Most Recent Content-
- Saturday, Jan 30, 2010
ZNet Article 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 overcast. Even the customs police officer checking my passport started grumbling about "$5,000 hockey tickets." Polls released on my first day in Vancouver back up this initial impression. Only 50 percent of residents in British Columbia think the Olympics will be positive and 69 percent said too much money is being spent on the Games. ZNet Article 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 overcast. Even the customs police officer checking my passport started grumbling about "$5,000 hockey tickets." Polls released on my first day in Vancouver back up this initial impression. Only 50 percent of residents in British Columbia think the Olympics will be positive and 69 percent said too much money is being spent on the Games. -
- Saturday, Jan 23, 2010
ZNet Article 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 all evidence, thirty-two individual competing units but is made up of one "single entity." -
- Tuesday, Jan 19, 2010
ZNet Article 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 cigarettes while doing is not a sport). But Dr. King understood with remarkable acuity the political and symbolic power of sports. He understood that the athletic field -- and athletes -- could be a powerful megaphone for civil rights and racial justice. -
- Wednesday, Jan 13, 2010
ZNet Article 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 were spared the personal disdain of "America's most trusted newsman." Until yesterday. Williams began his broadcast by going after true evil: Mark McGwire. -
- Tuesday, Jan 05, 2010
ZNet Article 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 Sharpton embraced by sports radio? Have we entered the twilight zone? Hardly. -
- Wednesday, Dec 30, 2009
  ZNet Article 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 of the games. Montreal’s athletic jamboree was in jeopardy and the cause of all the tumult, according to Sports Illustrated, was a diminutive South African poet the magazine called “the Dark Genius of Dissent.†His name was Dennis Brutus. Brutus organized entire blocks of the world around a simple question: how can the Olympics say they stand for “brotherhood†and fair play if apartheid nations could join the festivities? It worked. The “Dark Genius†shamed the shameless and changed international sports forever. Over the course of decades, as a dissident, refugee, and political prisoner, Brutus advanced this simple athletic argument. The organizations he founded, the South African Sports Association (SASA) in 1958 and its successor, the South African Nonracial Olympic Committee, (SANROC) used it to hammer critical nails in apartheid’s coffin. -
- Monday, Dec 14, 2009
ZNet Article 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 Series have we seen such a supersonic transition from heroism to heel. And not since Michael Jordan retired from basketball in 1993, following the murder of his father, has a world-class athlete voluntarily taken himself out of his sport in his prime. Woods's exile may last three months or it may last three years. But one thing is certain: unlike the twenty-four-hour wall-to-wall sleaze that's dominated the airwaves since the initial revelations of Woods's infidelity, this is actual news. After fourteen years of being protected by the press, the Tiger has become carrion. And now, the greatest golfer in history is walking away. -
- Wednesday, Dec 09, 2009
ZNet Article 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 “people’s historian†Howard Zinn brought to life by some of the most talented actors, musicians, and poets in the country. Howard Zinn and his partner Anthony Arnove chose the most stirring political passages in Zinn's classic A People's History of the United States, creating a written anthology called Voices of a People's History of the United States. Those "voices" have now been fully resurrected by a collection of performers ranging from Matt Damon to hip hop artist Lupe Fiasco to poet Staceyann Chin. -
- Saturday, Dec 05, 2009
ZNet Article 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 speech that recalled the worst shadings of George W. Bush’s "war on terror." -
- Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
ZNet Article 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 Thursday. But it didn't happen in East Timor or Burma. Goodman was detained by our neighbors to the north. -
- Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
ZNet Article 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" neurologists. As the commissioner said on NBC's Football Night in America, "As we learn more and more, we want to give players the best medical advice. This is a chance for us to expand that and bring more people into the circle to make sure we're making the best decisions for our players in the long term." -
- Saturday, Oct 17, 2009
ZNet Article 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 known him to be pathetic until yesterday. -
- Saturday, Oct 10, 2009
ZNet Article 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 Checketts, is close to buying the St. Louis Rams. In his last NFL intervention, the man who claims “talent on loan from God†lasted less than a month as an NFL commentator on ESPN after saying the Philadelphia Eagles' Donavon McNabb was overrated because the media wanted to see a black quarterback succeed. -
- Monday, Oct 05, 2009
ZNet Article 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 "). -
- Thursday, Oct 01, 2009
ZNet Article 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 Mayor Richard Daley's Chicago political machine on the other. Michelle Obama says, "My father was disabled, and I think what it would have meant for him to see someone in his shoes compete. Kids need to see that and that needs to be celebrated just as much, if not more." This seems more like an argument to support the Paralympics (a tremendous event) but that's beside the point. Michelle Obama should perhaps realize that if the Olympics had come to Chicago when she was a young girl on Chicago's working class south side, her home may have been torn down to make way for an Olympic facility. No word on how being out of house and home would have helped her disabled father. -
- Thursday, Sep 24, 2009
ZNet Article 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 and...having protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism or something, generally, is not really going to make much of a difference." -
- Friday, Sep 18, 2009
ZNet Article 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 basketball Hall of Fame speech to Rep. Joe Wilson bleating “You lie!†and the tea bagger “Up with Racism†parade that plagued my hometown of Washington DC. The idea that we are all just a bunch of uncivil goons sounds like common sense especially when you toss in the worst of reality television and anything done by Kanye West. But this conventional wisdom is not only wrong-headed, it’s downright dangerous. At the risk of sounding uncivil, the much hyped moments of Serena, Kanye, and Michael Jordan have zero in common with the confederate carnival of hate brewing on the edges of the far right. The efforts of the media to conflate “black people behaving badly†alongside “tea baggers on the march†should be soundly rejected. -
- Wednesday, Sep 16, 2009
ZNet Article A top-ranked tennis player in a moment of rage cursed out a judge and shocked the world, headlining every sports and news program from ESPN to MSNBC. Meanwhile, another champion tennis player hurled expletives at a judge and the media barely yawned. While the tennis world still reels from Serena Williams's f-bomb-laced tirade against a line judge on September 12, the "classy" Roger Federer pulled a similar tantrum two days later and didn't get half as much coverage. -
- Monday, Sep 14, 2009
ZNet Article The salacious sports media and the puritanical zealots that run international track and field have joined forces to hit a new low. Someone in the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) leaked to the press that Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old 800-meter track champion from South Africa, is, in the words of Oren Yaniv in the New York Daily News, both "a woman... and a man!" -
- Monday, Aug 31, 2009
ZNet Article In a recent monologue, Bill Maher said that the United States has two main political parties: one party on the center-right: the Democrats, and one party in a mental institution: the Republicans. Frankly, his comment insults those who receive care at psychiatric facilities; at least they are looking for help. -
- Wednesday, Aug 26, 2009
ZNet Article If you aspire to be a star woman athlete but have no aspirations to appear in Playboy's Women of the Olympics issue, you are far better off being from South Africa than the United States. The Western media's handling of the story of Caster Semenya, the gold-medal-winning 18-year-old South African runner, has been at best simplistic and at worst repellent. In a salacious, drooling tone, "Is she really a he?" is the extent of their curiosity. On various radio shows, I've been asked, "Why does she talk like a man?" No one defines what "a man" is supposed to talk like. Or, "Do you think she's really a dude? Is this a Crying Game thing?" I've heard it all this week, and most of the questions say far more about the insecurities of the questioners than about Semenya's situation. -
- Saturday, Aug 22, 2009
ZNet Article World-class South African athlete Caster Semenya, age 18, won the 800 meters in the International Association of Athletics Federations World Championships on August 19. But her victory was all the more remarkable in that she was forced to run amid a controversy that reveals the twisted way international track and field views gender. -
- Saturday, Aug 15, 2009
ZNet Article When a high school football star named Michael Vick visited Syracuse University, he was hosted by the big man on campus, quarterback Donovan McNabb. Today, McNabb is once again going to be hosting Vick and Vick will need his old friend to steer him through the rapids to come. -
- Thursday, Aug 13, 2009
ZNet Article This July, all the boxing news of note has been in the obituaries. Death has visited the sport like a plague, shocking even the most callous observers. -
- Thursday, Aug 06, 2009
ZNet Article For Henry Paulson and his son Merritt, the taxpayers of Portland, Oregon, must look like geese with an infinite supply of golden eggs.
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- Thursday, Jul 09, 2009
ZNet Article On Saturday, at Wimbledon's Centre Court, Serena and Venus Williams extended their generational dominance of women's tennis in electric fashion. They went head to head for the twenty-first time and Serena took an 11-10 lead in their sibling rivalry. But amidst the drama of watching two of the finest athletes of their era clash, the specter of sexism haunted the All England Club. Early in the tournament officials blithely admitted that for women players' "physical attractiveness is taken into consideration" when it comes to court assignments. As the Daily Mail explained, "While a succession of easy-on-the-eye unknowns have appeared in Wimbledon's prime arena, the top women's seeds have been relegated to lesser courts." -
- Wednesday, Jul 01, 2009
ZNet Article As the movement for marriage equality and gay liberation gains momentum, we should peer with heightened expectation toward the world of sports. Yes, sports. Every movement for civil rights over the past century has seen the struggle for equality reverberate in the often quite conservative arena of sports. -
- Tuesday, Jun 16, 2009
ZNet Article Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has compared the protests following his country's recent sham election to the common scuffles that take place after a soccer game... -
- Saturday, May 30, 2009
ZNet Article Reporters, pundits and conservative think tanks are picking through every last detail of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's professional life. But let the other journalists, bloggers and assorted trolls attempt to divine her views on abortion, the death penalty or campaign finance. We can learn all we need about Sotomayor's politics and perspective by examining her decisions in sports. - All Most Recent Content
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Recent Books-
- Tuesday, Jul 01, 2008
Book In this long-awaited book from the rising superstar of sportswriting, whose blog “The Edge of Sports†is read each week by thousands of people across the country, Dave Zirin offers a riotously entertaining chronicle of larger-than-life sporting characters and dramatic contests and what amounts to an alternative history of the United States as seen through the games its people played... - All Recent Books
Featured Zirin's Articles
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Dave Zirin's Bio Info: Dave Zirin, Press Action\'s 2005 and 2006 Sport... moreDave Zirin, Press Action\'s 2005 and 2006 Sportswriter of the Year, has been called "an icon in the world of progressive sports." Robert Lipsyte says he is "the best young sportswriter in the United States." He is both a columnist for SLAM Magazine, a regular contributor to the Nation Magazine, and a semi-regular op-ed writer for the Los Angeles Times.
Zirin\'s latest book is Welcome to the Terrordome:The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports(Haymarket Books). With a foreward by rapper Chuck D, the book is an engaging and provocative look at the world of sports like no other.
Zirin\'s other books include The Muhammad Ali Handbook, a dynamic, engaging and informative look at one of the most iconic figures of our age and What’s My Name, Fool? Sports & Resistance in the United States (Haymarket Books), a book that is part athletic interview compendium, part history and civil rights primer, and part big-business exposé which surveys the “level” playing fields of sports and brings inequities to the surface to show how these uneven features reflect disturbing trends that define our greater society. He has also authored a children\'s book called My Name is Erica Montoya de la Cruz (RC Owen).
Zirin is a weekly television commentator [via satellite] for The Score, Canada\'s number one 24-hour sports network. He has brought his blend of sports and politics to multiple television programs including ESPN\'s Outside the Lines, ESPN Classic, the BBC\'s Extratime, CNBC\'s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch (debating steroids with Jose Canseco and John Rocker), C-SPAN\'s BookTV, the WNBC Morning News in New York City; and Democracy Now with Amy Goodman.
He has also been on numerous national radio programs including National Public Radio\'s Talk of the Nation; Air America and XM Radio\'s On the Real\' with Chuck D and Gia\'na Garel; The Laura Flanders Show, Radio Nation with Marc Cooper; ESPN radio; Stars and Stripes Radio; WOL\'s The Joe Madison Show; Pacifica\'s Hard Knock Radio, and many others. He is the Thursday morning sports voice on WBAI\'s award winning "Wake Up Call with Deepa Fernandes."
Zirin is also working on A People\'s History of Sports, part of Howard Zinn\'s People\'s History series for the New Press. In addition he just signed to do a book with Scribner (Simon & Schuster.) He is also working on a sports documentary with Barbara Kopple\'s Cabin Creek films on sports and social movements in the United States.
Zirin\'s writing has also appeared in New York Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, CBSNEWS.com, The Pittsburgh Courier, The Source, and numerous other publications. lessMy ZSpace FriendsRecent Friends Messages
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