Finding our place in sport’s world order
You should hardly beat yourself up though if it escaped your attention that on Sunday night, Dirk Nowitzki’s Dallas Mavericks won the NBA championship. Sporting indifference isn’t confined to Ireland. Most of Europe wouldn’t have known Leinster were crowned kings of the continent in Cardiff last month, just as most of the world will be unaware of Ireland’s or anyone else’s exploits in the upcoming Rugby World Cup.
In Ireland we rightly take great pride in our rugby players. For more than a decade now, the likes of O’Gara and O’Driscoll have represented the best of us, as in us as a people rather than merely the best of the rugby-playing population.
The IRFU, Munster and Leinster have consistently outperformed and outwitted bigger and richer organisations in Britain and France, just like their players have on the field. Its players are among the most diligent and best prepared athletes in world team sport, and Irish players are among the most diligent and best prepared in world rugby.
Often in our rush to fete our rugby heroes though, we lose perspective. We have little concept of the world participation pyramid. We mock the income and fortitude of professional Premier League soccer players and bemoan how much more they make than rugby players, overlooking just how much more difficult it is — and how much more talented you have to be — to make it as a Premier League soccer player than a professional rugby player. Only two million people worldwide play rugby. Nearly 300 million play soccer. Roughly the same number, even more, play basketball. There’s a reason the least-paid player in the NBA makes as much as Brian O’Driscoll.
Statistically it’s as hard to make the NBA as it is to be consistently among the best two players in world rugby.
Those of us in this country favourably disposed to hoops are often made to feel like we’re members of some obscure religious sect, naively taken in by all the Americana of a game supposedly confined to that one country, America; that is, when we’re not fending off comments like how it’s a game just for tall people (the average height of the current Cork football team is taller than the NBA’s MVP, the 6’1’’ Derrick Rose) and a non-contact sport (we’d love to see those naïve fools try to take a charge from LeBron James or set a screen on Shaquille O’Neal). We’re dismissed, our sport waved and laughed off as a minority sport, when, say, rugby is globally much more of a minority sport than basketball is a minority sport in this country.
For all the reverence and mystique rightly afforded to New Zealand rugby, it’s essentially just Indiana basketball — a region of four-million-plus people totally passionate about a sport. And that’s without getting in to hoops’ popularity and tradition in the other 49 states, only to say that when it comes to appreciating just how big America and basketball is, its better to think of the place more as a continent than a country.
Outside of that continent basketball is still by a distance the second-biggest sport in the world. It’s not particularly big in India or the Middle East or Africa, though one of the greatest centres ever, Hakeem Olajuwon, hailed from Nigeria and three current Africans start with NBA teams. In China one in every three youngsters plays basketball. When Michael Jordan was in college, his coach Dean Smith would ease his players’ big-match nerves by quipping that a billion Chinese people couldn’t care less. They do now, thanks to the phenomenon of Jordan and their own Yao Ming. There’s a court in every one of the country’s 800,000 villages when there’s just 30 soccer pitches in all of Beijing. In total 350 million Chinese either play or watch hoops.
In South America it’s again second only to soccer. Argentina won the 2004 Olympics. A Brazilian, Nene Hilario of the Denver Nuggets, has the best shooting percentage in the entire NBA. Australia is hugely competitive in hoops. In most Eastern European countries, hoops rivals soccer as the national sport. In Greece a Euroleague star gets paid more than the Irish rugby starting XV put together. Five Turks play in the NBA. Further proof Spain is the greatest sporting nation in Europe is that it is the reigning European basketball champion.
Outside of Britain and France, the rest of Europe, as Dean Smith might say, doesn’t care about the Rugby World Cup. It’s watching the soccer or maybe following Spain’s Pau Gasol for the Lakers and Dirk draining another three for the Mavs. Those of us in rugby country who join in that guilty pleasure have no reason to feel guilty or apologetic at all.
* Contact: kieranshannon@eircom.net
