In their beautiful physicality, sports are often taken to be an expression of what's primal in human nature. But like it or not, our national pastimes depict our civilization just as well, perhaps better than, our art or politics. Games -- from soccer to ultimate frisbee, but in the great mass football, basketball, and baseball -- are played by the rules we make up.
Some of our recent amendments fit into our national narrative of a people approaching their more perfect union: after integration made victory colorblind, Title IX cleared the floor for women athletes. Yet worsening income inequality estranges team owners and players from the game-watching, stadium-financing public. And fear has a wicked jump shot: Athletes, many of them from less privileged backgrounds, know too well the stories of those whose acting on principle sent them, writes Dave Zirin in A People's History of Sports in the United States, on "a toboggan ride to unemployment."
Zirin's not for converting every wide receiver into a revolutionary. But he recognizes that sports are a safe harbor for aspirations that are basically political, a place where it's thought that teamwork and equal opportunity are always in play. When they demonstrably are -- for example, when a Black man becomes the world's champion golfer -- the victors become "political beings -- carriers of the dream that the playing field for all of us might be made a little more level." And when greed or misogyny steal home, that, too, offers an instructive moment.
Zirin unites sports and social commentary on his blog, edgeofsports.com, and in The Nation, The Washington Post, and SI.com, each of which he writes for regularly. The author of two other books on athletics and U.S. politics, Zirin this time reaches back to the beginning of the nation, when the Choctaw shook their lacrosse sticks heavenward in search of divine favor.
Do you feel like alienation or apathy is more prevalent in the world of sports fans today?
On the one hand, there's an apathy built into sports. I mean, it's designed in a way to make the observer a passive consumer as opposed to an active participant. There's nothing wrong with relaxing and watching a game -- that's just the objective reality of the setup.
But when you talk about alienation, that's something that's very real. That's really my audience: people who love sports but hate what they've become, who really resent the hypercorporatization, the racism, sexism, the homophobia in sports, the way working-class fans have been priced out of the arenas.
Is it true that sports often just start out as rough play and turn organized? That seems to have been what happens with baseball and football.
Well, yeah, or take an even bigger step back. Every human society, once they've learned to clothe and feed themselves, has engaged in some kind of sport. It may seem obvious to say this, but sports reflect the society that they're in. Sports are not inherently masculine, for example; sports are not inherently warlike: sports are not inherently overcompetitive. It depends on the era in which the sport exists.
What that means is that we can challenge sports to change. If we feel like we're living in an era in which women and men should have equal rights, we can fight for that in the world of sports. If we feel like we live in a society that shouldn't have racial prejudice, we can fight for that in the world of sports. Because there's nothing inherent in sports that feeds those emotions.
And that kind of gets obscured when you see Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson really explicitly linking sports with national defense or imperial ambition.
Yeah, sports and war. And that was the era of muscular Christianity, of the dawn of football and organized baseball and basketball for that matter too. They were very linked to concepts of war and masculinity, but we have to remember: this was about people in power co-opting sports, not sports [affecting the actions of] people in power. I think a lot of people who are otherwise progressive draw the other conclusion.
It also seems that during industrialization, sports became intertwined with the middle class's anxietes about going soft somehow.
Yeah. There's a whole section in the book about that. This is the era where you have the coining of the word "sissy" to describe people who didn't take part in the rough sport of football. And you have this almost pathological fear amongst the ruling classes that their children would not be fit to navigate the brutal world that they, in fact, had created. Sending the wealthy to fight and die in war wasn't an option, and sending them to work wasn't an option, so they sent them to play, to actually get calluses on their hands and toughen up.
I quote a lot of the sermons at the time, and it's remarkable how hysterical they are with fear about this new lackadaisical generation that would be just unfit for rule in a society that was ripe for conflict.
As far as the working classes, there wasn't a fear that they would be soft; there was a fear that they were too wild. Particularly with immigrant male youths, there was a fear that they weren't acculturated, that they hadn't accepted America; sports was a way to organize these communities. Things like the YMCA and the Public Schools Athletic League [in New York City] were underwritten by the big robber barons of the day: Vanderbilt, Rockefeller.
Can big sports like football be associated with pacificism, with a means of making people more gentle--
Sure.
--or do we need to come up with new games that encourage cooperation?
That's the contradiction of sports. All these sports we've named -- football, basketball, baseball -- they all involve some form of cooperation, some form of teamwork. It's all in how it's emphasized, how it's coached, how it's taught. I believe very strongly that sports is like a hammer: you can use a hammer to build a house, or you can use a hammer to bash somebody's brains out. So it's what we've made of it.
I don't think it's a matter of needing different sports; frankly, I've seen fistfights break out at anarchist soccer games.
You have two young children; what kind of sports would you encourage them to get into?
I would be happy if they found their own way to something they enjoyed. If [they] played basketball and baseball, that would be my personal joy, because I'd have something to say about it. My wife just heard me talking and said "No football for JJ," my son, and that's understandable too, because that's about wanting to make sure he makes it to 21 in one piece. But I really do believe that the sport is irrelevant. What's relevant when it comes to youth sports is the adults around, how it's constructed, how it's taught. I don't care if it's tiddlywinks; if you've got some lunatic coaching, it's going to be a disaster.
The University of Washington this month is signing a $39 million contract for Nike to supply their team uniforms and other gear. What's the politics of major corporations making licensing deals to get their logo out there?
What you're talking about are players who are little advertisements. They're running around like billboards but not seeing a cent of it. At some schools, boosters can even get a credit card with the image of their favorite players grafted onto the credit card, and it gives them all kinds of perks, free deals, souvenirs, whatever, yet the players don't see a dime of that.
Seattle this summer lost its NBA team to Oklahoma City. What did you think of that whole thing?
I thought it was an absolute embarrassment to the NBA, I thought it was an absolute embarrassment to pro sports in general, and I think that the folks who perpetrated this -- let's name their names: it's [NBA Commissioner] David Stern, [team owner] Clay Bennett, and [co-owner] Aubrey McLendon -- are absolutely perpetrating the worst fraud on a professional city that we've seen in a quarter century. It really is shame on them.
This is one of the things I argued in my writing about it at the time, that the state government ought to be more aggressive in challenging it. Including, if they had to, threatening to municipalize the team, going to court to keep the team [in Seattle]. I think that's what we need to start seeing. If you have teams asking for public subsidies, you can't have a system that you can socialize debt but privatize profit. That's what we're seeing with the bank bailout now. In sports we have to say no more to that. People should have a seat at the table if it's their tax dollars that are going to keeping a team in a place.
Who do you see as your influences in writing about sports through a prism of kind of the real world?
It's a bit lonely now, but I'm certainly not the first person to write about the way sports and politics have intersected. Growing up, I read two people a great deal: one was Ralph Wiley, who wrote for Sports Illustrated, among other publications: the other was Bob Lipsyte, who wrote for the New York Times. Both of them had a very biting social commentary that went along with their stories, and it was something that I just relished growing up in a big way.
One of the things that frustrated me when I was coming of age politically, as a sports fan, was you had these columnists like Lipsyte and Wiley but there wasn't a history book that examined the way sports and politics had intersected over a broad period of time in U.S. history, like a sports version of Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. So I thought, well, I'll write one.
There's one other person in the book who deserves mention, and that's Lester Rodney, sports editor of the Communist [Party] paper, The Daily Worker, in the United States in the 1930s, who used the sports pages to fight for things like integration in baseball, to organize people to support coverage of the Negro Leagues in ways that were really ahead of his time.
I'm sure it had a huge circulation.
In the '30s it did, partly because of the number of people in the Communist Party in the trade unions. There would be these big May Day marches with people carrying signs that said things like "End Jim Crow in Baseball." I like that feeling of fans feeling empowered, like they can reclaim sports, where they don't have to be just idly entertained or, in Seattle basketball's case, be victimized.