How Do You Invent World Basketball Day? This Way

…And you’ll never believe what I said. Just kidding, it was normal, I think? We talked NBA Wife Guys, the WNBA, and college football. Also, sorry I said Napheesa Collier won Unrivaled, my brain is eroding from all the scrolling. Apple. iHeart. Simplecast. 

I love when someone else writes a love (platonic, professional) letter to/about Mina Kimes, because that’s one less love letter to/about Mina Kimes I have to write. The Believer’s first-ever Sports Issue is here, and it features the aforementioned love letter. Plus, other good stuff! 

The Washington Post created an interactive college football happiness index, so you can officially decide if you have a reason to be doing so much belly aching or not. Worth noting, they only included the Power Four schools, and this newsletter writer takes issue with that! 

For my more bougie readers, who are also in need of snowboarding gear, Saint Laurent has you covered. How much could a snowboard cost? $12,000??

You get an alt-cast, you get an alt-cast, you get an alt-cast. Everyone’s doin’ alt-casts these days! Josh Matthews of the Substack, Stream Scoop, investigates their evolution and whether the result is “extra flavor or empty calories.” I won’t spoil your meal for you. Read for yourself.

If David Hollander, professor and dean at NYU and inventor of World Basketball Day (it’s this Sunday) has a million fans, then I am one of them. If David Hollander has 10 fans, then I am one of them. If David Hollander has only one fan, then that is me. His book is amazing, but so is all of his work. I’m actually just going to stop typing so you can listen to him instead of me. Goodbye.

Ashtyn Butuso: Tell me about inventing a new day, an official holiday.
David Hollander: Well, step one: Actually believe that it's needed. Step two: Believe that it could actually be a cause for celebration, a cause for lots of people to come together.
AB: Right.
DH: I knew there were others…There's, like, World Girls in Sports Day. There's World Yoga Day…Toilet Day. There's lots of days. So, first I started asking lots of experts…"Hey, you're in this field. Can I get a day from the United Nations?" And everybody told me, "Yeah, it'll be impossible. You can't do it. You have to get one member state to bring a resolution forward." 

AB: So, did this involve you actually speaking at the UN about basketball??

DH: So, what happened was, I made it a class project. I had 127 students. We had to settle on just one nation. We settled on Canada. And my strategy was to flood the inbox of the UN ambassador from Canada, with 127 slide decks telling him why.
AB: Oh my gosh.
DH: And that's what happened. He called me. He's like, "Stop! I'll meet you. Just stop sending these things." And so we did. We met for coffee, and he's like, "Look, Canada doesn't do these kinds of resolutions. That's not our kind of diplomatic portfolio." But then we quickly got to the Philippines, who were on our original list. We had to choose one as a class. No nation loves basketball more than the Philippines.
AB: Yeah, that's a great pick.
DH: So, I had coffee with the Philippine minister in Midtown Manhattan in June of 2023. And on August 23, 2023, we stood together on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly where the resolution was passed by consensus. It is the fastest from conception-to-adoption UN resolution that anybody has ever heard of.
AB: Unanimous. Everybody in the world needed it and everybody knew.
DH: That’s how it goes. It's an all-or-nothing vote. It only passes if everyone votes affirmatively, or they say “going once, going twice” and nobody objects, and then it's called consensus. That's how our resolution passed.
AB: I said before we started recording, your achievements are achievements that no one else would ever even think to reach for, and that's what makes them so cool. What else is on your list of future achievements?
DH: I'm pushing for an entirely new major in higher education. A sports major. Some people call it a sports performance major, meaning it's for athletes. And just like music, dance, or art, the earning of the degree is the doing of the thing. I have never felt athletics is any different. I know we all know studies show how much you learn when you train and practice and play.
AB: Of course.
DH: We had a big conference at Nike headquarters last summer. Over 60 schools from all over the country. I formed a little group called the Sports Major Collective and we dumped everything we knew into a repository and said, “Here's curricula, here's studies, please, start your own.” And two, Southern Virginia University, and Lindsey Wilson University did. More are coming. We will be holding another convening at Boise State in March. You should come.
AB: I’m sold. You and I can talk for hours about the state of the world, and we have, but what are you encouraged by right now? 
DH: At the end of August or early September, I went on a field trip with a really eclectic group of educators, artists, architects, ethnobotanists. I mean, it was a weird group. We went to this guy's backyard upstate... And he had built a basketball court that was made out of all natural materials. But what he's doing is he's looking deeply into the idea of basketball courts as the right human contribution to regenerative nature.

In other words, there's no getting rid of the humans. I know they're causing a lot of damage, but what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to move with each other? This guy has come up with an idea on how basketball can be the key to getting back to the right balance of nature and saving the earth. That was incredible.
AB: Tell me about your relationship with basketball and why it has been so integral to who you've become.
DH: When I was 6, my father shocked my mother and took probably a good bit of our savings, and dumped a bunch of concrete in our backyard, smoothed out a square, and put an actual basket, square backboard, and said, "This is what we're doing." And in that space, I learned to speak a language. I learned to speak with my siblings, with my friends, with kids I didn't even know.
AB: Yes!
DH: To this day, wherever I go in the world, I seek out that space. And when I do, I find that the whole world goes away and I feel peace. I feel balance. The world makes sense...And 10 years ago, when I saw the world kind of breaking down, people couldn't agree on basic stuff, no trust, failing institutions. I said, “Could I make the world look more like basketball?” 

And I knew a lot of other people would go to the space for that, too. So I created a course at NYU called “How Basketball Can Save the World,” where I kind of devised principles that I thought the way you played the game could teach us how we could behave with each other. The way the game is structured could teach us how we could structure a society and maybe even have kind of a hope for tomorrow.
AB: Right.
DH: People will be surprised, the largest South Sudan diaspora in the world is in Omaha, Nebraska.
AB: What??
DH: Yeah, I know. What? But it's true. And this community is profoundly displaced. And basketball has become the galvanizing force for this community to feel connected and belonging to heal trauma from a war-torn experience, which has brought all these people from different sides of the conflict together in Omaha, Nebraska.

AB: Every time I talk to you, I feel rejuvenated and reinvigorated about the things that I was feeling sort of jaded about. Back to World Basketball Day. How did you land on December 21?
DH: It's the day that James Naismith went into the gym in the Springfield YMCA and nailed up the original 13 rules of basketball and said, "This is what we're doing today." So, it's the day that basketball was invented.
AB: And how do you celebrate it every year?
DH: I celebrate World Basketball Day by having the diplomats from the United Nations play pickup at the local Y. We have something like over 65 diplomats from 28 different countries doing the thing that I want the world to do because they are the ones who are really at the front line of doing it. The ethos of a pickup game could perhaps be the next time they see each other in some kind of committee meeting or negotiation, see past the national label and see the human being.
AB: Amazing.
DH: And maybe that just gets us a tiny bit closer to settling things down a bit. 
AB: Okay, last question. Where's your favorite place to play in the world? Favorite court.
DH: You’re going to make me cry because my favorite place was that backyard. I forget which storm it was, but it took out our basket. It's gone.
AB: Oh no!
DH: So that was my favorite place. If I had to name another one that's still standing, it would be my high school gym in my small town in Newton, New Jersey.
AB: Shout out Newton. How many years did you get with your court? 

DH: That was maybe seven years ago that that happened.
AB: Okay. Rebuild.
DH: Exactly. That's what we have to do.
AB: That's all we can do. 

In my attempts to become sports’ Emily Sundberg, I want to make it a point to lean into events and other miscellaneous “it” girl happenings. I (along with my co-founders at my other hustle) hosted a collage event for our magazine last night at the first women’s sports bar in NYC aka Wilka’s, and the vibes were so good. 

The bar was showing the semi-finals for the NCAA Women’s Volleyball tourney and there were so many different groups and fandoms represented. LJ Rader of Art But Make It Sports was there; he made an app specifically for volleyball fans, check it out here. This brand, 5wins, a budding content company, and this app, and this brand, had the raffle game on lock (I won…brag…). Friend of OffBall Molly Morrison popped by, Haley O’Shaugnessy was there. My favorite indie artist Avery Friedman showed up. Five-time gold medal-winning  martial artist Kate Jasenski was here. Our friend and esteemed podcast host of Well Played, Blake Morgan, was there (she brought a full collage journal…ok flex).

Events and moments like these are such a reminder of the power of community. Especially when it comes to women’s sports, because that’s what we were celebrating tonight. Anyway, that’s kind of my holiday cheer story. 

Do creative and stupid and fun and silly things with your friends.  

Go to Taco Bell!!!!!!!!! Obviously, that’s always on the agenda, but now, more than ever.  

Then go to this fun sports bar in Brooklyn! 

Then do a bunch of backflips because, in addition to World Basketball Day, December 21 is also National Backflip Day. Don’t throw up.