Sweet 16: sports Cinderellas vs. world history’s best

By David Rothkopf

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With America's college basketball championship in its final week, it is the time of year when hopes ride with the Cinderellas, the little squads that overachieve in the NCAA men's tournament. Oddsmakers be damned, these little schools like Wichita State in Kansas offer hope to the little guy by showing underdogs can stand up to the big, hugely funded programs who dominate the headlines for most of every year.

But Cinderella stories are not just for basketball tournaments. They have their geopolitical side. After all Cinderella, herself was a working-class heroine who turned a pumpkin and a few mice into a successful power grab in a monarchy ready for some charismatic new blood (in glass slippers).

For this reason, we have decided to cook up a Sweet Sixteen bracket of our own, pitting eight of the sports world's greatest Cinderella sports stories against eight of the great rags-to-riches stories from world history. Here's how it all plays out:

ROUND OF 16

Our first match pits the 1969 Jets of “Broadway Joe” Namath, versus those once-upon-a-time underdogs of the modern Middle East, those little Davids that took on the Goliaths of the unified Arab World, the Israel Defense Forces of 1967, led by the charismatic one-eyed general, Moshe Dayan.

In the second contest, the Canadian Football League's answer to the Jets, the ‘00 British Columbia Lions, a team that entered the playoffs following a losing season, suit up against the ultimate long-shot contender: 13 fractured, struggling colonies that first took on the British Empire to win their freedom and then in two short centuries rose to become the greatest power the world has ever known.

Next up we find the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” U.S. Olympic hockey team versus a guy who spent much of his youth homeless and penniless but grew up to rule the greatest land empire in human history, Genghis Khan.

Finally, at the bottom of our left-hand bracket, we have the inspiring Japanese Women's National Soccer Team of 2011, winners of the World Cup in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, facing off with the world's most beloved former welfare recipient, J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author now herself a billionaire.

Across the bracket, is the young man who won “the greatest game ever played”: amateur golfer Francis Ouimet, winner of the 1913 U.S. Open, playing the son of a slave who grew up to rule the Roman Empire, the Emperor Diocletian.

Next, the 1954 Milan Indiana High School team that was the subject of the movie “Hoosiers” confront a man who was born poor but would remake global industry and create a breathtaking fortune in the process: Henry Ford.

The Greek national soccer team of 2004 that stunned the football world by winning the European Championships then encounters a man who uit school at age 15 to help support his family and then built one of Asia's greatest business empires: Hong Kong investor Li Ka-Shing.

Finally, the 2008-09 Afghan National Cricket Team, which came from nowhere to qualify for the ICC World Cup, vs. the battered Swedish banking system of the early 1990s, which when the rest of the financial world was rocked by trouble in the crisis of 2008-2009, it was hailed and studied as a model for doing things right.

THE ELITE EIGHT

The feisty Israelis easily defeated the New York Jets thanks to a very different idea of what air superiority could mean in such a contest. This set them up in a battle with the United States of America, which handily crushed the BC Lions given that the United States is a nuclear superpower while the Canadian Football League isn't even the third-best football conference in North America.

The “do you believe in miracles?” boys of Lake Placid could hardly hold their own against Genghis' Mongolian Hordes. And J.K. Rowling was no match for the gutsy Japanese 11, whose rise from the mid-ranks of women's soccer was more breathtaking than any Quidditch contest.

Francis Ouimet went on to become a successful businessman and an ambassador for the sport of golf, but he was no match against Diocletian, who won the Battle of the Margus, defeated the Sarmatians, the Carpi, and the Persians and brought stability to the empire.

Hoosier spunk faced a formidable foe with the man who built the modern automobile industry, but Ford was disqualified for his virulent anti-Semitism.

The Greek national soccer team was awarded a sentimental victory over Li Ka-Shing because, well, he is rich and Greece, well, not so much.

Finally, because the Afghan National Cricket Team didn't actually advance in the Cricket World Cup, the Swedish banking system edged them out.

THE FINAL FOUR

The United States defeated Israel because, well, Israel without the support of the United States would not be the same. This set up a match between the Americans and the Great Khan, from whom the Japanese women fled (for good reason) without putting up a contest. This was after they learned that DNA evidence showed that as many as 16 million people living today were descendants of the prolific conqueror and his harem.

Meanwhile, the boys from Milan High defeated Diocletian because they had the irascible but brilliant guidance of their coach, played by Gene Hackman. (And it is well known that almost no one from any era beats Hackman in his prime.) For their troubles, the Hoosiers were awarded a match against those coolly rational socialist financial wizards from the Swedish banking system.

THE FINAL

America may be the powerhouse of its day, but Genghis Khan ruled the greatest empire of all time and he did it without the benefit of nukes or drones while riding on horseback and living on yak's milk.

On the other side of the final: the boys from Milan High beat the Swedes, who had no outside game.

Unfortunately, those plucky, cornfed upstarts then faced the man who was so ruthless that in Iran alone his victims were so numerous that the country did not reach pre-Mongol population levels until 800 years after his death.

And so the final result: Khan rules. Read into that what you will, sports fans.

David Rothkopf is CEO and editor at large of Foreign Policy. Comments: david.rothkopf@foreignpolicy.com