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Znet Article Zirin: Ben Roethlisberger: No Justice, No Play?

Znet Article, April, 24 2010 Dave Zirin
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Ben Roethlisberger should be thanking the heavens that he possesses the unique skill to throw a football sixty yards. If he was Ben the 28 year old mill worker accused of raping a 20 year old student in the bathroom of a college town bar, he’d be ...

Znet Article Zirin: A Stadium Grows in Durban

Znet Article, April, 18 2010 Dave Zirin
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I have been to many a playing field in my day, and never have I seen a sports arena as breathtaking as Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban, South Africa. After taking a private tour of the $457 million marvel, I left utterly stunned, for both better a...

Znet Article Zirin: The Nike Ad: Tiger the Brand Finally Conquers Tiger the Man

Znet Article, April, 11 2010 Dave Zirin
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Why is the new Nike ad with a downcast yet proudly resilient Tiger Woods hearing the voice of his dead father making me so furious? It defies logic. After all, we just came through a week during which we saw film footage of the US military taking ...

Znet Article Zirin: Let Caster Run!

Znet Article, April, 04 2010 Dave Zirin
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Caster Semenya showed up to race in Stellenbosch, South Africa, this week and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) wouldn't let her run. Before we get into the specifics, let's take a moment to appreciate the courage invol...

Znet Article Zirin: The South Africa World Cup: Invictus in Reverse

Znet Article, March, 13 2010 Dave Zirin
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The present situation in South Africa could be called "Invictus in reverse." For those who haven't had the pleasure, the film Invictus is about the way Nelson Mandela used sport, particularly the near all-white sport of rugby to unite the country ...

Znet Article Zirin: Note to ESPN’s Bill Simmons: Tiger Woods is not Muhammad Ali

Znet Article, March, 04 2010 Dave Zirin
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Can ESPN please declare a company-wide moratorium on comparing current athletes to Muhammad Ali? I thought it was unfortunate when columnist Jemele Hill wrote that anti-choice icon Tim Tebow was "as courageous" as Ali. But that comparison is inspi...

Znet Article Zirin: Sportsmanship: The Great Olympic Fraud

Znet Article, February, 26 2010 Dave Zirin
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It was called the “Own the Podium” campaign, Canada’s efforts to win enough gold medals to make Ron Paul defect. Its zeal for gold meant such sporting practices as locking athletes from other countries out of the practice facilities. Anything for ...

Znet Article Zirin: Nodar Kumaritashvili: Never Forget

Znet Article, February, 23 2010 Dave Zirin
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The charter of the International Olympic Committee states that one of the Committee's primary objectives is to "encourage and support the promotion of ethics in sports." The circumstances surrounding the death of Georgian luge slider Nodar Kumarit...

Znet Article Zirin: Tiger Woods: Brand Rehabilitation

Znet Article, February, 20 2010 Dave Zirin
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Today's Tiger Woods press conference was an exercise in painful self-abasement that will achieve the opposite of its intended effect. I haven't seen anything this painfully scripted since the Phantom Menace. The same George W. Bush media advisers ...

Znet Article Zirin: Fruits of the Backlash

Znet Article, February, 19 2010 Dave Zirin
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Many in the media are already apoplectic about the infamous launch of the All-American Basketball Alliance (AABA). For those untainted by the news, the AABA would be a league exclusively for native-born whites. According to its press release, "onl...

Znet Article Zirin: Christopher Hitchens: Sporting Fool

Znet Article, February, 14 2010 Dave Zirin
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Nuance is the mortal enemy of essayist Christopher Hitchens. Whether it’s his rapturous support for Bush’s Iraq invasion or his best-selling dismissal (God is NOT Good) of religion, Hitchens will always eschew a surgical analysis for the rhetorica...

Znet Article Zirin: When Snow Melts: Vancouver’s Olympic Crackdown

Znet Article, February, 10 2010 Dave Zirin
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News Flash: Winter Olympic officials in tropical Vancouver have been forced to import snow - on the public dime - to make sure that the 2010 games proceed as planned. This use of tax-dollars is just the icing on the cake for increasingly angry Van...

Znet Article Zirin: As Olympics near, people in Vancouver are dreading Games

Znet Article, January, 30 2010 Dave Zirin
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The International Olympic Committee has leased every sign and billboard in town to broadcast Olympic joy, but they can't purchase people's faces. It's clear that the 2010 Winter Games has made the mood in the bucolic coastal city decidedly overcas...

Znet Article Zirin: As Olympics near, people in Vancouver are dreading Games

Znet Article, January, 30 2010 Dave Zirin
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The International Olympic Committee has leased every sign and billboard in town to broadcast Olympic joy, but they can't purchase people's faces. It's clear that the 2010 Winter Games has made the mood in the bucolic coastal city decidedly overcas...

Znet Article Zirin: NFL Owners Stiff-arm Fans/Union

Znet Article, January, 23 2010 Dave Zirin
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Call it the Super Bowl for lawyers and the reckoning for football fans. On January 13 the owners of all thirty-two NFL teams asked the Supreme Court to shield them from anti-trust laws. Their argument is that the league does not comprise, despite ...

Znet Article Zirin: One thing about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: the man understood sports.

Znet Article, January, 19 2010 Dave Zirin
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I don't mean that King was any kind of a star athlete. The only sport that the young, roundish "Mike" King was known to excel at was pocket billiards, which isn't exactly a sport (the golden rule: anything that you can gain weight or smoke cigaret...

Znet Article Zirin: Mark McGwire's Pound of Flesh

Znet Article, January, 13 2010 Dave Zirin
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In the ten years Brian Williams has anchored the NBC Nightly News, he has never once launched a broadcast by lambasting a public figure. Henry Paulson after the economic collapse? George W. Bush after Katrina? Dick Cheney after everything? All wer...

Znet Article Zirin: Al Sharpton Wants Gilbert Arenas Punished. Seriously.

Znet Article, January, 05 2010 Dave Zirin
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Whenever racism rears its head in sports, the Reverend Al Sharpton has usually had something important to say. In the process, he has proudly earned the contempt of the sports radio blabbocracy. But today, Reverend Al is earning their praise. Al S...

Znet Article Zirin: Dennis Brutus 1924-2009

Znet Article, December, 30 2009 Dave Zirin
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It was 1976, and the Summer Olympics in Montreal had improbably become ground zero in the struggle against apartheid. Several dozen African nations threatened to boycott if the International Olympic Committee dared allow South Africa to be a part ...

Znet Article Zirin: Tiger's Fall from Grace

Znet Article, December, 14 2009 Dave Zirin
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Tiger Woods's self-imposed exile from golf is the most stunning--and stunningly rapid--fall from grace in the history of sports. Not since Shoeless Joe Jackson was banned from baseball after being dubiously blamed for helping throw the 1919 World ...

Znet Article Zirin: The People Speak: When Television Makes History

Znet Article, December, 09 2009 Dave Zirin
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On December 13th, a date I’ve basically had tattooed on my arm like the guy from Memento, The People Speak finally makes its debut on the History Channel. This is more than just must-see-TV. It is nothing less than the life's work of “peopleâ€...

Znet Article Zirin: Message to Obama: You Can’t Have Muhammad Ali

Znet Article, December, 05 2009 Dave Zirin
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On November 19th, President Barack Obama wrote a stirring tribute in USA Today to the most famous draft resister in US history, Muhammad Ali. On Tuesday, Obama spoke at West Point, calling for an increase of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, with a...

Znet Article Zirin: Amy Goodman and Canada's Olympic Paranoia

Znet Article, November, 28 2009 Dave Zirin
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When it comes to independent, agitational journalism, the standard is Amy Goodman and her radio/television institution, Democracy Now! Goodman and her staff often find themselves accosted by officials, foreign and domestic. This happened again on ...

Znet Article Zirin: The NFL’s Concussion Conundrum

Znet Article, November, 24 2009 Dave Zirin
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On Sunday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell made a startling concession to medical ethics, one resisted by all of his predecessors. Goodell said that when a player sustains a concussion, teams will now be required to seek advice from "independent" n...

Znet Article Zirin: Rush Limbaugh: Why the NFL Just Said No

Znet Article, October, 17 2009 Dave Zirin
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Over the last eight years, even though it often made me break out into hives, I've listened to a lot of Rush Limbaugh. I've heard him express the full gamut of his emotional range: from hateful to very hateful. But over all this time, I've never k...

Znet Article Zirin: Why NFL Owners Must Flush Rush

Znet Article, October, 10 2009 Dave Zirin
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National Football League owners could be on the verge of a catastrophic error in judgment. In a league that is 70 percent African-American, an unapologetic racist is in talks to buy a team. Yes, Rush Limbaugh, along with St. Louis Blues owner Dave...

Znet Article Zirin: Can the NFL Tackle Homophobia?

Znet Article, October, 05 2009 Dave Zirin
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In the recent past, LGBT issues were only part of the NFL landscape when players held press conferences to assure fans that despite the rumors, they are not gay (without even adding the requisite "not that there's anything wrong with that ").

Znet Article Zirin: Obama’s Olympic Error

Znet Article, October, 01 2009 Dave Zirin
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President Barack Obama is now en route to Copenhagen in an effort to sell Chicago as the site of the 2016 Summer Olympics. In the process, he may be selling Chicago down the river. Obama is joined arm-in-arm with his wife Michelle on one side and ...

Znet Article Zirin: Olympics in Chicago: 'Obama's Folly'?

Znet Article, September, 24 2009 Dave Zirin
Zirin's ZSpace page

Recently Barack Obama criticized planned protests at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh because, as he knew from his Chicago days, "focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people's lives is what really makes a difference an...

Znet Article Zirin: Sports and the Uncivil Society

Znet Article, September, 18 2009 Dave Zirin
Zirin's ZSpace page

This week, the grand media theme from USA Today to ESPN has been that "we have lost a sense of civility in US society." The examples have ranged from Serena Williams’s expletive-infused outburst at the US Open and Michael Jordan’s brutal baske...

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