Wide World of Sport

Greetings Sports Fans!

Just the other day I read in Tuesday's "Saudi News" that New England beat St. Louis in the Super Bowl. Now, the Winter Olympics has started and it doesn't look like we are going to get much coverage of these events either. Somehow the interest in these sports has not quite caught on in the Middle East. Our Canadian company man was on shore last week and was able to get the game on TV, but couldn't round up enough people at 2:30 AM to have a Super Bowl Party. He told me there was a great half time show too.

And so it goes around the world. The things that seem important to us in Morrison, Illinois do not share the limelight in the rest of the world and the world's most popular sport gets little media attention in our part of the world. As you probably know the world's most popular sport is soccer (known almost everywhere else as "football"). A lot of people watch the Super Bowl in the USA, quite a few in Canada, and to some extent in a few far ranging areas of the world with sizeable expat communities of the same. On the other hand the World Cup final will draw 1/3 to half of the entire worlds attention and sweet victory or the agony of defeat will hang in the balance far exceeding the population of the competing nations.

The reason for this is pretty simple. The game of soccer requires little in the way of equipment or space and thus it is available to the masses of the world and in particular to those who live in poverty. You can mark out a goal area with sticks or rocks and can make a ball out of clothes if you don't have anything else. The game is played on every continent, in well over 150 countries and one stadium in Rio de Janeiro can hold 200,000 people. Its not surprising then that the Super Bowl doesn't get much press anywhere else.

By the same token its hard to believe after all the money spent on Super Bowl commercials that you might be better off sponsoring a luge competition if you wanted to sell American made long underwear overseas. Advertisers were definitely not targeting the countries with the highest per capita beer consumption, which would be Germany and Australia.

But sports are universal and competition plays a part in every society. If I say Canada you think ice hockey, but did you know their national sport is lacrosse? You'd probably be hard pressed to think of an internationally famous athlete from Pakistan or India where the popular spectator sport is cricket. Polo is popular in Argentina, sumo in Japan and ping pong in China. Because of the Bix in the Quad Cities we are pretty well aware that long distance running world class athletes come from Africa, but did you know Brazil stops working when Formula 1 racing events are broadcast?

Many years ago when I started working overseas the company I work for was based in Dallas and we would get video tapes of Cowboy games. You can't believe how difficult it is to explain American football to anyone from Britain, Germany, South Africa or practically anywhere. I was always being asked, "why are they stopping, " or "why is pass interference a penalty when the whole game is about getting in each others way" and "why don't they show more of the cheerleaders?" I had to admit the game doesn't make much sense unless you've grown up with it.

Still most of the guys seemed to enjoy the snacks during commercial breaks. Bring on those moguls, triple axles and skeletons!

(by Marc Adami, )