Steven Wells, R.I.P. -- America as world champions?

Dear America: you can't be world champions if no one else takes part
After setting fire to the trees on Broad St, pelting brawlers with beer bottles, playing the Rocky theme on bugles, looting a luggage store and flipping over a car and a fire engine (or a police car, versions differ, it might have been both), Philadelphia might still be grinning like a Prozac-dosed priapic dolphin with two dicks and a winning lottery ticket, but it's pretty much got over its World Series victory, the rapture subsumed into the citywide Obama euphoria and the anticipation - good things coming in threes - that next week it's probably going to rain gold.
But 30-year-old Texan-born interior designer and Philly resident Jaime Walters hasn't been entirely happy during this much-vaunted "best coupla weeks for Philly ever". The reason? She winces every time she hears the Philadelphia Phillies referred to as world champions or champions of the world. Which happens. Often. I know what she means. It's as if every TV and radio station unthinkingly referred to Miley Cyrus as "the reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix." It drives you freaking nuts.
"They're not world champions," says Jaime, who says she watches a hell of a lot of baseball for someone who's not a baseball fan. "They haven't even played a fair smattering of international teams. They play, what, one Canadian team? I don't want to rob Phillies fans of their victory because it's fantastic, but Americans calling them world champions is arrogant and ignorant - the two often go together, don't they? It's just an extension of American bravado and, right now, this isn't the time for that. This is the time for a little humility."
She's right. Which is why this blog is making a direct appeal to president-elect Obama.
Dear Mr President, we - the non-USAian people of the world (and Jaime) know this isn't the most urgent issue you'll face when you take office in January. We know you've got to close Gitmo, end the war in Iraq, put Dick Cheney on trial and save the global economy and that. But this "world champions" stuff - it really gets our goat. That roaring sound you hear? That's 6bn foreigners grinding their teeth and groaning. Please make it stop.
You will hear counterarguments. You will be told the reason the NBA, MLB and NFL champs are called world champions is because all the best teams in those sports are USAian.
This is codswallop. England has what is considered by many (well, by the English) to be the world's best soccer league. But its champions would be laughed at if they claimed to be champions of the world.
You will be told that nobody plays baseball to the same level as the USAian teams. But the champions of overwhelmingly British sports like conkers or cheese rolling or bog snorkelling make no claim to be world champions based purely on the assumption that no one conkers, bogsnorkels or cheeserolls quite as well as the Brits. And if these, minor, provincial, globally insignificant little sports were to spread to, say, Japan and a handful of economic colonies, and players from those nations competed in a strictly British teams-only championships, nobody would dream of calling the winners world champions.
To do so would be considered by the rest of the planet to be the very height of unthinking arrogance. And rightly so.
More importantly, the US does have a team that really have been world champions several times - the women's national soccer team. And every time a USAian refers to the winners of a purely national competition as world champions it not only insults these genuine USAian heroines, it diminishes the achievements of all USAians who are real global champions. In short, you're pissing on Michael Phelps' chips, dude. It's not cool.
By lavishing a title on those who haven't earned it, you devalue those who have. It's kinda like when Bill Clinton was called the first black president.
Another similar argument for calling the best NBA/NFL/MLB franchise the world champions is the idea that if there were an international competition, a US national team would win easily. But recent and regular humiliations in international basketball, baseball and women's softball have proven this to be a fallacy.
The one and only time the US national team took part in (an admittedly half-assed) baseball world championship, they lost.
Then there's the argument that because players from 20 other countries play in MLB, this alone legitimises the world champion label. Players from 83 different countries currently play in the Premier League. But this no more makes Manchester United world champions than you being top dog USAian makes you World King Emperor (despite what your predecessor might have thought).
And as for the NFL - no other country plays the sport. No other country ('cept maybe Canada) has a major American football culture. And thus the arguments used in favour of calling, say, the NBA top team world champions fall flat. You can't have it both ways - we're world champs because nobody else plays it AND we're world champs because we've got some players from other countries. Both arguments are utterly specious and entirely contradictory.
Would you not think it absurd and ridiculous if the Australian Rules football champs called themselves world champions? Given than no other nations play the game? And if Australia were the world's dominant economic, cultural and military power - would you not also find it grating, arrogant and offensive? Would you not grimace every time you heard or read it?
On behalf of every non-USAian on the planet, I can tell you that you would.
(Did you know that England are the European Champions of Australian Rules Football, by the way? No, me neither).
One last thing: after an extensive email debate on this topic with a USAian friend (a debate that I won, obviously) she emailed back: "USA is now World Champ of president electing!"
In which respect, of course, she is absolutely right.