It's Over

The NFL's Union Referees Return to Work in Style
Dave Zirin
September 27, 2012
http://bit.ly/Snk38d

The NFL referee lockout is over and we now have an answer to the question, "What does it take to pierce the shame-free cocoon of unreality where NFL owners reside?" All you need, it seems, is condemnation across the political spectrum ranging from the President of the United States to small-town mayors, to even anti-union corporate lickspittles like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. All you need is one of your flagship teams, the Green Bay Packers, publicly threatening to strike or "take a knee on every play." All you need are your star quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees blasting your product. All you need are online petitions with miles of signatures and 70,000 fans calling the league offices in the 24 hours following the debacle of a Monday night game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Green Bay Packers. All of this collective scorn finally punctured the owners' magical mental space, bringing them to the negotiating table to settle.

The deal is damn near a slam dunk for the NFL referees. Remember the root of this lockout was two-fold: the league wanted to end the pension system and ban refs from holding jobs outside of the sport. Now the league will continue—and even increase—the pension payouts for the next five years before a negotiated transfer to a 401K. Refs will also be given a 25% hike in pay starting next year, with more salary increases until the end of the seven-year agreement. The NFL owners wanted to hire 21 more officials to phase in as full-time employees. The refs agreed to seven new full time hires, and no restrictions on their own abilities to take outside work. In other words, Roger Goodell and the owners were shellacked by the same people they locked out, dismissed, and disrespected. The now infamous words of NFL VP Ray Anderson, “You’ve never paid for an NFL ticket to watch someone officiate a game", is now the league’s version of “You’re doing a heckuva job Brownie.”

But there is a bigger story here as well: the entire country received a High Def, prime time lesson in the difference between skilled, union labor and a ramshackle operation of unskilled scabs. When Scott Walker is sticking up for the union, you know we've arrived at a teachable moment worth shouting from the hills. People who care about stable jobs with benefits and reversing the tide of inequality in the United States should seize this moment. We should ask not only the Scott Walkers of the world but politicians of both parties drinking from the same neoliberal fever-swamp: why do you think we need skilled union labor on the football field but not in our firehouses, our classrooms, or even our uranium facilities? Similarly players need to be asking questions to the owners: how can you actually posture like you care about our health and safety ever again after subjecting us to this hazardous environment the first three weeks of the season, or as Drew Brees put it on twitter, "Ironic that our league punishes those based on conduct detrimental. Whose CONDUCT is DETRIMENTAL now?"

Lastly, it's another embarrassment after a year of embarrassments, for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. He has through his arrogance created an asterisk on this season, left an indelible mark on his legacy as commissioner, and created a crisis of confidence in his ability to do his job. He learned that people may not pay to watch referees but they do pay to watch a competently officiated contest. He also hopefully learned that if there's one thing people don't pay to watch, it's him: sweating before the cameras and doing his damnedest to make the NFL a reflection of the worst corporate arrogance. Hear the message Roger. This nine billion dollar league? This unprecedented popularity? This limitless national audience? You didn't build that. Your owners didn't build that. The sponsors didn't build that. It was built by the blood, sweat, and tears of those on the field of play including the referees. It was built by fans who invest their passion and the tax payers who have underwritten your archipelago of mega-domes in cities across the country. I can't wait for the union refs to be cheered when they take the field this weekend. We may go back to booing them after the firstplay, but it will be with respect: respect earned because they stood as one  and beat the NFL bosses.

A Question of Human Rights

Keeping the F1 Racing Series Out of Bahrain
by Dave Zirin
Edge of Sports
http://bit.ly/IwCluV

On April 22nd, the royal family of Bahrain is determined to stage its annual Formula 1 Grand Prix race. This might not sound like scintillating news, but whether the event goes off as planned is a question with major ramifications for the royal Khalifa family, as well as for the democracy movement in the Gulf kingdom. It will be viewed closely by the US state department and human rights organizations across the globe. From a renowned prisoner on a two month hunger strike to a British billionaire fascist sympathizer, the sides have been sharply drawn.

For the Bahraini royals, staging the Formula 1 race is a chance to show the people that normalcy has returned following last year’s massive pro-democracy protests. In 2011, the race was cancelled to the rage of the royals. Now, the royal family is hoping that the 60 people slaughtered by Bahraini and Saudi forces, as well as the thousands arrested and tortured can be forgotten in the roar of the engines.

For those protesting in the name of expanded political and personal freedoms, the return of the F1 racing series as a slap in the face, given all they’ve suffered in the last year and continue to suffer today. Now the protest movement and human rights organizations are calling upon Bernie Ecclestone, the CEO of Formula 1 Grand Prix, to cancel the race.

Maryam al-Khawaja, head of the foreign relations office at the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, said:

“The government promised changes last year but no changes have taken place because there is no incentive to make them. And tortures are still taking place. The government want the message to go out that it is business as usual. But today armored vehicles went into residential areas for the first time since last year's martial law ended in June. I have heard reports of protesters being thrown from rooftops and others having legs broken. That it is why Formula One should make a stand and call this race off.”

At a mass anti-F1 rally, Ali Mohammed commented to the AP, “We don’t want Formula [1] in our country. They are killing us every day with tear gas. They have no respect for human rights or democracy. Why would we keep silent? No one will enjoy the F1 in Bahrain with cries for freedom from the inside and outside of the race.”

Then there is prominent activist, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, who has been on hunger strike for more than 50 days. Calls for his immediate release have merged with calls for the F1 cancellation. Protesters are described as holding al-Khawaja’s picture in one hand, and a “no to F1” sign in the other.

1996 F1 champion Damon Hill, who is now a commentator for Rupert Murodch’s Sky News also expressed his concern, saying, "It would be a bad state of affairs, and bad for Formula One, to be seen to be enforcing martial law in order to hold the race. That is not what this sport should be about. Looking at it today you'd have to say that [the race] could be creating more problems than it's solving."

One might think that all of this would pose a moral and ethical quandary for 81-year old Formula 1 CEO Bernie Ecclestone. One would be wrong. The multi-billionaire Ecclestone, the 4th richest man in England, has done little more than roll his eyes. In February, when hundreds were arrested and tortured for protesting on the anniversary of the 2011 uprising, he was asked if the F1 race would be pulled,  He said, “I expected there was going to be a big uprising today, with the anniversary. But I think what happened, apparently, was that here were a lot of kids having a go at the police. I don't think it's anything serious at all.”

In March, Ecclestone said of the plans for Bahrain,  "It's business as usual. I don't think the people who are trying to demonstrate a little bit are going to use anything to do with F1. If they did they would be a little bit silly…The good thing about Bahrain is it seems more democratic there than most places. People are allowed to speak when they want, they can protest if they want to." There is no word as to what color the sky is in Ecclestone’s world or if at the conclusion of this interview, he released the hounds.

Not to shock anyone, but this 81 year old British billionaire has in the past expressed sympathy for Adolf Hitler, and by “past” I mean 2009. During an interview in July of that year, Ecclestone said, "Apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was in the way that he could command a lot of people able to get things done…..If you have a look at a democracy it hasn’t done a lot of good for many countries — including this one.”

This is an ugly twisted old brute, but say this for him: at least he commented when asked about Bahrain. That’s far more that we can say for President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  As Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a consultant to Human Rights Watch, wrote, “President Obama... loses his voice when it comes to Bahrain.” This isn't just oversight or happenstance. Bahrain happily houses the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, and has pledged to do so for another 50 years. It appears that this favor has bought silence and that’s exactly why we need to be loud. The call has gone out form inside of Bahrain to call upon Formula 1 to cancel this race. We should do our part.

People can email business@formula1.com and tell them their feeling.  For more information on Bahrain, visit http://witnessbahrain.org.

Dave Zirin is the author of “The John Carlos Story” (Haymarket) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Follow the Urine!

Ryan Braun Makes a Kind of HistoryDave Zirin on February 24, 2012
http://www.thenation.com/blog/166441/follow-urine-ryan-braun-makes-kind-history

Something historic happened this week in the world of sports and, for once, I'm not talking about Jeremy Lin. Milwaukee Brewers slugger, and reigning National League Most Valuable Player Ryan Braun, appealed and beat a looming 50 game suspension for failing a steroid test. This marks the first time in history that a baseball player has successfully challenged a steroid-related penalty.

"I am very pleased and relieved by today's decision," Braun said in a statement. "It is the first step in restoring my good name and reputation. We were able to get through this because I am innocent and the truth is on our side…..We provided complete cooperation throughout, despite the highly unusual circumstances. I have been an open book, willing to share details from every aspect of my life as part of this investigation, because I have nothing to hide. I have passed over 25 drug tests in my career, including at least three in the past year.

Braun beat the suspension because of a bizarre set of circumstances surrounding his drug test that seems like the plot of an awful movie that could be called “Brotherhood of the Traveling Urine Sample." As ESPN reported, “... the collector, after getting Braun's sample, was supposed to take the sample to a FedEx Office for shipping. But the source said the collector thought the FedEx Office was closed because it was late on a Saturday and felt the sample wouldn't get shipped until Monday. As has occurred in some other instances, the collector took the sample home and kept it in a cool place, in his basement at his residence in Wisconsin.”

Yes, the reigning National League MVP and arguably the highest profile player to ever test positive for steroids, had his good name destroyed and it was all based around a piss test left in a cold, Wisconsin basement. As Barry Petchesky of Deadspin wrote, “If the procedure is so f--ked up that some dude can keep a jar of Ryan Braun's pee in his fridge over the weekend, then maybe Major League Baseball should worry less about Ryan Braun's appeal and more about a chain of custody that relies on a courier knowing the hours of his local Kinkos.”

The response to Braun's acquittal by Major League Baseball and their testers, the US Anti-Doping Agency, has been nothing short of spiteful. MLB’s official comment was, "While we have always respected that process, Major League Baseball vehemently disagrees with the decision.” Behind the scenes, they have been described as “enraged” with the arbitrator’s decision.

The USADA CEO Travis Tygert said, "It's frankly unreal. And it's a kick in the gut to clean athletes... To have this sort of technicality of all technicalities let a player off ... it's just a sad day for all the clean players and those that abide by the rules within professional baseball.”

It’s not just Major League Baseball and their professional urine brigade that's up in arms. Reporters like Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News have made clear that, aqcuittal or not, Ryan Braun has not cleared his name. “Understand something: The overturning of Braun’s 50-game suspension doesn’t mean Braun is clean, no matter what he says or how many times he says it or what he expects reasonable people to believe. He wasn’t exonerated. He was acquitted. There’s a difference."

But as Sports Illustrated’s Joe Sheehan also wrote, quite logically, “This, by the way, is how it's supposed to work. If the penalty is 50 games and millions of $, the process better be PRISTINE.”

The remarkable lack of grace being shown by Major League Baseball is stunning. It’s understandable why the USADA is upset. Their entire for-profit business model is built around finding and rooting out the players who, as Tygert said, aren’t “clean.” Imagine if police officers were only paid per-arrest and you get a picture of why the USADA already is viewed with suspicion by players and the union.

Baseball executives are sour they didn’t get to lower the hammer and are saying that Braun was only found not guilty because of a “technicality.” But as Gabe Feldman from the Tulane Sports Law Center wrote, “Chain of custody a ‘technicality’? It's critical to fair drug policy, and is mentioned 33 times in the MLB drug policy.”

Major League Baseball is more upset because they need scalps to justify to congress, sportswriters, and the minority of fans that care, that they are serious about cleaning up the game and drug testing isn’t mere window dressing. As the baseball writers dean, Peter Gammons wrote, after Braun had already been convicted in the press, “ ….what the Braun test result tells is that the Commissioner's Office and the players don't care if it's the MVP or a 4A utility infielder, they want a level playing field. Thus, in a sense, this speaks for the sincerity of the program, that it doesn't protect the faces of the sport or anyone's favorites, that Ryan Braun gets no different treatment than some kid in the Dominican Summer League."

Very noble. Yet amidst all the steroid hysteria, is a person, Ryan Braun, who actually has rights. In baseball commissioner Bud Selig’s worldview, that means he has the right to shoot himself up with painkillers, chew tobacco, and drink himself blind, but no right to use even prescribed steroids. If that’s the kind of world the union wants to collectively bargain, then that’s their choice. It’s a choice with which I disagree. This is just the cultural sanctioning of a war on drugs mentality that’s been great for the prison industry, but awful for the rest of us. I can certainly understand why players want the right to not feel like they need to take steroids to compete with the guy in the next locker. But Braun also has the right to not have his urine stored in a basement. He has the right to not have had the test results revealed before his appeal. He has the right to some dignity through this process. We don’t know at end whether Ryan Braun is “dirty.” But we know that baseball and their drug testing system has deep flaws which should be seen as intolerable not just to Ryan Braun and Major League players, but to all of us.

Dave Zirin is the author of “The John Carlos Story” (Haymarket) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

"How the Most Lopsided Trade in NBA History Explains the World"

In struggle and sports Dave Zirin
http://bit.ly/ywp4Ch
http://www.thenation.com/blog/165610/how-most-lopsided-trade-nba-history-explains-world

When you study the rosters of all 30 National Basketball Association teams or even casually watch a game, you find yourself facing two stubborn facts: 1 - Every team possesses an international mosaic of talent. 2 – The last All-Star produced by the high schools of New York City is 32 years old and just changed his name to Metta World Peace.

Calling hoops “the city game”, as Pete Axthelm did 40 years ago, only makes sense if the city is Barcelona. Two decades of globalization alongside the crumbling of our urban infrastructure has dramatically altered who we see on the court. If there was one moment that represents both the birth and brutal pathos of this process, it was draft day 1998 when two teams took part in what must be seen as the most lopsided trade in NBA history. That was when a Michigan Wolverine superstar born and raised in inner-city Detroit, Robert “Tractor” Traylor, was sent from the Milwaukee Bucks to the Dallas Mavericks for a skinny teenager from a place called Wurzburg, Germany named Dirk Nowitzki, and role player Pat Garrity. Now Dirk is considered the best player on earth and Robert Traylor is dead, passing away earlier this year from a heart attack at the tender age of 34.

It’s unbelievable that these two folks were traded for one another. But equally unbelievable is that this was seen as a steal for the Milwaukee Bucks. Then CNN/SI scribe Dan Shanoff wrote at the time, “After trading away No. 4 draft-pick Stephon Marbury last year, the Bucks get it right in ’98 by stealing the marketable and talented Robert Traylor from the Mavs for an overhyped foreign prospect.”

I asked Dan Shanoff about this ill-fated prediction this week, and he said, "Looking back, I am mostly appalled at my simple-minded analysis and implicit xenophobia. Projecting (and developing) draft picks into Hall of Famers demands imagination that Don Nelson and Mark Cuban clearly had and I lacked. I also didn't account for the maniacal dedication that Dirk would put in to honing his craft. It is perhaps the ultimate irony that as my 5-year-old son became aware of basketball this past spring, he announced that Dirk was his favorite player. Nowitzki's talents are that obvious. I only wish I could have understood that back then."

We can laugh, scoff, or shake our heads at Dan Shanoff, but his analysis wasn’t a wild statement by any stretch. They represented my thoughts at the time along with most observers. But in hindsight it’s now clear that this deal was more than the most lopsided trade in hoops history. It was a "canary in the coal mine" for the way the game and the world has changed over the last 15 years.

The Dirk story is now well known. From Wurzburg, Germany, the 19 year old blew up in pre-draft workouts and, despite having the muscle tone of a baby deer, became the object of numerous team’s affections, including the Celtics (who had to “settle” that year for Paul Pierce.) But in the shadow of Dream Team I and II and the utter domination of “our guys” at the Olympics, the conventional wisdom was that Euro players were too weak, too fragile, and basically too lame to make it on the big stage. A soft seven-foot jump shooter? Not in this man's league.

The Traylor story is less known. He averaged 16 points and 10 boards as a junior at Michigan, and was the Big Ten Tournament MVP. His freshman year, “the Tractor “ tore down a rim and made it look easy. With the sweet charisma of a gentle giant, Traylor was in a national sneaker ad before his first pro game. He was “Big Man”, “Barkley, Jr.,” and any nickname that speaks to those rare players whose baby fat makes them magically aerodynamic. Traylor, as Shanoff wrote, was seen as a “can’t miss”: the Big 10 Superstar with the big league body.

But Traylor’s body didn’t go from baby fat to Baby Shaq. Instead he battled obesity throughout his career. He also battled income tax evasion charges that ended in a conviction for hiding the money of his cousin, a convicted drug dealer, But Traylor's greatest obstacle wasn’t weight, taxes, or scandal. It was his production on the court. In 438 NBA games, Traylor averaged 5 points and 4 rebounds. He then bounced across the globe, playing for professional teams from Turkey to Puerto Rico. It was in Puerto Rico when Traylor was talking on the phone with his wife when, she thought, the line disconnected. Unable to reach him again, she called team officials who found him dead of a heart attack.

It was remarked by those who knew Traylor that this cause of death was painfully ironic, given his generous heart. ESPN’s Jemele Hill, who is from Detroit, wrote, “He was generous to a fault. Traylor, like a lot of promising, black athletes from troubled backgrounds, never learned to say, ‘no.’ He received three years probation after he admitted he prepared a false tax return that hid the assets of his cousin, Quasand Lewis, a convicted drug dealer. He squandered a lot of his NBA millions, admitting in a 2009 Detroit Free Press story that he once took care of as many as 20 friends and family.”

Traylor was the guy from the projects who’s bigger, stronger, and faster than everyone else and is pegged for the NBA from the time he walked onto a court. Everyone told him that he would be a star, that the money would always be there, and that he had to take care of his friends at all costs. He also, even in Detroit, had the inner-city infrastructure, from youth leagues to avid boosters, that gave him a path to the League. Dirk was a skinny kid who had no justification to believe that a beanpole from Germany could ever be hailed as the best in the game. For several years other GM’s watched Dallas, and dipped one toe in the water, thinking the game’s globalization might just be a mirage.

Now the league is filled with badass players from across the earth. It’s also filled with Dirk imitators, born both inside and outside the states: seven footers who rain jumpers for days. It says a great deal that arguably the league’s best player, Kevin Durant, plays like Dirk and is from the Maryland suburbs. Rough, rugged, and raw rebounders like Traylor, with a little meat on their middle are in very short supply. As for Detroit, the attacks on the city's union and non-union workers has never missed a beat, and it's spent 15 years as victim of every neoliberal "shock therapy" on the populace. Last year, it was named the United States’s “most stressful city” by virtue of being in the top 10 for murders, robberies, poverty, and, yes, heart attacks. Brutal cuts to city programs has also meant that extracurricular activities, exercise, and for some, opportunity, have become casualties of “the new normal.” As we spend this shortened season celebrating Dirk, let’s also remember Robert Traylor and the way this one trade marked a fork in the road toward a very different NBA: a different NBA that reflects they way our world has changed and left many behind.

Dave Zirin is the author of “The John Carlos Story” (Haymarket) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

"An Olympics Without Black Athletes"

E of S Nation: Please read and enjoy the following excerpt published on Deadspin of the John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment that Changed the World.

You can purchase the book at:
http://www.haymarketbooks.org/hc/The-John-Carlos-Story

Or, if you mush, you can order it off of amazon.com at:
http://www.amazon.com/John-Carlos-Story-Sports-Changed/dp/1608461270/thekonformist

I challenge you not to biy the book after reading the below excerpt.

http://deadspin.com/5853690/an-olympics-without-black-athletes-martin-luther-king-jr-john-carlos-and-the-boycott-that-wasnt

"An Olympics Without Black Athletes": Martin Luther King Jr., John Carlos, And The Boycott That Wasn’t

John Carlos is best known as the man who, along with Tommie Smith, raised a clenched fist—the Black Power salute—on the medal stand after the 200 meter race. Carlos took bronze, and Smith gold, at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. But that moment was a culmination of months of political discussion among black leaders in America. One such discussion happened in early 1968 in New York City. Carlos explains, in a section excerpted from The John Carlos Story, written with Dave Zirin.
I recall going down to the Americano that evening, walking into the lobby and being just overwhelmed by the size of it all. I had never really made time in the downtown Manhattan hotels and my eyes almost popped out of my head. It looked like a movie set, with 50-foot-high ceilings, gaudy chandeliers, and the kind of deep, smoky woodwork that looked like it had been carved and sanded for kings. It crossed my mind that I'd turn the corner and bump into John Dillinger. I gathered myself and I went up to the room where the meeting was to take place.

When I entered that room, I had no expectations whatsoever as to who might be at the meeting or anything of the sort. I just knew it would be the place to be to talk boycott. Other than Harry Edwards, I had no idea who would be there or why. When I walked in, I was immediately shocked to see some of the social-movement political giants that I had seen on television—Andrew Young for one, and Ralph Abernathy, the number two man of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). I was thinking to myself that I couldn't possibly get in trouble with my parents for walking out on that paint job because the SCLC could do no wrong in our household. I was already feeling like gold and awestruck around Abernathy and Young. But not in my wildest imagination was I ready for the next individual to walk into the room: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When he walked into our meeting, for the first time in my life I was absolutely and completely tongue-tied. All I could do at that precise moment was think about my mother. My momma admired Dr. King so much, she could talk about him and tears would pool in the corners of her eyes. She felt like Dr. King was the first lieutenant to God, sent to this planet to heal the sins of this nation. At that moment, all I could think was, "Wow! I wish that my Mom could be a rock in my pocket or a bug on my lapel and just be here to take in this moment." I was in awe. I know I probably looked completely unnerved, but Dr. King had this way of putting the people around him at ease. He came out with such a warm manner—you could say an almost comedic style—and it relaxed all the young athletes who might have been starstruck in his presence.

If Dr. King had been born in another life and another skin, and didn't get involved in religion and the civil rights movement, he could have made a Brinks truck worth of money as a stand-up comic because he was so funny and charismatic, cracking jokes before the meeting, putting everyone in stitches and making us all comfortable. Then, with Dr. King present and accounted for, the meeting started in earnest. Dr. King made it clear from the beginning that he wasn't just there to lend moral support. He wanted to help us hammer out a plan and he made it clear that he would be a public supporter of the Olympic boycott. He also stated that while we had his public support, he wouldn't and couldn't be the lead man at the front of the march and in front of the cameras. He said that it would do the movement no favors. He wanted Harry Edwards to be the lead man, and said he would be very happy taking marching orders from Harry on this. Dr. King felt the boycott was a very worthy project and could prove to be a mighty platform to make clear the need to establish justice and equality for all men and women on this planet. He said that our strongest leverage was that an Olympic boycott could have a global reach. We could shock the world and we could do it by also adhering to the principles of nonviolence that he held so dear. We could bring attention to the problems of society, but we did not have to throw a rock or burn a building in order to do so.

This was Dr. King's methodology. He understood that militancy didn't mean violence. He understood that courage did not mean throwing punches. Sometimes it meant just the opposite. He also told us that if we wanted to go down and hold a demonstration during the Olympics in Mexico City, he would join us and bring the civil rights marches people knew from Selma and Montgomery right to the Mexican capital. I still remember him saying that he would get to work on that right after he saw through this garbage strike he was working on supporting in Memphis, Tennessee.

At the end of the meeting, I finally found my voice and was able to ask two questions of Dr. King. The first question I asked him, very respectfully, was why this idea of an Olympic boycott was attractive to him. He expressed to me that the concept and visual power of an Olympic boycott would be like a ripple in the water spreading throughout the world to let people know that the people of color of this earth were very disenchanted about their treatment and we could aspire to something better as a human race. He said that the visual power was in the void it would create: an Olympics without black athletes. He said that the process would be like black soldiers stepping back from the military. "We're not saying ‘burn it down,'" he said. "We're just merely saying we don't care to participate and see how you feel without us as a part of the show." I totally agreed. We weren't throwing any fire. We were just saying that we choose not to go. We felt like we had to step up because as I remember someone saying at the meeting, "If not us, who?" How do you become a "leader"? Well it helps if you decide that you are going to lead.

My second question to Dr. King was something a lot of people in the room were wondering and it had nothing to do with anything that had to do with the Olympics. We wanted to know, "Why are you going back to Memphis when they are threatening your life?" Remember, Dr. King had been back and forth to Memphis where he was supporting a sanitation strike that had gotten so violent it became an article of faith that Dr. King had been marked for death. We all knew it. We knew that if someone had a clear shot at this great man, the trigger would be squeezed. He was addressing not just racism at home but also standing up against the war in Vietnam. He was just becoming too dangerous to too many people. At that moment, Dr. King made a very positive statement directly to me. He said, "John, I have to go back and stand for those that won't stand for themselves, and I have to go back for those that can't stand for themselves." The way he said it was very distinct and very precise. Once again, he said he had to "stand for those who won't stand for themselves, and stand for those who can't stand for themselves." Won't and can't: he had enough room in his heart for both. When Dr. King said that, it made my life more certain. Maybe this is just the way I remember it more than forty years later, but that moment gave me a direction. Until then I was kind of a rebel without a cause, like Brando when they said, "What are you rebelling against?" and he replied,"What have you got?" I never had any kind of a game plan or formula for what I was going to do in my life. I didn't have a compass. I would improvise and speak out against injustice as I saw it arise. But when Dr. King said those words to me, it was like he joined my mind and my heart and guided them toward one direction. This is when I became a heart and soul member of what we called the Olympic Project for Human Rights.

Konformist Book Club: The John Carlos Story

E of S Nation: just a reminder that you can purchase the John Carlos Story right now at http://www.haymarketbooks.org/hc/The-John-Carlos-Story

Those who want to support Teaching for Change, can buy it at
http://zinnedproject.org/posts/11445

Those who support the amazon cabal of global doom can buy it at
http://www.amazon.com/John-Carlos-Story-Sports-Changed/dp/1608461270/thekonformist

In struggle and sports,
Dave Zirin

Olympic Protester Maintains Passion
NEIL AMDUR
October 10, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/sports/john-carlos-of-68-olympics-protest-maintains-his-passion.html

More than 40 years after Tommie Smith and John Carlos ignited the sports world with their black-gloved fists raised on the victory stand at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Carlos says, “I still feel the fire.”

Any doubts that time and age have somehow diminished the passion that fueled his track and field career are dispelled with the publication of “The John Carlos Story,” written with Dave Zirin and published by Haymarket Books.

“If I shut my eyes, I can still feel the fire from those days,” Carlos, 66, says, as early as the second page of a memoir with the intensity and power of a 200-meter dash. “And if I open my eyes, I still see the fires all around me. I didn’t like the way the world was, and I believe that there need to be some changes about the way the world is.”

Those who thought they knew Carlos as a brash New Yorker may be surprised by some of his more personal recollections, including having an early obsession with swimming across the English Channel and having Fred Astaire as a childhood hero. Carlos says Astaire would show up outside the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in “top hat, tails, shoes and cane,” watch Carlos and his young friends perform dance and acrobatic routines and then reward them with silver dollars.

And there are the poignant admissions that he was embarrassingly dyslexic as a grade-schooler (“in those days they didn’t call you dyslexic, they called you dummy”) and that he “didn’t care a lick if I won the gold, silver and bronze” in the 200-meter final in Mexico (he won the bronze behind Smith and Peter Norman, an Australian).

“Before the race started,” Carlos writes, “I made up my mind I wasn’t going to test Tommie for that gold medal.”

He adds, “I was there for the after-race.”

It is that after-race for which Carlos is most remembered. Carlos and Smith bowed their heads while the national anthem played, raising their fists to protest treatment of blacks in America. As a result, they were told to leave the Olympic Village.

The positive reception that Carlos says he is receiving on his book tour is far different from the bitterness and news media backlash that affected Smith’s and Carlos’s lives after Mexico, and different also from the way their relationship with each other evolved. Carlos’s first wife, Kim, whom he married while still in high school, committed suicide in 1977, four years after they split up, an event that led him into depression and still haunts him, he says.

Smith’s autobiography, “Silent Gesture,” written with David Steele, was published in 2007 and fractured Carlos’s relationship with him until they were reunited in Mexico City for a 40th-anniversary ESPN special.

“I understand Tommie a lot better now in terms of who he is, his attitude and his views,” Carlos said.

Carlos is less patient with the state of track and field and its assorted drug scandals. “How can you live with yourself and call yourself a champion, when you repeatedly have lied to yourself and lied to society?” he asked. “It’s gotten so bad that it’s actually destroying the sport and eating out the root of the sport from the bottom, and the bottom is about to fall out.”

Carlos was also dismissive of sprinting’s current sensation, Usain Bolt of Jamaica, saying, “I don’t look at him.”

At an appearance Carlos made last week at the Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, a student asked why he had risked his career to take such a controversial stand. Carlos replied, “Because it was so many individuals that were in positions of power that chose to just lay back.”

Carlos will appear at the Rosenthal Pavilion in New York University’s Kimmel Center on Wednesday night with his co-author, Zirin, and the writer and commentator Cornel West.

Now remarried and working as a guidance counselor at Palm Springs High School in California, Carlos offers his own prescriptions for success and survival. Don’t run from the moment, he tells students; in return, he says, they teach him how to stay young.

“I’m where I need to be, or should be, or could be in my life,” he writes. “I think as well as I’ve worked with kids, there are things I don’t think I had the opportunity to do in this life. I think God had intentions for me to do more, but yet still I hear the breath of God telling me, ‘You did more than most people ever thought you would be able to do under the circumstances, so just keep on keepin’ on and we’ll see what comes.’ When I hear that voice, I tell God politely that he sounds too much like the devil for my taste.”

Troy Davis, John Carlos, and the Moment that Still Matters

E of S Nation: this week marks the release of my book The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment that Changed the World. (Haymarket Books).
As much as I love writing this column, I can only do it if the Edge of Sports readers buy my books. Please take a moment to purchase a book that Michael Moore said he "couldn't put down." Also Dr. Michael Eric Dyson called it, "A remarkable chronicle of an epic life sketched against the defining crisis of race in America.... An inspiring and eloquent story about a great American whose commitment to truth, justice and democracy were tested and found true."

You can purchase the book NOW at the Haymarket Books website at:

http://www.haymarketbooks.org/hc/The-John-Carlos-Story

I also recommend supporting the Non-Profit Teaching for Change and buying the book at:

http://bbpbooks.teachingforchange.org/book/9781608461271

For those who feel compelled to support the independent-bookstore-destroying-monolith that is amazon.com, the link of evil is:
http://www.amazon.com/John-Carlos-Story-Sports-Changed/dp/1608461270/thekonformist

I also wrote a column that people can tweet or post about why I wrote the book. It's below.

Thank you all.
Dave Zirin

Troy Davis, John Carlos, and the Moment that Still Matters
Dave Zirin
http://bit.ly/nHX2wf

On September 21st, the day that Troy Davis was executed in Georgia, 200 very angry Howard University students pumped their fists in front of the Barack Obama’s White House and chanted “No Justice, No Vote.” At that moment, I understood why an image from 1968 still resonates today. It was 43 years ago this week when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists on the Olympic Medal Stand and, along with supportive silver-medalist Peter Norman, created a moment seared for all-time in the American consciousness.

This week also marks the release of John Carlos’s autobiography, The John Carlos Story, which I co-wrote. When John asked me to write the book, I felt compelled to do it because I’ve long wondered “why?” Not why did Smith and Carlos sacrifice fame, fortune and glory in one medal-stand moment, but why that moment has stood the test of time.

Of course, much of the book details why John Carlos took his stand. It was 1968. Dr. King had been assassinated. The Black Freedom Struggle had become a fixture of American life. In the world of Olympic sports, apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia were regulars at the games. There were scant black coaches. Avery Brundage, an avowed white supremacist, ran the International Olympic Committee.

John Carlos in particular, in the 1960s, went from being a Harlem high school track star - walking down the street talking both smack and politics with neighborhood regulars like Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell - to being a scholarship athlete at segregated East Texas State. The gap between his sense of himself as a man and going to the South and being treated like a boy drove him politically toward his medal stand moment.

The answer to “why do so many of us still care” was tougher to decipher. In 2010, I appeared on a panel on the history of sports and resistance with Carlos, after which a long line of young people born years — even decades — after 1968 patiently waited for his signature on everything from posters and T-shirts to hastily procured pieces of notebook paper. Why? And why have I seen street-corner merchants from Harlem to Johannesburg sell T-shirts emblazoned with that image?

The most obvious is that people love a good redemption song. Smith and Carlos have been proven correct by history. They were reviled for taking a stand and using the Olympic podium to do it. A young sportswriter named Brent Musberger called them “Black-skinned storm troopers.” But their “radical” demands have since proved to be prescient. Today, the idea of standing up to apartheid South Africa, racism, and Avery Brundage seems a matter of common decency rather than radical rabble-rousing. After years of death threats, poverty, and being treated as pariahs in the world of athletics, Smith and Carlos attend ceremonial unveilings of statues erected in their honor. America, like no other country on earth, loves remarking on its own progress.

But it was the Howard students, chanting “No Justice, No Vote” to an African American President on the night of a Georgia execution, who truly unveiled for me why the image of black-gloved fists thrust in the air has retained its power. Smith and Carlos sacrificed privilege and glory, fame and fortune, for a larger cause. As Carlos says, “A lot of the [black] athletes thought that winning [Olympic] medals would protect them from racism. But even if you won a medal, it ain’t going to save your momma. It ain’t going to save your sister or children. It might give you 15 minutes of fame, but what about the rest of your life?”

Carlos’ attitude resonates because for all the blather about us living in a “post-racial society”, there are reservoirs of anger about the realities of racism in the United States. The latest poverty statistics show that black poverty rate of 27.4% is nearly double the overall U.S. rate. Black children living in poverty has reached 39.1 percent. Then there’s the criminal justice system, where 33% of African American men are either in jail or on parole. The image of Carlos and Smith evokes a degree of principle, fearlessness, and freedom that I believe many people think are sorely lacking today. They stood at the Olympics unencumbered by doubt, as brazenly Free Men. We are still grappling with the fact that they had to do it and the fact that it still needs to be done.

Dave Zirin is the author of “The John Carlos Story” (Haymarket) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

After Troy Davis's Death, Questions I Can't Unask

by Dave Zirin
http://www.thenation.com/blog/163568/after-troy-daviss-death-questions-i-cant-unask

Folks - In honor of Troy Davis, I gave more than I can afford to the Campaign to the End the Death Penalty. at the following link. Please do the same:

http://bit.ly/qnxerv

In struggle,
Dave Zirin

1. Can Troy Davis, who fought to his last breath, actually be dead this morning?

2 - If we felt tortured with fear and hope for the four hours that the Supreme Court deliberated on Troy's case, how did the Davis family feel?

3. Why did the state of Georgia need to leave him strapped to the death-gurney while waiting for the Supreme Court to rule?

4. Why does this hurt so much?

5. Does Judge Clarence Thomas, an impovershed African American son of Georgia, ever acknowledge in quiet moments that he could easily have been Troy Davis?

6. What do people who insist we have to vote for Obama and support the Democrats "because of the Supreme Court" say this morning?

7. Why does the right wing in this country distrust "big government" on everything except executing people of color and the poor?

8. Why were Democrats who spoke out for Troy the utter exception and not the rule?

9. Why didn't the New York Times editorial page say anything until after Troy's parole was denied when their words wouldn't mean a damn?

9. Why does this hurt so much?

10. How can Barack Obama say that commenting on Troy's case is "not appropriate" but it's somehow appropriate to bomb Libya and kill nameless innocents without the pretense of congressional approval?

11. What would he say if Malia asked him that question?

12. How can we have a Black family in the White House and a legal lynching in Georgia?

13. Why does this hurt so much?

14. Can we acknowledge that in our name, this country has created hundreds of thousands of Troy Davises in the Middle East?

15. Can we continue to co-exist peacefully in a country that executes its own?

16. What the hell do I tell my seven year old daughter who has been marching to save Troy since she was in a stroller?

17. If some Troy's last words were, "This movement began before I was born, it must continue and grow stronger under we abolish the death penalty once and for all", then do we not have nothing less than a moral obligation to continue the fight?

Where was the Pat Tillman Story on NFL Sunday?

Dave Zirin
Monday, September 12, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/blog/163328/where-was-pat-tillman-story-nfl-sunday

In 2004, President George W. Bush appeared on the Jumbotron at Arizona’s Sun Devil stadium to address the combat death of former NFL player turned Army Ranger, Pat Tillman. Bush said: “Pat Tillman loved the game of football. Yet, as much as Pat Tillman loved competing on the football field, he loved America even more… Courageous and humble, a loving husband and son, a devoted brother and a fierce defender of liberty. Pat Tillman will always be remembered.”

But Sunday--- while NFL teams around the country commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks---Pat’s name was only mentioned before the game in Arizona. In stadium after stadium, in pregame show after pregame show, as the NFL’s 9/11 commemoration strategy was rolled out with lockstep discipline, Tillman’s name was conspicuously absent. George W. Bush certainly got his moment in the spotlight, receiving a standing ovation by 70,000 fans at the Meadowlands. On other football fields, massive flags were unfurled, “official NFL/9/11 logos” were unveiled, soldiers were cheered, Reebok’s “We Will Never Forget” 9/11 gear was worn, and yet it was as if Pat Tillman had never existed.

The NFL’s media man, Brian McCarthy, vigorously contested this when we called for comment. “Yesterday was a day to remember to those who lost lives on 9/11...We did not single out any NFL player that had been in the military. We saluted all military members around the country and the world. Pat means so much to the NFL. We have funded the “Pat Tillman USO Center,” a USO center in his name in Afghanistan at Bagram [Airfield]. We also worked with his wife Marie on the creation of the NFL scholarship. The first thing you see in the NFL [New York] building is Pat’s jersey. He is very dear to the. NFL family. We salute him every day. If [you are] trying to create controversy there is none.”

I respectfully disagree. I don’t contest that Tillman’s jersey is in the NFL office, or that “he is honored every day.” But I think it’s worth asking why the NFL paid so little attention to Pat. It’s worth asking because the answer says a great deal. Pat Tillman is the only NFL player – or professional athlete – to die in the theater of war since September 11th, 2001. He walked away from millions of dollars to join the U.S. Army because of the way 9/11 shook his system. On 9/12/01, Tillman gave an interview where he said, “My great-grandfather was at Pearl Harbor and a lot of my family has gone and fought in wars, and I really haven’t done a damn thing.”

Twenty-two months after enlisting, Pat Tillman was dead. His memorial service was aired on national television. The Army awarded him a Silver Star for his “gallantry in action against an armed enemy.” They said Tillman's convoy had been ambushed in Afghanistan. They said Tillman charged up a hill to protect his men but was shot down by the Taliban. Responding to this heroic story, the NFL, as they are quick to mention, created statues and memorials in his honor.

Why didn’t we hear Tillman’s name on Sunday? It’s because the Pentagon’s official story, the very story the NFL initially embraced, is an awful lie. Tillman actually died in friendly fire, a fact that was criminally hidden from his family, his fans, and to the greater public. Tillman also began to turn against the war before his death, telling friends in the Rangers that he believed the war in Iraq was “illegal.” A voracious reader, he started reading anti-war authors in an attempt to wrap his head around how he had become the most famous solider in an endless conflict.

After the Bush administration finally revealed the truth, Tillman’s shocked family and friends did the only thing they could do: fight to find out the real facts of his death. They went public with the narrative of a Pat Tillman that was inconsistent with the Bush administration and NFL’s. They put forth a Pat Tillman that was an intensely iconoclastic atheist, turning against war.

The misrepresentation of Pat Tillman’s death speaks to the lies used to sell war, and to the way people’s rage and grief was exploited in the wake of 9/11. But thanks to the tireless work of his family, and the creators of the documentary The Tillman Story, his true story is now public knowledge. As Pat’s mother Mary said in The Tillman Story, “I think they just thought, if they spun the story and we found out ... we'd just keep it quiet because we wouldn't want to diminish ... his heroism or anything like that ... but, you know, nobody questions Pat's heroics. He was always heroic. What they said happened, didn't happen. They made up a story, and so you have to set the record straight.”

In one respect their effort saved Pat Tillman’s name this past Sunday. In the least it saved his family and friends the pain of knowing that Pat was being displayed in a way he would have found, in the words of fellow Ranger Jade Lane, as “criminal.” But the NFL’s exclusion of Tillman in their commemoration is a statement of its own. They could have discussed Tillman’s service in all its complicated, messy glory. They could have respected his sacrifice as well as his inner conflicts. They could have interviewed the eloquent and elegant Mary Tillman on all the pregame shows. The country could have learned not just about Pat Tillman, but that the former Commander in Chief being cheered at the Meadowlands had committed a felony in falsifying the facts of Tillman’s death. It’s an awful story, but it’s real. It's also far from finished. As The Tillman Story director Amir Bar-Lev said: “This is an unsolved mystery; nobody has ever really paid a price for what was done to the Tillmans. No one has taken accountability or made an admission for a deliberate attempt to conceal the truth. This story is not over yet.”

Dave Zirin is the author of “The John Carlos Story” (Haymarket) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

DON’T Give the Miami Hurricanes the Death Penalty

Give it to the NCAA
Dave Zirin
http://www.thenation.com/blog/162841/don%E2%80%99t-give-miami-hurricanes-death-penalty-give-it-ncaa

Thursday morning’s cover of USA Today blared the two words on everyone's lips: “the death penalty.” No, this isn’t because Texas Governor Rick Perry – who just loves executin’ innocent and guilty alike - is now running for President. It’s the fate that most people believe awaits the storied football team at the University of Miami. The death penalty means that the NCAA will for an indeterminate time shut down the entire Hurricanes program. It’s a brutal, financially crippling fate that many believe Miami has more than earned, following a Yahoo Sports expose by Charles Robinson which detailed eight years of amateur violations that would make Dennis Rodman blush. A mini-Madoff financial criminal named Nevin Shapiro, currently serving 20 years behind bars, offered prostitutes, payola, jewelry, yacht parties and every possible South Beach excess for the Hurricane players. While corrupting the athletic program, he was simultaneously being feted by school President, former Clinton cabinet member Donna Shalala and Hurricanes athletic director Paul Dee. They even let him on two occasions lead the team out of the tunnel on game day.

This bombshell has the moral majority of sports journalists in full froth, rushing to the barricades to defend amateur sports. We have people like Sporting News columnist David Whitley, to use merely one example, writing, “The only way to make Miami behave is a long timeout. No more football, smoke and parties for a couple of years. Nothing else has a chance of ending the culture of corruption that is The U.” He even calls Miami "the Ben Tre of college football", writing, “American forces wiped out the village to get rid of the Viet Cong, prompting a timeless explanation from the U.S. commander: ‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.’ The only way to save Miami is to destroy it, stripper pole and all.” But like the war in Vietnam, not to mention the actual death penalty, the call for the NCAA to shut down the program is dead wrong. As with capital punishment, eliminating the Hurricanes is an exercise in hypocrisy that does nothing but ensure these scandals will happen again and again.

What this scandal should produce, instead of the isolation and destruction of one program, is a serious reflection on the gutter economy that is college athletics. Players cannot be paid openly and legally so instead we get the amoral wampum of “amateur sports.” Reading the Yahoo Sports story, it’s difficult to not be chilled by the casual misogyny detailed as strippers, “escorts” and hookers were purchased and handed to players like party favors. You wonder why over 80% of NFL players get divorced after retirement. It’s because as teenagers, they are mentored by parasites like Nevin Shapiro who show them that women are the exchange value for their lucrative labor. This kind of gutter economy also has an ugly echo in old slave plantations, as the prized sports specimens in the antebellum South were handed women by the masters in return for their athletic prowess. Or as David Steele wrote earlier this week, ”Of course, America’s tender little feelings will be bruised if this is equated to slavery, or a plantation economy, or a plantation mentality. Fine. Maybe it can live with a metaphor like sharecropping. You do all the work, we take all the profits, we compensate you with the bare necessities of life, and tough break if you don’t like it."

The metaphor works because once you wave away the smoke and hot air, this is about jock sniffing criminals and corrupted college Presidents taking advantage of primarily poor African Americans from the South, who see everyone getting paid but them. One anonymous University of Miami player told Yahoo Sports about University running back Tyrone Moss, who took $1,000 from Shapiro. “The guy had a kid while he was in college, a little Tyrone Jr.,” the player said. “He comes in poor as [expletive] from Pompano and he’s got a little kid to feed. I could barely feed myself. I can’t imagine having to feed a kid, too. Of course he’s going to take it when someone offers him $1,000. Who wouldn’t in that situation?”

The solution lies in paying the players but it also lies in driving a stake through the heart of the NCAA as an instrument of enforcement. Having the NCAA shut down the program only reinforces the illusion that they are the motor of morality, compliance and justice, when in fact they are the corrupters of these concepts. Already, NCAA President Mark Emmert, he of the seven figure salary, has been across the national media, preaching about protecting, “The integrity of intercollegiate athletics.” Emmert and his 14 assistants, each who make at least $400,000 a year, will stand on their soapbox and quarantine the bad boys of Miami just in time to save the Golden Goose: the billion dollar television contracts, and the $135 million from the Bowl Championship Series used to crown a fake national champion.

They defend amateurism as an end unto itself, but this is also complete nonsense. As Patrick Hruby wrote at espn.com last year, “Philosophically speaking, amateurism is malarkey, about as credible as the Tooth Fairy. The Victorian-era English aristocrats who came up with the concept ascribed it to the ancient Greeks, who supposedly competed for nothing more than glory, honor and olive wreaths. The only problem? History and the legend don't match. Modern archeology suggests that the ancient Olympics were rife with spoils. Think prize money, prime amphitheater seats, generous pensions and civic appointments. According to Olympic historian Tony Perottet, one Games winner even parlayed his victory into a senatorial seat in Athens. Indeed, the ancient Greeks didn't even have a word for amateur, and the closest term --idiotes -- needs no translation."

Let what has happened at Miami be a wakeup call: the NCAA has about as much moral authority to give “the death penalty” as Rick Perry. If this ends with the NCAA giving Miami the death penalty, then the “gutter economy” survives and we are all the worse for it. If you listen closely, you can hear King Leopold’s chains rattling in the NCAA’s halls, haunting and guiding the daily maneuvers of this “non-profit” that enriches itself by paying its laborers nothing. Shut it down and end the culture of corruption once and for all.

Dave Zirin just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Look Who's Standing for LGBT Rights: Tim Hardaway

Dave Zirin 8-22-11
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/dave_zirin/08/22/tim.hardaway/index.html

The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community has a new ally and his name is Tim Hardaway. The former NBA All-Star traveled to El Paso, Texas, last Thursday -- where he perfected his killer crossover dribble, also known as the UTEP-Two Step -- to stand up for gay rights. There is a group in El Paso who are trying to recall mayor John Cook and two members of the city counsel for re-establishing domestic partner benefits for both gay and unmarried couples. Hardaway arrived from Miami to speak at a press conference organized by the "No Recall" group.

"It's not right to not let the gays and lesbians have equal rights here," Hardaway told the crowd. "If I know El Paso, like they came together when the 1966 team won a championship and Don Haskins started those five [black] guys, I know the city will grow and understand that gays and lesbians need equal rights." Hardaway was referencing UTEP's 1966 national championship team when coach Don Haskins' all-black starting five made history by beating Adolph Rupp's all-white Kentucky squad.

Hardaway is the last person you would expect to speak out for gay rights. It was just four years ago when Hardaway said "I hate gay people" on a Miami radio show after John Amaechi became the first former NBA player to come out of the closet. Hardaway went further by adding, "I don't like to be around gay people. I'm homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world for that or in the United States for it. So yeah, I don't like it."

Hardaway was hit with an avalanche of criticism. He apologized, even promised to go into counseling and -- as public figures are prone to do -- pledged to change. Now it looks like he actually has.

I spoke with Amaechi to get his thoughts on Hardaway's change of heart. Amaechi said that he "heard about the story. I was in contact with the people he did his 'emergency rehab' with after his 'I hate gay people rant.' They were underwhelmed to say the least. Back then his contrition seemed more to do with the financial and reputation hit he had taken in the aftermath. However, it seems to me that this is a far more genuine piece of outreach ... I hope this is a story of true redemption rather than a savvy p.r. ploy. Either way, he is at least saying the right words, and that will make a positive difference."

Amaechi's cynicism is understandable. But Rus Bradburd, the assistant on Don Haskins staff who recruited Hardaway to UTEP, was in El Paso for the event and said Hardaway was there for the right reasons. "Tim has shown great compassion in re-thinking his position," said Bradburd. "It's one thing for a celebrity to apologize as damage control. But in this case, Tim has taken a much bigger step: he's pushing for the correct cause now, and equated the movement with Civil Rights struggles of the past. And the fact that he's pushing for equal rights in a place that is not exactly the national stage makes his move even more authentic."

As for Hardaway, he told the media in El Paso that he was a different person. "My family and friends came to me and were like, 'What are you doing?'" Hardaway said of his comments four years ago. "I talked to them and they made me understand that wasn't right."

In many ways, sports are different today than in 2007. Teams like the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs do public service announcements against anti-gay bullying. Steve Nash, Michael Strahan and Sean Avery do commercials for New York State's Marriage Equality campaign. Charles Barkley says he knows he had gay teammates and couldn't care less. Hardaway's unglamorous activism in 100-degree heat on an August day is commendable. It brings us closer to a sports world where the sexual orientation of athletes is little more than a detail. For that Hardaway deserves recognition, if not praise.

This was truly Hardaway's best crossover.

Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming book “The John Carlos Story” (Haymarket) just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

GQ’s '25 Coolest Athletes of All Time' has a Slight Omission

An Entire Gender Dave Zirin | August 16, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/blog/162804/gq%E2%80%99s-25-coolest-athletes-all-time-has-slight-omission-entire-gender

I know it’s GQ. I know it’s a magazine written for barbershops, cigar bars, and massage parlors. I know it assumes that men are men and women are scenery. But the magazine’s list of “25 coolest athletes of all time” [1]truly sets a new standard for phallocentric panic. Gentleman’s Quarterly has given us 25 athletes they see as the coolest of cool, and not one woman makes the cut.

This isn’t about feminism, or tokenism, or quotas. It’s about ignorance and a national magazine not having an even basic knowledge if sports history. “Cool” should mean grace under pressure with a soupcon of style. By that definition, here are the first six women who come to mind when summon my inner-CM Punk [2]and ponder true transgressive coolness.

How could there be any list without Billie Jean King? In addition to her 12 Grand Slam [3] singles and 16 doubles titles, Billie Jean beat Bobby Riggs in the 1973 Battle of the Sexes match in front of a packed house at the Houston Astrodome and one of the largest national television audiences ever. As she said years later, "I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn't win that match. It would ruin the women's tour and affect all women's self esteem." She had the weight of the women’s movement on her shoulders and still dispatched Riggs in three straight sets. Her signature early 70s mullet and Gloria Steinem glasses [4]were part of the deal.

Or what about Cheryl Miller? Miller dragged women’s basketball into the spotlight by virtue of her own brilliance at USC in the 1980s. She was college player of the year three times and a two time champion. Miller also did it with a style and attitude that forced people to reconsider their own ideas of what women could do on the court. I remember playing ball in NYC growing up and if a woman shook you on the court, you were “Cheryl Millered.” She made women's hoops appointment television.

If Cheryl Miller brought true swagger to the women’s game, Diana Taurasi took that swagger and used it as a club. The Phoenix Mercury WNBA MVP was a two time player of the year at UConn but also played with a smack-talking sneer backed by the sweetest jump-shot in the game. Before the 2004 final game her coach, Geno Auriemma [5], predicted victory with the simple theory: "We have Diana, and you don't.” That’s more than cool. It’s Jordan-esque.

But cool should also mean possessing the power of reinvention and no one has ever represented that in sport quite like tennis great Martina Navratilova. Martina started her career as a very talented but poorly conditioned Czech teenager. In the span of a decade she defected to the US, came out of the closet, had her lover Judy Nelson sitting courtside in the family section, died her hair blond, and transformed her body into a new standard for women athletes: all corded muscle wrapped with pulsing veins. And all with Reagan in the White House.

Martina’s musculature was reflected in her play: a fast powerful, serve and volley game that she rode six straight Grand Slam victories. She also found her political voice in this time, and has been a consistent and public presence against homophobia and intolerance. Martina once said, “The most absurd part of my escape from the unjust system is that I have exchanged one system that suppresses free opinion for another. The Republicans in the U.S. manipulate public opinion and sweep controversial issues under the table. It's depressing. Decisions in America are based solely on the question of how much money will come out of it and not on the questions of how much health, morals or environment suffer as a result." Connie Chung challenged Martina’s statement on CNN, saying to her, [6] “Go back to Czechoslovakia....if you don't like it here. This a country that gave you so much, gave you the freedom to do what you want." Navratilova responded, "And I'm giving it back. This is why I speak out. When I see something that I don't like, I'm going to speak out because you can do that here. And again, I feel there are too many things happening that are taking our rights away."[

Martina is so cool, she is known by just one name. So is the tennis player who plays most like her: Serena. Serena and her sister Venus Williams have both dominated tennis for the last 15 years. But only Serena has done it with a style that matches or even exceeds her substance. That’s quite a statement considering that Serena has won more Grand Llam titles than any active player, male or female. But we’re talking about cool and only Serena has ever warmed up at Wimbledon in a white trench court. Only Serena showed up to play at the US Open in a denim skirt and knee high boots. (Officials intervened to prevent play in the boots.) Only Serena is a certified nail technician. Only Serena wore “the cat suit.”

This is just a taste of some of the cool GQ left off their list. I could go on about Florence Griffith-Joyner with the speed and the fingernails, or Oksana Baiul, winning the 1994 figure skating gold under the weight of the Kerrigan/Harding drama. But if there is one other name I’d leave you with, it’s Wyomia Tyus. [7] Tyus became the first person to retain the Olympic [8] title in the 100 meter dash, winning in 1964 and 1968. But her cools came in 1968, after winning another gold by running anchor in the 4x100 dash relay. That was the year John Carlos and Tommie Smith electrified the Olympics with their black-gloved salute. Their movement, with its emphasis on “reclaiming manhood”, didn’t involve women athletes. Wyomia Tyus recalled many years later. “It appalled me that the men simply took us for granted. They assumed we had no minds of our own and that we’d do whatever we were told.” But Carlos and Smith had been expelled from Olympic Village and were being torn to shreds across the media and Tyus saw that there was a bigger principle at play. In front of the press, and standing with her team, Tyus said, “I’d like to say that we dedicate our relay win to John Carlos and Tommie Smith.” That took guts. That took cools. That took the kind of grace under pressure the listmakers at GQ chose to ignore.

I hope people read the GQ piece. But read it as a statement of the kind of narrow, myopic gender segregation best located in a museum. In other words, GQ might be slickly produced. It might have Mark Sanchez on the cover. It might have ads that smell like the latest cologne. But one thing it’s absolutely not, is cool.

Contact Dave at dave@edgeofsports.com

[1] http://www.gq.com/sports/lists/201102/25-coolest-athletes-poll
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqUl6n92DJg
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Slam_(tennis)
[4] http://www.hollywoodmemorabilia.com/files/cache/billie-jean-king-former-tennis-pro-autographed-8x10_7250297c1302e22222836272538d823d.jpg
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geno_Auriemma
[6] http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0207/17/cct.00.html
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyomia_Tyus
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Games

The London Olympics and the London Riots

Dave Zirin | August 12, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/blog/162742/london-olympics-and-london-riots

And so they played beach volleyball in small bikinis; on imported sand; while the world burned.

It ai'nt exactly Shakespeare, but it is actually what happened earlier this week as the London Olympic Committee staged a beach volleyball exhibition as fires engulfed the city.

Opening Ceremonies for the London Olympics are in less than a year and this week’s explosion of bottled fury has the International Olympic Committee on edge. Even worse for Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, the riots took place as representatives from 200 Olympic Committees across the globe visited the city, just in time for the days of rage. Can you imagine the scene? It would be like Michele Bachman and her 197 children visiting New York City and walking straight into the Gay Pride Parade.

As Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics said, “There’s no doubt that this is a very bad day, a worrying day.... Olympic organizers in London planned to protect London from conventional terrorism. But of all the things they might have thought might happen, I’d be surprised if civil insurrections was high up on their list of expected risk factors.”

The knotty problem however is that the Olympics - courtesy of Tony Blair's Labour Party - aren’t a parallel operation to the mass civic unrest but an aggravator. As social services wither, the Olympics will cost upwards of 20 billion pounds and the Olympic torch has acted as an instrument of arson. Ask the residents of Clays Lane Estate, in East London. Clay’s Lane Estate was the largest housing cooperative in the UK, and the second largest in all of Europe. Over protests, Clay's Lane was demolished to make way for Olympic Facilities. The protests haven’t been heard, and we get riots, or, as Dr. King put it, “the language of the unheard.

But much of the political class choose to hear nothing. London Mayor Boris Johnson rushed back from holiday to say, “In less than 12 months we will welcome the world to a great summer Games in the greatest city on earth – and by then we must all hope that we will look back on these events as a bad dream.”

Tom Jenkins, the European Tour Operators Association executive director, sniffed,“I don’t think the rioting will impact the Olympics. The Olympics is, overwhelmingly, a domestic event. British people won’t be put off from visiting the Olympics in Stratford because a year earlier shop windows were broken in Hackney.”

Former Olympic great, and current Olympic flak Lord Sebastian Coe even called everything this past week, “Business as usual.”

But the many others are far less confident. Paula Radcliffe, the world record holder in the marathon said, “In less than one year we welcome the world, and right now they don't want to come.”

The question now is whether the IOC will demand an even more severe police crackdown to ensure that the games will be run according to plan.

The IOC told us at the Nation that they will keep completely out of any security arrangements altogether. Andrew Mitchell, Media Relations Manage of the IOC emailed, “Security at the Olympic Games is a top priority for the IOC. It is, however, directly handled by the local authorities, as they know best what is appropriate and proportionate. We are confident they will do a good job in this domain.”

This assertion has left many rolling their eyes. Bob Quellos, an organizer for No Games Chicago, which helped keep the Olympics out of the Windy City for 2016, said to me, “Simply, what the IOC wants, it gets. In London next summer, the IOC will be dictating the level of police repression. Billions of dollars have been spent on the security. London's Olympic Park is already a highly militarized zone protected by barbed wire, dogs, and armed patrols.”

Chris Shaw, the author of the book Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games, points out, based on his experience in Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Games, that the harassment would only get worse."[As the games approached] the Charter [their Constitution] went out the window for the duration of the games; People were followed and harassed. Reporters were deported and cops were acting like reporters.”

This has certainly been the case for previous Olympic festivals as well. In other words, every historical precedent points to an increased crackdown in the months ahead, which will only further fan tomorrow's flames. We have a collision coming between the Olympic Monolith and the poor, angry youth of Great Britain. Conflict is ensured if David Cameron’s ultimate response continues to be, “Let them eat beach volleyball.”

Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Against All Odds

Against All Odds: NFL Players Association Emerges From Lockout as Bruised, Battered Victors
Dave Zirin
http://www.thenation.com/blog/162260/against-all-odds-nfl-players-association-emerges-lockout-bruised-battered-victors

A sports media consensus on the end of the NFL lockout has already emerged. Like six year old kids getting trophies after soccer practice, everyone’s a winner. As Don Banks at Sports Illustrated, assessed, thrilled that the golden goose will lay eggs another day, “Neither side got everything they wanted, but good negotiations are like that. Now that this CBA fight is almost over, and labor peace seems finally at hand, both the players and the owners have the right to claim success.”

These parroted assessments, by focusing on the final score, miss the true, overarching story of the longest work stoppage in NFL history: at the opening kickoff, the sides weren’t close to evenly matched. I think that what the NFLPA has done is the equivalent of the Bad News Bears squeaking out a victory against the 1927 New York Yankees. It’s The Haiti Kid taking down King Kong Bundy. It’s workers, in an age of austerity, beating back the bosses and showing that solidarity is the only way to win.

When the lockout began, NFL’s owners had, in their judgment, and frankly mine as well, every possible advantage. They had a promise from their television partners of four billion dollars in “lockout insurance” even if the games didn’t air. They had a workforce with a career shelf-life of 3.4 years, understandably skittish about missing a single paycheck. And most critically, they had what they thought was overwhelming public opinion. After all, in past labor disputes, fans sided against those who “get paid to play a game.” Owners wanted more money and longer seasons and approached negotiations with an arrogance that would shame a Murdoch spawn.

I remember talking to NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith at the start of this process, and hearing his optimism in the face of these odds, as he spoke of the bravery of workers in Wisconsin and the people of Egypt who he said were inspiring him to fight the good fight. He mentioned the books he was reading like the classic Civil Rights history Parting the Waters: America in the King Years by Taylor Branch. I remember smiling politely at De Smith and thinking, “This guy is going to get creamed.”

I was very wrong. I didn’t count on Judge David Doty, a Reagan appointee, putting an injunction on that four billion dollar lockout slush fund, taking away the owner’s financial upper hand. I didn’t count on the way that health and safety issues would bond the players together, making defections among the 1,900 players nonexistent. I didn’t count on the way many fans, upset at the lockout and well-educated on the after-effects of the brutality of the sport, would side with the players. I lastly didn’t count on the way that reservoirs of bitterness felt by NFL players and the union would bind them together against NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and an ownership group that had just lied to them once too often.

They stuck it out and now, the end results of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, look quite good for players. We are looking at a 10 year CBA in which minimum salaries will go up 10% a year for the life of the agreement. Players get a slightly lower % of revenues (about 46% down from 50%), but they will receive 55% of future national media revenue, which, will mushroom in the years ahead. Teams also will now have to spend at least 90% of the salary cap on actual salaries. In other words, there won’t just be a salary cap there will be a salary floor. In return, rookies will need to sign four year contracts that are scaled at a lower rate. The net affect of all of this, is that veteran salaries will go up perhaps quite dramatically, and if players can stay healthy beyond that fourth year, they will be very well compensated.

But there’s the rub. If the average career is only 3.4 years, how can players be ensured to stay healthy enough to get the big payday? Here is where I think the NFLPA made the most headway. Not only did they beat back the owner’s dream of an 18 game season, they also negotiated a much less arduous off-season regimen. The off-season program will now be five weeks shorter. There will be more days off. Full-contact practices are going to be greatly curtailed. This matters because it will limit not just the wear and tear on players bodies, but also concussions and other brain injuries which are far more likely to happen in repetitive drills than in games.

Also when careers finally do end, players can now be a part of the NFL’s health plan for life. This is a mammoth deal for players who previously were kicked off of all plans five years after retirement. Getting private insurance after playing in the NFL is a nightmare, as your body is a spiderweb of pre-existing conditions. Retirees also will now receive up to a $1 billion increase in benefits, with $620 million going to increasing pensions for those who retired before 1993.

Yes, owners received a bigger piece of the pie, and yes they received their rookie pay scale. Yes, I agree with Brian Frederick, director of the Sports Fans Coalition, who commented today, that it’s a problem that “Fans were forced to sit on the sidelines during these negotiations, despite the massive public subsidies and antitrust exemptions we grant the league.” This is especially true given the fact that, as SFC reported, “Thirty-one of the 32 NFL stadiums have received direct public subsidies. Ten of those have been publicly financed and at least 19 are 75% publicly financed.”

But in the end, this deal – against all odds - is a victory for players, their families, their health, and their long-term financial solvency. It’s also an example for workers across the country. There is power in labor and there is power in solidarity.

Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Why I'm Boycotting Tuesday's Arizona All-Star Game

Dave Zirin
http://bit.ly/pgr27z

Over the last year, civil rights organizations, politicians, sportswriters and baseball players have asked Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig to move Tuesday's 2011 All-Star Game out of Arizona. He chose not to listen and now I choose not to watch. If I lived within a day's travel of Arizona, I'd be choosing to protest at the stadium gates. Ever since Arizona passed its darkly punitive racial profiling law SB 1070, thousands of people have pleaded with Selig to do the right thing and move the game. Baseball is 27.7% Latino. It's a sport dependent on Latin American talent from the baseball academies of the Dominican Republic to today's biggest stars, Albert Pujols and Adrian Gonzalez. Even more, Major League Baseball has prided itself – and marketed itself - on historically being more than just a game. Bud Selig, in particular, is a man, who publicly venerates the game's civil rights tradition. Jackie Robinson's number is retired and visible in every park and the great Roberto Clemente in death has become a true baseball saint. But Selig's inaction makes his tributes to the past look as hollow as Sammy Sosa's old bat.

Selig clearly loves the symbolism of civil rights more than the sacrifice. The presence of the game will mean a financial windfall for the state as well as for Arizona Diamondback owner Ken Kendrick. Kendrick is a first-tier right wing money bundler who has let the state politicians behind SB 1070 use his owner’s box for fundraisers. The game will also mean a national spotlight for the vile Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County, our 21st century Bull Conner. Arpaio has been threatening to bring down his pink-clad chain gang to clean up outside the stadium.

Selig is not the only one backing down from the moment. The Major League Players Association issued a very strong statement last year against SB 1070 and hinted that a boycott might be in the cards, saying they would “consider additional measures to protect the interests of our members.” Earlier this week, after months of silence, Executive Director Michael Weiner, said “SB 1070 is not in effect and key portions of the law have been judged unlawful by the federal courts. Under all the circumstances, we have not asked players to refrain from participating in any All-Star activities.” To say SB 1070 “is not in effect” is sophistry. Only a section of SB 1070 has been judged unlawful: the extension of police powers to demand papers without cause. Other aspects are now on the books including stiffer penalties for “illegals” and giving citizens the right to sue any city that sets up safe havens for immigrants. In addition, State Governor Jan Brewer is currently appealing the pruning of SB 1070 directly to the US Supreme Court. Also, the law has spawned copycat legislation is states around the country. My own discussions with Arizona activists tells me that racial profiling has been rampant since the law passed, with Latinos, legal and illegal, in fear to call the police or the fire department, or even attend church. Even if you agree with the Michael Weiner, as he writes, that immigration matters “will not be resolved at Chase Field, nor on any baseball diamond” the MLBPA is being remarkably cavalier about its responsibility to “protect its members.”

As for the players, a massive number are bowing out of this year’s game. Is this because of SB 1070? We don’t know, but either way a weakened product will be on display Tuesday night. If the spotlight shifts to anyone on the field, it will be centered on Boston’s All-Star first baseman Adrian Gonzalez who changed his position a year ago that he wouldn’t play if the game were in Arizona. There is a movement to have players like Gonzalez, sympathetic to the cause, to wear a ribbon or make some kind of statement. We will see if Adrian Gonzalez takes advantage of the spotlight.

But in the end, responsibility for this debacle rests with Selig. NFL owners, who no one would confuse with the NAACP, threatened to pull the 1993 Super Bowl out of Arizona if the state continued to refuse to recognize Martin Luther King’s birthday as a national holiday. The Now 20 years later, baseball’s commissioner does nothing. Yes, Bud Selig would undoubtedly have received an avalanche of criticism it he had moved the game. That’s what it means to actually sacrifice something for the sake of the civil rights he claims to hold so dear. Instead, his legacy will bear another blot, joining the steroid boom, the cancellation of the 1994 World Series, and the gouging of state economies with tax-payer funded stadiums. Now Bud Selig can always be remembered as the Seinfeld of sports commissioners: the man who did nothing; the man who, with the game on the line, kept his bat on his shoulder and took a called third strike.

Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

N.B.A. Lockout: Can Players Save Owners from Themselves?

Dave Zirin
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2011/07/nba-lockout-can-players-save-owners.html

National Basketball Association players, like their N.F.L. counterparts, have now been “locked out” by team owners, putting the 2011-12 season in jeopardy. But other than the presence of a lot of very angry athletes, there are few similarities between the two conflicts. In the N.F.L., the owners want a longer season and even higher profit margins. They claim future losses but refuse to open their books and prove it.

The situation in the N.B.A. is a much stinkier kettle of fish. The N.B.A. just completed its most profitable season ever. Driven by fan interest around LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and the Miami Heat, among other attractions, the league pulled in a record $4.3 billion in revenue. Last off-season, $2.5 billion was spent on contracts. Attendance was the fifth-highest total in league history. Despite all of this, twenty-two of the thirty teams in the league claim to have lost money this past season. And Commissioner David Stern has opened the books to prove it to the player’s union.

It’s all very bizarre. How can record profits and financial hardship coëxist?

One answer is the economy. Owners are getting less in public subsidies than had been projected before the bottom dropped out in 2008. But the true answer lies in understanding the mindset of the typical N.B.A. owner, many of whom seem to have the impulse control of an Adderall addict armed with a lighter in a fireworks store. The league-wide losses, which Stern pegs at $200 million, can be put at the feet of awful contracts that teams have given older players. It’s guaranteed money that has to be paid long after a player’s value has expired.

To take one example: the highest paid player in the N.B.A. next year won’t be LeBron, Kobe, Dirk, or any of the icons that rule the league. It’ll be Rashard Lewis, a player who was signed to a $118 million contract four years ago with Orlando and never earned that kind of money on the court. (He’s no longer even with the team, having been traded to Washington.) The owners argue that there is no mechanism for them to “get out” from under these kinds of bad contracts. Yet no one put a gun to their heads when they offered this money in the past.

The owners want the union to agree to a hard salary cap enforced across the league, “guaranteed profits for each team,” and the freedom to escape from these lousy contracts. In other words, they want the union to help them exercise the fiscal discipline they are unable to exert themselves.

Atlanta Hawks center Etan Thomas said to me yesterday as the lockout loomed that “most union negotiations start from the existing contract. David Stern has started from the point of a fantasy Christmas list. No guaranteed contracts. A hard salary cap. Drastic concessions. Guaranteed profits … as if we have control over the broader economy. We have been open to renegotiating how we divide revenue. But instead they showed up with this Christmas list of anti-union wishes that would have hurt not just players but the game of basketball.”

Thomas makes the point that if the owners most fevered wishes come true, teams will have a couple of superstar players that make a fortune and then ten guys fighting over the crumbs. “Basketball without a middle class is a game where people are playing selfishly, trying to pad their stats at the expense of the team because there is no security,” he said.

Since the last lockout, in 1999, the conventional wisdom has been that players would always lose labor conflicts because time is not on their side. They need to play when their bodies are in their primes. (Owners have more ability to wait it out.) Or some people have suggested that players lead the kinds of profligate lifestyles that demand consistent game checks. But this time it seems different. This current crop of players, faced with a lockout, have adopted a resolute determination not seen in decades.

Fifty players showed up to negotiations last week wearing the same bright yellow T-shirt that read “STAND.” David Stern was not amused, but the players are solid.

As Derek Fisher, president of the National Basketball Player’s Association, said, “We will not accept a bad deal that is not fair to our players. We’d love to avoid a lockout, but we are unified in the sense of not being afraid if that’s what we’re faced with.”

Etan Thomas also described to me how schooled the younger players are on the game’s past. “There’s a stereotype that athletes don’t know their history,” he said. “But I talk to these guys and they know about Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Spencer Haywood. They know about the players who refused to take the court for the 1964 All-Star Game unless the union would be recognized. They all paved the way and fought for this league to reach the level it is now, and we respect that. We cannot take all of their hard work and throw it down the drain.”

For hoops fans, we should hope that the National Labor Review Board ends the lockout, per the request of the N.B.P.A., that the two sides pound out a long-term deal, and that owners start to practice the very self-discipline that the league preaches to its players. That would truly, to use the playground vernacular, be money.

Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

The "Accidental Sportswriter" who saw it all

The Beatles! Muhammad Ali! And the "Accidental Sportswriter" who saw it all
Dave Zirin
http://bit.ly/jJCkXJ

It's difficult to imagine your heroes and she-roes arriving at greatness in "accidental" fashion. It’s hard to envision Magic Johnson as an "accidental basketball player", who just stumbled into a gym and started zipping no-look passes. No one thinks Adele sings like Adele because she was pushed onstage at a karaoke bar. We are taught that focused, hyper-competitive ambition is a prerequisite to achievement. The reality is often far more pedestrian.

Enter arguably the finest sportswriter above ground: Robert Lipsyte. Lipsyte has chosen to call his new memoir "An Accidental Sportswriter" and title alone raised my eyebrows. He really did come upon this brilliant career accidentally: a dizzying tale of luck, talent, and political acumen merging to create an indelible journalistic mark. His acclaimed New York Times column blazed new trails as an unabashedly progressive exercise in the politics of sports. But as we learn, it didn't rise out of any sort of grand design. Lipsyte had a summer job as an editorial assistant (which meant assisting in getting coffee for the editors) at the "Grey Lady." It was a pit-stop on the way to grad school and he never left. For several years he toiled for little pay at the disrespected corner known as the sports page. Then came a stroke of luck: the Times’s regular boxing writer wanted to cover a horse race rather than travel to Miami to see a blowhard young boxer named Cassius Clay get his behind handed to him by the fearsome champion Sonny Liston. The 26-year-old Lipsyte was dispatched down south to see the 22-year-old Olympian the papers called "Gaseous Cassius." While the older media was somewhat horrified by Clay's antics, Lipsyte's youth and politics allowed him to see what others could not: that the man who would be known as Ali was something special.

Lipsyte has a front row seat when, in one of the great pop cultural collisions, the Beatles visited Clay's training camp.

As he writes:

"As I climbed the splintery stairs, there was a hubbub behind me. Four little guys around my age in matching white terry-cloth cabana jackets were being herded up. Someone said it was that hot new British rock group on their first American tour....A British photographer traveling with the Beatles had tried to pose them with Sonny Liston, but the champ had refused-"Not with them sissies," he was supposed to have said-and now they were settling for a photo op with the challenger. At the top of the stairs, when the Beatles discovered that Clay had not yet arrived, John Lennon said, "Let's get the fuck out of here." But two huge security guards blocked their way and crowded them into an empty dressing room. I allowed myself to be pushed in with them, figuring to get a few funny quotes. Had I understood who those four little guys were, I might have been too shy to become, briefly, the fifth Beatle. But then I was also clueless about Clay. The Beatles were cranky in that damp dressing room, stomping and cursing. I introduced myself, rather importantly, I'm afraid, and they mimicked me. John shook my hand gravely, saying he was Ringo, and introduced me to Paul, who said he was John. I asked for their predictions. They said that Liston would destroy Clay, that silly little overhyped wanker. Then they ignored me to snarl among themselves again. Silly little overhyped wankers, I thought. Suddenly the locker room door burst open, and Cassius Clay filled the doorway. The Beatles and I gasped. He was so much larger than he looked in pictures. He was beautiful. He seemed to glow. He was laughing. "Hello there, Beatles!" he roared. "We oughta do some road shows together, we'll get rich." The Beatles got it right away. They followed Clay out to the boxing ring like kindergarten kids. You would have thought they'd met before and choreographed their routine. They bounced into the ring, capered, dropped down to pray that Clay would stop hitting them. He picked up Ringo, the bittiest Beatle. They lined up so Clay could knock them all out with one punch. They fell like dominoes, then jumped up to form a pyramid to get at Clay's jaw. The five of them began laughing so hard their impromptu frolics collapsed. That photo op is a classic (Check YouTube; you might even see me.) After the Fab Four left, Clay jumped rope, shadowboxed, and sparred as his court jester, Drew Bundini Brown, hollered, "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, rumble, young man, rumble!" Afterward, stretched out on a dressing room table for his rubdown, Clay pretended to fall asleep as reporters asked him what he was going to do after he lost. Finally, a crabby old reporter from Boston said, "This whole act is a con job, isn't it?" and Clay pretended to wake up and he said, "I'm making all this money, the popcorn man making money and the beer man, and you got something to write about. Your papers let you come down to Miami Beach, where it's warm." The Boston reporter shut up. I think that was the moment when I began to wish this kid wasn't going to get his head knocked off, that somehow he would beat Liston and become champion or at least survive and keep boxing. He would have been such a joy to cover, I thought. Too bad he's got no chance. Too bad he's only passing through, a firefly fad like those Beatles. We could all have had a blast."

This is only one gem in a book packed with stories alternately hilarious and moving about Mickey Mantle, Howard Cosell, and people at the gritty grass roots of sports in New York City. While I still don't fully understand Lipsyte's attraction to NASCAR the descriptions of him taking the wheel and burning rubber around the track at over 120 mph made me want to grab a helmet and ride shotgun.

But the book is more than a stroll down memory lane. In the most striking sections, he interrogates his old columns and laments how he would write about great female athletes like Wilma Rudolph or Billie Jean King. He examines his own assumptions about race, class, and gender and charts how they changed from the 1960s to today. Honestly, I've read many books like these and I have never seen a journalist put themselves under this kind of magnifying glass. It's brave and very affecting.

I should say in the name of full disclosure that Bob Lipsyte writes some very kind things about me in the final chapter. I should also say that even if he had chosen to say that I was little more than an oozing boil, this review would read exactly the same.(except I probably would write, “I could have done without the whole ‘Dave Zirin is an oozing boil’ section.)

This is a book to be read, shared, and treasured. It's beach reading. It's classroom reading. It's storytelling at its finest. In other words, it's pure Bob Lipsyte.

Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.