PARIS – Gaining a perspective on anything can be difficult. Acquiring that perspective when the subject is one that involves the emotions of sports is that much more difficult.

Standing outside the subject, circling it, experiencing the subject through the senses of others in one course to perspective. Traveling through Europe over the past month afforded such an opportunity in thinking about sports.

The world may have grown and be growing smaller, yet the traditions of sports are not easily displaced. There are no Michael Jordan highlights here. There are no advertisements with his likeness. College and professional basketball, football and hockey scores from the U.S. are in the papers two days after the games, if you can find them.

While the Internet may bring the immediacy of all sports to the world, Europe is inclined to take no more than a passing glance at our games just as we barely follow their sports life blood – soccer.

World soccer coverage continues to be the essence of sport for Europe. The stories it generates and the worldwide stars it creates fill the nightly television sports shows and the daily papers.

In the U.S., soccer has struggled for recognition on the collegiate and professional levels. Despite the dynamic growth of the games for youngsters, it is still true that when a soccer child reaches the age of 12 or so, the chances are one’s sports interest will divert to one of the other major sports in the U.S.

In Europe, youngsters rarely begin any sport but soccer. There are pockets of interest in basketball and even more for ice hockey, but they are peripheral sports when compared to soccer. Baseball to most of Europe is simply a game played elsewhere.

These are telling signs about the role tradition plays in sports worldwide. Fans are not born, they are created. That creation comes from exposure to the games. That exposure is initiated by family and by what is seen and heard through the media.

The interest in any given sport by an individual or society is largely cyclical – a matter of tradition. A new sport that seeks to enter the cycle finds it hard to do so since the elements of family and media attention aren’t there.

No sport in the U.S. and maybe the world, has more lost sight of this truth than Major League Baseball. Those who have addressed the damage done to the game through strikes, lockouts and 1 a.m. World Series finishes are talking about losing the tradition that carries the sport from generation to generation.

Baseball has long survived despite owners and players attempts to bury it. Tradition has been a sufficiently strong cord to pull fans through the muck. However, no one knows what the effect on baseball interest will be from the last two decades of debacle by those running it.

If the caretakers of MLB misstep again this year, they and we may find that cord of connection frayed to the point of breaking.

The perspective gained from stepping outside the U.S. sports world is to realize that despite all the advances in shrinking the world through communications, the ability to generate interest in any given sport is in many cases only nominally affected.

The U.S. has not joined a sports world that lives and breaths soccer. Europe has not joined the U.S. craziness for baseball, football or basketball.

It is a perspective that should remind those who run their sports businesses around the world that you’d better take care of your own backyard first.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and NBC sportscaster.