William Watson: TV sports are global. So why not the Wide World of Trade?

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When prevented from enjoying the great outdoors this summer, whether by downpours, smoke, smog, tornado warnings or simple thunder and lightning, I’ve been enjoying the great indoors. Specifically, live sports on TV. Between commercials for Barbie, who loved pink, and Oppenheimer, who was accused of being pinko, I’ve been thinking about globalization. Bear with me.

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I remember in grade school writing a “composition” about “ABC’s Wide World of Sports,” a new 90-minute weekly show that brought viewers all sorts of sports from all sorts of places — though usually on fuzzy black-and-white videotape flown in days or even weeks after the fact.

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How times have changed! Last week in the space of a day or two I was able to watch soccer — the women’s world cup — live from Australia in gorgeous HD. And F1’s Hungarian Grand Prix, live from, you guessed it, Hungary. And then the Open Championship (golf) live from Liverpool, which I believe was broadcast in colour though on the last day the rain and fog were so insistent the screen looked mainly grey. And also the Blue Jays playing baseball in Seattle against the Mariners though it often seemed they were at home, thousands of Canadian fans having travelled south to pack the stands behind the visitors’ dugout and ballyhoo whenever their heroes did anything good.

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The soccer game I watched was the nil-nil draw between Canada and Nigeria, which wasn’t actually as dull as nil-nil sounds. Many of the players play soccer for a living, including for famous club teams in Europe. Canadian team members play for such storied franchises as Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspurs, Chelsea, Arsenal and the Penn State Nittany Lions. The Nigerian goalie, Chiamaka Nnadozie, who made a terrific save on a Christine Sinclair penalty shot, plays for Paris FC.

Another Nigerian player, Ashleigh Plumptre, was born in Leicester, England, played for England in several age-bracket tournaments, moved to the U.S. for college soccer, helped USC win the NCAA championship in 2016, played pro for the LA Galaxy and decided in 2021 to take advantage of her paternal grandfather’s Nigerian heritage to play for Nigeria’s national team. Leicester to L.A. to Lagos: talk about globalized!

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Though baseball is America’s national pastime, eight members of the Blue Jays’ roster were born outside the United States, including Montreal-born Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the two-time major-league home-run contest champion, who speaks to the press via an interpreter (a Spanish one, not French). The California Angels’ Shohei Ohtani, who leads the league in home runs and is fourth in strikeouts — throwing strikeouts, that is, because he’s a pitcher as well as a slugger — also uses an interpreter, a Japanese-language one. He may be the best player since Babe Ruth.

Golf’s Open Championship was won by Brian Harman, born in Savannah, Ga., U.S.A. In winning by six strokes, he beat players from (in order) Austria, Australia, Korea, Spain, Argentina, Northern Ireland, the U.S., India and the U.K., to list just the nine behind him.

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What’s my point? Sports on TV is very international: Melbourne, Liverpool, Budapest, Seattle. “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport,” the intro to Wide World of Sports boasted. Mere aspiration in the early 1960s, that is now a 24/7 reality. British “Premier League” soccer is a big deal on the U.S. networks. North American insomniacs can watch Asian golf broadcast live overnight on the Golf Channel. Like the stock market, golf never closes.

Moreover, the sports themselves have become very international. We’re now used to watching players who hail from just about everywhere playing just about every sport. According to Statista, 28.5 per cent of major league baseball players are of Hispanic or Latino origin. The Montreal Canadiens drafted an Austrian defenceman with their fifth overall pick in the recent NHL draft — yes, Austrian — and were roasted by fans who had been rooting for the Russian who ended up going seventh.

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All of this is to say that in our daily preoccupations — one of which, for many of us, is spectator sports — we are now thoroughly accustomed to globalization.

Imagination is often a limiting factor for humans but I do find it very hard to imagine we’ll give up on the two main subliminal messages TV sports now sends: that we can find enjoyment from virtually any event anywhere in the world, and that if we’re good at something, we can follow our talent to wherever on the planet it leads.

But if it’s true of sports, won’t it also be true of just about everything else, including trade? We hear a lot these days about the need to shorten supply chains and produce more of what we consume ourselves. But for every one Canadian on the planet there are 200 other people. Are we really going to try to produce everything for ourselves and not rely on them at all?

It’s as wide a world of trade out there as it is of sports and, despite the strength of the protectionist lobby, I really doubt people will give up the constant variety of trade they’ve grown accustomed to over the past two generations.

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