What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States
Though the sports arena is often used to stage morality plays shoring up the status quo–no other country in the world kicks off every game with the national anthem, Zirin says–he believes it once was a ring where the establishment was challenged and can be again.
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Makes sense to me. When the Green Bay Packers take on the Dallas Cowboys, for example, I can’t help but see a symbolic battle between good and evil. On one side there’s the last real hometown team in the NFL, a crew of working stiffs whose stock is still owned mostly by locals and doesn’t pay dividends; on the other, megarich Texas owner Jerry Jones and his Astroturf-chewing pawns.
This hopeful, unjaded tone buoys most of the text. In his introduction Zirin politely takes down Noam Chomsky for his facile dismissal of sports as mere bread and circuses, declaring that “we need to look at sports for what they are, so we can take apart the disgusting, the beautiful, the ridiculous, and even the radical.” Chapter one dives into history with a biography of 94-year-old Lester “Red” Rodney, who as sports editor of the communist Daily Worker during the 30s turned the party organ’s sports page into a forum for investigative journalism that pushed to end the ban on black players in major league baseball.
By the third quarter, unfortunately, the book starts to drag. The historical background in the chapter on women in sports, for instance, would have hit harder had it been interwoven with the civil rights history laid out early on. And the inspiring final chapter on recent acts of rebellion would have been stronger had it wrapped up with some analysis rather than another Q & A. But I’m glad he got this stuff on the streets just as oil prices deliver a right hook to tailgaters’ pocketbooks and our commander in chief’s approval ratings are worse than the Milwaukee Brewers’. Zirin offers no miracle cure for the queasiness induced by starred-and-barred Super Bowl commercials, but he provides hope that if we tap into the legacy of rebels like Ali and Carlos and Billie Jean King we can “build a broader movement for social justice outside the arena” and turn our ball fields into staging grounds for the forces of sanity.
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