Sport Makes a Difference Globally

Many people believe that sport is just a type of entertainment and game that has no place in suffering countries.  People believe that countries in strife need to take care of more important things than a game before they can move on to entertainment activities.  While this belief is partly true, it is not completely accurate.  I am a little behind in reading Sports Illustrated and so I sat down and started reading the September 26, 2011 issue with Moneyball on the cover.  I read a majority of the magazine and finally came to the article titled, "Sports Saves The World," by SI senior writer Alexander Wolff.  Wolff went on a yearlong journey across the globe to explore grassroots programs involving tens of thousands of participants around the globe.  His article was amazing and taught me a lot about the actual importance of sport.

Wolff travelled to many places including Vancouver, Rio de Janeiro, Port Elizabeth, Toronto, and Chicago, among others, but the one that hit me the most was his paragraph on Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the West Bank.  He discovered the organization called Peace Players International (PPI) which has been using basketball to build bridges between children in divided communities for almost a decade now.  Established in Israel in 2005, it has brought Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis together on the same team.  At first Palestinian parents were afraid of their children traveling to Israel by bus and balked at the idea, but now that mindset has changed drastically.  Although some parents still are hesitant to allow their children into the program, PPI now has 5,600 participants in the Middle East and is hoping to grow even larger.  Karen Doubilet, the PPI Middle East director stated that all of the kids just come for sport and meeting the other faith is just something that they do.

Once the kids buy into PPI, the coexistence ideal set by the program comes along pretty easily.  It is a curriculum based on a United States think tank called the Arbinger Institute, which is a conflict-resolution machine.  Without this, Heni Bizawi thinks that players would still "clique up" and wouldn't become as close.  Bizawi was a player and coach in the program.  Although this is just a tiny step in the whole Arab-Israeli conflict, every tiny step could amount to one large one and that is what everyone should want.

I thought that it was an incredible article and you can probably find it on SI.com in their Vault section under the September 26, 2011 issue.