March Madness in Lebanon

It's that time of year in the United States, when fans of college basketball start preparing their office pools and feverishly working the old boy network for tickets to the big alma mater home game. But if you think Americans get a little carried away in the name of a basketball tournament, consider basketball games in Lebanon, where riot police and the occasional armored personnel carrier are as common as cheerleaders.

Basketball is the most popular sport in Lebanon, and for inhabitants of a small Middle Eastern country, the Lebanese have got surprisingly good game. With a mere 4 million people, Lebanon often ranks near the top of the Asian championships, lagging just behind the likes of China (population 1.3 billion). Unfortunately, Lebanon's toxic brew of sectarianism and politics cause as much excitement as the athletes. All 12 of Lebanon's semi-professional basketball teams have some sort of religious or political affiliation. And despite the fact that fans from rival teams are segregated into stands on opposite sides of the court, fights break out so regularly that last year that the government barred spectators from attending games for a few months last year. Even when there isn't violence, games resemble political rallies – with flags, political salutes, and chants that mention political leaders – as much as they do sporting events.

That's a problem because in Lebanon, politics have a way of turning ugly. The country fought a devastating civil war from 1975 to 1990 mostly along religious lines: Christian vs. Muslim. Today the battles lines are forming once again between those Christian and Sunni Muslim groups allied with the American-backed government, and Shia Muslm and Christian groups that form an opposition movement supported by Syria and Iran.

These tensions – heightened by concern over the possibility of another war with Israel – spill onto the court. Because Lebanon's Shia Muslims generally prefer soccer (perhaps reflecting their status as a traditionally disenfranchised minority) the main action is Christian vs. Christian, and Christian vs. Sunni. In fact, basketball is an extension of politics to such a degree that when General Michel Aoun, a Christian leader, turned against the country's mainline pro-government Christians, one of the first things he did was start a basketball team, the Blue Stars.

On Friday night at a game hosted by a team from Achrafieyh, a Christian neighborhood in Beirut, the home crowd shouted: “God, Achrafieyeh and the Doctor!” in reference to a Christian leader who once attended medical school. They also tried to distract a rival player with a gay slur intended to be particularly insulting to Muslims. “Toot, toot, toot! Khaled is a fruit!”

That basketball has become a reflection of the country's disunity is a sad irony of history. The sport was brought to Lebanon by American missionaries and educators in the early 20th century as part of a broader Wilsonian project to teach the colonized peoples of the Middle East skills to build their own nations. Perhaps sportsmanship could have been part of a civil society that erased boundaries between Christians and Muslims, East and West, but that never happened. “In Lebanon, we never have progress,” said Ellie Fawaz, a legendary Lebanese player who himself was taught basketball by an American missionary. “Instead, we have war.”

Still, basketball in Lebanon has its transcendent moments, such as in 1999 and 2000 when Sagesse, a Christian team, won the Arab club championships two years in a row and the country shut down in celebration. And the players here – a mix of locals with a bit of imported American talent -- are professionals in the best sense. “It's the opposite of America,” said Demetric Shaw, a player visiting Lebanon from Fort Worth, Texas. “Here the fans fight, but the players never do.”

However, in the end, the biggest problem facing Lebanese basketball may not be politics but economics. Even before recent political upheavals, Lebanese teams were having trouble competing with oil-rich teams from the Gulf who have been buying up top players. But Pierre Kakhia, the head of the local basketball federation, has developed a typically Lebanese response to a financial crisis: tap into the vast network of talented people all over the world who have Lebanese ancestry, and lure them back home to the Switzerland of the Middle East. “We're looking abroad for the tallest Lebanese,” he said.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut