Class Action February 2007 Book of the Month!

Food for Super Bowl Thought

Dave Zirin, What’s My Name, Fool?
Sports and Resistance in the United States (Haymarket Books)

A book review by Peter Redington

When French Situationist philosopher Guy Debord coined the term, “society of the spectacle,” he probably didn’t have Super Bowl Sunday in mind. But he just as well may have.

Super (Media-Hyped) Bowl Sunday has become as American a holiday as the Fourth of July. Tune in this Sunday (pre-game begins at noon, actual kick-off finally takes place almost seven hours later) and you’ll be greeted with million-dollar thirty-second commercials, a football-field-sized American flag stretched out under a jet-aircraft fly-by, and a corporate-sponsored half-time show performed live by Prince— not to mention, of course, an actual football game.

In the face of so much hoopla, it’s easy to see sports today as nothing more than an escapist distraction, an uncomfortable marriage of commercialism and entertainment. But self-avowed progressive journalist — and rabid sports fan — Dave Zirin has a different take. Sports, he shows us, can be, and always has been, a stage of social conflict, too.

In his illuminating and entertaining book, What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, Zirin tackles (no pun intended) a notion shared by many left-wingers like Noam Chomsky, who, in Manufacturing Consent, observes that “sports keeps people from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about.”

“It is truly amazing,” Zirin acknowledges, “how we can be moved to fits of fury by a missed call or a blown play, but remain too under-confident to raise our voices in anger when we are laid off, lose our healthcare, or suffer the slings and arrows of everyday life in the United States.”

But Chomsky, Zirin quickly adds, fails to understand “how the very passion we invest in sports can transform it from a kind of mindless escape into a site of resistance.” Sports “can become an arena where the ideas of our society are not just presented but also challenged.”

“Just as sports can reflect the dominant ideas of our society,” Zirin contends, “they can also reflect struggle.”

Indeed, Zirin’s tour-de-force showcases, within sports, innumerable moments of resistance against the oppressions that afflict us, everything from racism and sexism to heterosexism and classism.

Zirin doesn’t just highlight what various athletes have achieved in the social justice arena. He also illustrates how the mainstream media subject athletes who question the status quo to relentless attack, encouraging them, all the while, to just “shut up and play.”

The book’s title comes from the line Muhammad Ali shouted at Floyd Patterson during their title fight in the mid 1960s. Patterson had refused to call Ali by his then new Islamic name.

“At the time,” notes Zirin, “calling the champ Ali or Clay indicated where one stood on civil rights, Black Power, and eventually, the war in Vietnam.”

For years, he adds, the New York Times refused to refer to Ali by his legal name. The disrespectful New York Times would hardly be alone. Never, writes Zirin, “has an athlete been more reviled by the mainstream press, more persecuted by the U.S. government, or more defiantly beloved throughout the world than Muhammad Ali,” the athlete who “forced professional sports – and the country as a whole – to examine the issues of racism and war.”

We cannot, Zirin notes, underestimate Ali’s influence. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. cited the champ when he first proclaimed his opposition to the Vietnam War, announcing to America and the world: “Like Muhammad Ali puts it, we are all – Black and Brown and poor – victims of the same system of oppression.”

Zirin places Ali within a class-based history of sports. In the 19th century, Victorian society considered sports “a working-class pastime that reflected the brutality of early industrial life.” Athletes saw sports in class terms as well.

“A ball player’s got to be kept hungry to become a big-leaguer,” Hall-of-Fame baseball star Joe DiMaggio once remarked. “That’s why no boy from a rich family ever made the big leagues.”

Sports began to transform itself into a bulwark of status quo politics when Teddy Roosevelt, financier J. P. Morgan, and their likes decided that “sports could breed a sense of hard work, self-discipline, and the win-at-all-cost ethic of competition.” Thousands of dollars in funding later, we see the beginnings of sports-promoting organizations like the YMCA and the birth of professional teams whose names, like the Green Bay Packers, still pay tribute to their factory beginnings.

Organized sports, Zirin writes, became “a narrow window of opportunity for immigrants, white urban youth, and people right off the farm to claw their way out of poverty.”

Such clawing has, unfortunately, scarred the underbelly of professional sports every since. Notes Zirin: “Only 3 percent of high school athletes play in college and only 3 percent of college athletes play any kind of professional sport. But when 50 percent of young Black men are unemployed, like they are in New York City, or 60 percent of Black men are in the criminal justice system, as is the case in Washington, D.C., and the only places hiring pay $7.00 an hour with no benefits, 3 percent doesn’t look like the worst odds in the world.”

Zirin takes sports history right up through today’s steroid scandal, contending that team owners and the leagues themselves, far more than any individual players, bear responsibility for the drug epidemic in sports.

“It was Major League Baseball that approved Nike’s ‘Chicks Dig the Long Ball’ ad campaign,” he reminds us. “It was Major League Baseball that spent the nineties building baseball parks the size of Hugh Hefner’s hot tub to encourage high scoring and home run totals. It was Major League Baseball that advertised its Home Run Derby … using cartoon characters with freakishly huge muscles slamming the ball out of the park. And it was Major League Baseball that rewarded the big bashers with eye-popping contracts.”

Barry Bonds, the prime target of Major League Baseball’s steroid witch-hunt, made a similar point responding to accusations that he used performance-enhancing drugs. Cheating, said Bonds, “is when the U.S. spends fifty cents to make a shirt in Korea and then sells it for $150 here.”

Cheating may also aptly describe how pro sports owners have, over the past twenty years, manipulated the political process to get taxpayers “to cover the tabs for new state-of-the-art stadiums – and no one ever fronted a stadium swindle better than [former Texas Rangers baseball team owner] George W. Bush.”

Overall, calculates Zirin, working people in the United States have, since the mid 1980s, “paid over $500 million a year in stadium construction and upkeep with more than $7 billion to be spent on new facilities by 2006.”

And these numbers don’t include the $600 million that Washington, D.C. has just pledged to build a baseball stadium for the baseball Washington Nationals. This is the same city that, Zirin notes, has “just laid off 300 public school workers, closed its only hospital, and has the second worst infant mortality rate in the Western hemisphere, bested only by Haiti.”

Words do not do justice to this madness. But justice certainly rings true in Zirin’s What’s My Name, Fool? We truly are all richer for it.

This upcoming Super Bowl Sunday, let’s all join Zirin by looking past the half-day pre-game, the star-studded half-time rock concert, the uber-patriotism of the national anthem complete with jet aircraft fly-by, and the million-dollar commercials sprouting up everywhere in between. Let’s all reflect on the history of sporting resistance by remembering and honoring those who came before, celebrating those whose dissent can be seen today, and encouraging those whose stand is yet to come.

And somewhere in there, amidst all that is ugly and beautiful about sports in our society, maybe we can even enjoy watching a well-played football game.

View previous Class Action Book of the Month selections...

December Book of the Month: Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming

November Book of the Month: Awol

October Book of the Month: Class Passing

September Book and Video of the Month: Beyond Silenced Voices and Declining By Degrees

August Books of the Month: Human Cargo and Gathering the Sun

July Book of the Month: The Overworked American by Juliet Schor

June Book of the Month: More Money Than God by Steven R. Leder

May Book of the Month: Global Class by Jeff Faux

April Books of the Month: Classified and Strapped

March Book of the Month: Welfare Brat, A Memoir by Mary Childers

February Book of the Month: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

January Book of the Month: Invisible Privilege: A Memoir about Race, Class, and Gender by Paula Rothenberg

View last year's Book of the Month selections...

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