Tiera White, 20, is a women's basketball player at Quinnipiac University and has been a fan of anime since middle school. One of her favorite show is "Demon Slayer," which she is wearing a character on her shirt. Photo by Toyloy Brown III
Savion Lewis, a 21-year-old player on the Quinnipiac men’s basketball team, has hooped his entire life. Like most athletes, he understands how the mental aspect of the sport is often even more important than being in peak physical condition.
Being psychologically prepared for a game assists with decision-making, patience and composure — all crucial aspects of the sport. This is why Lewis meditates consistently, which helps him just as much off the court as it does on the court.
The ballplayer didn’t start this practice because a coach told him or he saw it from a teammate. He learned the importance of mediation through anime.
“Anime has shown me patience. They've shown me that meditation is a powerful key to life,” Lewis said. “Think about any one of your favorite main characters in an anime. At one point where they reach their highest potential was the point when their trainer was teaching them … Ever since I started meditating, I've been so much more clear-minded and I’m like ‘shout out to anime.’”
While not everyone learns meditation, it is still accurate to say a number of athletes are fond of anime and the sports world has welcomed it.
For the uninitiated, anime is Japanese created or inspired animation that is unique because of its art style, which is more intricately drawn than traditional American cartoons and tends to be more representative of human anatomy.
The genre has grown in popularity in the United States since the late 1990s and early 2000s thanks to shows such as “Dragon Ball Z.” Now in the United States, at least 56 million people watch anime, which is almost 18% of the population. The explosion in its mainstream appeal is due to its wide selection and accessibility on streaming platforms such as Netflix and Crunchyroll.
While a large swath of Americans has embraced the genre, in the early days, the first fans in the U.S. were sometimes deemed nerds for liking foreign cartoons. Nowadays, that is not the case. Anyone can be an avid watcher of anime and a sizable portion are athletes and people in the sports world.
Noah Lyles, the 2020 Olympic bronze medalist in the 200-meter, is an anime nerd who dyed his hair silver because Goku from the show “Dragon Ball Z” has that color hair in his strongest form. In 2018, NFL teammates Darren Fells and David Njoku celebrated a touchdown by doing the fusion dance from the same show.
NBA star Zion Williamson has a Jordan Zion x Naruto collection of sneakers with three colorways that will be released May 11 and 18. Bleacher Report, a popular sports site, occasionally makes videos that incorporate basketball and football stars in anime shows such as “Attack on Titan,” “Naruto” and “Cowboy Bebop.” These are only a few examples of how the fabric of sports includes anime.
“I think it's something that's always been there,” said Aran Lee, a Colorado high school football coach and the primary co-host of the YouTube Channel Blxxk Anime. “There is a big intersection between a lot of nerds and sports.”
Photo from Open Product Facts
Lee also said that many sports fans are also nerds and demonstrate that through an obsession with fantasy sports, which requires copious amounts of stat checking at times.
Kyle Melnick, a sports reporter for the Washington Post, wrote articles last year about how “Dragon Ball Z” invaded NFL locker rooms and how anime was squarely in the public eye during the 2021 Olympics in Japan. He said the programming block Toonami, which in 1997 started consistently airing anime for two hours a day on Cartoon Network, has contributed to this generation of athletes’ fandom.
“These are some of the first athletes who grew up with anime,” Melnick said. “These athletes came home from school to watch the latest Dragonball Z episode.”
That is exactly the case for Lewis. He was introduced to anime by his older siblings, specifically his brother Isaiah, and the first show he watched was Dragon Ball Z.
“I'm thankful for it because it was my childhood, basically, and it helped me become more sure of myself,” Lewis said. “Characters like Goku or like Vegeta, guys who work hard, like I was able to relate my life to the anime.”
He also said he “lives and dies” by “Naruto,” his favorite anime, because the story and the main character resonate with him deeply.
“I was able to shed a few tears, I'm not gonna lie,” Lewis said. “I was able to feel his pain, I was able to feel his success and all I can do is relate that plot to my life and hope for the same outcome.”
For the average person not interested in anime or sports, learning that a Japanese cartoon can have such an impact on an African American basketball player might produce at least mild surprise. Lee, an athlete himself, made a YouTube video about why it is logical for Black people to love anime.
“For a lot of athletes who like anime and stuff like that, they see in another foreign character who basically is a blank slate. Naruto is a blank slate,” Lee said. “We can project ourselves onto these characters, and we can basically live through their achievements, and it helps us figure out ways to achieve ourselves.”
This aspect of a show or movie is also true in American media at times, but Lee said that Japanese writers and animators are adept at creating characters that are relatable to individuals’ personal experiences. In the show “Naruto,” the titular character is shunned by villagers and goes on an extensive journey to prove everyone wrong in order to be accepted.
“You can pretend Naruto is a Black kid and he's at a white school and everyone looks at him and picks on him,” Lewis said. “But he keeps this positive attitude, keeps showing persistence and perseverance.”
Tiera White, 20, plays for the women’s basketball team at Quinnipiac and started enjoying anime during middle school when she watched shows such as “Soul Eater” and “Hunter X Hunter.” She didn’t share her fandom for anime until she started her career at Quinnipiac.
“I didn't really tell people I liked to watch anime when I was younger because people (in school) would always say ‘you’re so weird for watching anime,’” White said. “I kind of just kept it hidden until recently.”
Lewis, who was always open to showing he enjoyed anime, used to be worried that teammates would overhear the anime music he listened to sometimes before games.
Hunter X Hunter Photo from Flickr
“Before my games, I wouldn't tell people that I was listening to anime music to get me hyped. I wouldn't tell them,” Lewis said. “Anytime I had an anime song pop in the rotation, I turn my headphones down.”
Lee said that people who assume it is strange for athletes to enjoy anime showcase their “narrow-mindedness.”
“It’s also the idea that one person can only like one thing. Everyone wants to categorize people into different boxes, like ‘you’re just a football guy, you’re just a basketball guy, you’re just a soccer girl,’” Lee said. “People are fluid and people like different things and no one fits in just one box.”
Tyrese Williams, a 22-year-old player on the Quinnipiac men’s basketball team, said that it makes sense why athletes enjoy anime.
“(Anime) gives off a message of fight, grit, learning how to persevere through certain things, learning how to bounce back when you're at your lowest point,” Williams said. “That all relates to sports in a sense, you know what I mean? When you get injured and you want to bounce back … watching shows like that might give you more motivation than talking to somebody.”
White said she imagines what her favorite characters would tell her when she struggles in basketball.
“I think sometimes definitely when there's a rough pasture in my game, sometimes I just like to think about some inspiring things that anime characters would say,” White said. “It's obviously not really the same, but it honestly holds some sort of meaning to me, and I think it kind of helps me mentally. And it helps me get myself out of my head.”
Tyrese said that another area where anime specifically relates to sports is due to how often characters are organized in teams similar to athletic programs.
“Most of the animes, you’re all part of a team, all part of a team effort to stop somebody or try to accomplish something,” Williams said.
Anime’s inclusion in sports also pops up in the form of detailed analysis. Noah Terranova, 20, is a basketball content creator that primarily makes film breakdowns of basketball. Within his videos on YouTube, he uses anime references to explain what he sees on the basketball court in the NBA. Outside of his pure passion for anime, he said he used it as a way to stand out and reach a broader audience
He said that he never worried that people who see his videos would be turned off by the sporadic reference to an aspect of an anime when talking about NBA players. He said he felt the opposite.
“I was more worried honestly, about when I didn't do it because I built a platform off of doing that,” Terranova said. “I was never worried about it working or not because anime was so prominent by the time I started making content in 2019. The chances of somebody watching basketball and watching anime was very high.”
Just like in overall American society, anime has a place in sports, even though it is an intriguing “contrast” to some.
Athletes are just like an everyday person, when they aren’t working on their craft, they unwind and go to as an escape.
“As an athlete, sometimes when you have your downtime you just want to watch something funny that makes you laugh, and I think anime is a really good genre you can watch that is just completely different from what you do and see every day,” White said.
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