When I was growing up in the nineties, all the kids my age worshipped Michael Jordan. We begged our parents to buy us any and every product that he promoted, and whenever we touched a basketball, we screamed, “I’m Jordan!” All of us were familiar with José “Piculín” Ortíz (perhaps the greatest Puerto Rican basketball player of all-time), but we didn’t care about him. He was never on TV, he couldn’t dunk from the free throw line, and he didn’t make movies with Bugs Bunny.
We had also heard stories about Roberto Clemente. As one of the greatest players in the history of Major League Baseball and a proud Puerto Rican, he was revered throughout the island. Sadly, he died 15 years before we were born. As a result, we never had the chance to see him play, so he was irrelevant to our immediate reality.
A few months after Jordan retired, the Tournament of the Americas (now known as the FIBA Americas Championship) was held in San Juan. Although seeing NBA players in person was an exciting experience for an 11 year-old sports fan, the thing I enjoyed the most about the tournament was getting to know the Puerto Rican national basketball team. I could root for players from my own country for the first time in my life!
This experience inspired me to learn about Puerto Rican athletes. Even though most of my favorite sports stars are still U.S. Americans, I get more emotionally invested when the Puerto Rican national team is playing, as opposed to NBA or MLB teams. Watching my fellow countrymen defend the colors of our flag carries much more weight than watching foreigners represent cities that I am barely familiar with.
On March 15 this year, the Puerto Rican national baseball team faced the United States in an elimination game that would guarantee the victor one of the top four positions in the World Baseball Classic. Many sportswriters felt that beating the U.S. would represent the most important athletic achievement in Puerto Rico since Carlos Arroyo guided us to victory in the first game of the 2004 Olympics. Perhaps not incidentally, this game was also against the U.S. team, a star-studded roster that included former and future NBA MVP’s Allen Iverson, Tim Duncan, and LeBron James.
I called my grandfather before the game to discuss the implications of a Puerto Rican victory. Aside from being a huge sports fan, he was also an assemblyman for the New Progressive Party (the political party that advocates statehood for Puerto Rico), so I decided to tease him a little bit.
“Wait, why am I talking about this with you?” I said. “You want the U.S. to win!”
Although he knew I was joking, he still felt offended and told me that he had no idea what I was talking about.
I tried to explain that it was a contradiction to support statehood for Puerto Rico but still root for the home team, because if the statehood advocates’ dream ever materialized, we would lose all international representation and would have to compete with U.S. Americans for a spot on their team.
Before I could finish my point (one that I’m sure he had heard numerous times before), he interrupted me and said, “I am in favor of statehood, but I’m also a native Puerto Rican. How could I deny my roots and support the Americans? That would be political fanaticism.”
His answer spiked my interest in the matter, and I decided to find out what my pro-statehood friends thought about the game. I was particularly curious about my best friend Danny’s perspective. For as long as I’ve known him, he has been a proud admirer of the United States. When I asked where his loyalties lay, he responded without hesitation, “I always want the U.S. to win.”
“I understand, but they’re up against players from your own country!” I asked. “Do you really want your guys to lose?”
“Yup. I hardly know about the Puerto Rican players, but I like the Americans because they’re the ones I see on TV. Also, if you seek statehood, you love the U.S., so you’re supposed to support them by default. My ideology forces me to despise the fact that we are a colony, and I don’t like to think of Puerto Rico as something separate from the U.S.. I don’t care if this looks bad because I’m from another ‘country’. This is how a statehood supporter is supposed to think.”
His frankness surprised me, so I quickly wrote the question on my Facebook page to see if anyone else felt the same way. The response was unanimous – all my pro-statehood friends wanted Puerto Rico to win. Not only that, but they could not believe that their loyalty towards their homeland was being questioned. Despite admitting that they don’t follow the Professional Baseball League of Puerto Rico, they stressed that seeing the national team excel in the tournament made them feel very patriotic.
After the team secured a ticket to the championship game by beating the U.S. and two-time defending champion Japan, the leading newspaper in Puerto Rico (El Nuevo Día) published an article that compiled the reactions of various Puerto Rican public figures. Juan Dalmau, the 2012 gubernatorial candidate of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, said “the team managed to tap into the strong pride all Puerto Ricans feel about their national identity, regardless of political ideology.” This quote says it all. It might be a cliché, but the World Baseball Classic showed that sports can generate powerful emotions and unite the masses, and that nothing makes us happier as a people than seeing our compatriots exceed expectations and make noise on the international stage.
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