My idea of play changed after 9/11. But not quite as I expected. As a sports journalist, working in the world of fun-and-games—reporting from the “toy department” in the estimation of many newsside colleagues—my immediate reaction to that day included the realization, hardly atypical, of how insignificant ball games were.
Amid a national mood that ranged from insecurity to ethnic profiling to seeking revenge through American military might—with an entire country, Afghanistan, initially targeted over the deeds of the guilty terrorists—a sporting emphasis was difficult to rationalize.
Until I read an essay in Salon by Allen Barra shortly after the attacks. To Barra, a problem with Afghanistan, which had become a safe haven for the likes of al-Qaeda and the brutal Taliban, was that it was “badly in need of some national pastimes.
”Forget about cutting back on games here [in the United States],” he wrote. “Maybe we should look to getting them involved over there. Before we drop bombs on them, maybe we should try some basketballs.”
Basketballs? As an answer to the some 3,000 murdered and 25,000 injured in four coordinated attacks on the East Coast? Frivolous? Or, as Barra argued, a far better source of activity—not to mention a model for young people to emulate—than more violence?
Barra’s was the sort of reasoning that Johann Olav Koss, the great Olympic speedskating champion, cited for organizing the donation Of 12 tons of sports equipment that he personally delivered to children amid civil strife in Eastern Africa in the 1990s. He had seen how “the martyrs” during Eritrea’s war against Ethiopia had become the standard of admiration there.
“I don’t think that’s good for children to have people who die in wars as their ideals,” Koss said. ”If they could have sport, to be healthy, to have a social connection, that would be good.”
Shortly after the 9/11 destruction, when so many of us were trying to figure out why and who, I sought out some with first-hand experience in Afghanistan. It hadn’t been that long ago—before the Soviets invaded in the late 1970s and years of war set the stage for religious extremists there—that Afghanistan in fact had basketballs to occupy citizens.
Tom Gouttierre, recently retired after 40 years as director of the Center of Afghan Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, had spent 10 years of Peace Corps service in Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s.
With his Peace Corps buddies, Gouttierre created a set of basketball leagues there, finding “excellent athletes” among the natives, “these mountain people who can run like gazelles and run forever, with tremendous lung capacities. I used to love for other teams from sea level to come into Afghanistan and play us. We’d run ‘em to death.”
At one point, Gouttierre learned that a young American basketball pro and Rhodes Scholar was visiting and asked him to give his players tips on shooting jump shots. The player was the Knicks star Bill Bradley.
Gouttierre translated basketball lingo into Persian and gave names of historical figures in Afghan history to his formations, so Genghis Khan was a 1-3-1 defense and Iskandar (Alexander) was 1-2-2. At the time, he said, soccer was popular, and volleyball , field hockey and team handball, with a long history of Afghan wrestling and boxing. Girls and women played sports then, especially basketball and volleyball, before sports lost out to ongoing wars.
By the late 1990s, when the United Nations refused to recognize the Taliban government, Afghanistan became the only one of the International Olympic Committee’s 200 nations suspended by the IOC, which cited the fact that women had been banned from sport, a direct violation of IOC rules.
Gouttierre said the Taliban reminded him of H.L. Mencken’s description of a Puritan’s “living in mortal dread that somewhere someone is having fun.”
So, maybe if there had been some more fun to be had over there….