As something of a sports fan –the secret is out—I’ve been struck over the past week by the frequency with which a number of the suicide bombers in what are now being called the 7/7 attacks in London have been referred to, with surprise, as sports-loving. One was a talented soccer player. One studied Sports Science at Leeds Metropolitan University, specializing in cricket. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour reported with a tone of astonishment that one of the suspects had been on a rafting trip in Scotland just a few weeks before (!!!). The implication of the remarks has been that these athletic interests, indeed talents, would seem to be marks of an unshakable normalcy, a full integration into British culture and values. What could be more English than cricket?

While this is hardly my area of expertise, I do know there is a body of critical literature on the colonial appropriation of cricket and its complex cultural meanings, for example: C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary, an interesting chapter in Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large --and then there’s the international hit über-Bollywood production Lagaan, in which a group of Indian villagers, their backs to the wall, accept a wager and master the game to win three years with no taxes. The Great Game indeed. While the colonial legacy is far less direct –one might say this is the empire of cultural imperialism writing back—American team sports have also become increasingly internationalized. Just a little over a half century after Jackie Robinson broke, as they say, the color barrier in baseball, the three star players of last year’s NBA champion San Antonio Spurs were from the Virgin Islands (Tim Duncan), Argentina (Manu Ginobili), and, for goodness sake, France (Tony Parker).

What strikes me as potentially interesting about all this is the various ways in which particular sports have, or appear to have (I’m not sure the distinction is important here), strong links to national identity. At the limit, once could say that sports are a significant component of the imagined community famously formulated by Benedict Anderson, like a national anthem (sung at baseball games, of course) or a national holiday (which the Superbowl has become). The internationalization of previously national sports would then suggest a change in this function –the formation of a different kind of imaginary community, very much caught up with national ones, of course, but by no means synonymous. American universalism makes this possible in a particular way. Anecdotally, my experience has been that French Olympic coverage is mostly about French athletes, however poorly they fair and however obscure the event, whereas American Olympic coverage is mostly about Americans, of course, but also about all the winners of whatever nation, who become, through the universal value of their Excellence, confirmations of the truth of American values. Consider, by contrast, the reception of Lance Armstrong in France.

I suspect that if some of the London bombers had been highly skilled at ice hockey or drag-racing, this would not have seemed a relevant fact. In any event, it is clear that people want to understand what happened, and understandably so; but these efforts to understand seem almost fatally mired in outmoded notions of national culture, which manifest themselves in terms of normalcy and deviancy that clearly are no longer appropriate, if they ever were. The Terrorist should be an introvert, a bearded junky mainlining the Koran in the inner chamber of some madarassah, not a strapping lad playing cricket in the light of day. Not someone whose father owns a fish-and-chips shop.

In his early Infancy and History, Giorgio Agamben, drawing on the work of Claude Levi-Strauss writes that “while rites transform events into structures, play transforms structures into events.” In other words, ritual tries to close the gap between the mythic past and the present by uniting through a consistent form, while play shuffles forms around and invents new ones, redefining or largely ignoring the present’s relationship to the past. Sport today perhaps more obviously assumes the form of a ritual, compulsively transforming events into myths through instant replay. Play, writes Agamben, “tends to break the connection between past and present, and to break down and crumble the whole structure into events,” a definition that to me, today, sadly, sounds like nothing so much as terrorism.

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