We Fight Low Information
Named one of UTNE Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World”, Dave Zirin writes about the politics of sports for the Nation Magazine. He is their first sports writer in 150 years of existence. Winner of Sport in Society and Northeastern University School of Journalism's 2011 'Excellence in Sports Journalism' Award, Zirin is also the host of Sirius XM Radio’s popular weekly show, Edge of Sports Radio. He has been called “the best sportswriter in the United States,” by Robert Lipsyte. Dave Zirin is, in addition, a columnist for SLAM Magazine and the Progressive.
Dave Zirin: Tim Tebow is a neon distraction in a league that prefers the equivalent of men in gray flannel suits. If Tom Brady is the Don Draper of quarterbacks, then Tim Tebow is Megan Draper, flashing some skin and singing French pop songs, equal parts transfixing and excruciating.
Dave Zirin: Profiteering and childhood, whether we are talking about youth sports or charter schools, are a toxic mix. It’s creepy enough that the representatives of big business are oozing around the playground and judging youth sports as an underdeveloped “opportunity.”
Dave Zirin: Sports bears a very specific responsibility to take this struggle on. No other institution reaches more men and no other institution plays a greater role in teaching boys how to define their own manhood and masculinity.
Dave Zirin: Short of a billion of us rising, happy and safe homes will not be a reality for the women of the world. It should be. We have to act now unless we want to keep telling the stories of Kasandra Perkins, Anene Booysen and Reeva Steenkamp over and over again, only with different names.
Dave Zirin: It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the tributes to Dr. King by the NFL don’t include the time when he said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”
Dave Zirin: Like LaPierre, Goodell enforces a disciplined message that presents his harmful industry as American as apple pie in the name of profit.
Dave Zirin: On the highest possible cultural platform, the NFL told the world that the death of a 22-year-old woman, the suicide of a player and the mental state of his teammates is secondary to the schedule.
Dave Zirin: Mr. Miller never played the game, but he may have had more influence on baseball than anyone else in this half of the century.
Dave Zirin: I’m sure it’s tempting to look at today as an advance for women in sports. But it’s very difficult think that today’s national celebration of a multi-billionaire and a war criminal has anything to do with women’s liberation.
Dave Zirin: The gloves will come off indeed. Let’s see if the workers, immigrants, and everyday people of the UK can take the punch and return in kind. If not, we’ll always have the Spice Girls.
Dave Zirin: Particularly remarkable is that even though the IAAF set a tone that the track and field community should be suspicious and resentful of Pistorius, the other athletes saw his accomplishment as something to celebrate.
Dave Zirin: This is the Olympics as nothing less than a neoliberal Trojan horse. Seeing the queen sit in observance of pantomime protests and Cameron cheer the very NHS he aims to slash is actually quite perverse.
Dave Zirin: If the call was to abolish all of college football in the wake of the Penn State scandal and convert all athletic scholarships into academic ones, then let’s support this for the collective good.
Dave Zirin: I hope that Sandusky’s victims leave room in their deserved litigious appetites for Governor Corbett. We should all hope he has to answer for the banality of his own evil.
Dave Zirin: When Serena had to field the “emotions” question on the highest possible stage, it was for me a window into why so many women and men celebrated the recent 40th anniversary of the passage of Title IX.
Dave Zirin: In recent years Drew has taken some strong positions against league management. He doesn’t have to do this, but he chooses to because he knows it’s the right thing to do, and because he’s a natural leader who all players look to and respect.
Dave Zirin: With Jerry Sandusky, brand protection for both the football program and a research university with a $1.8 billion endowment mattered more to those in power than acting aggressively.
Michael Sigman: For many old-media types I talked to, there was more resignation than outrage this time around, as though a cherished institution were already gone.
Julie Driscoll: Students and their parents’ only hope is Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, two Democratic Senators who have the cojones to take on big banks, Wall Street, and the powers that be.
Berry Craig: Called the “Ride for Respect,” the demonstration at Walmart corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, will be modeled on civil rights volunteers who rode buses into the South in the 1960s to protest Jim Crow racial injustice.
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Did Shaquille O’Neal Just Box Out Mumia?
Dave Zirin: Why did Newark’s only movie theater, co-owned by Shaquille O’Neal, just pull a scheduled showing of a documentary about Mumia Abu-Jamal? No one is talking, but this is a story that stinks worse than the Jersey swamps.