SPORT / Dave Zirin : Decriminalize Baseball!

Ryan Braun isn't Al Capone. Image from Deadspin.

Decriminalize the game:
A solution to baseball’s drug wars

I love baseball and it’s tragic to watch it self-devour.

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / June 5, 2013

See Thorne Dreyer's articles about progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin at The Rag Blog, and at Truthout, and listen to our March 22, 2013, Rag Radio interview with Zirin.

If you want to know what’s wrong with Major League Baseball, look no further than today's top headlines. Described as “the largest [Performance Enhancing Drug scandal] in American sports history,” at least 20 Major League Baseball players now face significant suspensions for PED use.

Included in the guilty-until-proven-innocent public parade are Yankee albatross Alex Rodriguez and the man Buster Olney is calling “the Lance Armstrong of baseball," Milwaukee Brewers star Ryan Braun. [The latter is in reference to Braun’s Shermanesque denials over the last two years that he ever imbibed in pharmaceutical help, not his ability to master the Pyrenees.]

MLB has leaked the names of the accused because they have confidence in their source. His name is Anthony “Tony” Bosch and he is the former director of Biogenesis, a now shuttered South Florida “anti-aging clinic." Tony Bosch is not a doctor nor does he play one on TV. He did, however, have a roster of “patients” whom he allegedly supplied with all manner of banned substances.

MLB was in the process of suing Biogensis when the near-bankrupt Bosch, unable to afford a proper legal defense, chose to turn over every scrawled receipt, hand-written ledger, and appointment book to MLB officials. In return, they have reportedly pledged to stop their civil suit and use their political clout to halt the Justice Department’s forthcoming criminal indictment.

Forget your personal feelings about whether you like or dislike A-Rod or whether you think these players are worse than Pol Pot for “cheating the game.” Forget if you're convinced there is no greater evil than a pill that helps an adult professional athlete heal from injuries or work out with greater efficiency.

Forget it all and consider the disturbing audacity of what Major League Baseball just accomplished: a powerful private corporation has used its political connections with the Justice Department as well as the power of its own purse to squeeze a weaker business to disclose confidential medical records. America!

If that doesn’t bother you, perhaps this will. According to Major League Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement with the players' union, the league can impose a 50-game suspension for a first PED offense, 100 games for a second offense, and a lifetime ban for a third.

In this case, according to sources, the league will be pursuing 100 game suspensions for every player deemed guilty on the basis that it’s really two offenses in one. Their mere connection to Bosch is one strike, and any previous denial that they were connected to Bosch -- in other words lying to MLB officials -- constitutes a second.

Yes, you don’t even have to fail a drug test. You just need to be around drugs and make statements that Commissioner Bud Selig unilaterally determines to be a lie. It’s like a kid’s baseball book co-written by Mike Lupica and George Orwell.

Tony Bosch.

This should be calling the entire system into question but many baseball writers are instead already writing paeans to Bud Selig's tough justice. ESPN’s Jayson Stark wrote, “[I]f Tony Bosch sings the song that baseball firmly believes he's about to sing, some of the biggest names in this sport could pay a monstrous price. And the aftershocks will be rattling baseball's Richter Scale for generations to come."

This is not an earthquake. Instead it will be death by 10,000 paper cuts. The union will protest the idea that there could ever be two suspensions for one offense and appeals will drag on for years. The only thing “rattling” in future generations will be the skeletons of what once comprised the fan base of this sport.

I love baseball and it’s tragic to watch it self-devour, so here is my own humble advice about a different way to handle this. Steroids and all PEDs need to be seen as an issue of public health, not crime and punishment. If seen as an issue of public health, the scandal here would not be that a group of players may have used PEDs. The scandal would be that they had to visit a skuzzy, unregulated “clinic” not run by medical professionals to get their drugs.

Instead of criminalization, educate all players about the harmful effects of long-term PED use when not under a doctor’s supervision. Have medical officials make the policy and determine what PEDs help a person heal faster -- an admirable quality in a medicine, no? -- and what shouldn't be a part of any training regimen. Centralize distribution under the umbrella of MLB so it doesn’t become an arms race of which teams get the best doctors and the best drugs.

Then, players could take advantage of the most effective new medicines and MLB would be removing the process out of the shadows where the Tony Bosch types of the world hold sway. They also then have an ethical basis for testing and rehabilitation when use crosses the line into abuse.

This solution won’t please the purists who revere a game that never existed. It won’t please the anti-steroid furies who think that the behavior of children is determined in Pavlovian fashion by the actions of Major League Baseball players. It certainly won’t please baseball’s owners who like a system where fleecing cities out of millions in tax money isn’t cheating but taking a pill to work out longer is.

It would however finally at long last take the game out of the courts, off of the front pages, and put it back on the field. Bud Selig isn’t Eliot Ness and Ryan Braun isn’t Al Capone. It’s time to stop the madness and decriminalize the game.

This article was also posted to The Nation blog.

[Dave Zirin is sports editor at The Nation and the author of the new book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down (The New Press). Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

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SPORT / Dave Zirin : RGIII Is Trending with Muhammad Ali

Robert Griffin III. Photo courtesy of Muhammad Ali Center. Image from The Nation.

What did RGIII learn at
the Muhammad Ali Center?

The social-media-savvy RGIII tweeted, 'What Ali stood for and the way he expressed it from the boxing ring to the streets of everyday life would have him trending for weeks.'

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / May 6, 2013

See Thorne Dreyer's articles about progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin at The Rag Blog, and at Truthout, and listen to our March 22, 2013, Rag Radio interview with Zirin.

It should be enough that Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III is the most exciting athlete to enter professional sports since Lionel Messi and has restored the thrill of the possible to our football-obsessed community in Washington, DC.

It should be enough at this moment to learn that RGIII is focused solely upon rehabilitating his knee, torn to shreds in last year's playoffs. But the Heisman Trophy winner, who also found time in college to graduate from Baylor with a degree in political science and a 3.67 GPA, has clearly committed this off-season to exercising his mind as well.

According to his running Twitter commentary, RGIII spent Saturday at the museum that in my view is the Mecca of the intersection of sports and politics: the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Muhammad Ali Center is a remarkable testament to the courage of an athlete willing to take unpopular stands because of political principle. The fact that Ali took these stands at the height of his athletic powers when he was between the ages of 22 and 26, clearly had an impact on Mr. Griffin. RGIII’s first tweet said simply that “seeing in depth what Ali did and who he was is so inspiring.”

The quarterback then soaked in just how much Ali suffered for his unpopular stands against racism and the war in Vietnam and put himself in the Champ’s shoes. He wrote, “An athlete like Ali would get destroyed in today’s world even more than in his own time.” The social-media-savvy RGIII then tweeted, “What Ali stood for and the way he expressed it from the boxing ring to the streets of everyday life would have him trending for weeks.”

He then retweeted someone who wrote to him, “Ali transcended sports and sacrificed his most productive boxing years to stand for his beliefs. Name a modern athlete that would.”

From left: Muhammad Ali, Buffy St. Marie, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Harold Smith, Stevie Wonder, Marlon Brando, Max Gail, Dick Gregory, Richie Havens, and David Amram at a 1978 concert at the end of the Longest Walk, a 3,600-mile protest march from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., in the name of Native-American self-determination. Image from IndiVisible.

I must say that it's thrilling that Muhammad Ali still has such a strong effect on athletes born a decade after he last set foot in a boxing ring. It’s also quite a statement that Robert Griffin III, who comes from a proud military family, would pay tribute to the most famous war resister in human history. Yes, Ali’s radical stance in 1968 has been smoothed out for mass consumption.

Yes, in today’s myriad Ali tributes, few quote him saying, “I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over... The real enemy of my people is here.”

But the museum, to its credit, does not engage in a whitewash. RGIII was confronted with the actuality of Ali's ideas and was deeply in awe of his sacrifice.

Lastly, I would point out that in today’s age of social media, an athlete like Ali would get far more support than in 1964. Back then, a small cabal of hard-bitten sportswriters, who were conservative, calloused, and Caucasian, dominated public commentary, and were deeply resentful of the man they called “The Louisville Lip.”

Today, in addition to the hate, there would be a public outpouring of support, which would also shape the coverage. The trend-lines of Ali's resistance would have ample amplification.

There’s another side of this, however, that could not have escaped RGIII’s precise mind as he considered the concepts of sports and sacrifice: There is no way in heaven or hell Muhammad Ali, who is of African, Native American, and Irish ancestry, would have ever accepted being called a Redskin.

RGIII had to notice that the question of names and what we choose to call ourselves figures strongly at the Ali Center. You learn that Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., named not only after his own father but also a famous 19th Century white abolitionist. The political history of that name didn’t stop him from changing it upon joining the Nation of Islam. As he said, “Cassius Clay was my slave name. I don’t use it because I am no longer a slave.”

The museum speaks about the boxers, reporters, and even members of the draft board who called him “Clay” and how he responded with at different times “say my name,” “what's my name?” and my personal favorite, “what’s my name fool?”

Ali’s belief that a name was something far more precious than just a brand has found echoes across the culture in multiple forms, from Destiny's Child, to Ravens Coach John Harbaugh’s Super Bowl victory speech, to perhaps the most famous scene in the classic television show The Wire. Names matter. What you call yourself and what others choose to call you is a question of respect.

I wonder if RGIII took notice that the Muhammad Ali Center has a proud history of doing traveling exhibits with the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, including one called “IndiVisble: African-Native American Lives in the Americas.”

The 2012 press release for the exhibit reads, “Prejudice, laws and twists of history have often divided them from others, yet African-Native American people were united in the struggle against slavery and dispossession, and then for self-determination and freedom. For African-Native Americans, their double heritage is truly indivisible.”

I wonder if RGIII would ask himself how that heritage is served by the fans in feather headdresses and war paint, and the stained crimson face on the side of his helmet.

There was much made this week about a poll taken by ESPN, which showed that 79 percent of people in the U.S. find nothing wrong with the Redskins name. RGIII -- the athlete, the brand, the corporate pitchman -- is someone who could look at that poll and think, “Great. Now I don’t need to say anything.” RGIII, the human being inspired by Muhammad Ali, has to look at those numbers and think, “Whether it’s 79 percent or 97 percent, right is right.”

The Redskins name is racist as all hell, the creation of a segregationist owner and only possible because the people being insulted were subject to genocide: thinning their ranks, political power, and voice. It’s a name RGIII’s boss Dan Snyder will only defend in the most controlled of public settings. It’s a name that Muhammad Ali would have hated because it’s a damn disgrace.

At the end of his Twitter commentary about The Champ, Robert Griffin III wrote, “The Ali Center confirmed my belief that although we, as people around this world, are different, we can all help & learn from each other.”

He’s correct. But a precondition of helping and learning from one another is respect. RGIII is under no obligation to say anything about the Redskins name. But if he learned nothing else from the Muhammad Ali Center, it should be that sometimes you just have to speak out no matter the risk, no matter the trends or trend-lines.

It's a little known part of The Champ's history, but In 1978, Muhammad Ali joined Buffy St. Marie, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Stevie Wonder and the recently departed Richie Havens to rally at the end of the Longest Walk, a 3,600-mile protest march from San Francisco to Washington, DC, in the name of Native American self-determination.

That was Muhammad Ali. He was nobody's Redskin.

This article was also posted to The Nation blog.

[Dave Zirin is sports editor at The Nation and the author of the new book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down (The New Press). Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

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FILM / Dave Zirin : '42' is Jackie Robinson's Bitter Pill

 

A Review of '42':
Jackie Robinson's bitter pill

This was a man tortured by the fact that his own experience was used as a cudgel against building a public, fighting movement against racial injustice.

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2013

See "Dave Zirin Writes from the Busy Intersection of Sports and Politics" by Thorne Dreyer at Truthout, and listen to Dreyer's March 22, 2013, interview with Zirin on Rag Radio.

This week in Major League Baseball was Jackie Robinson Day. This is when Commissioner Bud Selig honors the man who broke the color line in 1947 and pats MLB on the back for being “a leader in the Civil Rights Movement.” It’s possible to appreciate that Selig honors one of the 20th Century’s great anti-racist heroes. It’s also possible, out of respect for Jackie Robinson, to resent the hell out of it.

Ignored on Jackie Robinson Day are baseball’s decades of racism before Jackie broke the color line. Ignored are Robinson’s own critiques of baseball’s bigoted front office hiring policies. Ignored is the continuance of the racism that surrounds the game in 2013. Ignored is the fact that today in Arizona, Latino players live in fear of being stopped by police for not having their papers in order.

The recent film 42 about Jackie Robinson’s entry into the Major Leagues shares this contradiction. I can certainly understand why many people I respect love this film. I can understand why a teacher I know thinks it’s a great primer for young people who don’t know Jackie’s story. I understand why, given the high production values and loving depictions, Jackie Robinson’s family has been outspoken in their appreciation.

But I didn’t like it, and with all respect, I want to make the case that I don’t believe Jackie Robinson would have liked it either.

Early in the film, Jackie Robinson, played by newcomer Chadwick Boseman, says, "I don't think it matters what I believe. Only what I do." Unfortunately that quote is like a guiding compass for all that follows. The filmmakers don't seem to care what Robinson -- a deeply political human being -- thought either. Instead 42 rests on the classical Hollywood formula of “Heroic individual sees obstacle. Obstacle is overcome. The End.”

That works for Die Hard or American Pie. It doesn’t work for a story about an individual deeply immersed and affected by the grand social movements and events of his time. Jackie Robinson's experience was shaped by the Dixiecrats who ruled his Georgia birthplace, the mass struggles of the 1930s, World War II, the anti-communist witch-hunts, and later the Civil Rights and Black Freedom struggles. To tell his tale as one of individual triumph through his singular greatness is to not tell the story at all.

This is particularly ironic since Jackie Robinson spent the last years of his life in a grueling fight against his own mythos. He hated that his tribulations from the 1940s were used to sell a story about an individualistic, Booker T. Washington approach to fighting racism.

As he said in a speech,

All these guys who were saying that we've got it made through athletics, it's just not so. You as an individual can make it, but I think we've got to concern ourselves with the masses of the people -- not by what happens as an individual, so I merely tell these youngsters when I go out: certainly I've had opportunities that they haven't had, but because I've had these opportunities doesn't mean that I've forgotten.

This was a man tortured by the fact that his own experience was used as a cudgel against building a public, fighting movement against racial injustice.He wanted to shift the discussion of his own narrative from one of individual achievement to the stubborn continuance of institutionalized racism in the United States. The film however is a celebration of the individual and if you know how that pained Mr. Robinson, that is indeed a bitter pill.

The film's original sin was to set the action entirely in 1946 and 1947. Imagine if Spike Lee had chosen to tell the story of Malcolm X by only focusing on 1959-1960 when he was a leader in the Nation of Islam, with no mention of his troubled past or the way his own politics changed later in life. Malcolm X without an “arc” isn’t Malcolm X. Jackie Robinson without an “arc” is just Frodo Baggins in a baseball uniform.

The absence of an arc, means we don’t get the labor marches in the 1930s to integrate baseball. We don’t get his court martial while in the army (alluded to in the film without detail). We don’t get Jackie Robinson’s testimony in 1949 at the House Un-American Activities Committee against Paul Robeson. We don’t get his later anguish over what he did to Robeson. We don’t get his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement when he was a barnstorming speaker across the south.

We don’t get his public feud with Malcolm X, where Malcolm derided him as a “White man’s hero” and he gave it right back saying, "Malcolm is very militant on Harlem street corners where militancy is not that dangerous. I don't see him in Birmingham.” We don’t get his daring, loving obituary to Malcolm after his 1965 assassination at a time when the press -- black and white -- was throwing dirt on his grave.

We don’t get his support of the 1968 Olympic boycotters. We don’t get the way his wife Rachel became an educated political figure who cared deeply about Africa, as well as racial and gender justice in America. We don’t get the Jackie Robinson who died at 52, looking 20 years older, broken by the weight of his own myth. We don’t get Raging Bull. We get Rocky III.

But if the focus of 42 is only going to be on 1946 and 1947, then there is still a lot to cover: namely Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, and their relationship to the Negro Leagues. Rickey -- with Robinson’s support -- established a pattern followed by other owners (with the notable exception of Bill Veeck), of refusing to compensate them for their players.

On the day Robinson signed with the Dodgers, Rickey said, "There is no Negro League as such as far as I'm concerned. [They] are not leagues and have no right to expect organized baseball to respect them." This led to the destruction of the largest national black-owned business in the United States.

You would never know this from 42. Instead the film chooses to affix a halo to Branch Rickey’s head. Instead, under a prosthetic mask, Harrison Ford plays Rickey as a great white savior, and not even Han Solo can make that go down smoothly.

Fairing better than Ford is the terrific performance of Chadwick Boseman as Robinson. Jackie Robinson could be sensitive about his voice, which was clipped and somewhat high-pitched. Boseman’s voice is so smoky it could cure a ham and his eyes and manner give hints of an internal life the film otherwise ignores.

There is no doubt in my mind that Jackie Robinson, if alive, would call on Bud Selig and Major League Baseball to stop using his history as an excuse to do nothing about the racial issues that currently plague the game. But there is also no doubt in my mind that Jackie Robinson, ever the pragmatist, also would support this film publicly.

He was an honorable person who would have been humbled by the effort made to make him look like a hero. He would have seen the value in being a role model of pride and perseverance for the young. But at home, alone, he would have thought about it. And he would have seethed.

This article was also posted at The Nation blog.

[Dave Zirin is sports editor at The Nation and the author of the new book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down (The New Press). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Progressive Sportswriter Dave Zirin Takes Off the Gloves

Dave Zirin: "Politics have always been a part of sports."

Rag Radio podcast:
Progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin
on the intersection of sports and politics

"Sports has become such a big business that the line between journalism and being a broadcast partner for all intents and purposes has been obliterated." -- Dave Zirin on Rag Radio

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / March 28, 2013

Dave Zirin will speak on the politics of sports at the Belo Center for New Media on the University of Texas campus in Austin, Monday, April 1, from 7-9 p.m., an event sponsored by the Texas Program in Sports and Media.

Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation and author of Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down, was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 22, 2013. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Dave Zirin here:


Dave Zirin has been called “the best sportswriter in the United States,” by noted sports journalist Robert Lipsyte. Named one of UTNE Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World,” Zirin writes about the politics of sports for The Nation and hosts Edge of Sports Radio on Sirius XM.

Ron Jacobs of The Rag Blog called Zirin, "the man who politicized the sports pages," and The Washington Post described him as "the conscience of American sports writing." ("They didn't mean it as a compliment," Zirin told us with a chuckle.) Christine Brennan of USA Today called Zirin's Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down, "the perfect book for our time in sports."

Zirin told the Rag Radio audience that the nature of sports journalism has changed dramatically in recent years. "Unfortunately," he said, "sports has become such a big business that the line between journalism and being a broadcast partner for all intents and purposes has been obliterated."

"I don’t think Hunter S. Thompson [who started out as a sportswriter] could have imagined a situation where the best journalists would work for places like the NBA.com, NFL.com, MLB.com."

Sports journalists need to be watchdogs, he said, because professional sports organizations represent "very powerful multi-billion dollar interests with tentacles in every aspect of our society."

In discussing his book, Game Over, about how politics has changed sports, Zirin says that “politics have always been a part of sports," but that things changed dramatically after the economic crisis of 2008. The owners, he says, “were freaking out about the loss of public subsidies which they had gotten used to over the last 20 years... And so they’re trying to figure out a way to restore profitability.”

“The most obvious thing is we almost lost the whole hockey season this year, we lost part of the NBA season last year, we almost lost the NFL season last year and the first quarter of the NFL season this year. And there were scabs -- so-called replacement referees who made the game unsafe -- and sometimes unwatchable.”

“When owners lock out players,” he pointed out, “they’re also locking out everybody that works in the parking lot, who works in the stadium, all the waiters and waitresses picking up an extra shift at the restaurants. And when you think that it’s our billions of dollars that go into building these stadiums... they’re not just locking out the players. They’re locking out all of us.”

Dave Zirin takes off the gloves.

When people ask him who his favorite sports owners are, “I always say, the Green Bay Packers. They’re the best 200,000 owners in sports. That’s a fan-owned team. And the difference is profound in terms of the relationship between the team and the community. The difference between a nonprofit that puts money back into the community, and a sponge that sucks money and resources out of the community.”

About violence in professional football, Zirin said that “trying to curb head injuries in the NFL is basically like trying to make a safe cigarette.” “It’s such a dangerous, violent game that your next play can always be your last, so they dehumanize the players. They don’t want you to get attached to them...” Players are “quickly ferried off the sidelines if they get hurt, brought to some back room so you don’t actually have to see the effect of the injuries…”

“You can’t really separate football from the violence,” he says, but he believes there are things that can be done, “like maybe having certified medical concussion experts on every single sideline in the NFL.” “One player said to me, 'You’ll know the NFL is serious when they propose reforms that actually cost them money.'"

Zirin is very critical of the hypocritical way major league baseball has handled the steroids issue. “It was either a situation of malign neglect or malignant intent,” he says. With “owners happily looking the other way, to make sure that the home runs would keep getting hit, the fans would keep coming to the park, and the game would keep growing.”

He is also critical of the baseball writers who are keeping deserving players like Jeff Bagwell -- “anybody who has a whiff of rumor about them” -- out of the Hall of Fame. “It is guilt by association, guilt by rumor, and guilt by innuendo,” he said, and smacks of Joe McCarthy.

Zirin discussed the story of Houston Rockets rookie Royce White who suffers from a severe anxiety disorder and has been “battling with the Rockets over how they would deal with his mental health.” As Zirin wrote in an article run on The Rag Blog, "For months, the 21-year-old has been sitting out the season in protest: a rebel with a cause." "White has become a crusader for change," he wrote, "calling out the NBA for disregarding mental illness and treating him like 'a commodity.'"

Zirin told the Rag Radio audience that White "has developed quite the radical consciousness. Just by standing up and just by the abuse he’s taken.” White “did an interview with ESPN and he said that the majority of players in the NBA are mentally ill,” but that they self-medicate with alcohol and drugs.

“Mental health issues are nearly taboo to talk about in the world of sports,” Zirin says. It’s only “in recent years that players have begun to come out of this particular closet.”

Zirin says more women are actively involved in sports than ever before, but that there’s “less and less visibility. There’s less coverage of women’s sports now then there was 10 years ago. And less coverage 10 years ago then there was 20 years ago.”

He talked about a major study out of the Tucker Center at the University of Minnesota that asked the question, “Does sex -- and I think we can more appropriately say, sexism -- sell women’s sports? Are people more likely to watch women’s sports when women athletes dress up in certain ways?”

“They did this massive research project on this issue, interviewing tens of thousands of people, and what they came up with was that sexism actually hurts women’s sports. It makes people less likely to consume women’s sports.”

Zirin says that the LGBT movement has had a major impact on the sports world and he believes that there are gay athletes in pro sports who are on the verge of coming out publicly.

In an article about the recent rape trial involving football players at Steubenville High School in Ohio, Zirin pointed to “the bond between jock culture and rape culture.”

He told the Rag Radio audience: “I think that there is a connection. I think that men’s sports, with its combination of hero worship, of an emphasis on team and of men looking out for each other, and oftentimes looking at women as the spoils of being an athlete, can create a culture where women are seen as objects and where women can be seen as something to be taken.”

Zirin says that, “When you have a town like Steubenville, which is a town of 18,000 people, yet the stadium holds 10,000, When you have a school that’s been refurbished... and everybody walks around and says, ‘that’s because of Big Red football, that we got this money,’ and these kids walk around and adults kiss their butts, I think that’s a recipe for disaster.”

The problem, he says, is hero worship. And, as with the scandal at Penn State, “When a football team becomes the emotional, the economic, the cultural, and the social center of a community, the priorities spin out of whack dramatically.”

The worse thing about Stuebenville, he said, was that “there were 50 people who saw what was happening -- boys and girls -- and they all chose to do nothing.” But, he believes, “with the active intervention of coaches, of adults, that you can actually affect and change rape culture.”

There are a lot of positive things happening in sports, Zirin says. “I love the fact that LeBron James and the Miami Heat actually took a stand when Trayvon Martin was murdered by Robert Zimmerman, the self-appointed neighborhood watch leader. They all posed with their hoods on.”

And “the actions of the Phoenix Suns a couple years back in immigration solidarity, in protest of the horrific immigration laws in the state of Arizona, wearing jerseys that said Los Suns.”

One athlete Zirin admires is Houston Texans running back Arian Foster, who is “incredibly literate and erudite.” Zirin begins his latest book with a quote from Foster: “I heard Jim Brown once say the gladiator can’t change Rome. I love Jim Brown. But I disagree. I’ll die trying, my brother.”

And, Dave Zirin reminds us, we remember Muhammed Ali "because the 1960s were happening outside the boxing ring. And without that context of social struggle you’re not gonna have the athletes who can rise up and meet the moment.”

Winner of Sport in Society and Northeastern University School of Journalism's 2011 “Excellence in Sports Journalism” Award, Dave Zirin hosts Sirius XM Radio’s popular weekly show, Edge of Sports Radio. He is also a columnist for SLAM Magazine and the Progressive and his articles frequently appear on The Rag Blog.

Zirin is a regular guest on MSNBC, CNN, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, NPR’s All Things Considered, and other major media outlets. His earlier books include the NAACP Image Award-nominated The John Carlos Story, Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love, and A People’s History of Sports in the United States, part of Howard Zinn’s "People’s History" Series.

Ron Jacobs wrote at The Rag Blog that “Dave Zirin takes on those people and institutions that have crippled sports in the name of profit and power while championing those athletes and others who have used their name and position to make sports a force for change.”

And New York Magazine's Will Leitch said that "Dave Zirin, as the years go by, sounds less and less like a politically slanted leftist rabble-rouser and more like the only sumbitch who understands what the hell's going on."

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, March 29: "Bronx Butch" poet, performance artist, and memoirist Annie Rachele Lanzillotto.
Friday, April 5: Anti-violence activists John Woods and Claire Wilson James about the issue of guns in schools and on college campuses.
Friday, April 12: Sixties activists and Yippie founders Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan.
Friday, April 19: Amsterdam-based poet John Sinclair, founder of the White Panther Party and former manager of the MC5.

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Dave Zirin : Steubenville and the Bond Between Jock Culture and Rape Culture

Image from Serious Insanity.

The verdict:
Steubenville shows the bond
between jock culture and rape culture

''I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.'' -- Bob Knight, Hall of Fame basketball coach, 1988.

By Dave Zirin / TThe Rag Blog / March 21, 2013

Progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 22, 2013, 2-3 p.m. (CDT), on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live on the Internet. The show will be rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, Sunday at 10 a.m. (EDT). Zirin will speak live at Chicago's Heartland Cafe, Sunday, March 24, at 3 p.m., and at the Belo Center for New Media on the University of Texas campus in Austin, Monday, April 1, from 7-9 p.m., an event sponsored by the Texas Program in Sports and Media.

As a sportswriter, there is one part of the Steubenville High School rape trial that has kept rattling in my brain long after the defendants were found guilty. It was a text message sent by one of the now convicted rapists, team quarterback Trent Mays. Mays had texted a friend that he wasn't worried about the possibility of rape charges because his football coach, local legend Reno Saccoccia, "took care of it." In another text, Mays said of Coach Reno, "Like, he was joking about it so I'm not worried."

In this exchange we see an aspect of the Steubenville case that should resonate in locker rooms and athletic departments across the country: the connective tissue between jock culture and rape culture. Rape culture is not just about rape. It's about the acceptance of women as “things” to be used and disposed of, which then creates a culture where sexual assault -- particularly at social settings -- is normalized.

We learned at the Steubenville trial that not only did a small group of football players commit a crime, but 50 of their peers, men and women, saw what was happening and chose to do nothing, effectively not seeing a crime at all.

We need to ask the question whether the jock culture at Steubenville was a catalyst for this crime. We need to ask whether there's something inherent in the men's sports of the 21st century, which so many lionize as a force for good, that can also create a rape culture of violent entitlement. I am not asking if playing sports propels young men to rape. I am asking if the central features of men’s sports -- hero worship, entitlement and machismo -- make incidents like Steubenville more likely to be replicated.

There are many germs in the Petri dish of sports. Growing up I had the great fortune of big-hearted, politically-conscious coaches, some of whom patrolled sexism in the locker room with a particular vigilance. As the great Joe Ehrmann has written so brilliantly, a "transformational coach" can work wonders. But different germs also exist. Ken Dryden, Hall of Fame NHL goalie, once said, ''It's really a sense of power that comes from specialness... anyone who finds himself at the center of the world they're in has a sense of impunity.''

On colleges, there is reason to believe that the same teamwork, camaraderie and "specialness" produced by sports can be violently perverted to create a pack mentality that either spurs sexual violence or makes players fear turning in their teammates. A groundbreaking 1994 study showed that college athletes make up 3.3 percent of male students but 19 percent of those accused of sexual assault. One of the study's authors, Jeff Benedict, said,

Does this study say participation in college sports causes this? Clearly, no. We're not saying that. We just think that at some point there is an association between sports and sexual assault... the farther you go up, the more entitlements there are. And one of those entitlements is women.

That was two decades ago but there is no indication that anything has changed. A February 2012 Boston Globe article about sexual assault charges levied against members of the Boston University hockey team, reporter Mary Carmichael wrote about the findings of Sarah McMahon, "a Rutgers University researcher who studies violence against women."

McMahon "said it is unclear whether college athletes are more likely to commit sexual crimes than other students. But she said her work had found a unique sense of entitlement, sexual and otherwise, among some male college athletes, especially those in high-profile or revenue-producing sports like BU hockey."

You can't extricate the entitlement at the heart of jock culture from McMahon's comments about its particular prevalence in revenue-producing sports. The insane amounts of money in so-called amateur athletics and the greasy desire of adults in charge of cash-strapped universities to get their share also must bear responsibility for rape culture in the locker room.

They have created a system where teenage NCAA athletes can’t be paid for what they produce so they receive a different kind of wage: worship. Adults treat them like heroes, students treat them like rock stars, and amidst classes, club meetings, and exams, there exists a gutter economy where women become a form of currency. You're a teenager being told that you are responsible for the economic viability of your university and everything is yours for the taking. This very set-up is a Steubenville waiting to happen.

If people think that this doesn't translate to high school, they're wrong. I spoke with Jon Greenberg, an ESPN journalist and also a graduate of Steubenville High. He describes a school "with a pretty high poverty rate" that was still able to get state funds to build "a swimming pool, a new on-campus gym, cafeteria and more." The dynastic "Big Red" football program drove those changes.

As Greenberg says,

The football players themselves, at least in my experience, weren't treated as heroes or above the law, but the team itself was put on a pedestal, especially when they were good... There are some very good people who played Big Red football and coached football. But there needs to be some changes, most importantly a very serious seminar, for all male students, on the definition of rape and similar curriculum.

In thinking about Steubenville, thinking about my own experiences playing sports, thinking about athletes I've interviewed and know, I believe that a locker room left to its own devices will drift toward becoming a breeding ground for rape culture. You don't need a Coach Reno or a Bob Knight to make that happen. You just need good people to say or do nothing.

As such, a coach or a player willing to stand up, risk ridicule, and actually teach young men not to rape, can actually make all the difference in the world. We need interventionist, transformative coaches in men’s sports who talk openly about these issues. We need an economic setup in amateur sports that does away with their gutter economy. But most of all, we need people who recognize the existence of rape culture, both on and off teams, to no longer be silent.

As for Steubenville, Coach Reno needs to be shown the door, never to be allowed to mold young minds again. Football revenue should go toward creating a district-wide curriculum about rape and stopping violence against women. And "Jane Doe," the young woman at the heart of this case, should be given whatever resources she and her family needs to move if they choose, pay for college, or just have access to whatever mental health services she and her family may need.

After the trial, testimony and verdict, they deserve nothing less.

This article was also posted to and first published at The Nation.

[Dave Zirin is sports editor at The Nation and the author of the new book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down (The New Press). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

See "Dave Zirin, the Man Who Politicized the Sports Pages" -- Ron Jacobs' review of Zirin's latest book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down -- on The Rag Blog.

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SPORT / Dave Zirin : The Rockets' Royce White Is Rebel with a Cause

The Houston Rockets' Royce White. Image from Hoopspeak.com.

Mental health revolutionary:
The Houston Rockets' Royce White

White has become a crusader for change, calling out the NBA for disregarding mental illness and treating him like 'a commodity.'

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / February 14, 2013

Read Ron Jacobs' Rag Blog review of Dave Zirin's new book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.

This week, the most famous NBA player yet to play in the NBA finally took the court. Royce White, rookie forward for the Houston Rockets, suited up for their D-League team, the esteemed Rio Grande Valley Vipers. In 18 minutes, he had seven points, eight rebounds, and four assists.

But the bigger story was that White played at all. For months, the 21-year-old has been sitting out the season in protest: a rebel with a cause. White has been battling the Rockets over how they would deal with issues surrounding his mental health. The first-round-draft-pick has an anxiety disorder that affects how he handles everything from flying to practices.

He has made it clear amidst an avalanche of criticism that his mental health is more important that his contract or career. Throughout this difficult fall, White has become a crusader for change, calling out not just the NBA for disregarding mental illness and treating him like “a commodity," but also the fans that have sent him "hundreds" of violent and especially homophobic threats. White isn't gay but apparently, for some, caring about your mental health is the equivalent.

Until a recent interview, however, it wasn't clear just how politically thoughtful, serious, and even revolutionary an athlete we have in Royce White. For White, this isn’t just about his struggle or changing how NBA teams treat mental illness. It's about something far greater. In his interview on the ESPN spin-off site Grantland with journalist Chuck Klosterman, White said that the question we are scared to ask in the United States is, "How many people don't have a mental illness?” Klosterman responded, "Why wouldn't we want to talk about that?"

White’s reply is one for the ages:

Because that would mean the majority is mentally ill, and that we should base all our policies around the idea of supporting the mentally ill because they're the majority of people. But if we keep thinking of them as a minority, we can say, "You stay over there and deal with your problems over there."...

[T]he problem is growing, and it's growing because there's a subtle war  --  in America, and in the world -- between business and health. It's no secret that 2 percent of the human population controls all the wealth and the resources, and the other 98 percent struggle their whole life to try and attain it. Right? And what ends up happening is that the 2 percent leave the 98 percent to struggle and struggle and struggle, and they eventually build up these stresses and conditions.

As if this wasn't enough for one interview, White also said that he wants to use basketball as a platform to fight for universal mental health coverage with clinics in every community. He claimed that he is willing to "die for this."

When athletes use their hyper-exalted positions to fight for something greater than themselves they are, consciously or not, laying claim to a powerful tradition. It’s a tradition marked by people like Billie Jean King, Bill Russell, an, of course, Muhammad Ali.

In listening to White, I was reminded of something Ali once said:

All of my boxing, all of my running around, all of my publicity, was just the start of my life. Now my life is starting -- fighting injustice, fighting racism, fighting crime, fighting indecency, fighting poverty. Using this face that the world knows through fame and going out and representing truth.

White as well is that rare person who wants to use his fame to represent truth. There is, of course, an ocean of difference between Royce White and Muhammad Ali in terms of athletic accomplishment and cultural capital. But there’s a subtler difference as well. Ali at his political apex was part of a massive anti-war wave. Even though the boxing establishment and much of the media despised him, he had an army of supporters.

Contrast that to today. There is no wave of people standing up for the rights of the mentally ill. There is no one in mainstream politics talking about the mental health crisis that pulses beneath daily life in this country. There is no one on Capitol Hill pointing out what’s in plain sight every day.

Think about all the massive attention we are paying to gun violence and the absence of attention to what makes people crack and become violent in the first place. Think about the tragic shootings in Chicago and the absence of discussion about the poverty and racism that define the parts of that city where the murders are taking place. Think about the mental stress that precedes so much of the violence in communities around the country.

This is the discussion Royce White wants us to have and the 21-year-old seems like the only person in public life who wants to have it. In other words, if Ali, like no one else, brilliantly rode the rapids of a tumultuous era, Royce White is attempting something far for daunting. He's trying to change the direction of the whole damn river.

This article was also posted at The Nation blog.

[Dave Zirin is the author of the new book Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the SportsWorld Upside Down (The New Press). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Dave Zirin, the Man Who Politicized the Sports Pages

A look at Dave Zirin’s latest:
The man who politicized the sports pages

No longer can owners, managers, and commissioners argue that sports and politics must and should be separated. The taboo has been trashed. The silence has been shattered.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / February 7, 2013

[Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down by Dave Zirin. (2013: The New Press); Paperback; 240 pp; $18.95.]

When journalists wanted to paint crazy pictures using alliteration and description, then the place for them to write used to be in the sports section. Speculation and flights of poetic fancy were not only allowed but expected.

That most iridescent of journalists, Hunter S. Thompson, began his fabled writing career reporting on sports. One of his earliest national pieces was an impressionistic, iconoclastic report on the most famous of horse races, The Kentucky Derby.

As the reader knows, Thompson went on to produce some of the best cultural criticism and political reportage of the 1960s and 1970s. In his later years his books and articles combined his twin passions of sports and politics into a series of incisive and funny collections on the decline of U.S. civilization in the name of profit.

Thompson has never been replaced. Most sports journalists nowadays use up their ink rewriting the words of management and ownership or attacking superstars they seem to build up just to knock down. Mock expressions of shock accompany reports of steroid use and pot possession, yet there is little analysis of how and why athletes might feel the need to use either type of drug. No matter what they write about, the writing itself is all too often nothing but a repetition of press releases, especially when compared to a master like Thompson.

But wait, there is a sportswriter out there whose writing is different. His reportage includes political critique and is laced with humor and sarcasm that make your sides hurt. Considerably more radical than Thompson (especially in his later years) Dave Zirin takes the world of sports and rips it open for all to see. His latest book, titled Game Over: How Politics has Turned the Sports World Upside Down, examines the world of sports in the age of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and their opposite in the halls of power and capital.

CLR James wrote about the meaning of cricket in the colonialist world of Trinidad; Curt Flood and Jackie Robinson, each in their own way, ripped away the mantle of racism in Major League Baseball; Jon Carlos and Tommy Smith raised their fists against the racism of Avery Brundage’s country club apartheid Olympics; Lester Rodney ripped away the white robe of racism in U.S. sport.

Dave Zirin carries this legacy into the twenty-first century, taking on those people and institutions that have crippled sports in the name of profit and power while championing those athletes and others who have used their name and position to make sports a force for change.

In his introductory remarks, Dave Zirin discusses the return of politics to the field of play. Once again, the basketball court, football field, baseball park, and hockey rink have become forums where players dare to vocalize their opinions on issues of the time. From gay rights to labor rights, racism, and war, players are once again making their opinions public and using the forum their career provides to sway public opinion.

Although Zirin concerns himself primarily with the U.S. sports world, he covers international soccer and the Olympics, too. In fact, one of his most evocative pieces in this book is titled “Today’s World Cup and Olympics.” Perhaps the most unique chapter is the chapter discussing Egypt’s Ultras.

For those who don’t know, Ultras are soccer fans found in almost every country where soccer is played who literally live and die for their team. In the case of the Egyptian Ultras, they involved themselves in the ongoing uprising in that nation and were crucial to Mubarak’s overthrow. In a very real way, these fans changed the course of their nation’s history.

Although he would probably never acknowledge it, Dave Zirin is a big part of the reason politics is back in sports. His commentary, lectures, and other appearances have challenged athletes to speak out and sportswriters to respond to the political role sports plays in the world.

No longer can owners, managers, and commissioners argue that sports and politics must and should be separated. The taboo has been trashed. The silence has been shattered.

Who would have thought when his first columns were published in the small-time Maryland weekly The Prince George’s Post a little over a decade ago that he would become a regular on ESPN, a sportswriter for The Nation and SLAM Magazine, and the author of several books; that his words would be read in the corporate boardrooms of professional sports teams and attacked by shills?

There was obviously a need for the type of writing that Zirin does and he does a remarkable job of filling that need.

One does not have to go too far back to a time when Michael Jordan’s hang time and George Steinbrenner’s Yankees were what people talked about in U.S. sports; when no player dared to speak out about issues of the day. The combination of a growing grassroots movement against imperial war, the economic policies of the “1%,” the ongoing struggle against racism, and the movement for LGBT equality have changed that.

With Zirin helping to lead the charge, the world of sports will never be the same. That, my friends, is a good thing.

Read articles by Dave Zirin at The Rag Blog.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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SPORT / Dave Zirin : The Player's Tweet that Told the Truth

Cardale Jones' revealing tweet. Image from BigLeadSports.
The smartest, or dumbest,
(or maybe smartest)
tweet an athlete ever sent

We are corrupting these young people by demanding that they become complicit in a sham.

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / October 10, 2012

Many allegedly great minds from professors to school presidents have devoted peals of pages to the multi-billion dollar industry otherwise known as NCAA athletics. Yet no one has quite put their finger on the contradictions, frustrations, and tragicomedy of being the labor in this industry -- a so-called student-athlete -- quite like Ohio State's third string freshman quarterback, Cardale Jones.

On Friday Jones tweeted, “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS.”

Jones immediately deleted the tweet -- as well as his entire twitter account -- but as many have learned before him, deleting a tweet is like cleaning a grease stain with fruit punch. As soon as the 18-year-old sent his tweet out into the world, Cardale Jones was held up as yet another example of (altogether now) "everything that's wrong" with today's athlete.

Even worse, Jones, who hasn't played one snap all season, was benched for Saturday's game. As the Toledo Blade put it, "Mark it down as DNP (tweet).

But Jones’s crime wasn’t authoring what the Daily News called a “lame-brained tweet.” It was committing, to paraphrase Michael Kinsley, the greatest sin in sports: he was caught telling the truth. "We ain't come to school to play classes" will most likely be a quote of mockery that rings through the ages.

But Cardale Jones has also hit on something factual. Ohio State football, like a select sampling of the sport's aristocracy, has morphed over the last 30 years into a multi-billion dollar business. Even in the shadow of sanction and scandal, according to Forbes Magazine, the Buckeyes program creates $63 million in revenue every year and accounts for 73% of all the athletic departments profits.

Columbus is where legendary coach Woody Hayes was pushed out after striking an opposing player in 1978. He was making $40,000 a year when removed. Their coach today, Urban Meyer, draws a base salary of $4 million and is the highest paid public employee in the state. Meyer also gets use of a private plane, a swanky golf club membership, and a fellowship in his name. He can also earn six figure bonuses as well as raises for staying on the job.

The football coach earns three times Ohio State President Gordon Gee. As higher education lawyer Sheldon Steinbach said to USA Today. “The hell with gold. I want to buy futures in coaches' contracts."

The source of the contradictions and confusion that create this moral cesspool is not the riches earned by the Urban Meyers of this world. It's that the players are given nothing but the opportunity for an education they often have neither the time nor desire to pursue.

These are 18-22-year-olds treated like a hybrid of campus Gods and campus chattel. I once had a former All-American tell me a story of hitting the books until an assistant coach stopped by his dorm room and said, "You know you don't have to do that right?" This particular athlete persevered and graduated and good for him.

I can only say that when I was 19, if an authority figure told me I didn't have to study, I would have held an impromptu book-burning in my dorm room. We are corrupting these young people by demanding that they become complicit in a sham. We are telling them to be grateful for the opportunity to be party to their own exploitation. We are telling them effectively to do exactly what Cardale Jones said, and “play school.”

This mentality of “play school” and get a shot at the NFL or the NBA is profoundly effective. It acts as a form of discipline that keeps players in line. This discipline doesn’t only come from coaches, academic advisors, and family members, but other student-athletes as well.

A culture is created through “amateur athletics” that incentivizes keeping your head down. If you’re going to cheat, or take easy classes with compliant professors, you do it quietly and keep the trains running on time. One thing you don't do is point out that the Emperor is buck-naked.

I have a friend who is a professor at Ohio State and he outlined this to me very clearly. He told me that in the wake of Cardale Jones’s tweet that "many student-athletes are enraged. They feel he makes them all look bad when all of them are busting their butts."

Their anger is what allows this system to continue as sure as the NCAA. They are angry because Cardale Jones just pulled back the curtain on an NCAA moral terrain built on a 21st century bedrock of bewildering moral confusion.

This only changes if Jones’s fellow football players stand with him and ask the question: “Are we all just ‘playing school’ so Urban Meyer can live like some sort of absurdist sports Sultan? Are my blood sweat and tears first and foremost a means to pay for the fuel for my coach's private plane?”

We don't know if this will cost Cardale Jones his scholarship in the days to come. But one thing we can be sure about: whether or not he stays will have less to do with his effrontery than whether the freshman can effectively throw a football.

[Dave Zirin is the author of The John Carlos Story (Haymarket). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

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SPORT / Dave Zirin : What They Can't Take from Lance Armstrong

Survivor: Lance Armstrong. Photo by Christopher Ena / AP.
He quit the fight but not the war:
What they can't take from Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong, and his ubiquitous Livestrong bracelets, are 21st century totems of survival and the USADA isn’t going to change that.

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / August 29, 2012

If Joe Paterno represents the greatest fall from grace in the history of sports, then many are saying that Lance Armstrong might now have won the silver.

On Thursday, Armstrong was stripped of all seven of his Tour de France cycling crowns and will be banned for life from any connection to the sport he made famous. Why? Because he withdrew his appeal against the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s contention that he time and again rode steroids and performance enhancing drugs to victory.

Armstrong quit the fight against the USADA but issued a statement without contrition, accusing them of an "unconstitutional witch hunt."

As Armstrong said in a statement,

There comes a point in every man's life when he has to say, "Enough is enough." For me, that time is now... I have been dealing with claims that I cheated and had an unfair advantage in winning my seven Tours since 1999. The toll this has taken on my family and my work for our foundation and on me leads me to where I am today -- finished with this nonsense. Today I turn the page. I will no longer address this issue, regardless of the circumstances... I will commit myself to the work I began before ever winning a single Tour de France title: serving people and families affected by cancer, especially those in underserved communities.

With the swiftness of a pro cyclist going 75 miles per hour down a steep hill, the USADA acted immediately, treating Armstrong’s surrender as a legal admission of guilt. Travis Tygart, the USADA's chief executive, spoke as if a jury of Armstrong’s peers had voted to convict, saying, "It is a sad day for all of us who love sport and athletes. It's a heartbreaking example of win at all costs overtaking the fair and safe option. There's no success in cheating to win."

Tygart maintained that Armstrong didn’t give up the fight from exhaustion but because he knew that the USADA had 10 former teammates ready to testify that he was doping. Armstrong, it should be noted, made clear that no matter what any witnesses had to say, “There is zero physical evidence to support [their] outlandish and heinous claims," Armstrong said. "The only physical evidence here is the hundreds of [drug tests] I have passed with flying colors."

I don’t know about Armstrong’s guilt or innocence, but anyone who writes off Armstrong after the USADA ruling and thinks that he's about to enter some sort of Paterno-Pete Rose-Barry Bond pantheon of infamy, doesn’t quite understand his appeal or why he connects so strongly with his army of fans. Of the 70 top-10 finishers in Armstrong’s seven Tour De France victories, 41 have tested positive for PEDS, Armstrong is a hell of a lot more than just number 42.

The Texas native came to public consciousness not just for beating the Pyrenees but for beating stage four cancer. In our increasingly toxic world, I don’t think a family exists that hasn’t been touched by cancer in some way. Lance Armstrong, and his ubiquitous Livestrong bracelets, are 21st century totems of survival and the USADA isn’t going to change that. Nothing ever could.

No adult male saw Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa in 1998 and thought, “Someday I’m going to hit 70 home runs.” No adult female saw Marion Jones and thought, "Someday I’ll win gold at the Olympics.” But legions of adults have watched Lance Armstrong and thought, “Someday, I’m going to beat this damn cancer.”

That’s a deeper connection than fandom or even the virtual-world of fantasy sports could ever provide. If Lance Armstrong has been able to further the connection because he’s white, photogenic, and politically connected (and did I mention white?), then to his credit he’s leveraged those advantages to raise over $500 million for cancer research and access to treatment in poor and minority communities across the United States.

Armstrong, a religious agnostic, was once asked how his belief in God helped him beat cancer, He answered, according to the great sportswriter Robert Lipsyte, “Everyone should believe in something, and I believe in surgery, chemotherapy, and my doctors.” That response in the end is why he won’t go into hiding. He won’t live in self-imposed exile. He won’t slink to the margins of U.S. society and he won’t lose his fans.

Call him a doper. Call him a cheater. Call him the dirtiest player in a sport that’s as dirty as they come. He’ll call himself the guy who keeps fighting to make sure people have the surgery, chemo, and doctors they need. For people like those in my own family who have through trials of unimaginable courage, earned the right to wear that LiveStrong rubber bracelet, that will always matter more.

[Dave Zirin is the author of the book, Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports (Haymarket). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

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SPORT / Dave Zirin and Zach Zill : The Death of Socrates

Brazilian soccer legend Socrates before a World Cup match in Guadalajara, Mexico, June 16, 1986. Photo by Wolfgang Ratta / Reuters.
The death of Socrates:
Celebrating the Brazilian soccer legend

Socrates was one of those rare athletes whose outsized personality and effervescent humanity transcended the game.

By Dave Zirin and Zach Zill / The Rag Blog / December 12, 2011

International soccer lost a hero last weekend when Socrates, the masterful Brazilian midfielder who captained Brazil’s famed 1982 World Cup squad, died from an intestinal infection at age 57.

The death of the lanky, bearded, 6-foot 4-inch field general with a philosopher’s name will be felt far beyond the sports world. Socrates -- full name Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira -- was one of those rare athletes whose outsized personality and effervescent humanity transcended the game.

Socrates’ interests, talents, and achievements were staggering. He was a medical doctor, a musician, an author and news columnist, a political activist, and a TV pundit. Somewhere in all of this, he managed not only to lead what may have been the most artful team to ever grace the pitch, but also to fearlessly challenge the decades-long military dictatorship that ruled Brazil.

Alongside the 1982 Brazilian midfield of Zico, Falcao, Cerezo, and Eder, Socrates brought a combination of technical prowess, deadly goal-scoring ability, and blissful creativity that has never been matched. If ever the uninhibited joy of children playing merged with raw competitive dominance, it was in the squad that Socrates led to the World Cup in Spain.

They embodied Eduardo Galeano’s description of Brazilian soccer as “the most beautiful soccer in the world, made of hip feints, undulations of the torso and legs in flight, all of which came from capoeira, the warrior dance of black slaves, and from the joyful dances of big city slums...There are no right angles in Brazilian soccer just as there are none in the Rio Mountains.”

Socrates approached soccer with the intensity and lack of restraint that he brought to every aspect of his life. He drank, he smoked, and he played without shin guards. His impetuosity as a player and a person was embodied in his signature move on the field: the blind heel pass.

Socrates became a professional player almost as an afterthought, not becoming a full-time professional until he signed with Corinthians at age 24. And unlike most professional athletes then and now, he refused to check his politics at the door.

Unlike the great Pele, Socrates never made financial or political peace with Brazil’s dictatorship. In fact, with his medical expertise, his flowing hair and full beard, and his resistance politics, he shared less in common with Pele than Che Guevara.

That’s not hyperbole. Socrates may be the only professional athlete to ever organize a socialist cell among his fellow players. He helped assemble Corinthians, a club team from Sao Paolo built on a radical political foundation. Corinthians proceeded to become a focal point for national discontent with Brazil’s military dictatorship.

The military had ruled Brazil since 1964, when it overthrew left-wing president João Goulart who promised land redistribution and nationalization of industry. By the early 1980s, as the dictatorship was beginning to strain under the weight of mass repression and economic stagnation, Socrates and his teammate Wladimir organized and played for Corinthians, known as the "Time do Povo" or "Team for the People," to demonstrate the power of democracy.

With the consent of club president Waldemar Pires, the players established a democratic process to govern all team decisions. As Socrates explained, “Everyone at the club had the same right to vote -- the person who looked after the kit and the club president, all their votes had the same weight.”

The players decided what time they would eat lunch, they challenged strict rules that locked players in their hotel rooms for up to 48 hours before a match, and they printed political slogans on their uniforms.

In this way, one of South America’s most popular teams became a beacon of hope, not just to Brazilians, but across a continent largely shackled by U.S.-backed dictators. Socrates, on his way to 297 appearances and 172 goals for Corinthians, was one of the most popular figures in the country, and thus nearly unassailable by the military rulers.

The tragedy of Socrates' death lies both in his age, just 57, and the timing. As the World Cup and Olympics are thundering toward Brazil, his would have been a critical voice against the way these international sporting carnivals run roughshod over local communities, all for the benefit of a nation’s elite.

When asked earlier this year by the Guardian if the coming World Cup would help the poor of Brazil, Socrates said, “There will be lots of public money disappearing into people's pockets. Stadiums will be built and they will stay there for the rest of their lives without anyone using them. It's all about money. What we need to do is keep up public pressure for improvements in infrastructure, transport, sewerage, but I reckon it will be difficult.”

Speaking out against the World Cup in Brazil? Now that is true political courage. But Socrates, true to form in this interview, didn’t confine his commentary to soccer. He said, “What needs to change here is the focus on development. We need to prioritize the human being. Sadly, in the globalized world, people don't think about individuals as much as they think about money, the economy, etc.”

Let’s hope that a new generation of young Brazilians will see fit to pick up where Socrates left off. As the World Cup and Olympics come to the new Brazil, expect the spirit of Socrates to echo in the streets.

[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. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog. Zach Zill is a freelance writer living in Washington DC. He can be reached at zach.zill@gmail.com. This article was also posted to The Nation.]

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