“Spanning the Globe to Bring You the
Constant Variety of Sports”: Teaching
the United States and the World in the
Cold War
Molly M. Wood
One of the challenges we face in teaching the Cold War is accurately illustrating and
helping students understand the emotional and sometimes-intangible features of incessant international tension. Personal responses to the threats posed during the Cold War
included a heightened competitive spirit, intensified passions associated with national
identity, loyalty, allegiances and pride, the need to feel prepared for the unknown, and
feelings of uncertainty or nervousness, all of which can be associated with the evershifting series of crises around the globe. Sports might help students achieve deeper understandings because, as the historian Thomas Zeiler notes, “the history of all sports is
deeply embedded in politics, society, and culture.” In my United States since 1945 general education survey class, which I teach with a United States and the world focus, I find
that examining athletic competition is an effective way to help students develop a greater
appreciation of America’s place in the world in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Connecting
selected sporting events from the Cold War era, which are accessible to large audiences
due to the rise of television coverage during the same period, provides a fascinating and
highly teachable window on global interactions and the American role in the world order during the Cold War. I can help students better understand that history is made up
of a series of human interactions. I have also increased students’ participation in class
discussions and enhanced their understanding of the often-intangible “us-versus-them”
anxieties of the Cold War era by inserting mini–case studies on sporting events or sports
figures into my regular lectures. Finally, using a variety of video sources to accompany
each “sports story” heightens student engagement and improves their primary-source
analysis skills.1
Molly M. Wood is a professor of history at Wittenberg University. She would like to thank the Textbooks and
Teaching editors, Laura Westhoff and Scott Casper, for their outstanding suggestions for this essay.
Readers may contact Wood at [email protected].
1
Thomas W. Zeiler, “Conclusion: Fields of Dreams and Diplomacy,” in Diplomatic Games: Sport, Statecraft, and
International Relations since 1945, ed. Heather L. Dichter and Andrew L. Johns (Lexington, Ky., 2014), 431. As Fan
Hong and Lu Zhouxiang have observed, “sport is not only a major form of human interaction but also one of the
central ways in which a society reflects its ideology and identity, as well as its place in international politics and relations.” Fan Hong and Lu Zhouxiang, “Politics First, Competition Second: Sport and China’s Foreign Diplomacy
in the 1960s and 1970s,” ibid., 385. The media scholar Gary Edgerton has noted that television evolved from the
1960s through the 1980s from “a local, to a regional, to a national, to an international, and finally to a global medium” and that “sports was second only to news as the programming genre that contributed the most to the growing
national and international awareness of American television audiences.” Gary R. Edgerton, The Columbia History of
American Television (New York, 2007), xi, xvii, 285.
doi: 10.1093jahist/jaw509
© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
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Talking about sports and international relations helps students comprehend the role of
soft power and public diplomacy in the Cold War in tandem with the overt diplomatic
practices we also cover. At my small Division III private university, many students participate in athletics, either through varsity or club sports. Many others are sports fans or have
friends who are athletes or attend athletic events on campus, root for their favorite professional teams, and watch major events such as the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the National
Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament, and the World Cup. Most of them
can relate to or have experienced the emotions associated with participation in or watching sports. Using examples in which sporting events or sports figures intersect with international relations and/or the presence of the United States in the world can push students
to think about human relationships through history, whether as an individual, as part of a
team, or through international competition. Sports is a conduit into history, culture, society, politics, and international relations. As Zeiler has observed, “scholars no longer argue
about state involvement in sports. The record of intervention, ideological trumpeting,
nationalism, diplomatic intrigue and pressures, and individual leaders’ self-promotion for
political gain at the national or international levels bears out the intimate ties of sport to
diplomacy and world politics.” In the Cold War era, sporting events reached around the
world through television, providing nearly endless classroom potential.2
Before we use video sources in class, we talk about how historians “do” history and the
importance of primary-source analysis, and we make lists of the many kinds of primary
sources that we might use to gain a more accurate understanding of the past. I encourage
students to take seriously video images and popular culture sources (including sporting
events) as part of the documentary record and both a creation and a reflection of the time
when each event took place. For each piece of video footage we watch in class, I make
sure that students understand the necessity of knowing the logistical details and historical
context—the date, the location, the format, the actors, etc. And then I ask them, often in
small-group discussions, to respond to questions about the purpose of the video clip, the
audience, the emotional appeals being made or the other kinds of responses that might
be elicited from a television viewing audience, and other interpretive questions specific to
each piece of video.
To acquaint students with the power of television and sports in a global context, I introduce them to the Wide World of Sports, which premiered on abc television in 1961.
A generation of Americans recognizes Jim McKay’s introduction to the popular sports
anthology—“Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport . . . the thrill
of victory. . . and the agony of defeat . . . the human drama of athletic competition”—
and associate it with the breathtaking sight of the Slovenian skier Vinko Bogataj losing
control on the downhill, careening out of control, flying through the air, and crashing
spectacularly. The unique format of the weekly show, as I explain to the students, helps
situate them in the world of the early 1960s, when jet travel and satellite communications made the world more interconnected than before. The concept for the Wide World
of Sports reflected many Americans’ increased global awareness and interest in other parts
of the world, which was driven at least partly by the frightening possibilities associated
with Cold War conflict. The producers of Wide World of Sports took advantage of this curiosity and consciously “set the scene for . . . viewers by introducing the host city and its
environs, history and customs.” As one longtime regular viewer of the show remembered,
2
Zeiler, “Conclusion,” 433.
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“I learned more about geography, politics, and what makes people tick watching the show
. . . than I ever did in school!” Video clips are widely available online from abc Sports,
so I play the show’s opening montage for the students, and they can hear McKay’s stirring words and can see the featured shots of sporting events from all over the world. I ask
them to think about what “spanning the globe” meant to Americans in the early 1960s
and what parts of the world might or might not be accessible to Americans. In particular,
I want them to understand that many parts of the communist world were closed off to
Americans. Using maps as visual aids helps students accurately visualize the location of
those areas.3
The show employed a news magazine format to provide more than simple coverage of
a particular sporting event, including as well profiles of athletes and connections to social
and cultural landscapes. It focused on a wide variety of sports, highlighting two or three
events from around the world each week, often covering sports unfamiliar to American
audiences or sports usually featured only during Olympic competitions, such as downhill
skiing, figure skating, gymnastics, and track and field. As the producer Roone Arledge
observed about his show: “It was at the height of the Cold War and athletic competition involving the world’s two superpowers often became bigger than the event and an
effective way to attract viewers whose patriotic fervor drew them to sports they normally
wouldn’t watch.” The first episode of Wide World of Sports aired on April 29, 1961, and
the show first garnered widespread attention in July 1961 when it televised a U.S.-ussr
track-and-field meet from Moscow. “With the Cold War in full swing and tension high
between the two superpowers,” recalled the longtime show producer Doug Wilson, “all
eyes were on Moscow—and abc—as the U.S. and Soviet teams marched side by side into
Lenin Stadium on July 15.”4
After showing video clips from the Moscow track meet and providing students with
background information about the show, I place the coverage of the 1961 event into context using a simple timeline of international events. My purpose is to emphasize the tensions of that time as well as the sense of mystery many Americans felt about life “behind
the Iron Curtain.” We discuss John F. Kennedy’s January 1961 inaugural speech, when he
challenged a generation of young Americans to “bear any burden” in an increasingly dangerous world. Then in April, Americans were shocked when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, stoking the fears that the United States was falling
3
Excellent scholarly work has been done on sports, history, diplomacy, and international relations. As Heather
Dichter writes in her 2014 overview of the historical literature, “sport history is addressing many of the areas which
interest diplomatic historians, including colonialism, military history, and public diplomacy.” The North American
Society for Sport History was founded in 1972, and the field has expanded enormously, and internationally, in the
decades since. Scholars have explored nationalism within the context of the Olympic Games, cultural imperialism
from a variety of perspectives, and the ways the Cold War was waged through international sports, among many
other topics. Heather L. Dichter, “Sport History and Diplomatic History,” Dec. 17, 2014, H-Diplo State of the
Field Essay, no. 122, http://h-diplo.org/essays/PDF/E122.pdf. See also, for example, Amy Bass, “State of the Field:
Sports History and the ‘Cultural Turn,’” Journal of American History, 101 (June 2014), 148–72; Stuart Murray,
“The Two Halves of Sports-Diplomacy,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, 23 (no. 3, 2012), 576–92; P. Kissoudi, “Sport,
Politics and International Relations in the Twentieth Century,” International Journal of the History of Sport, 25 (Nov.
2008), 1689–1706; Jeffrey Hill, “Introduction: Sport and Politics,” Journal of Contemporary History, 38 (July 2003),
355–61; Roger Levermore and Adrian Budd, eds., Sport and International Relations: An Emerging Relationship (London, 2004); Russ Crawford, The Use of Sports to Promote the American Way of Life during the Cold War: Cultural
Propaganda, 1945–1963 (Lewiston, 2008); Dichter and Johns, eds., Diplomatic Games; Barbara Keys, “Sport and
International Relations: A Research Guide,” Passport: The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (March 2002), 9. Doug Wilson, The World Was Our Stage: Spanning the Globe with abc Sports (North
Charleston, 2013), 2.
4
Edgerton, Columbia History of American Television, 287. Wilson, World Was Our Stage, 3.
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far behind the Soviet Union in the “space race,” another new competitive venue. Americans were similarly shaken when they learned of the failed Central Intelligence Agency–
orchestrated invasion at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, one more sign that whatever “game” we
were playing with the communists, we appeared to be losing. Then in June, Americans
watched the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union take the
form of a personal competition of wits and toughness at a summit in Vienna between the
older veteran politician Premiere Nikita Khrushchev and the American president, freshly
wounded by the humiliation in Cuba.5
In July Americans watched the televised track meet from Moscow, showing Soviet and
American athletes engaged in athletic competition. The first dual track meet between the
Americans and the Soviets had been held in 1958 in Moscow, and a second in 1959 in
Philadelphia, but because these meets were not televised they garnered little public attention. For the first time, then, in 1961, American television audiences peered inside the Soviet Union and saw Soviet athletes as human beings, not automaton communist pawns.
One year later, after the construction of the Berlin Wall had come to symbolize the apparent permanence of the Cold War, Soviet athletes nonetheless traveled to Palo Alto,
California, to compete again in another track meet with the Americans. I ask students
to think and talk about the ways competition in sporting events might or might not affect individual attitudes toward people who Americans were being told were “the enemy.”
I also ask them to consider whether they believe that competition in athletics might or
might not lessen the possibility of armed conflict.6
Another sports example of global topics in the Cold War era highlights the boxer Muhammad Ali’s rise to fame in the 1960s and provides opportunities to think about and
discuss race relations, anti–Vietnam War resistance, and Cold War Africa. Decolonization in Africa, which accelerated in the 1960s and resulted in new independent nations
governed by Africans, drew worldwide attention to issues of race relations, particularly in
the segregated United States. As African decolonization proceeded, nations incorporated
racialized differences into their Cold War rivalries. As Paul Kramer argues, “given the centrality of the Cold War to U.S. foreign relations historiography, and African Americans
to the study of race in the United States, it made sense that the foundational works connecting race and diplomatic history established the fact of Jim Crow as an international
embarrassment in the post-1945 period.”7
Ali’s introduction to the world stage as an elite, charismatic athlete provides a way for
students to view 1960s American race relations from a more global perspective. First, I
provide them with background on Ali, who fought as an amateur under his given name,
Cassius Clay, and won international fame with his 1960 gold medal in Rome. According to biographers, Clay’s charismatic persona was enhanced by his Olympic experience,
5
John F. Kennedy, “Inaugural Address,” Jan. 20, 1961, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency
.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=8032&.
6
Joseph Turrini, “‘It Was Communism versus the Free World’: The usa-ussr Dual Track Meet Series and the
Development of Track and Field in the United States, 1958–1985,” Journal of Sports History, 28 (Fall 2001), 427–
67. The dual meet U.S.-ussr series continued until 1985.
7
Paul A. Kramer, “Shades of Sovereignty: Racialized Power, the United States and the World,” in Explaining
the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan (New York, 2016), 245–70,
esp. 247. See also Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, 2015); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton,
2000); Philip E. Muehlenbeck, ed., Race, Ethnicity, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective (Nashville, 2012); and
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge,
Mass., 2001).
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when the boy from Louisville, Kentucky, wandered all over the Olympic village meeting
and talking with athletes from around the world. After Clay’s gold medal match, a Soviet
reporter, reflecting Cold War strategies and propaganda, asked Clay how it felt to win
gold for a country that practiced racial segregation. Pausing to allow students to digest
that question provides them with a mechanism for viewing the United States from an
outside perspective. What did the United States “look like” from inside the Soviet Union?
What kind of justifications could American officials provide to explain racial segregation?
This topic also allows us to discuss the ways both the United States and the Soviet Union
used the media and propaganda to portray each other in the most negative light possible.
At the time, the young Clay simply replied that he was sure those problems would be
solved and that he was proud of his country, but he later admitted that he had been naïve
at that point in his life about race relations in the United States. Indeed, in 1960 Clay was
conscious of and proud of his identity as an American representative when he returned to
Louisville and delighted his hometown fans with the following poem: “To make America
the greatest is my goal/So I beat the Russian, and I beat the Pole/And for the usa won
the Medal of Gold.” So that students can understand Ali’s personality, his penchant for
clever rhymes, and his popularity with the press, I show them a variety of short clips of
him speaking to journalists.8
The next phase of Ali’s life and intellectual and emotional growth, much of which
played out in the public arena, provides another glimpse into the global awareness of
race. Shortly after the Olympic Games, Clay turned professional, became friends with
Malcolm X, and developed an interest in the Nation of Islam. A significant part of the
Cold War conflict, I explain, involved decolonization in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and
the Middle East, and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for
allies around the world. The teachings of the Nation of Islam expanded Ali’s global and
historical consciousness, and because he was a beloved global figure, his musings about
these issues are telling. As he later explained, Islam taught him “things like that we twenty
million black people in American didn’t know our true identities, or even our true family names. And we were the direct descendants of black men and women stolen from the
rich black continent and brought here and stripped of all knowledge of themselves and
taught to hate themselves and their kind.” In 1965, before Ali’s bout with the heavyweight
champion Sonny Liston, Malcolm predicted that a victory by Clay, which no one except
Clay and Malcolm believed was possible, according to biographer Manning Marable,
“would not only be a triumph for the Nation of Islam, but for several hundred million
Muslims across the globe.” When Clay stunningly defeated Liston he danced around the
ring, yelling, among many other things, “I’m the king of the world.” The next day, “Clay
confirmed his membership in the Nation of Islam” and consequently changed his name
to Muhammad Ali. Overnight, he became the most famous American Muslim in the
world, and later that same year he visited Africa for the first time.9
Ali’s fame and career also provide an opportunity to discuss the Vietnam War and draft
resistance to that war. In 1967 Ali made global headlines, not for his prowess in the boxing ring but for refusing induction into the armed forces when he received his draft notice. On June 20, 1967, Ali was convicted of draft evasion. He was sentenced to five years
David Remnick, King of the World (New York, 2016), 102, 104–5.
Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York, 2011), 225–26, 286, 287, 313. For an excellent collection of photographs covering Muhammad Ali’s life, see “Muhammad Ali, 1942–2016,” CBSNews, http://
www.cbsnews.com/pictures/muhammad-ali/.
8
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in prison, fined $10,000, stripped of his heavyweight title, and banned from boxing for
three years. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which overturned the conviction in June 1971. I use video of Ali talking about his decision and also show key quotes
so that students can perform textual analysis. I ask them to consider his remarks in the
context of the expanding and increasingly unpopular war, the American civil rights movement, and race in a global context. I use these key quotations:
Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong . . . My conscience won’t let me go
shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud
for big powerful America.
And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they
didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my
mother and father. . . . Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people?
Just take me to jail.
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home
and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro
people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?
No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another
poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker
people the world over.
I make sure that students understand the appropriate context for these statements, both
the war in Vietnam and American foreign policy and the racial crises and civil rights
movement in the United States. I ask them to identify some of Ali’s specific historical
references, such as, “they didn’t put no dogs on me,” and I ask them why Ali refers to the
Vietnamese as “brown” people.10
Ali’s career also offers students insights into the Cold War in Africa. After he returned
to boxing, Ali continued to make a global impact, particularly with his decision to challenge heavyweight champion George Foreman. One particular topic of controversy surrounding the fight planning provides fodder for class discussion. The fight promoter Don
King needed money and sponsorship to make the fight a reality. Specifically, he needed
a country outside the United States to sponsor the fight. The leader of Zaire (now the
Democratic Republic of the Congo), Mobutu Sese Seko, wanted global publicity for his
country and offered to hold the fight in the capital city, Kinshasa, in October 1974. The
tremendous publicity that accompanied the buildup to this fight, billed as “the Rumble
in the Jungle,” brought global attention to the African continent in unprecedented ways.
Reflecting the power of American television viewership, the fight took place at 4 a.m.
Kinshasa time so it would appear live in the U.S. eastern time zone at 10 p.m. (There is
much compelling video footage of the preparation and the event itself.) The planning for
the fight and then the bout itself brought African history and culture into people’s living
rooms, probably for the first time, especially since both fighters spent considerable time
in Africa training for the fight. Mobutu, a controversial, corrupt dictator who presided
over three decades of human rights abuses, was also a reliable anticommunist American
10
“Muhammad Ali Refuses Army Induction,” History: This Day in History, http://www.history.com/this-day
-in-history/muhammad-ali-refuses-army-induction; “Muhammad Ali and Vietnam,” June 4, 2016, Atlantic,
http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/06/muhammad-ali-vietnam/485717/; “Muhammad Ali Refuses
to Fight in Vietnam (1967),” Alpha History, http://alphahistory.com/vietnamwar/muhammad-ali-refuses-to-fight
-1967/#sthash.Bug8aQZy.dpuf.
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ally. The realities of American alliances with and support for distasteful but anticommunist authoritarian regimes around the world challenge students to think about American
Cold War foreign policy. I often ask students whether American support for such leaders
at that time was “right” or “wrong” and sometimes set up an informal debate, asking or
directing students to take one side or the other and formulate arguments.11
My third example of using sports to enhance student understanding of the Cold War—
the visit to China by the American national Ping-Pong team, followed by a visit by the
Chinese team to the United States—is especially powerful for discussing global realignments of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the Sino-Soviet split and the Nixon
administration’s “grand strategy.” For background and context, we talk about American
perceptions of communist China since 1949, seen either as a nefarious danger or a total
mystery, depending on global events. Increasing tension in the relationship between China and the Soviet Union, and an explicit threat in the form of border conflicts in 1969,
caused China’s leaders to seek a more cooperative Sino-American relationship. Students
discuss the observation made by two scholars of China that “sport was seen by [Chinese]
politicians as one of the most suitable vehicles for political diplomacy” and that sporting
events “enabled China to both oppose Western imperialists and to make approaches” to
them “through a medium that benefitted from an apolitical image.” I ask students, How
and why could sport be a “vehicle for political diplomacy?” Why would China want to
“make approaches” to “Western imperialists” and why use sport to do so? I want students
to try to see international relations in the early 1970s from the Chinese perspective.12
During the World Table Tennis Championships in Japan in February 1971, Chinese
and American athletes struck up an unlikely friendship. As a result, Chinese officials invited the American team to visit China. In April 1971 the American team and accompanying journalists became the first American delegation of any kind to visit China since
the 1949 Revolution. The eight-day visit was covered extensively in the media. As a cbs
news anchor told American audiences, “the ‘Bamboo Curtain’ has been lifted by a pingpong ball.” It is also fun to talk with students about how the phrase “the Bamboo Curtain” echoes the rhetoric of the early Cold War as well as common stereotypes about Asia.
Television coverage of the visit is widely available from news outlets, and a 2013 featurelength documentary, How Ping Pong Saved the World, chronicles the events using a variety
of archival video. The April 1971 tour was followed by a secret visit to China in July by
Henry Kissinger to discuss a potential summit meeting, and the February 1972 visit by
President Richard M. Nixon. In April 1972 the Chinese team toured the United States,
stopping in Detroit, Washington, New York, Memphis, and Los Angeles. Students consider whether or not “Ping-Pong diplomacy” was a crucial factor in the creation of détente
and whether a visit to China by President Nixon would have been possible without the
table tennis overtures.13
By the time the class has discussed and thought about a variety of examples such as
these, I can orchestrate a broader discussion about the validity of sports as a tool for analyzing international relations, and I can ask students to compare and contrast different
11
On the fight in Kinshasa, see Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own Story (New York, 1975). On Mobutu
Sese Seko, see Sean Kelly, America’s Tyrant: The cia and Mobutu of Zaire (Washington, 1993); and Robert Edgerton,
The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo (New York, 2002).
12
Hong and Zhouxiang, “Politics First, Competition Second,” 385.
13
How Ping Pong Saved the World, dir. Ed Mabe (2013). Hong and Zhouxiang, “Politics First, Competition
Second,” 397.
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examples or to try to think of additional examples. For instance, similar questions can be
addressed in different Cold War contexts through a variety of examples from the Olympic
Games, when global television audiences gather to watch what the broadcaster Jim Mc­
Kay called “a town meeting of the world.” Examining the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City,
students can continue to explore race and international revolutionary movements by focusing on the black power salute that American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos
made upon receiving their medals. Some students might be aware of the rivalry between
the American and Soviet ice hockey teams in the 1980 Winter Olympics but might not
realize the magnitude of the nationalistic and patriotic response to the underdog American victory. They also might not realize that the United States boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow as a result of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The intersections of sport, culture, and diplomacy as a teaching tool need not be limited just to
the Cold War period. The history of sport in an international context is a useful, and fun,
strategy for multiple classroom contexts.14
14
Wilson, The World Was Our Stage, 137. On the black power salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos, see
John Carlos, The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World (Chicago, 2011). On the U.S.-Soviet
hockey rivalry, see Do You Believe in Miracles? The Story of the 1980 U.S. Hockey Team, prod. Rick Bernstein and
Ross Greenburg (hbo, 2007). On the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, see Nicholas Evan Sarantakes,
Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War (New York, 2011).