Outside of ESPN, Mixing Left-Wing Politics
Volume 49, Issue 7
By David Crohn

For this week’s Beach Reading special, we feature Dave Zirin, a Maryland-based journalist whose family has a home in Seaview. Zirin’s first book, What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, was recently published by Haymarket Books. What’s My Name, Fool? takes a unique look at a largely untold story: the intersection between sports figures, from athletes to sportswriters, and left-wing political activism.

As he writes in his introduction, “…the very passion we invest in sports can transform it from a kind of mindless escape into a site of resistance. It can become an arena where the ideas of our society are not only presented but challenged.”

Zirin, a news editor at The Prince George’s Post, an impassioned blogger (www.edgeofsports.com) and new father to an 11-month-old daughter, took time from his busy schedule to talk to The News about his book.

Why should people read your book?

I think people should read the book because there’s not a lot out there [about this story]. It’s a book that tries to talk about the radical [political] tradition in pro sports, and so much of that history is history that we’re either not familiar with or has been completely buried. And it’s a history well worth knowing for a variety of reasons.

I think it provides context to some of the most celebrated figures of the last 100 years. That’s what the book really means to do, to tell the story of people like Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, but do it in a way that tells a story about them, about what they were actually saying at the time, what they were actually arguing at the tiem. The influence of movements like the black freedom struggle and the women’s liberation movement.

It’s also an effort to tell stories of today that frankly don’t get in the mainstream news. They get what I like to call “ESPNded.”

So you see the history of sports not as a separate entity but as a parallel to our social history?

Oh, exactly. I think sports in many ways is like any aspect of popular culture in that it both reflects and influences what’s going on on the streets and in politics and ordinary people’s lives.

But in some respects I think sports is an even more dynamic arena than, say, music, or art, or film for a couple of reasons. One, sports is a mass pastime: it’s something that people invest a tremendous amount of emotion in, both in the broadest sense and also the fact that athletes are in this really contradictory position.

The overwhelming majority of [pro] athletes come from poor, working class backgrounds, but also are able to have their lottery tickets punched, so to speak, by making these incredible amounts of money. Then there’s the fact that they make so much money it’s like they’re not really in charge of their own lives the way other entertainers are. It creates certain tensions that don’t exist in other areas of popular culture. Issues of race, class and gender just swirl in the area of sports.

How did you get into this rather unique niche, the mix of left-wing politics and sports?

Well, I was born in Brooklyn, my father was from Brooklyn, and I was raised with stories of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jackie Robinson, of being able to trade in milk bottles to get money for tickets. It certainly sounds like a different story from what we have now. I mean, how many milk bottles would you need to get into Yankee Stadium? You’d need a truck. I grew up a sports fan; I memorized statistics like a rabbi, a Talmudic scholar.

And as I started to get into issues of social justice as a teenager, in high school you had the issues of both the first Gulf War and the L.A. riots, and both of those things collided in my mind to make me think there was something really quite wrong with the system, with how society was set up…and then I would go to sports games and I would see all the chanting, the U-S-A, U-S-A, and the attempt to rally war fever. I felt like sports was something I had to give up, the way a vegetarian gives up the McRib. I thought sports was part of the problem in our society.

I’ve obviously come now to think that that was quite wrong, for a number of reasons that I outline in the book. One of the things that had me thinking that was wrong was in 1996, when a basketball player named Mahmoud Abdul Rauf refused to stand for the national anthem, largely in protest of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. He was just destroyed for this stand. He kind of cracked under the strain of it. Even though he was a terrific player he was never heard from again—he was driven out of the league.

It made me think that maybe if this tradition [of resistance, dating back to Ali] was more known maybe it would not only have given Rauf a little more strength to stand up but it would have allowed people who were quietly sympathetic with him to say, “This guy stands with a tradition, and I want to stand with him too.”