Hey! I’m Michael, and this is All Fields.
If you’re new here, we do this every Friday, bringing you a short essay with some musings on the wide world of sports. We cover a lot of ground, hence the name, and we try not to be total prisoners to the news cycle either. We’re just interested in what’s interesting.
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Disclosure at the top — this edition is just barely about sports. This is about something bigger that just so happens to involve sports. So there’s your warning if you want to bail out now. Off we go.
I don’t watch the Little League World Series. Shoutout to the Fairfield frat guys Laura and I ran into on a lil weekend trip last Saturday, pounding Miller Lites as their native sons got rocked by Nevada. But I’ll never have that kind of commitment. (To the LLWS, that is. Miller Lite and I are forever.)
Now, I can see the appeal. It’s awfully wholesome, isn’t it? It’s cool to watch kids chasin’ their dreams, and it’s a good reminder as to why team sports can be a really great part of growing up. By golly, by the grace of baseball, those youths might just make it.
Lastly, it also brings the world together in ways that the actual World Series does not attempt. The whole world, which is what results in a tournament final between Nevada and “Chinese Taipei,” which is, of course, Taiwan. We all just agree not to call it that, because to do so would be a geopolitical statement. Nay! An outright provocation.
You don’t need to look very hard to find many other such deferences to what is colloquially referred to as the “One China” policy, the idea that territories such as Hong Kong and Taiwan are as much a part of mainland China as, well, mainland China.1 Those territories disagree, by the way, which is why this issue remains so contentious.
You also don’t need to look far to see other examples of diplomatic tensions elbowing their way into prominent sporting events on American soil. Take the Khamzat Chimaev fight we noted last week. The Chechen fighter was not allowed to enter the U.S. due to sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Those politics changed with the occupant of the White House. All it took was a shift in focus and in favor. Just like that, Chimaev’s back in, and Du Plessis is down.
For another example, you could take the antics of Daniil Medvedev after blowing a winnable match at the U.S. Open. Thoughts and prayers to his racket, by the way. He’s a good player, so it’s a shame to see him implode like this so frequently lately. What was weird, watching that match, is to see the French flag next to his opponent’s name and nothing next to Medvedev’s. My grandmother would kill me for saying so, but I briefly mismatched those flags, given they do have the same colors (Russia’s bars are horizontal, France’s are vertical) and I didn’t initially know where Bonzi was from.
Alas, though. The answer is simpler. Medvedev has no flag. As far as international tennis is concerned, he’s a stateless citizen. You and I both know that he’s Russian, of course. It’s not a secret. But you won’t see the Russian flag pictured on TV, because the sport has collectively decided that that’s their punishment for the country invading Ukraine. No flag for you. The same goes for Belarus’ Aryna Sabalenka, for the same reasons.
Adding to the muddled picture, back in 2023, closer to when the war began, ESPN removed those flags on their broadcast but kept them if you checked the score on their app or website. It all added up to a rather odd little dance. Once you’ve started drawing those lines, it’s hard to know how or where to stop.
For Taiwan, this whole phenomenon hits a little different. After all, Medvedev and Sabalenka aren’t Ukrainian players having to play as “Novorossiya.” Taiwan’s citizens live with this inconsistency because, for many decades now, agreeing to refer to themselves as the Republic of China or, in this case, “Chinese Taipei,” has been a small price to pay for avoiding a bloody conflict with their much bigger neighbor across the strait. This has been the rest of the world’s view as well.
What I did not realize is how historically dominant Taiwan has been at the Little League World Series, which is itself a result, partly, of the Pacific War in the 40s. To see baseball embraced so fanatically in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is a strangely cheery relic of an awful and traumatic time for basically everyone involved. It’s complicated — it’s not quite as simple as just, ‘Murica — but it’s also not a coincidence that the same enthusiasm for the sport doesn’t exist in North Korea or China.
Owing to that history, Taiwan has won the tournament an incredible 18 times. They were so good, in fact, that the U.S. briefly threw a fit in 1974, banned international teams from competing in the Little League World Series for a few years, and then rewrote the rules to ensure that an American team would be in the final every year.
As such, the last time Taiwan won it all was in 1996, which happened to coincide with a big year in Taiwanese politics. They held their first general presidential election that year, eschewing what had been a convoluted process whereby lawmakers in a body somewhat akin to U.S. Congress chose the president and vice president by voting themselves.
Possibly as a result of some anxiety over the results, mainland China carried out a series of missile launched widely seen as intended to intimidate the electorate. They didn’t like the guy in the lead, an incumbent candidate from the KMT, which is Taiwan’s OG ruling party dating back to before they fled the mainland shortly after WWII and has historically supported Taiwanese independence from Beijing. In the end, the mainland’s provocations backfired. He won.
What Taiwan continues to lose, though, on the simple basis of global power politics, is the ability to refer to themselves as Taiwan. They do amongst themselves, of course. Hot mics caught that all through this tournament, which is its own sort of rebellion, and an increasingly bold one at that.
When they wrote the headline, the AP put it this way, as did Fox News.
Whereas ESPN and the rest did this:
This, too, has some history. The name Chinese Taipei comes from a 1981 decision by the International Olympic Committee, which handed out a name in the interest of letting athletes from Taiwan compete on the world stage without angering China. If you go back and look at the old headlines from the 70s, and even the 80s, you see a lot of this from papers like the New York Times.
This may all seem more than a little academic. I don’t expect this will resonate much for a lot of sports fans. But what I find so interesting about this is the power dynamic. The reason the New York Times could run that headline in 1986, a full five years after any sports team from Taiwan was obligated to compete internationally as Chinese Taipei, is a matter of focus. It’s not that they didn’t know China’s preference on the matter, or couldn’t have found out.
It was that they didn’t care, which — for better or worse — is how Americans, and thus their newspapers, tend to treat global issues they see as outside their purview. They’re not very good, so you’ll have to bear with the hypothetical example, but if Ethiopia were to make the next World Cup, you wouldn’t hear much discussion as to whether ESPN could in good conscience fail to acknowledge the country’s brutal civil war in the course of that competition.
It’s focus. Again, the above headline was from 1986, when the U.S. was locked in a Cold War with the USSR, long before the Pentagon was worrying about China as a meaningful threat to American supremacy.
Those times have changed. And so have the headlines.
Full circle indeed.
💒 Can I get away without acknowledging it? Here come Mr. and Mrs. Kelce. I’ve found the reaction to all this a little bizarre — oftentimes, people who are dating for multiple years get engaged…? — but I should have lost the capacity to be disappointed in the internet years ago. At the risk of extreme backlash, far worse than anything I could expect from the long arm of the CCP, I’m not sure I care about Taylor Swift’s personal life. Good luck to those crazy kids.
🏈 What’s up with Dallas pro sports teams trading their 26-year-old superstars this year? It was very tempting to hijack this edition to talk about the Micah Parsons trade instead, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So here’s my take in miniature. I asked a few weeks what the hell Jerry Jones was doing here, and allowed myself to be assured by the many pundits — you know who you are — who said that Jones was just making all this noise get the Cowboys in the news cycle and would ultimately pony up the cash. Historically, that’s been his pattern. Evidently, that is not how this went. I can only interpret the available facts, but they suggest that Parsons and his camp felt slighted by all the bullshit from Jones. So when Parsons didn’t take the offer on the table, which wasn’t quite a lowball but was less than he got from the Packers, the Cowboys decided to throw up their hands and trade away one of the best players in the NFL. He’s a two-time All-Pro who already has 52.5 sacks to his name and has finished in the top three for Defensive Player of the Year thrice now in his first four seasons. You could not make a much clearer case for a future Hall of Famer than this guy. This sort of thing doesn’t happen. For all but the very best of draft classes, Parsons is the exact kind of player you pray you end up with if you have the first overall pick. Dallas will get two tries, but they were very very lucky to land Parsons in the first place. I doubt they’ll do it again, like the NBA team across town. That’s the kind of lightning I do not expect to strike twice.
🎾 Another far less important observation from the U.S. Open. I guess it never totally left the scene, what with Rafael Nadal, but I really feel like the tank look is alllllll the way in right now on the men’s tennis tour. You’ve got Alcaraz, Draper, Shelton, Tiafoe, Rune, all within the top 12 or so, and I’m sure I’m missing a few too. Sun’s out, guns out, fellas!
I refer back to the incredibly ignorant comments made by the likes of LeBron James in 2019.