I'm not going to make wild claims about sports uniting everybody, but in the US, professional sports were integrated earlier than a lot of other things.
It unnerving to think that sports is one of the few parts of life where people sometimes care enough about competence to make it a deciding factor.
See also _Moneyball_ (about the intelligent application of statistics to baseball by Billy Beane of the Oakland A's)--a combination of focus and lack of money led to recruiting players who were too short, fat, old, and/or crippled to be of interest to the other teams--and got a very respectable win percentage by choosing players by their records rather than by how they looked.
(no subject)
I'm not going to make wild claims about sports uniting everybody, but in the US, professional sports were integrated earlier than a lot of other things.
It unnerving to think that sports is one of the few parts of life where people sometimes care enough about competence to make it a deciding factor.
See also _Moneyball_ (about the intelligent application of statistics to baseball by Billy Beane of the Oakland A's)--a combination of focus and lack of money led to recruiting players who were too short, fat, old, and/or crippled to be of interest to the other teams--and got a very respectable win percentage by choosing players by their records rather than by how they looked.