How Basketball Can Save the World

November 28, 2022
In this flawed offering, Hollander, a professor at NYU’s Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport, argues that lessons from basketball can help address the world’s problems. Hollander, a longtime player and fan of the game, writes that a new paradigm is necessary to examine such issues as authoritarianism and income inequality. Basketball, he contends, offers a promising one: it “opens closed worlds,” “gives sanctuary to the outsider,” and has proven “influential in major societal discussions of race, access, gender.” Analyzing basketball as a “source of ideas for fairness, problem solving, sustainability, and growth,” the author outlines 13 takeaway principles—the same as founder James Naismith’s original number of rules—codifying elements of the sport that can be applied to larger issues. For example, basketball’s “positionless-ness” speaks to the importance of flexibility in 21st-century professional attitudes (a 2022 study showed members of Gen Z changing jobs “at a 134 percent higher rate than they were in 2019”), while the sport’s accessibility highlights the need to remove social barriers to advancement. Elsewhere, Hollander discusses basketball as an “antidote to isolation and loneliness” and highlights its ability to cross urban and rural divides. Though well-meaning, the author shoehorns examples into his conceptual framework as needed, with frequently unconvincing results. For example, he positions basketball as “a vehicle for gender inclusion” without including a comprehensive discussion of disparities in professional opportunities and salaries for male and female players. This attempt to find a sports-based model for solving society’s ills misses the mark.