Political gamesmanship

While most sportswriters like to talk tough about sports figures—we can think of a few who seem to delight in egging on athletes and officials with personal attacks—the talk almost always amounts to more blather than substance. All of which makes sportswriter Dave Zirin appear to be working in an entirely different profession.

Consider the introduction to his new book, Welcome to the Terrordome (Haymarket Books, $16). In it, he notes the irony of the tragic relocation of Gulf Coast inhabitants post-Hurricane Katrina to the New Orleans Superdome—where 25,000 residents sought shelter in squalor. The Superdome, like so many professional sports stadiums built in recent years, was largely financed on the public dime, while the levees that burst and allowed floodwaters to destroy the public’s homes remained underfinanced. Zirin, 32, has made a career of flipping the old adage that all politics are sport on its head, proclaiming that all sports are political. He writes a weekly column at his website, edgeofsports.com, a column for SLAM magazine, and is a regular contributor to progressive publications like The Nation.

“I think sports has become such an aggressively political animal,” says Zirin, who lives in Washington, D.C., from his cell phone during a stop in New York. “We need to have a political understanding of something that has a tremendous effect on our lives, whether we choose to believe that or not, whether we choose to be sports fans or not.”

Throughout the essays in the book, Zirin consistently challenges not only the notion that sports and politics should be separate, but the current conventional wisdom about the relationship between the two. In a chapter that every Chicagoan should read, “The Olympics: Gold, Graft and Guns,” Zirin details the problems the Olympics cause wherever they land. When Athens, Greece, won the bid for the Olympics, estimates put the public cost at $1.3 billion. By the time it was done, Greece had spent $14.2 billion on the games. Put that alongside the “martial law” that security forces become during the games, and as Zirin writes, “Only those who want to see their hometowns bankrupted, militarized, and flattened should pine for the Olympic Games.”

Likewise, in a chapter on steroids, Zirin comes to the defense of the oft-villified Barry Bonds, pointing out the racial undertones in the press’s condemnation of the San Francisco Giants outfielder (one talk show host quipped, “If he did it, hang him”). One particularly illuminating chapter breaks down the NBA’s strange relationship with hip-hop. The league has willingly embraced rap as its soundtrack, often setting its highlight films to hip-hop songs and comfortably aligning the “music of the streets” with the “game of the streets.” And yet, because of the well-known baggage hip-hop often carries—alleged misogyny, homophobia and violence—the NBA has also tried to distance itself. The NBA wants to be hip-hop, but more Kurtis Blow than 50 Cent.

A far cry from the beat reporting and analysis we’re accustomed to, Zirin’s writing feels like a political theory course meshed with ESPN.

“So much of sports writing is apolitical, but that doesn’t mean the writer has to be apolitical,” says Zirin. “Part of me wants to pull these guys out of their shell, on the left or the right, to say let’s talk about these stories with some context and some politics so we can make sense of it.”

Zirin’s work has certainly struck a nerve. At 32, this is his third book, following his highly acclaimed, What’s My Name, Fool! and The Muhammed Ali Handbook. He’s currently at work on APeople’s History of Sports, part of Howard Zinn’s People’s History series, and just signed on to do another book with Simon & Schuster.

“Sports is about the selling of political ideas,” says Zirin. “The story came out a couple months ago that George Steinbrenner puts up chains in the aisles so people can’t leave during the singing of ‘God Bless America.’ How is that not political?”

Zirin appears at the Socialism Conference Saturday 16 and Wednesday 20.