watched pickup basketball games in the Philippines! No, my editor said, basketball was an American sport, and I should make sure that any sports references I used were about soccer so as not to offend international readers.
No matter that Americans don’t know the first thing about soccer, and Americans were the bulk of the publication’s readers.
Another time, on an ghostwriting project, I had made a great analogy between currency market trading and baseball. The idea was that how often someone hits the ball or gets on base tells you about their potential to score, but it is not the same as the score, just as the strength or weakness of a currency gives you information about what a country’s economy is, but it is not the same as the overall health of the economy. Well, the title author told me that the analogy was great, but he was afraid it might put off international readers or prevent an international publisher from picking up the rights. Maybe we could find a way to use soccer instead! Well, In said, I don’t know nearly as much about soccer as I do about baseball, but my impression from watching preschoolers run around was that there wasn’t the same intermediate step to scoring, Besides, I said, baseball is an international sport, played in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and the Caribbean as well as the United States. No, the title author said, it;s an American sport. How about cricket? Could we use cricket? Well, I said, I know nothing about cricket. Neither did the title author. So, I stated the point – that the strength of the currency is not the same as the strength of the economy – with no clever analogies.
Soccer is an Olympic sport, but so are hundreds of others. It’s nice to be reminded of that, and not just because I like baseball.
As for an American sport not played anywhere else, you’d probably have to go with lacrosse, although that has quite a following in Canada, too.
