THE WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS

An interesting transaction took place the other day in the National Basketball Association. The Brooklyn Nets were purchased by Joseph Tsai, a Chinese who co-founded the internet-commerce giant Alibaba. He bought the team from Mikhail Prokhorov, a Russian who owns nickel mines.

The deal for the Nets, No.2 in New York’s basketball market, was worth an announced $2.35 billion, a record turnover for any U.S. sports franchise. Prokhorov bought the Nets for $223 million in 2009, meaning that his profit ought to keep him and his family in blini for many generations to come.

What the deal mostly did was illustrate the extent to which American sports have become internationalized, as has just about every other important area of commerce. It’s sure to stay that way. Wishing won’t make it otherwise.

At the management level, at which the Nets swap took place, the movement has barely begun in the U.S.; it’ll be a while before it goes as far as in England, where in the soccer Premier League 14 of the 20 teams are non-English owned. Still, Nintendo, the Japanese gaming company, has owned the baseball Seattle Mariners since 1992, and two other big-league outfits, the hockey New York Islanders and football Jacksonville Jaguars, are owned by foreign-born individuals who made their financial piles on these shores (the Islanders by Chinese-born Charles Wang and the Jags by Shahid Khan, born in Pakistan).

 The NBA Phoenix Suns broke the league’s foreign-coaching barrier last season when it hired Igor Kokoskov, a Serbian national, as its head coach. Major League Baseball has had a number of managers born abroad (e.g., Preston Gomez, Cookie Rojas, Felipe Alou, Ozzie Guillen), but all had played in the Bigs and were well known before they became skippers.

The playing fields, however, have become a true melting pot, the sole exception being football, which no other country has embraced. In baseball, almost 30% of the players have been foreign-born in recent seasons, mostly from Latin America but with an occasional Australian or Dutchman thrown it. The Dominican Republic and Venezuela lead among foreign nations of origin; only two states in the U.S. (California and Florida) produced more major leaguers than the DR’s 102 this season.

The NBA had a foreign player in 1946, the year it began. He was Henry Biasatti, born in Italy and raised in Canada. He played a few games for the Toronto Huskies of the new league before deciding that his sport was baseball, and he would have a short stay with the Philadephia Athletics. The invasion commenced in earnest beginning in the 1980s, and last year 108 players from a mind-boggling 41 different countries made up almost a quarter of the league’s rosters. Gianni Antetokoumpo, from Greece, was the NBA’s Most Valuable Player last season, and Luca Doncic, from Slovenia, was Rookie of the Year. Last year’s top draft choice in the league was Deandre Ayton, from the Bahamas.

In hockey it’s mostly the U.S. that’s been doing the invading. From its founding in 1917 into the 1970s the National Hockey League’s ice was almost exclusively a province of Canadian blades, but the expansion to 12 teams from six in 1967 created more jobs and dictated a wider talent pool. From 90- percent-plus dominance the share of Canadian players in the league fell below 50% a few seasons ago. Last year it stood at 47%, with 25% of the players American-born and those from a dozen or so other lands (mostly Sweden and Russia) making up the rest. One web site I visited said that if present trends continue U.S.-born players will outnumber Canadians by 2050.

Sport is a product of prosperity and leisure, and through the first half of the 20^th century the U.S. and Great Britain had a corner on those things. World War II pretty much wrecked Europe and Asia, leaving the games to Americans while those continents dug themselves out. The extent to which they’ve succeeded is best seen in the country club sports of tennis and golf. If not for a man named Woods and two women named Williams, the U.S. has been absent from the upper reaches of those activities in century 21.

               Men’s golf’s foremost international bauble is the Ryder Cup, begun in 1927, pitting teams of professionals from the U.S. against those from, first, Great Britain, and, since 1979, Europe. Americans won 22 of the first 25 of those, but since 1985 the Euros have racked up a commanding 12-5 edge. The Davis Cup, a wider-ranging tournament involving many nations, long has been men’s tennis’s biggest world go-round. The U.S. used to win it frequently but has done so only once since 1995.

               No American man has won a singles title in a tennis “grand slam” (the Australian, French and U.S. Opens and England’s Wimbledon) since Andy Roddick won at Flushing Meadow in 2003. Just one American woman besides Serena or Venus Williams (Sloane Stephens in 2017) has won at a “slam” since 2002.  The only American man among the 32 seeds at the current U.S. Open was John Isner, at 14. Just five of the 32 women’s seeds were Yanks.

               Women’s pro golf has become largely an Asian domain, with eight Koreans among the LPGA Tour’s current top 20 (to five Americans) and Japanese, Chinese and Thais in the mix. The top player, by far, has been J.Y. Ko, whose last-name-first Korean name is Ko Jin-Young.

I used to know quite a bit about women golfers when Babe Zaharias, Carole Mann or Nancy Lopez played, but not much now, so I googled Ms. Ko. Not much personal there: she’s 24 years old, turned pro at 18, isn’t married and isn’t a lesbian (as one site noted), and her zodiac sign is Cancer. Apropos romance, she has confessed to having a crush on husky Brooks Koepka, from the men’s tour. “I like big guy,” she said.

 Hey, she’s learning. How much Korean do you speak?