Rooting
Against Yourself
August 23, 2006
This year’s FIBA World Basketball Championships may give Greek-Americans
another possibility to possibly pit both ends of the hyphen against each other.
With both teams cruising through their opening round matches, a meeting between
these two teams would be in one of the later elimination rounds of the
tournament. Balancing ethnic-pride and patriotism doesn’t always lead to the
same result. Depending on the circumstances, you may find yourself rooting for
the Greeks and sometimes actually rooting for the Americans.
Growing up in the 80s during the Cold War, visits to Greece in the summers
often featured arguments with our cousins on the topic of Greece versus the U.S.
in various areas. Products of public elementary school education, where
patriotism and monolithic teachings of the theory that the “USA is A-Okay”
didn’t leave us open to the possibility that Greece could be somehow better at
anything that the U.S. Retorts to anything our older cousins would throw at us
would typically consist of the following three points:
1) At least we have grass in America;
2) At least we have air conditioning in America; and
3) If it weren’t for the U.S., you’d all be speaking Russian.
Discussions of sports never seemed to make much sense when despite the fact
that the Greeks invented the Olympic Games, its track record during the 1980s
was pretty sorry. U.S. Soccer was virtually nonexistent during this time and
Greece winning the European Basketball Championship in 1987 was a decent
accomplishment, but c’mon they were playing against other Europeans, right?
(Big deal.)
The rise of ESPN, the birth of the Internet, and the falling from grace of
some of America’s most prominent sports and political figures in the 90s
(think O.J. Simpson, Bill Clinton) finally made it acceptable to start rooting
for Greece when pitted against the U.S. ESPN’s broadcasts of the 1994 World
Cup and the World Basketball Championships from Toronto later that summer was
probably the first time we had ever watched a Greek team sport with commentary
in English. While we all knew what happened to Greece’s World Cup team that
summer, Greece’s National Basketball team fared much better. Unfortunately
Greece was on the business end of a 97-58 rout at the hands of “Dream Team 2”
back when “Dream Team” actually meant something. But the stat we were able
to tout to our fellow Americans who were watching those games with us was that
we were the first and only team in that tournament to hold the U.S. under 100
points. (Greece eventually finished 4th in those World Championships.)
Looking back we didn’t realize that Greece and the U.S. met again in the World
Championships four years later for the bronze medal. (The Internet made it
possible to track Greece’s non-televised matched that led to these defeats at
the hands of the U.S.)
The “Golden Age” of competition between Greece and the U.S. was probably
at the 2004 Olympics. As the host nation, Greece had teams in sports that it
normally wouldn’t even qualify in, with rosters filled with Greek-Americans.
And for some reason they met up against the U.S. in almost every sport that
summer. There was never an easier time to be a fan of Greece against the U.S.,
as the host country and typically the underdog in most of these events,
sometimes with rosters full of Greek-Americans. (And if you were lucky enough to
be at one of these matches, particularly the U.S.-Greece matches in basketball
and volleyball specifically, you had no choice but to root for Greece for fear
of getting pelted with a newly-minted Euro or throwback drachma in the stands.)
So with both teams winning their first three matches in this year’s World
Basketball Championships, (Greece in more dramatic fashion) thoughts of a
U.S.-Greece late round face-off abound. Despite the drubbing that USA Basketball
has been getting in International Competition at the Olympics and World
Basketball Championships in recent years it still won’t be hard not to root
for Greece. For the first time though, we won’t feel too upset if the U.S.
does win. Frankly, the U.S. is in greater need of a morale boost internationally
than Greece these days, and sport is a simple way to achieve that result. For
the sake of both teams though, and for the sake of the internal struggle with
the rivalry inside all Greek-Americans, a blowout by either team would
ironically be the best result, only if either team goes on to win the whole
thing.
Read
past feature articles