Without rivals, international games bore

With the World Baseball Classic almost complete, everyone agrees that it has been a huge success. Yet one obvious trend is disappointing to many: American fans don't care nearly as much as the fans of the other nations involved in this worldwide competition.

The WBC is not unique, however, in this disparity of attitude towards international sporting events. This February's Olympic games were a perfect example.

For an event that only comes around once every four years and is broadcasted in a country that has a nearly insatiable appetite for anything on television, you would think there would have been more people tuning it.

This was far from the case. In fact, NBC reported ratings that were so embarrassing that they almost had to apologize to their sponsors.

For American viewers, watching the greatest athletes in the world accomplish feats faster and further than any human in history is apparently not nearly as worthwhile as watching Simon Cowell crush the hopes and dreams of untalented fat kids on Fox's American Idol, whose head to head ratings easily doubled those of the Olympics.

Another network, ABC, overestimated viewers' demand for the Olympic games so much that they actually opted all but to accept a ratings loss and broadcast a rerun of "Lost" during the Olympics instead of taking the risk of running a new episode that no one would watch. They were pleasantly surprised however, when the rerun hammered the Olympics in the ratings.

"Dancing With the Stars" also received ratings far higher than the Olympics. NBC did manage to lure more viewers than the WB's "Reba," but so did every other show on television.

The World Baseball Classic has been much of the same story. While everyone anticipated that the Australia versus China Taipei match would not draw many viewers, even games involving the United States have not performed as well as many would like in the ratings.

What is the cause of the lack of American interest in international events? Perhaps it is because many of the athletes representing our country give a half-ass effort because there's no financial incentive, and thus the American public views them as a disgrace and hardly worth cheering for.

This explanation certainly works for the men's Olympic basketball team. Many of the top players refuse to even play, while others that do (Carmelo Anthony for example) admitted that they really didn't care whether or not the American team even medaled in the 2004 Olympics.

That's certainly sound logic. After all, if you're not playing for money or for your own personal glory, what other reason is there?

Yet, while such greed and selfishness has all but destroyed the concept of the U.S. basketball "Dream Team" forever (and came close to destroying golf's Ryder and President's Cup as well), it can't explain why we don't care about the Olympics, the new World Baseball Championships or many other international sporting events.

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It could, of course, be that we as Americans are self-absorbed and refuse to consider anything happening outside of our borders as relevant or meaningful.

Or, it could be that our culture views itself as superior and thus assumes that we will so easily dominate in any event that it is not even worth watching.

Those are certainly possibilities, but I think there's more to it than that. Frankly, I think a lot of it comes down to gloating, or the lack thereof.

Everyone knows that it's no fun to be a fan unless you get to gloat after a win in front of the fans of the team that lost.

Red Sox fans wouldn't enjoy being Red Sox fans as much if they couldn't rub it to the Yankees fans after a win. The same goes for Duke and North Carolina, or any other rivalry, for that matter. That's a huge part of what makes sports so interesting and thus, worth watching.

But we can't do that with other countries. We can't gloat after a victory in front of fans of the Norwegian bobsledding team during the Olympics because we don't know any Norwegian bobsledding fans. This holds true for fans of the various countries involved in the WBC. It's a lot easier—and far more politically correct—to make fun of Cubs fans than it is to make fun of Mexico's fans.

Others, too, have recognized this.

"What's the use of saying we're better at baseball than this country?" Minnesota Twins centerfielder Tori Hunter said. "We all play together [in the MLB], so what's up with saying our country is better than your country? It's stupid. I don't like it."

Without any nation versus nation rivalries, it's very difficult to generate a significant amount of public interest. At least in terms of sports, it would be great if we could go back to the good old days when we hated the U.S.S.R and they hated us. Any competition between the two was always something to tune into.

That being the case, televised international sporting events have their work cut out for them. NBC is already in the process of working up a new plan to make the Beijing games of 2008 more appealing to television viewers.

While they aren't releasing details, they did mention that it most certainly does not involve replacing Bob Costas with Ryan Seacrest.