Why Do Some Sports Seem So Foreign?

April 4, 2005 — -- Just as baseball's opening day can signal a shifting of the seasons and a new beginning, other countries' sports also can carry deeper meanings.

"We would class the beginning of the cricket season to signify spring," said Richard Marshall-Duffield, manager of the F3K sports bar in London.

Different countries may follow different sports -- but even so, those sports can fill similar niches, said Michael Mandelbaum, author of "The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football, and Basketball and What They See When They Do." (see related story on the meaning of sports)

For instance, British traditions embrace the ball-and-bat game of cricket rather than baseball, the contact sport of rugby (in two different pro versions) rather than football and the ball-and-goal game of soccer rather than basketball.

Still, subtle differences in the nature of different nations' major sports may highlight cultural differences. Most Britons probably don't understand the cultural meaning of baseball's opening day and may have little interest in basketball, hockey or American football.

"The main interest in my bar is premiership football," said Steven O'Leary, manager of J.D. Young Sports Bar in London, referring to the British soccer league. "I've watched American football, and I can't get into what's going on, the way they keep stopping and starting."

Things about European sports can bug American fans, too.

For example, having winners and losers may be particularly important to Americans, said Mandelbaum, who also is an American foreign policy professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. Unlike European team sports, our most popular games tend to feature lots of scoring and few ties.

"We want a definitive result: We want everybody to be even at the beginning, and we want a clear winner at the end," he said. "Ties are very common in cricket. They're impossible in baseball. They're very, very common in soccer. They're not in basketball."

But Noel Dyck, editor of "Games, Sports and Cultures," believes any discomfort people feel with foreign sports may come more from unfamiliarity than cultural differences.

One aspect of sports' appeal as entertainment, Dyck said, is that they can be easy to follow, even for newcomers. For instance, while living in Montreal, Dyck often took visiting foreigners to Montreal Expos games regardless of whether they knew baseball's rules.

"They just loved the game," he said. "They started to put it in the context of a sport being similar in some respects, and different in other respects, to sports that exist in their countries."

And in a globalizing world of satellite sports transmissions, there's an increasing chance sports shown abroad may be the same as those shown in Montreal or Chicago. For example, Marshall-Duffield, the London sports bar manager, is an avid Chicago Cubs baseball fan.

"I would lose my marriage, I would lose my job and my home for a World Series title," he joked of the team that has not won a championship since 1908.

Sports scholars note that individual sports and racing exhibitions mainly predominated into the 19th century when team sports started to become organized. Differing sports cultures then evolved, often under the influence of the British Empire or American power.